Rehosted Advice

((Originally written by 4e and rehosted without permission))

HOW TO HAVE A GOOD SGRUB/SBURB RELATED SESSION.
This won’t be the best written of posts, but oh well! I’ll try and make it coherent. This was written with fantrolls/human sessions in mind, but it can also apply pretty well to sessions that use the canon or alternate versions of the canon characters.

PLAYERS
You want to search for people who are reliable, not likely to flake out, and who are coherent. They don’t have to write paragraphs upon paragraphs of text, but they need to be there, regularly post, and have an active hand in plotting in the RP. If you’re concerned, maybe do a little bit of background checking- do they have a habit of flaking out of RPs? A first come first served basis is generally a bit of a bad idea, unless you know that everyone who would possibly apply is an excellent RPer.
When opening applications to your session, plan out the number of players and assess the applications based on the characters- because, when it comes down to it, inter-character relationships will be an enormous part of any session, and having fun interactions with other characters is key to enjoying an RP.



CHARACTERS
You don’t want to have characters who all have the same personality, or have there be a vast majority of one character type over another. A session made of sweet and lovely players would be boring, because nobody would hate each other and there’d be no conflict. At the same time, a session made of horrendous douchebags would be (while entertaining at first) ultimately a trainwreck because they’d just kill each other or flat out not work together at all.

Gimmick characters, i.e. ones that revolve around one thing (a human who is based on nothing but Portal jokes, or a troll with the defining trait of “has horns that look like dongs”) are best avoided, or kept to one-or-two-per-session. While it’s possible for these characters to gain depth, normally they just end up very shallow and don’t fare well in any sort of complicated relationship or drama. On the other side of the coin, though, having a cast of all immensely complex characters might wind up getting too dramatic and thus boring.

Perhaps we should simplify this with a canon comparison. A session full of Eridans or Vriskas, full of emotionally volatile murderers, would end in nothing but tears and drama with little to no comic relief.

A session full of Nepeta-like characters, the cutesy comic relief girl who literally had a world named LOLCAT, would be adorable: but she’s not suited to angsty drama, and if you wanted to give your session drama and emotional depth it’d be very hard when all the characters were wearing tea cosies on their heads and mewling in their last post.

A session full of Tavros or sopored Gamzees (sans the rage state) would simply fall on it’s own face due to the incompetence of the participants. They’d all die! You need a good mix of all the character types, although perhaps not carbon copies of the canon trolls.

Now that we’ve got the players, let’s move on!


PRE-GAME PLANNING
All SGRUB sessions should be properly planned out before the actual game starts. I don’t mean “plot every twist out to the letter”, because an element of surprise and suspense can be crucial to an RP, but hammer out your foundations well before you start playing. The following facts should be collected from players and listed down, preferably in a typewith.me or other public text sharing document:

Dream planets. Knowing who’s on what planet means you can plan how the Prospit dreamer’s prophetic clouds will affect their perception of the RP, and how the Derse dreamers will be affected by the whispers of the horrorterrors. In addition, the Derse dreamers might be crucial in anything to do with the Derse royalty or Jack Noir. (Keep in mind that the Black Queen doesn’t normally leave Derse, as far as I can remember: it is not actually necessary to exile her!)

Strife specibi (weapons) and fetch moduses/sylladex (inventory system). The latter doesn’t need to be gone over in too much detail unless you plan on doing something with them, but it’s good to have them planned out in advance. Try not to have there be too much overlap with the weapons, but that’s not really a big deal.


Guardians (if human) or Lusii (if troll). Will the guardian survive and make it into the session? If so, will they be doing their own thing in the Medium, like Bro and Mom and Dad were? Are the Lusii going to be prototyped? Is one of the lusii ridiculously powerful, much like Feferi’s was? How helpful are they going to be, and is one of them going to accidentally/intentionally fuck something up?

Home/Hive locations. If the character is a vagrant, there may be an element of drama in that they’ll need to race home before a meteor hits in order to enter, as you need to be in your domicile (or simply a domicile, maybe, not sure). If two characters live relatively close to each other, they may have had pre-game knowledge of each other. The location of their home would also affect the character somewhat.

RELATIONSHIPS. Obviously, everyone needs to know each other- but what do they think of each other? Plot out if anyone has an extensive backstory with another character; was there a dramatic incident in the past that might be brought up? In addition, get together and think of some ships that your players might like to shoot for in the game. Shipping makes the online world go round!


Exiles. Who are they?

Medium Lands: Land of X and Y, Z and Q, etc etc. Make sure that no two lands are similar to each other for the sake of keeping things from being repetitive. Remember, your space player MUST have a Land of ____ and Frogs!

Denizens. What are they doing to the land to fuck it up? What’s their name? Is there a mythological theme to them? (Roman, Egyptian, Norse, Japanese, etc) What do they look like, and what weapon do they drop?


Titles. They’re monosyllabic (Heir of Time, Knight of Light, etc). Not all players awaken to any of their title’s powers; you can say that quite a few of the trolls never figured out how to use their powers, like Equius never displayed Void powers and Tavros never displayed Breath powers beyond that one thing when he was leaning over Vriska’s corpse. List them out, make sure there’s no overlap, and…

GOD TIERS. Aaah. Here’s a definite piece of advice: Do not, do not have everyone god tier. They’re rare. You have to hit the absolute top of your echeladder to do it; not everyone can just stab themselves on their quest bed and suddenly gain insane powers! In addition, the process of God Tiering is highly unintuitive (YEP, GONNA JUST KILL MYSELF ON A FUNNY BED, NOTHING CAN GO WRONG HERE) and obviously has to be unlocked in some way or form. Don’t have people god tiering unless they hear of it from, like, their sprites or something! And unless you’ve got a massively powerful enemy to defeat… don’t have more than a quarter of your players do it!
And a final note…. You know how Jade lived next to a volcano? You know how Kanaya had this near her hive? No way to get around it, your Space player has to live close to a volcano. Who knows, it could be broken up so that only the foundation remains and was built over, if you accidentally cast an urban player as your Space; but it’s gotta be there, to be the Forge.
Now that you’ve got those down, let’s consider the structure of a SGRUB/BURB game itself. Here’s how things are supposed to progress for the average player, in a regular fashion:

Entry. A chain is formed, and people enter. Not everyone has to enter before the game can get underway, Jade didn’t enter until Act 5.2. Whenever someone enters, their Seven Gates are concentrated above their house- except, perhaps, in SGRUB, where the gates were all over the place?


Prototyping of sprite (although, that’s included in the Entry). First tier prototypes are generally unhelpful as hell (see: crowsprite, harlequinsprite) but second tiers are decent (unless it’s Li’l Calsprite). The sprite is a constant source of knowledge, a companion, and will reveal more information about the game as the character progresses. This is ideally a good source for your character to find out about god tiers, The Reckoning, etc al.

Grist collection, alchemization. Fighting imps. Your character messes around in their land, gets to learn the basics of The Medium, maybe alchemizes a few trivial things. More complex items should be saved for later on or for people who join late in the chain.

Meeting the consorts. Finding out what the problem in the land is (John’s Denizen keeps the skies cloudy, Rose’s killed all the fish in the sea) and what the Denizen actually is. Don’t have to see what they look like, just what they are.


Leveling up on the Echeladder, buying Fraymotifs (combo moves), exploring your land. At this point, you would probably have gone through a few gates, and started meeting up with other chain members. Keep in mind that, although they are apparently easy to make, the game was PROBABLY NOT MEANT to be cheesed with a jetpack. You’re supposed to build up to the gates!

Sidequests. You can make up any conceivable sidequest you want, from Breeding The Ultimate Consort to a fetch quest to a cooking tournament to a matchmaking mission to Running the Stocks Market to slaying a monster to racing consort-karts. These inevitably end in a little bit more information about SGRUB/BURB being revealed to the player, and the collection of boonbuxx. (See: how Tavros’ puzzle had the answer being a frog, and Vriska finding boonbucks on LOMAT).

Dreaming. At some point, they may wake up on their dream planet and perhaps explore. If you want to exile the Queens so they can become Exiles, well, there’s your chance.


The Space Player needs to breed the Genesis Frog. Andrew has left a lot of this quite vague, so uh, nobody’s gonna judge if you’re vague about it too. The Time Player also needs to make a time turner device like Dave or Aradia and start doing maintenance behind the scenes, skipping back and forth to ensure that nobody fucks up and you stay on the Alpha Timeline. Nobody likes doomed offshoots.

Going through the Seven Gates. Fighting tougher enemies, fighting your Denizen, and alchemizing more and more powerful weapons, until you’re finally ready for….

The final boss fight against the Black King! His toughness depends on what was prototyped, the skill of your players and whether you successfully kicked out the Queen. When he dies, you get access to your new universe!


Most sessions falter around steps 3 and 4, but if you put in a little bit of effort, there’s no reason why they should! Planning is key. So what else is there? Ah, yes. If you want there to be a twist in the plot, go right ahead. If you want to make up your own First Guardian, go right ahead. But you’ll need to think about the consequences of the twist, what it’s going to force your players to do, and how the twist can be resolved. Do the players need to escape into another session? Are they going to rip Skaia asunder? Did someone forget to prototype before entering, or did someone go mad and murder everyone? Is the First Guardian being an almighty dick? All possibilities, but ones that need to be thought through!


FIRST GUARDIAN
If the kids and their universe don’t exist in some way or form in your session, you can’t have Doc Scratch: he was made from Li’l Cal, after all. This is an opportunity for you to either make up your own, or simply disregard the issue altogether. After all, it seems odd to think that the Guardian would intervene in every single session like Scratch did; perhaps your session’s incarnation has been manipulating things so subtly that it doesn’t need to be pointed out that they exist at all.


OTHER
Having programs like Pesterchum is also highly helpful to a session, as it’s the best method of doing logs. The style that people post in is totally up to you, really: if one person prefers to do their posts with lots of images, and another likes walls of text, does it throw off the flow of the RP or does it mesh well? Should your players all post in an uniform style? There’s no right answer to that.
Wow, I hope this actually made sense.



WHY AM I RAMBLING ABOUT WHY SGRUB/SBURB RPS HAVE SUCH A HIGH FAILURE RATE?


SGRUB/BURB RPs, I think, die so fast because people are so excited about escaping meteors (the start of the RP, the entry sequence) and fighting the Black King (the end of the RP, final boss fight) that they jump into sessions without giving any sort of thought to what their characters are going to do in the long gap between those two events. And the gap IS long- if I remember correctly, it’s something like a week that you get for dicking around in the Medium before the Reckoning is induced, something that can even be prolongued if you do stuff with the carapace royalty like exilin’ and stuff.
Part of this problem is that, well, even Homestuck itself didn’t focus too closely on the “middleman” section in favor of putting it in the background as a setting for plot development. We can see from Vriska and Tavros that there are definitely sidequests and puzzles, but what do those puzzles actually consist of? Helping out consorts? Defeating tougher than usual bad guys? Breeding the ultimate chocobo? People enter their medium world, alchemize cool things, and then go “wait…. what do I do now?” And then the RP, more often than not, snuffs it.

Even in the RPs that succeed, it’s sort of rare to see the participants actually doing the sidequests, or even playing the session like it was meant to be played. This is understandable- after all, half of the fun of playing SGRUB/BURB is finding a way to smash the session into smithereens. But there’s a definite tendency to skip ALL the pre-established game mechanics, the sidequests and the consorts, and just skip to what people deem interesting. Sometimes, this need to jump ahead to the “good stuff” leads to some pretty uninspired sequence breaking.


I’ll use an example here: A player, last in their session, is a mechanics or astrology buff. Despite knowing almost nothing about how S*** works, and having had nobody explain alchemization in detail to them beyond a cursory rundown from their chain members, they manage to alchemize a fully functional jetpack and skip to their fourth gate, thus bypassing their entire world and several other ones. Now, you can say that making a jetpack isn’t that special (John managed it relatively soon after getting into his world), and that they can just return to do their world problems later.

But making a jetpack straight off the bat is a bit unrealistic, especially considering most sessions don’t go to the effort of making a “LOOK AT ALL THIS EXTRA TECHNOLOGY, LET’S INSTALL IT AND CALL A MEMO EXPLAINING THE TECH TO OUR TEAM MEMBERS” post and instead assume that everyone can figure it out for themselves. In addition, well, chances are they’re never going to go back and do their world problems, as they get caught up in other drama.

Ultimately, I can understand wanting to skip over this stuff. It’s boring, right? Who wants to make a post about your character dicking around in temples and getting bitten by their consorts when you could be BEATING UP OGRES RARRR?!!! But skipping it all, like a lot of RPs do, leads to a complete lack of structure to fall back on. The current plot thread dies, your character has nothing to do except level grind: wait, hold on, we never bothered establishing people’s consorts! Or the problems their denizen inflicts on the land! People get fed up and just dump it, or they make something up that wasn’t really very well thought out.


In addition, people tend not to know what to do about exiles and the Derse royalty, mostly because quite a lot about the purpose of exiles is still not known and, well, how exactly does one exile a Black Queen anyway? They skip over them, or pull another half-assed mashup out of their rears, leaving people with a dissatisfied taste in their mouth. Not to mention the trouble with actually figuring out a plot point to derail their session -with- (after all, we’ve already had someone prototyping a First Guardian and a horrible monster; prototypings are the easiest way to fuck up a session, but also unoriginal) and then inevitably throwing it out the window when things turn out to be too hard.

TL;DR. What does this boil down to? Probably something like, “if you can’t be bothered plotting out a lot of intricate details about your session, don’t bother starting it.” You don’t have to map out every single twist in the plot beforehand meticulously, not at all, but if you don’t have anything planned beyond “I’M GONNA PROTOTYPE A DINOSAUR AND ALCHEMISE SOME COMPUTER GLASSES” it’s best just to stick to other forms of RP.