Ask me anything

especially proud of:

•I didn't get bored
•I wasn't undermined by the unexpected popularity
•I had to learn HTML to make the fancy FAQ effects. That was cool

what could be written out or explained better:

•I should have made an AO3 account with a typical pesterchum name
•The whole fic is an orgiastic trainwreck of typos and broken syntax
•There's a lot chapters with such bad quality writing that it makes me cringe just to look at them again and if these chapters were people, I would challenge them to a gladiator battle in an ancient coliseum. The chapter "title and values" comes to mind, but also "the main quest" and "advanced game theory".

How Rain's combat abilities work? That's a bit hard to answer.

I envisioned in my fic that Sburb is like a sandbox game where people have to figure out their own role. Aspects can do a lot of things and people can pick their tools. I mentioned somewhere in the fic that aspects have a LOT of abilities. Like, 150~ different abilities for each aspect. Sburb is supposed to be a huge game.

So there are a lot of way to use madness and fight with it.

Aspect chapters are only trying to illustrate that kind of things that an aspect is all about. You can invent any kind of ability that sounds madness-related.

For example: you could say that a Rain player exploits a specific ability which increases his/her stats depending on how much confusion he/she creates on a battlefield. The more an area has "madness" in it, the stronger the Rain player feeds on it. He/she would fight with traps, tricks and illusions to grow in strength before delivering a killing blow. If it was a player vs player fight, people would say things like "keep your head together guys, or else you're just making the dude stronger".

So yeah, power over madness can be interpreted in many ways. Rain players can be buffed when surrounded by madness. They can induce madness or confusion. They can self-inflict madness on themselves (laugh continually and lose control) to boosts their stats. They can duplicate to swarm an enemy. Like most aspects, I proposed that Rain should have a physical manifestation for a direct attack spell, and that's the rainbow stuff that makes things melt.

So depending on how the aspect is approached, a Rain fighter can be a berserker, a trickster, a mass-debuffer or a psychic-type pokémon that spams the ability [confusion].

There's also all kind of specific title themes to factor. A guard could protect someone from a mad situation. A prince could put an end to madness. A Muse could devise a plan to confuse separate enemies and make them fight each other. Or a Waste of Rain could avoid a battle entirely by making enemies sit down and enjoy a mad tea party. That's gotta be worth a few rungs on the echellader. And some extra character ARC for being in-character.

I'm rambling again.

Oh drat, Law

It was created specifically to be the opposite of Light. Terezi doesn't really have anything to do with it. I really wanted to pair aspects because I'm weird like that. Since Light is considered like a blessing in general, the act of removing Light (basically what Vriska did) is like cursing. However, being the Hero of Curses doesn't seems particularly badass or interesting to talk about. I figured that since Light is all about opening paths, then Law would be focused on paths that are blocked. It would encompass having knowledge of the things you shouldn't do or CREATING paths that are blocked.

I guess that a Page of Law would be like "I create the rule X and if you mess with it, your head is gone". A Mage of Law could flat-out declare an attack/ability that enemies aren't allowed to use anymore. A Seer of Law would know about rules to follow and taboos to avoid. Like advising someone by saying "when you see your friend about to die tomorrow, the Law is that you must do nothing and let him die. Then it will be for the best. Respect the Law and it will be fine".

Stuff like that, idk

I'm concerned about Law because it's pretty much my forgotten aspect. I always forget to mention it and I'm surprised when people remember that it's still there.

I was pretty close to calling the aspect "Steel" but that was dumb.

Hope you don't mind a follow up question, I was wondering more specifically about Rain's elemental materialization- the "Headaches". A field of melting colors and warped reality is pretty badass, but I'm not sure what sort of effect such a thing would have on people who, say, stuck their hand inside it or something.
Here, I'm gonna rephrase this in the least shitty way I can manage.
If someone got hit with [Requiem of Sunshine and Rainbows], how exactly would they die?

Alright, that makes a good amount of sense. Thanks.

I don't think that these apocalyptic scenarios are intended by Sburb. I don't know what would happen to a partially-destroyed world.

I was just trying to make a common theory out of the basic mechanics of the game that we have seen: it destroys the player's world and it creates a new one. Like you say, there are many more universe-destroying things going on in Homestuck but I'm sticking to what seems to be deliberately planned by the game and therefore, what should happen in every session by default. That's hard to answer since every session seen in the MSPA adventure is non-conventional. I think we can agree that death-by-meteor is scripted by the game, but not much else.

The whole chapter is full of holes anyway. I don't know why Carapaces are repopulating the world in the future, I don't know how to handle universes that have more than one planet with sentient life, and I don't know why a universe isn't wholly destroyed from the start instead of just having one world go through planetary bombardment by meteors the size of planet fucking Jupiter.

The chapter was an excuse to set up a scenario of infinitely repeating games to explain why the FAQ author appears to be some sort of veteran. It just made writing the FAQ more interesting to me.

I don't know why it spawned an AU.

It was an accident I swear.

How "canon" Advanced Game Theory is supposed to be in the first place? Very very little. The author is indeed supposed to be a dumbass. I don't think I stress that fact enough. It would get repetitive though. In the Sburb Game Theory chapter, he just repeats a popular theory without being really into it.

ANYWAY, the original question was about sburb destroying worlds and I found the latest update strangely on subject.

UU: all Universes die at some point. some sooner than others. it is all part of the cycle, and sometimes things like this mUst happen for reasons beyond oUr Understanding.

If it's canon that all universes invariably dies because of some sort of cycle, then it paves the way to canonizing that Sburb is something akin to cellular reproduction. Yay? It would be, like, the only thing in the fic not explicitly proven to be wrong.