>Inb4 Autism I've heard a lot of mixed opinions about this series and it's fanbase, despite this whenever there's a "Series you wish were campaigns" thread I usually see this get posted. I've got a lot of free time lately and, knowing next to nothing about the series itself, have been considering trying to slog through the 12000(?) page mess to see if I enjoy it or not. That being said, given how it's requested I'm wondering if playing in a TTRPG of it blind would be a better experience since I've heard the plot was written on the spot for most of it. Problem is I've seen the aforementioned Autism from its fanbase and finding a group + GM willing to run the game might be just as terrible of an experience.
Tl;Dr To those who know the series should I just read the damn thing or look for a group to try and play in it as a setting.
Also how trash is the fanmade system? It seems to be based around 4E though I haven't read past the introduction of the pdf to avoid spoilers.
>Inb4 Autism I've heard a lot of mixed opinions about this series and it's fanbase, despite this whenever there's a "Series you wish were campaigns" thread I usually see this get posted. I've got a lot of free time lately and, knowing next to nothing about the series itself, have been considering trying to slog through the 12000(?) page mess to see if I enjoy it or not. That being said, given how it's requested I'm wondering if playing in a TTRPG of it blind would be a better experience since I've heard the plot was written on the spot for most of it. Problem is I've seen the aforementioned Autism from its fanbase and finding a group + GM willing to run the game might be just as terrible of an experience.
Tl;Dr To those who know the series should I just read the damn thing or look for a group to try and play in it as a setting.
Also how trash is the fanmade system? It seems to be based around 4E though I haven't read past the introduction of the pdf to avoid spoilers.
Nolan Sanders
This is trash, fuck off and die.
David Long
I don't know what this is and you never said the name. Fuck off.
Noah Hughes
The first three acts are pretty solid, four and five have both low points and some of the best parts of the whole comic, six is shit, and seven is pretty much an epilogue. That said, the setting and worldbuilding are both great, and I've enjoyed RPs in the setting much more than the series itself. The fanbase is likely dying down now, thanks to the fact that it ended a while back, but be wary anyways - around late act 5/early act 6, Tumblr pretty much took over.
Xavier Ramirez
gets the joke.
Julian Williams
The biggest problem with playing with it as a setting is that as a setting its barely even half finished. Most of the stuff with the Classpects and game mechanics are basically guesswork and inference on your end, Trolls exist in a state of "I guess, because..." for most of their culture and biology, and the actual purpose of half the game is barely explored. I think the best way to actually play a game of the whole thing would be to treat it kind of like Problem Sleuth, in terms of starting with "weird and absurd" and keep going from there. Take most of your inspiration for the actual campaign bits from the first few acts as a strange, absurdist comedy campaign making fun of adventure games while still being enjoyable, and then branch forward from there until it's a suitably awe-inspiring adventure.
Definitely though, most of the problem is that most of Sburb/Sgrub/Swhatever has only had maybe a tenth of its content explained/shown, and without any proper mechanics. You're going to have to do a lot of guesswork to make it happen.
William Garcia
Don't try to make a system for it. Find friends that you know are good roleplayers and go freeform, ideally using some sort of online chatroom. Focus only on colaboratively making a fun convoluted story and developing everyone's characters
Isaiah Hughes
It ended kinda flatly so it's hard to recommend but I wouldn't say it's bad.
Carson Robinson
Honestly one of the best pieces of advice I've heard for reading it is just pretend that canon ends at EOA5, that the ending was something cool, and the rest is basically a giant expansionist aside.
Alexander Martinez
I've got a solid idea for the campaign I'd run. Typed that shit out in a 'games you'll never run' thread a while back because it would also be impossible.
Hot tip: google 'overseer project' for a multiplayer HTML approximation of SBURB. Last I heard they were looking to a really gay 'non infringment' rework that would ruin it tho so idk.
Jack Ramirez
id say the quality started to come back towards the end, but it wasn't given enough time. If Hussie ever goes back and edits the weaker stuff I think the potential exists for a true masterpiece
Jace Lee
It stops being interesting when it stops being about the game.
Grayson Gutierrez
It stops being interesting when interpersonal drama and shipping ceases to be a topic of fun, and becomes a topic treated seriously. It then spends the rest of the comic becoming more and more integral until its literally just a soap opera told in gif format.
Matthew Moore
Homestuck is a pretty good mirror of the life cycle of a gaming group
A group of friends gets together and learns to play tabletop RPGs together. They have a few false starts (Jailbreak and Bard Quest) before the GM really hits his stride (Problem Sleuth). At the end of this campaign, everyone is excited to see what happens next. The GM has a grand, exciting vision for what he wants his next adventure to be.
It starts out a little slow. The players bear with it, anticipating better times ahead. Their patience pays off in spades, as plot elements, surprising twists and amazing set pieces begin to pile up. The GM always has balls in the air, is always iterating on what the players are doing, setting up hooks for their characters and building up the world. Everyone is hyped for what happens next.
(Cont)
Daniel Watson
As it always does, life gets in the way. At first it's just a few missed sessions here and there, nothing the GM can't plot around. It gets worse though. Soon the group goes months without meeting. Plot threads are truncated or forgotten and the story loses direction. Players start to drop out, leaving gaping holes in the narrative. In desperation, the GM brings in other people he knows to fill the gap. It doesn't work, and the newcomers just end up making everything worse. The GM looks at his creation and realizes that there's no way it will ever live up to his initial vision, if he can even remember what that was.
(Cont)
Nicholas Mitchell
At some point he comes to realize he's not having fun anymore. He's pushing on out of some sense of obligation to his players but he wants to do something else, maybe he's sick of RPGs entirely. He tries a "rocks fall you die" but nobody's having it, he'll have to end it some other way. The campaign crawls along at a snail's pace, halting and stopping altogether at times as people fight over scheduling and obligations outside the game take precedence over finishing what they started all those years ago.
Finally, sick of it all, the GM throws together a final session just to have the thing over and done with and dissolves the group. Nobody is satisfied with the conclusion, but all the old hands who really cared about the ending have long since moved on to other things, having outgrown the hobby altogether.
Everything up to the retcon was salvageable
Adam Kelly
It wouldn't work as an RPG, Majority of the time each of the characters are stuck in their houses or doing their own thing. The only real interaction they have is through messaging each other. Your party would never do anything as a group.
Adrian Smith
Anything where you have to read 42 quintillion pages before getting to the good part can't be that good.
I've attempted to read through it twice and got bored every time around the time they introduced the third character.
Might I suggest A User's Guide to the Apocalypse? It's based on Jenna Moran's Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG, so the game is 100% diceless, characters go on quests which award them XP for things like “heartfelt conversations”, “making other people feel emotions towards your character”, or “you sit on cracked stones and share a meal with friends”. It all depends on the flavor of quest you have going on and the flavors range from stuff like gothic horror or even slice of life.
The author wrote A User's Guide to the Apocalypse based on the wonderful Replay Value AU. Basically, Sburb is stuck in a glitch where if you beat the game and get the final reward: You don't. The final reward is playing the game over again and again and again because whoever made Sburb wishes only to inflict pain and suffering. So a community formed using extra-spacial message boards and a culture develops based on interests like speed running, exploit hunting, and overall screwing around.
I don't get it when people complain about Act One, I thought it was pretty fun.
Carson Parker
>Might I suggest A User's Guide to the Apocalypse?
Ok, what does it have to offer?
>It's based on Jenna Moran's Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG, so the game is 100% diceless
Not a promising start, but I'll-
>characters go on quests which award them XP for things like “heartfelt conversations”, “making other people feel emotions towards your character”, or “you sit on cracked stones and share a meal with friends”
Well when you put it that way, it sounds pretty terrible. What else is there?
I'll be honest, that was an awful pitch, all things considered. I don't really understand why you'd want a tabletop system to simulate the feel of a freeform RP. You can simulate freeform RP with freeform RP. You don't need mechanics for being sad or having a conversation over the internet, you can just do those things.
Connor Johnson
Yeah, it's the second most Problem Sleuth act. That puts it head and shoulders above the others once you realize that the "story" in the later acts isn't actually going anywhere.
Nicholas Young
replay value also gets sburb so wrong compared to canon it might as well be a different thing altogether
Juan Reyes
To be honest, my pitching skills are like that of an infant without arms, rolling on the mound without purpose and a father in the bleachers, slowly crying as he realized his son would never pitch in the major leagues.
Honestly, the framework's there to make sure all the story beats related to the quest get hit, so the game's all carrot and no stick, like one of those fancy-schmancy story games.
A general option that I like that's more crunchy is to use something light and generic like FATE. It lets you get as silly as you like and not be constrained by table-top game logic and get as entangled as possible by poorly-designed computer game logic.
David Russell
>replay value also gets sburb so wrong compared to canon it might as well be a different thing altogether
Yeah but looking at how the canon ended up, I'm not sure I want to be right
Jack Watson
Autism
Matthew Adams
>Everything up to the retcon was salvageable The truth.
Heck, I'll even take all of Caliborn's interruptions after it. Just not the kids.
Read until it gives you the first password for the Libra page. From there, imagine your own ending, trust me. He unofficially handed the project off to a total hack while he worked on the kickstarter vidya game that still isn't out because development hell.
He threw up his hands after a point and said "screw it, I don't care just make it end." Which it does. And it's pretty easy to tell that's what he did.
Joshua Wilson
...
James Ward
Unfortunately, it's impossible to talk about because certain ex-fans hate it with an unthinking passion because politics and make an effort to spam any thread that mentions it with tangenially related complaints.
Thomas Rivera
Just go onto their IRC, user. You'll probably be able to find a game on there. Eventually.
Oliver Ross
It the quality of music it has any telling to how good it is? I haven't touched the comic yet either but I've used its music tons of times in games of my own.
I’ve run a Homestuck game 4 times through. Here’s what I know. > 1. Don’t focus on SBURB, it’s secondary to any good Homestuck story. The rules are made to be bent all to hell, like Jade with her first guardian powers. Godteir is important to the players but if you rush you’ll miss the Derse and Prospit dreams. The most boring thing I can imagine is a straight by the numbers game of SBURB or SGRUB where players succeed the way they should. > 2. Plan far in advance, then be ready to throw that away. Any story with time travel is hard to make cohesive, players make this much worse. The story is out of your hands most of the time, try to imitate Mark Twain and plan to improvise. > 3. Start things small. Homestuck difficulty isn’t a curve, it’s a ladder. Things should be challenging and then suddenly pointless as the players progress. A few Imps can be insurmountable to the beginning player. > 4. Don’t worry about Alchemizing too much. You’ll get fatigued mixing and matching and the players won’t stop until they have some game breaking gear. Try to keep grist abstract so you can tell them they’ve have run out and have to get back to the adventure. Don’t spend forever working out 1/2scissorkind items till you settle on Refrigerazor. Try to take unusual strife decks seriously and work out how to make them viable. That’s the short of it. I have some Homebrew stuff too but that’s something you can figure out for yourself.
Mason Gonzalez
Much like anything that has sweet music: absolutely not.
But the music is used in a way that augments the flashes from glorified powerpoint presentations with fancy fade-in fade-out zoom-in zoom-out effects.
Parker James
I savor the comic's slow start. It gets me in the point and click adventure mindset.
I wish it wasn't such a fucking roadblock for first time readers.
Camden Clark
From lurking there a bit in their height, I think that was kinda the point.
Matthew Perry
This is the tragedy of Homestuck
The early comic did so much with so little
The late comic did absolutely fucking nothing with an entire team
Isaiah Diaz
IS THE COAST CLEAR?
NOBODY TELL VRISKA I'M HERE...
Juan Hall
Too late.
Angel Reyes
>Don’t focus on SBURB, it’s secondary to any good Homestuck story. I already hate you
Aiden Carter
PLEASE, NO...
Thomas Hughes
Yep.
Jonathan Morgan
Dont focus on the way Sburb is supposed to go, focus instead on what's gonna go wrong.
Hunter Peterson
Too l8*
Luke Myers
The thing to remember about Homestuck is that, for most of the beginning, it was still under reader control. It starts gradually transitioning into a proper webcomic somewhere around act three, but before that it is literally the narrative equivalent of Twitch Plays Pokemon. Hence, the meandering.
I've noticed that the large majority of people who complain about the beginning are those who didn't start with Problem Sleuth first and thus are expecting a well-paced narrative rather than /qst/-style tomfoolery.
Brody Miller
Nothing that works THAT hard to make me work that hard to absorb its content, to the point that they intentionally make it sufficiently arcane to be un-wiki-able, does not get my business. If you spend so much effort making something hard to read, how much of your effort can possibly be left to create quality content.
Ain't nobody got time for that.
Charles Sullivan
I agree in spirit, but you don't really have a leg to stand on when it comes to complete shit if you're going to go around posting Adventure Time
Daniel Gomez
>He still thinks that reader input had anything to do with Homestuck, even on the early pages No user, that was all Hussie. He just knew that his audience would suggest nothing but stale memes from Problem Sleuth and buffoonery and he catered to that.
Oliver James
You wouldn't be able to play in a Homestuck setting without having read it. And even then your GM will make up 90% of it.
But you should read it. You'll either love or hate the beginning, but try to keep at it for the first thousand or so pages. It changes a lot during the series.
