I like to read about games I can never play and imagine what it would be like playing them. I also really really like Homestuck. This was pretty much a foregone conclusion. So a bunch of cool people over at the MSPA forums decided to take it upon themselves to make a Homestuck tabletop RPG for whatever reason. I love them. So, let's dive right into this monster, shall we?
Boom.
The Homestuck Rpg. sBurb in book form. I can't help but see these endeavors to make homestuck games as vaguely Quixotic, trying to make a manageable system out of all that glorious narrative mush. Still, I was impressed by the sheer size of this thing, as well as the amount of documentation they're keeping on this. There's actually two big playtest files that they're keeping that I found, one called Residencelocked, created by who I can assume to be the instigator of this most interesting travesty. The other is Manorjammed , which is equally as large and inclusive. They both prove interesting reads, and I may write up a post about trends and quirks I noticed in how the system played out. But enough about that, this post is specifically about the game itself.
Front Matter
First thing, the sBurb watermark behind all the text, not the best idea as far as readability goes, though I got used to it eventually. Also, that's a pretty boss fantasy Jade and Dave pic at the beginning. Since the game is still in its fetal stage, there isn't too much to see here, so moving on, we get to the general rules for playing.
So, from the rules section at the beginning, they're hewing pretty close to what originally spawned it. A few minor add ons to the are included at the beginning, I take them to be little rules added to the Gamma World set to put it more in line with the Homestuck experience, such as replacing the mutation/tech cards and with the alchemy and sylladex cards, as well as giving abilities a range strictly based on having a direct line of communication with someone.
The most significant thing in this is foregoing the d20 in favor of 2d10 for most every roll, and any time doubles are rolled, there's a chance to either land a Brutal Afront or a Grave Blunder. The end result is a probability curve that's fairly stable and prone to getting rather extreme successes and failures, but with a real difficulty to either improve your chances of doing something or impede someone else's chances of doing something. I rather liked this little system quirk a lot! I will be interested in going over the play logs to see how this affected their sessions. There's also rules for if you'd rather use a d20. Another thing to note is that as you gain levels, your character gains Brutal Affront bonuses that stack, meaning critical hits become more game changing as you progress. At the same time, these same bonuses are dealt TO you on a Grave Blunder. Failure hurts even worse as you climb the Echeladder. I like this.
Character Creation
1) Decide on an Exclusive Template
Exclusive Templates are a collection of net bonuses that provide the sort of basic features that would be common for a certain set of Sburb players. Like a game played by a bunch of kids or a game played by a bunch of trolls. Or a game played by a bunch of ghosts. Hmmm, I actually like that last idea. Okay, so let's say for the sake of this review, my imaginary DM conferred with his imaginary players and decided that their Homestuck game would be about a bunch of ghost kids playing the game. Each player is allowed only one Exclusive Template, though they're also able to tack on Common Templates at the DM's discretion to further take their character further and further away from the middle of the Human-Centric bell curve of normalcy. Possibilities for Mary Sue Monstrosities are obvious, mentioned in the text, and something that I take particular delight in. Technically, most Template fiddling is done near the end of character creation, but I don't see why you can't do it now, either. So, let's see what my four made up players finally decided upon for their kids.
El and Kris decided they were going to play this pretty straight, and just went for the regular Incorporeal template, as was agreed upon at the beginning of the session. This gave them a lot of different bonuses, essentially making them weaker then the average human, able to pass through and squeeze through stuff, and allows them to hover over the ground. While Kris has no idea what aggrievements are, he decides to use the one given to him by this template just for kicks. El, in a similar state of ignorance, decides not to.
Bruce asked if it would be cool if he could play a zombie instead of a ghost for no real reason except he likes them. The DM said it was fine and still kept with the sort of supernatural pumpkin fantasy style flavor that he was wanting to cultivate. For this, Bruce just took the human Essential Template and tacked on the undead Common Template. He also decided to take the aggrievement given to him by his undead Template.
Ana wanted to make her character as unique as possible and decided to make a Fairy Ghost! She can do magic and is really smart and can fly! To the other player's horror, the DM grinned and said that sounded just fine. So along with the Essential Template of the game, she took on the Telekinetic, Telepathic, Savant, and Flyer Common Templates. She also decided to use her magic abilities as her Kind Abstratus, taking Heavy Rangedkind (magic). She has absolutely no idea what this means, but this is for later.
With the absolute inexperience that I have with the system, the template thing seems like a fun way for the players to actively sculpt their players, especially since the titles that Skaia gives them are completely arbitrary. For instance, Kris's dude is pretty much going to be a tank no matter what he does because of his regenerative abilities, and Ana's character is going to be a horror to DM with all her unique traits.
Also, because they're ghosts, their play style will lend itself more towards being sneaky and inconspicuous. A minor caveat to highlight is that while it says that the player who takes this template gains the Insubstantial property, it's never defined as to what this actually means in the text. I would consider this something important. The imaginary DM decides that it means that any physical non magic damage is halved if you're insubstantial.
2) Determine your title by rolling for your character's Class and Aspect
This is straightforward enough. You take a d8 and d12 in hand and let them fly. Congratulations, you now have the title that Skaia gave your character. The book hilights that this should be done before actually fleshing out your character too much as their title is supposed to be reflective of them. Some players might complain that this means the game hems in what character they are from the get go, but I like this. It lets players think about how their title would correspond to the character that they're thinking of. Anyway, let's see what the imaginary kids got.
Kris- Seer of Time
El- Page of Light
Bruce- Mage of Life
Ana- Sylph of Hope
Huh, they all got really positive, white magicy style titles, which seems pretty incongruent with the DM's silly sort of macabre style world he was going for. He just sort of shrugs it off though. Who knows what Skaia has planned for these dudes anyway, right? The player's title gives them access to the abilities they can get as they level up, though their classes are more important in the earlier levels, until they are able to access their aspect traits at the beginning of fourth level.
The book also gives multiple examples for each part of the titles, just in case you end up getting overlaps amongst the characters or if the players want something that sounds different. The DM asked if they wanted to mess with their titles at all to make them more in line with the characters they had. Kris decided on Magus of Ages, which the DM rolled his eyes and said fine to. El decided on Luck instead of Light, thinking it would fit her ghost a bit more. Bruce asked if he could be the Lich of Life to go more in for the zombie thing he wanted to do, and Ana saw that she could be the Maid of Love and instantly went for that one.
3)Assign Ability Scores
In a cleaving from the six ability standard of most anything that uses a D20, two of your four abilities are already predetermined by your title, and the other two are numbers you get to assign. The first two, your Primary and Secondary abilities, are decided by your Class and Aspect respectively. You also choose two differing arrays for the last two, depending on if you want to make your character more "balanced" or "specialized". The four abilities are Mangrit which is your strength and toughness, Acumen which is your reflexes and quick thinking, Imagination which is your lateral thinking and general smartness, and Pulchritude which is how much people pay attention to you.
Because of the number of abilities and how much your title affects them, there really isn't a wide spectrum of ability modifiers like in a lot of other D20 based games. This actually makes sense both thematically and because with the 2d10 probability curve, really big differences with modifiers could do some wacky things to the system. Definitely something to consider if I ever decide to break it down and kitbash the thing for my own purposes... Anyway, here's what these player's stats would look like.
Kris
-Mangrit: 14(+2)
-Pulchritude: 6 (-2)
-Acumen: 16 (+3)
-Imagination: 18( +4)
El
-Mangrit:10(0)
-Pulchritude:18(+4)
-Acumen: 12(+1)
-Imagination: 16(+3)
Bruce
-Mangrit:14(+2)
-Pulchritude:16(+3)
-Acumen:18(+4)
-Imagination:6(-1)
Ana
-Mangrit:18(+4)
-Pulchritude:16(+3)
-Acumen:10(0)
-Imagination:12(+1)
While I'm unsure why they decided to just use four stats instead of the standard six that come with the system aside from giving them snazzy MSPA style names, l don't mind having fewer numbers to track.
4) Determine Your Skills
Now here's something I can really get behind. This is a fine skills list. Key reason why? It's short. You get bonuses according to your title, origin, template, and you get a +4 randomly. These, along with providing the player with in game bonuses, can also be seen as a way to help determine a bit more about the character and his/her various INTERESTS. I'm not going to list all the skills, this is already running a bit long. There's ten of them. They all make perfect sense. Allocating bonuses is quick and easy. I love it. Props to the makers on this particular section.
5) Allocate Kind Abstratus and Strife Specibus
For all intensive purposes, this is where one would normally find the big ol' gear section in another such book. But because this is homestuck, things are a bit different. One of the main things to be noted here is that whatever weapon you choose at the beginning of the game, you're stuck with for a while. Instead of listing all the possible kind abstrati that could be used...
Hmmm... iceskatekind?
They gave some basic kind types that you could ascribe your particular article of destruction to. These are pretty simple, ranging from light, heavy and finesse based melee weapons with blades, without blades, blades on sticks or simply sticks, heavy ranged and light ranged. This determines such things as damage, how easily you can hit things with it, and which abilities give bonuses to wielding it. What's interesting is that almost all the specibi have different abilities that can be used for bonuses to attack or damage. For instance, if Bruce wanted his zombie dude to use Shovelkind as his specibus and decided that Reaching Melee-kind was close to what he was approximating, he could choose to use either his Acuity, his Imagination, or his Mangrit ability for attack and damage. This means that for the most part, players are pretty free to choose whatever kind makes sense to them without worrying about if it'll work with their specific character. While there are some exceptions to this (fistkind only uses Mangrit for a bonus) the player has a lot of freedom here. None of that "only fighters can use swords and elves are able to wield bows" nonsense, which works perfectly considering the subject matter. There's also some quick rules for armor, but really, the rule of Homestuck as far as garments go is just make everything outrageously awesome, and you're fine.
As for the fake kids in this particular scenario, kinds were chosen with minimal fuss.
Kris -Textbookkind
El- Knifekind
Bruce- Shovelkind
Ana- Magikind!
6) Fill out the rest of your numbers
This is more of the crunchy wunchy, gamey wamey stuff that anyone who's played an RPG would be familiar with. HP, it exists. Defense, comes in four flavors. Speed and initiative, there they are. Nothing really to say about any of that silliness here, I can assume it was lifted straight from the parent system with minimal modification. About as straightforward as it gets.
7) So... just who are you?
This is where, after going through all of the system based character creation, the players get to flesh out their little people a bit more in earnest. By this point, they've probably had plenty of time to think about what their deal is, how they met each other, that sort of thing. This'd be the sort of stuff that'd be mentioned in the panel with your character standing in his room, surrounded by all his INTERESTS. Some short blurbs for my kids.
Kris: "My dude was a real studious kid who got really sick and died young. He likes video games and reads a lot of programming textbooks. He wanted to be the next Sid Meier when he grew up. Coincidentally, he also uses those text books as weapons to keep squatters out of his old apartment room."
El: "My character was killed in a car crash. Her family's still alive, her older brother can actually see her and pretty much functions as her Guardian, like Bro... but minus the puppet stuff. She loves to play poker and blackjack and still does it as a ghost to help her parents out with paying off their house."
Bruce: "Zombie kid. One of the few still around since the Zombie Wars of the early 2000's. His dad runs a funeral home and still looks after him. The kid spends most of his time gardening. His mind's not all there anymore."
Ana: "My character died saving a bunny from a hunter! But it was okay because then the hunter felt really bad and offered to watch over her and now they live on a farm and she uses her magic to help the crops grow and make the animals happy!"
By this point, the DM is slowly sinking his head to the table. But he's already invested too much into the game at this point, there is no going back.
8) Add any additional Templates
Sort of... did this out of order... ah well.
9) Draw your initial Sylladex hand
Everything having to do with the cards is going to be taken care of in another post. Just suffice it to say that before your first session, you'll draw one sylladex card to represent whatever stuff you start with.
In Conclusion
... Is anyone still there? Geez, that was a lot longer then expected. Okay, so first impressions of the system thus far. The product's still pretty rough around the edges, and a few gaps in explanation seem to account for that fact. As someone who hasn't played the Gamma World RPG before, I felt a little lost with some of the terms. Still, there was a lot that I liked here. Character creation is INVOLVED but actually pretty fun. Things that were able to be simplified were simplified, and from what I've seen thus far the dudes putting this thing together are doing a lot to keep the spirit of sBurb alive. I'm sort of curious for their logic behind using such a big complex system for a game that I always thought would benefit from a lighter rules set, but it seems to be working okay thus far. This is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg, in the next two entries I want to really dig into the Class, Aspect, and Template sections of the book and see what's really going on there, as well as figure out just how well this thing would hold up to customizing if you want to have your particular homestuck experience veer a little further from the comic then is possible already.
