Ooooh, nice. How's Ogleer sound for an underling name for that? Or maybe Spectaterror. I've got all sorts of ideas for fun gaze attacks with it.
Sorted out grist costs for stuff by compiling a list of everything alchemized in Homestuck ever. goes about like so Spoiler: ~ here indicates "on the order of magnitude of" 0 grist: why would you make this? ~ 1 grist: generic stuff ~ 10 grist: congrats, you made something you probably couldn't buy in a store ~ 100 grist: early-game weapons, nicer wearable computers, most canonical outfits, basic utility items like the remote ghost gauntlets ~ 1000 grist: high-powered early weapons, probably outfits with a bit more defensive capability, basic magic computers (the homestuck kids kinda skipped over this tier) ~ 10,000 grist: midgame weapons, really nice utility items like the captcharoid camera, nice outfits like Rose's velvet squiddleknit dress ~ 100,000 grist: more powerful midgame/end-midgame weapons like that Sepulchritude hammer John never got to make, power suits ~1,000,000 grist: endgame weapons, powerful magic/scrying computers (e.g. Jade's junior compu-sooth spectagoggles) ~10,000,000 grist: Legendary Weapons, including most Denizen-associated weapons (although fear no anvil's one down). I'd say about even odds of ever getting anything from here. ~1,000,000,000 grist: someone's brain ~10,000,000,000 - 1 zillion grist: oh-god-what-the-fuck tier; that proton cannon Jade tried to make, the trickster weapons For building things it's about 2 + (2 per 100sq feet/9m2) of build grist, which comes out to about 5o build grist to add a new story to your house, assuming you're building it properly and not just like perching everything on copy-pasted chimneys and praying it doesn't fall down. This cost might go up as you build higher, though, because that seems like the sort of dick move SBURB would pull. I should also figure out how tall houses need to go. I'm probably just going to track total grist between all parties and types-of-grist-acquired, although I could track individual grist types between players (although gristtorrent is still a thing) without much trouble if people thought that would be more interesting. Armor is gonna be done pieceways by individual alchemized items that either add to your AC or give you a bit of damage reduction (probably with associated penalties to other stuff). It probably won't go up with level. If I go for old school saves by category-of-thing I'm thinking like Save vs. Death or Poison..........Paralysis or Immobilization.......... Fear or Mind Effects.......... Blast or Bomb.......... Traps and Hazards.......... Spells and other effects In rough order of increasing difficulty of making the save. Exact saves are probably by aspect (e.g. Breath gets high vs. paralysis or immobilization, Doom gets relatively low vs. Death, Mind gets high vs. Fear/Mind Effects, etc.) If I go fort/reflex/will saves I'll probably just have good/medium/bad starting saves that people can assign as they wish. Either way, saves will get better with leveling. Got started on meteor-generation geomorphs, so good on that front too. Things are starting to come together. :D Can I get some feedback on the starting-things on the last page, though?
Thoughts: I think the list of starting "special things" is good. Is that going to be an exhaustive list, or are you open to player suggestions that are in the same spirit? I'd be happy to help you brainstorm about aspect powers - I think it might make more sense to tailor those to the PCs once you know who they are rather than setting them up front. The Time power would be a fun GM tool to use in addition to something the player has control over! IMO, for a game of this type, mechanical balance matters way less than narrative balance. If a PC starts off with a giant advantage that looks game-breaking, that might actually be okay, because it's going to come with huge strings attached or betray them later or otherwise become a plot driver. A less overpowered special ability will be consistently useful in a straightforward way. I like the idea of tiered grist costs (the log scale seems to be the way to go here), but I still think keeping track of grist micro might become tedious. (Maybe this is just a reflection of the games I'm in now, which all abstract away as much of the resource management as possible.) I wonder if you could do something like "once you have alchemized 3 items at this cost tier, we'll just assume that anything you want at a lower tier, you can have." House construction costs could go up a tier with every gate or something? As far as saves go, I would prioritize simplicity and flexibility - fort/reflex/will and give bonuses, penalties, or class special modifiers as appropriate. I wouldn't try to break it down further, because this is SBURB and you never know what BS is going to come up. It sounds like you have some dungeons and cities planned out, which is awesome! How are you planning to handle medium travel and dream selves? Do dream selves have the same stats as the normal PC? Same abilities? What determines if a dream self is awake?
wheeeeee! thank you! Yeah, that's not an exhaustive list at all. I might add some more to that and player suggestions are totally welcome. Yeah most powers are gonna be tailored to PCs, these are just gonna be little starting things to give you something small aspect-related before you actually get your first real power. Like Void getting a free fistkind specibus, maybe. I'd love to have someone else to bounce ideas off for later powers once the game has started, too, though. I'm not really comfortable using the Time power for a player, on the principle that timeloops can fuck you right up if you're not careful and I want that to be the player's fault if that happens rather than something I set them up for. Give players the rope to hang themselves with, but let them put themselves in bad situations rather than putting them there, y'know? Yep, pretty much. I'm also probably gonna have to talk through nerfs with players for things that turned out way more powerful than expected. If someone gets something properly powerful by sequence breaking though, I'm not gonna nerf it or bump up the challenge to compensate. If you can pull that off successfully you deserve to mow through challenges for a bit. (and there's some things that are just plain dangerous independent of level and equipment) Eh, it's not like I'm not already running half the game through excel spreadsheets. It's really not gonna be that much trouble for me to keep track of grist at a micro level. (of course, grist drops and costs are pretty much all gonna be round numbers, so the last few digits will pretty much stop mattering after a while) Unless people express interest in fine recordkeeping, though, I'm just gonna put everything in one giant grist pool. Hmmm, that is a fair point. I kinda like the old-school saves better thematically, and they make more sense with applying grace* bonus/penalty to all saves, but simplicity/easy comprehensibility is a good thing to have. (flexibility's not as much of a problem, though, paralysis catches all stop-moving effects, blast catches all AoE, and the last one is just a general catchall doesn't-fit-elsewhere) I'm gonna try to go pretty light on modifiers in general, because I find that they tend to make things more powerful and more fiddly without making them more interesting, which isn't really where I wanna go. I'm pretty happy with how I set up my stats bonuses/penalties in terms of making things interesting, though (and also those don't go more than +/-2) Planned but not planned out. :P Making dungeons will have to wait until after chargen so I know what the lands are gonna be, and figuring out how to manage Prospit and Derse exploration is giving me grief. Ideas there would be welcome. The smart way to do medium travel is with transportalizers or by hitching a ride on a ship or something. If you can fly, then you can just fly around between planets and whatnot, but it's gonna take a while. I'm in the process of making random generators for meteor labs in the veil, so you can land on any old meteor and just start poking around in it. I'm assuming gravity is just hardcoded to kick in at Earth levels when you're sufficiently near "ground" so you could technically scoot around the Medium zero-g ways without flight if you had some sort of propulsion, but that's probably not the best idea. (I'm not sure if this is quite what you were asking about, though) Everyone except the space player starts with dreamself asleep, although I need to figure out conditions for dreamselves waking up. Dreamselves have the same stats as you had at level one (although they probably just use grace* for most everything), plus the ability to fly and change shape somewhat (cf. dream Jade dreaming extra arms to play her bass). If you get revived as a dreamself, you lose those abilities but, y'know, get all the levels and powers you have. (this does mean you're stuck on Prospit/Derse until you find a transportilizer unless you have other ways to fly) *or wisdom. still undecided on that merge, although I'm leaning towards yes
I guess that brings up a game philosophy questions I was curious about anyway... Spoiler: Timeline stuff One element that's come up in SBURB in relation to time players especially is the idea of an "alpha timeline" and all timelines that deviate from the alpha timeline being doomed. Did you have any thoughts on that? On one hand, the realization that they are in a doomed timeline could lead to some interesting character moments and allow some really dramatic scenes to play out without bringing the game to a premature end, and the experience from doomed timelines can be transferred to the alpha sometimes (Davesprite, Rose merging with her doomed dreamself, ghosts from doomed timelines in dreambubbles). On the other hand, it could really, really feel like GM railroading - the characters in Homestuck definitely express that sentiment more than once! I'd love to hear your thoughts, since it seems like you've thought a lot of things through really carefully.
Basic idea is that if you know something, you can't change it. What you don't know about the future can go any old way, and gets played out in the normal past-to-future causality sort of way. This makes knowledge of the future a very dangerous two-edged sword -- it allows you to prepare for things in advance, but it also locks down the future to the thing you saw. Treating the alpha timeline as Schrodinger's cat, essentially. Accordingly, learning things about the future is always gonna be up to player choice -- do you want to jump forward in time and check things out? Do you want to look in the clouds, and if you do, do you want to explore some in an eclipse to get more information? Do you want to read this book of cloud-prophecy in the Prospitian library? The time player and I as the GM are gonna keep a kind of "cosmic to-do list" of these known things that have to happen and open causal loops that need to be closed. If circumstances become such that a known thing can't happen or a causal loop can't be closed, then you've got a doomed timeline. This is, incidentally, one of the other benefits of knowing things about the future. If there's a locked point in the future involving you then you have a sort of "plot armor" because any timeline where you die before that is doomed. (This doesn't work for the Time player themself, though, because they have to be the one to go back and fix things. If they're gonna permadie before a known event that involves them, their future self will step in and take the killing blow to preserve the timeline. Which gets them out of death once but also means that they have to go back and die sometime in their future. If they die before they can do that, that's probably a session-wrecking causality bomb barring shenanigans) Heroes of Time seem to have an intuitive sense of timeline dynamics, so I think I'd just let them know when they'd entered a doomed timeline (they could figure it out themself from the cosmic to-do list, anyways). From there they can choose to rewind immediately or continue down the doomed timeline looking for further advantages like Davesprite did. I'm also playing with the idea of giving some advance warning of potential timeline splits in the form of "timesickness" where penalties and unpleasant feelings start to stack up with too many open causal loops until some get resolved (also functions as a limitation on the "your future self put just what you needed behind this rock for you two hours ago" shenanigans).
After consideration, I have decided to go with the familiarity and simplicity of fortitude/reflex/will saves. Starting saves are 13, 10, and 7, assigned however you like. With my current level-up chart, this means you can get one save to 100% at level 14 (level cap), if you're okay with another save being at 50% or 55%. (saves are roll-under score on a d20, with possible +/- 1 or 2 modifiers)
Glubdate: - meteor geomorphs coming along. Seriously, these things are fucking gorgeous. I'm really liking how they are coming out. - poking at balancing the basic Underling vs. Player level-up math, so that I can then proceed to shit all over that balance with special abilities and whatnot - considering dusting off my old Python skills and making the underling roller there instead of Excel - more Aspect starting things: Light: once per session you can roll a d30 in place of any other die (except for like rolling stats or HP or other permanent things) (this is pretty powerful, but then so is having exactly the right tool for the job) Mind: once per session you can know what any one person is thinking or what decision they are likely to make in response to some circumstance. This is perfectly accurate, but not supernatural, so it won't tell you things relating to something that person knows about but you don't, and if that person is pretending to be someone other than they are or have an entirely different agenda than they do, they may be entitled to a save (if you have no reason to suspect them). Breath: The Breeze is present in your session and likes you. (random chance that The Breeze will help you out whenever you are in a situation that some wind could reasonably help you. it is fickle, though) Doom: you can turn any failed roll (yours or someone else's) into a success automatically, on the condition that the DM can then change some future crit that you roll into a crit fail (these accumulate, too) Life: you can set aside a "reserve" of any amount of HP (effectively reducing your max HP). The first time you or an ally hits zero HP (note that zero HP != dead, just vulnerable to maiming or mortal injury) they get half the amount of HP that you put in reserve (the rest is wasted). You can restore the reserve next time you are at full health. Heart: you and an ally get a +1 bonus to whatever (attack, AC, damage reduction, saves, a stat, &c.) of your choice when standing next to each other. The bonuses are chosen at character creation (although you can wait to choose them if you don't know what you want) and can be different for different allies. Only one can be active at a time, in the interests of having people actually move around instead of be stuck in a "by your powers combined!" lump all the time. Let me know what you think of these! I'm worried some may be a bit fiddly for level-1 always-on things, but I like them all thematically. I may also let Space retcon themselves simple skills by way of seeing x situation in a cloud and preparing for it. Also, ideas for the other four Aspects would be welcome.
Disclaimer: I've only played Pathfinder and Savage Worlds and I've never dmed, so I don't know that much about the mechanics side of things. The ones that seem most fiddly are Life and Heart, but they can both definitely work and I don't think any of them are over powerful. I absolutely love resource management stuff, so my opinion should be weighted, but the grist system sounds awesome. I think the major issue I can see is that sburb is very solitary- there's a lot of teamwork going on but mostly people are on their own planets working alone, so there would be a lot of switching between different people while everyone else just, like, takes a break? But there are definitely was to work around that, both on the DM and the players side (the DM can necessitate communication so as to understand certain abilities, parts of the games, ect, or the players could decide to maybe do all their quests together? Is that a thing sburb would allow?) As someone who has played in games that occasionally got very "ok, everyone's doing their own thing" it mostly comes down to the personality of the group. I might have just missed it, but have you said anything about how the house building mechanic would work? Would it just be an alternate thing to spend grist on? Ummm, Aspect Abilities: Void- Maybe once per session you can auto-crit success on a sneak or bluff roll, or any roll to do with needing to hide or obfuscate knowledge? Ummm, for Hope and Rage the obvious one for me would be once per session Hope can turn any roll from anyone into a crit success and Rage can turn any into a crit fail, but if that doesn't work then just something to do with making things go right/wrong? Nobody knows what blood is so I can't speculate on that, sorry. Also, just in case you don't have enough random tables and need a pointless one to build: randomized echeladder tiers upon level up, just for flavor? Like have a list of general ones and then some related to aspects of classes, and upon level up you can just go, "Congratulations! You have ascended to [randomizes] wily shitflinger tier!"
@Arxon Yeah, Life and Heart were the ones I was most worried about. Hopefully the fact that you only have to deal with the Life one every once in a while should help The kid's session was pretty solitary, yeah, but S***b doesn't really have to be. The trolls did a lot of pair/team adventuring, and you can get everyone together fairly easily by just going round your second gates in a circle. And a session with any Heart players is gonna have a major incentive to group up. Also, electronic communication means that players can chatter even when on different planets. The only time someone's likely to be completely out of communication is when dreaming. I imagine there will be a bit of, "okay can you guys wait a bit/hang out while I set up this thing/do go through something with one person." There is an advantage to the option of playing solitary, though, in that I can still run sessions if some people can't make it. (current plan is to run this online through like roll20 or something at set times so that everyone's online at once) House building is gonna be assumed to be mostly just copy/pasting the basic floorplan over and over as you go up, so it'll normally just be a stock grist cost to extend the top of the house a story. I'm gonna use @WithAnH's idea of increasing grist costs, probably exponentially, with every gate you go up. Of course, if you don't want to just do the default, you can save grist by skimping on building (like Rose's ludicrously unsafe edifice on top of John's house in Act 2-3 with the structural chimneys and ladders) or spend a bit of extra to put in shit like more alchemiters for consorts or sprites to use, or weapons platforms or landing strips or docking sites or communications towers to talk to prospitian ships or what-the-fuck have you. Oh, I forgot: I do have something for Void Free fistkind abstratus (1d8 instead of 1d6-2 for unarmed attacks, can't be upgraded ever but you get a shitload of bonus attacks as you go up in levels) and also just straight-up immune to scrying/supernatural detection/omniscience/whatever I'm planning on going with @Raire's blood-as-change theory and with Rage-as-Dionysian, basically. And no, I'm not gonna be making a random echeladder title generator. Those are all gonna be lovingly handcrafted. :D e. in case it's not clear enough: thank you for helping me get ideas in order!
@Wiwaxia Lovingly handcrafted tiers are even better! :D Yeah, just keeping up a constant level of party chatter will def help,and that's a good point wrt people not being able to make it. Glad I could be of some help!
Aaaah super excited at the idea of someone using my blood as change theory! I have never played any D&D, but I really want to. I'm hoping to organizing something with three friends in the future, just to see how it goes >u< I didn't understand a bunch of things here, but what I got makes sense and seems to be setting up nicely :3
Current idea for Rage: straight-up berserkergang. Pick one or two triggers at character creation. When either of those is tripped, you go berserk (note: not necessarily rage, mad and uncontrollable sadness, mirth, &c. would also work). This replaces your stats with 2,5,11,17 and 19, randomly arranged (note that this breaks the normal possible range of stats at both ends) which scrambles what kind of things you can attempt. Also, make an extra attack at the start of every round. It gets applied to anyone and anything who is next to you at any point during the round (including moving past). Lasts 1d4 minutes or until you calm down, whichever comes first. I'm worried about this one being fiddly, too, especially because it's essentially doing two things. But neither of them would be super interesting on their own. I'll probably set up some sort of program thing to automatically calculate what the stat changes to to your ac and the like for the duration, but still... I'm thinking I'll probably scrap the Heart one I had above, 'cause constantly adding and removing bonuses is way too fiddly and takes too much time for something fairly uninteresting. :/
Rejiggered Heart a bit so it's just at character creation rather than constantly flu%uating. Heart: You get five "points" at character creation that you can put in any one of your or your friends stat-things (movement speed, a save, a stat, HP, song, AC, damage reduction, elemental resistance, attack bonus, &c. &c.) or use to give them a roughly-equivalent something or other that you come up with (note that most everything has a soft cap at around 17 or +7, so this is a p significant bonus even at endgame. HP has a much higher cap, so every "point" you put there probably counts for several HP. also note that this is the only way to get innate, non-equipment dependent bonuses in AC, DR or resistances) These bonuses are part of the recipient's innermost self, and cannon be harmed, reduced, negated, or impinged upon in any way, even across universe instances. So, still fiddly, but you only have to deal with it once and then it's there forevermore. Now I just need to figure out something for god fucking Blood. :T Also thinking of setting up a 2x[weapon]kind as one of the Special Starting Things.
Oh also, got a terminology/clarity question for y'all. So current plan is to split armor/defenses into being harder to hit (don't-get-hit, for the purposes of this post) and taking less damage when you are hit (don't-get-hurt, for the purposes of this post). My question is what I should refer to these pools as. AC (armor class) and DR (damage reduction) is the traditional D&D way to refer to it, and has the advantage of familiarity for people who've played D&D before, but is kinda clunky and not always super clear. Also more heavy armor might count to DR more than AC? Evasion and Protection is the Sil way to refer to it, but makes don't-get-hit strictly a matter of dodging, which is harder to imagine improving with equipment and could get weird for larger Underlings and whatnot. Armor and Resistance? Something else? I dunno, what's the most clear to people?
Evasion & Protection sounds good. You might want to take a look at WH40k's pen&paper versions, they have this quite neat, and more easily understandable than the d&d version (which i have always struggled with). also hitzones.
Hmmmm I would go with maybe Resistance and Reduction, but that isn't too clear? I know that Evasion would confuse me majorly.
