Tag: homestuck

prokopetz:

I’m generally of the opinion that trying to directly emulate Sburb at the tabletop would be missing the point of the source material. The whole idea is that Sburb is an unplayable mess by design and can only be defeated by discovering ways to turn the rules against themselves; you can’t use game rules to directly reflect a situation where the rules themselves are an enemy to be defeated.

There are a couple of different ways to get around that. My first impulse would be to go full meta, and for that I’d recommend Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist (warning: direct PDF link) – and for once I’m not recommending it as an inside joke! In a nutshell, WTF captures both exploration of and antagonism with the rules by erasing the distinction been in-character discovery and out-of-character invention.

Fatalists have mastery over what things are, so a successful Knowledge check allows a fatalist’s payer to simply declare facts about the setting and have them be true, inventing those facts even as her character discovers them. Similarly, theurgists have mastery over how things work, so a successful Insight check allows a theurgist’s player to institute new game on the spot. Wishers govern both the telos of the game’s metaphysics and the social contract of the table, and so forth.

It’s basically an unholy fusion of a tabletop RPG and a nomic, with a three-part division of the traditional GM role that allows anyone to step in as author of the setting, engineer of the rules, or mediator of the social contract at will, while still remaining notionally a player. This is paired with a default setting whose major features start out literally undefined – not in the sense that the game doesn’t talk about them, but in the sense that the world is at least in part a dream that hasn’t yet been kindled into reality – and an antagonistic metaphysics that pre-emptively declares the players’ quest impossible and their ignominy and defeat a foregone conclusion, which together make overthrowing the system from both an in-character and out-of-character perspective a basic necessity for getting anywhere at all.

(Inicentally: John is a wisher, Dave is a theurgist, Rose is a fatalist, and Jade is some sort of weird hybrid build.)

The other major approach is to set aside the notion of directly emulating Sburb at all and treat the game-within-a-game as a backdrop to a story about a bunch of dorky kids with burgeoning godlike powers working through their various psychological hangups, and for that I’d go with Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine.

I’ll warn you right now: appearances aside, this game is not rules light. It’s probably one of the crunchiest new-school narrative storygames out there, to the point that for some builds it’s entirely possible to have a character sheet that’s twenty pages long; character creation is so intricate that most people just use the pregenerated characters provided with Glassmaker’s Dragon, the game’s first published campaign.

If you can stick it out, though, what you get is a game whose rules treat emotional character development with a level of depth and nuance normally reserved for combat systems in historical wargames. Depending on the sort of character you’re playing, you might get bonus XP for shocking the table into speechlessness, develop reality-warping powers that scale with how bored you are, or suffer no ill effects from forgetting to eat for a week because you were busy brooding – or even all three on the same character. Descriptively, your import can range all the way from “ordinary twelve-year-old girl” to “the actual, literal Sun” – in fact, the latter is one of the aforementioned pregens – and both of those characters can at least theoretically play at the same table.

The part that makes it particularly suited for Homestuck is that the formal character arcs whose pursuit makes up the bulk of play pull double duty as “character classes” that provide a customisable set of miraculous powers, so the kind of god you become is directly linked with the course of your narrative development; the applications of this approach to Homestuck’s “classpects” conceit should be obvious. There’s a wide variety of options to choose from, though only eight or so have been formally published at the time of this writing; the rest can be obtained in playtest form from the author’s blog.

orangelemonart:

imagine the afterlife where the only people there are your internet friends, the people who harass you online, and the guy who made your favorite comic Problem Sleuth for some reason

thats what happens to most of the characters in homestuck

consuelodoodles:

I love him because out of all the iterations of Jack Noir in the world of Homestuck, Spades Slick is the most morally upstanding. Oh, he’s still a huge fucking murderer and a caustic asshat with no regard for life or really any social skills to speak of, who thinks himself the center of the universe and won’t hesitate to get rid of anyone who gets in his way… But he’s the only Jack who ever showed empathy for another person of his own volition.

Bec Noir’s love of Jade is artificial, forced onto him from the prototyping. Union Jack doesn’t have any agency of his own at all for the majority of the time. Spades Slick goes out of his way to do this.

I’ve always believed that the strongest way to convey a scene is not through self-explanatory or long winded dialogue, nor is it through looking at still establishing shots of things that aren’t moving. It’s having the context of a scene inform the meaning behind the actions taken by the characters.

To break that down a little more, it’s about A Person the Audience Knows who Does Something with Another Person We Know that Changes Something Between Them Forever

Spades Slick is a character we know to be crass, evil, mean, angry all the time, the kind of person who calls people he doesn’t like “coffin stuffers” and feels no remorse in killing them. Karkat we know is an asshole who’s full of himself and judgmental of everyone around him.

In this scene, we learned that Karkat has been hiding something about himself that he cannot change, but that fills him with shame and makes him feel like an enormous weirdo. He overcompensates for this enormous insecurity by being a pompous asshole. When Spades Slick initially meets him, he stabs Karkat in the gut, and Karkat doesn’t even care about the wound, he just worries that this chess guy is going to tattle on him and reveal his secret that he’s been tightly guarding for all his life. 

Instead, Spades Slick decides to cut open the palm of his hand and let Karkat know that he’s in the exact same boat. We never see another Jack Noir willingly, and with sound mind, comfort a child ever again. This is the only time. And that has just colored my perception of Spades Slick forever, because while he is an enormous dickwheel, he’s also the only Noir who naturally has a soft side.

cairo-overcoat:

itsdanimotherfreakingglitter:

cairo-overcoat:

cairo-overcoat:

not to downplay jade tho, if you throw literally ANYTHING she will instantly teleport and fetch it

john takes to yeeting everything as far as he can to see if she’ll miss anything and she never does it’ll be like

jade: hey can you pass me a soda

john: 

What about when he fake tosses it

jade, once she’s 2 miles away from the cookout they were having and there’s no soda: