[Discussion] An alternative ending: Can Town

[ventricularPipefitter]

I am *so* with you on the signatures on those stories. The way they showed the larger setting really was something.

You could probably also build a beacon, if you didn't use the Green Sun, or if it was destroyed. Or there could be some other, already-found, beacon.

The spooky thing to me is...the longer a place like Can Town goes on, the more it may eventually become like a new universe, unto itself. What if you took your Lands with you, for example? Or Veil meteors, and the resources upon them?

And...someday, kids would be born there, and grow up. And...going out into the world, and playing a session of sburb, is /explicitly/ what is going to happen, when they come of age.

[disasterAverted]

By the way, do note that even combining their powers Rose and Dave were only able to navigate the void because the Horrorterrors gave them a map and explicit instructions on how to use it. It's almost certain that doing so on a global scale would require the explicit cooperation of the Others, if not outright forging a deal with them. What would the price of such a deal be? What would they even want?

My guess is bringing along your land is a Bad Idea, simply because you're practically inviting timeline doom to seep in. And under the idea for forcing them back in that I posited earlier, either children born there wouldn't have to play ever or (more likely) they'd be forced to play the next time that their parents are. Like, while they're still babies. Yikes.

Also, scratch what I said about blowing up the Green Sun. I kinda forgot for a minute that that's not what they actually did.

[enturbulatedOccupation]

You've got a point there, regarding the 'Terrors. But...at least, it is shown, that they do want things, they have agendas, and they can be communicated with, to a degree. I'd agree with you that navigating their space only happens with, at best, their non-interference.

What are Rose and Dave and everyone using to navigate the ring now, actually?

As for what they want....uh. To become tangle buddies? To stop dying? (Skipper Plumbthroat is hunting squiddles...) In some way, to provide opposition to the process of creating new universes by putting demands or conditions upon a session's narrative.

[slothfulAmphibian]

Okay, I'd normally put a hi into the new guy thread first, but this one caught my attention because i had a very similar idea. My one, however, involves using Magicant.

Space players always feel like they could make a better spacial rip than the ones that lead to Magicant, right? What if they actually tried to do exactly that? I was thinking that an awesometier Space hero could start messing about with the Magicant in their session, discovering that an entrance on a meteor still leads back to their session even if that meteor happens to be in the Furthest Ring, and then getting the bright idea to ride to another session and try welding the two Magicants together.

It would take a hell of a long time, but the end result is a kind of inter-session subspace city made by blending together several hundred instances of Magicant. And that would give players something to hope for; that their session is the next one that a Can Town Scout Meteor drops into to add to the network, to rescue them from having to play all the time.

Even if it isn't possible to mix the Magicants together, it might still be possible to send meteors between sessions to use the various Magicants as an inter-session portal network. Whether we have one hub session containing nothing but meteors leading to other sessions or a complex network that several players get employed keeping mapped, I don't know.

I didn't even have a good name for this. I can't believe I didn't think of Can Town myself.

[walkingUnwoken]

I like these ideas. I've thought about them myself a bit, and I actually had one of my characters(magnumCerebrum) spend 6000 years sitting around before joining the forums. His god tier time player's sacharine doppelganger used a more volatile version of the time berserk trigger mentioned in the faq, causing the whole session to snap into the slow time stream. mC was in the magicant at the time, and when he went back he discovered that, because he was out-of-session when it happened, it didn't effect him. His body aged about 10 years over those 6000, but his mind functioned normally, of course, due to spending 6000 years alone, he's a little more than mildly insane. But anyway, they could use that as a proof of concept, that a player got time(a lot of it) away from the session, but time still flowed very slowly, though gravity and such were effected by it, and air became super thick, as if any movement that he made was fast enough to feel the rush of wind against him. Anyway. It could be something like that done on purpose by a time player, though they probably couldn't maintain it as long as a GT SD. Oh, also, it killed every living thing in the whole session and disabled spawning... so it's a little dangerous...

tl;dr: You know that berserk trigger time ability mentioned in the faq that slows shit down? THAT except BIG

[lucidChthonia]

I'm going to be boring right now and say I think that is not acceptable for this setting.

Six days, okay. Six thousand years? No.

Otherwise when someone needs a break from the game the Time player will freestyle an infinitesimally small multiplier on time passing outside the second player's bubble. Effectively unlimited time like that significantly decreases the pressure of many of the psychological aspects of this roleplay, and in fact completely nullifies a plot that some of us are working with right now.

I think the multiplier for time powers is set to certain "gear ratios" like those on a bicycle, which preserves its usefulness in combat but prevents /exploits/ like this.

----

Ed.: Let's put it this way. The continuous grind on the characters' souls inherent to Sburb is one of the most integral aspects of playing in this setting. It's a long downward slide, and the way players do or don't deal with it is where we get most character development done.

If your character is here to chew ass and kick bubblegum, fine. But they need some form of compensation too, and the easiest way to get that is by screwing them up on a mental level. Without that, a competent character with inexplicable mental fortitude inappropriate to the setting would have no reason to try to escape the game, and/or would have a far easier time breaking it (cf. spacetimeCounselor's planned character arc right now, which has my blessing due to having long-term consequences).

[disasterAverted]

I dunno, I think it could be fine to have minute outside centuries inside scenarios as long as they, you know, are that far out of proportion. And anything powerful enough to generate one is way beyond the ability to properly control. I'd consider anything over 100 years of complete isolation to be as bad as anything the game can throw at you, though I dunno what the guy'd be like afterword (especially since the game would almost certainly expect him to jump right back into things afterward).

Remember, folks, suicide is console-command disabled!

[walkingUnwoken]

I see your point, but you're acting as if it's a perfectly wonderful break from the game, maybe I didn't cover the downsides well enough.
As far as consequences go, there are plenty, for one, every other thing in the session dies of old age, time got to be so slow by overloading. This also made the session unwinnable even if the players were ALL in the skaian magicant, the black king can't be defeated; he already died. Another consequence is the mental one, he's utterly insane, to the point where he seems stable until something fucks with him. He's also severely depressed, and would kill himself if he could. As far as the control thing goes, it was a GT SD's berserk trigger, can you get any less control than that?

Does that work? I only meant that it could be a proof of concept, not a do-it-whenever solution.

[tungstenTinkerer]

Still, I think the point is that there is no reason for someone not to find a way to tune that kind of ability so to exploit it in a way that would grant an acceptable respite time, like, an year or so.

[disasterAverted]

Right. If by "someone" you mean "every time player who goes on a berserk trigger". Because you just described what Time's berserk trigger does. Like, it's literally described that way in the FAQ (I think, though I can't find it now). The time player has too much and tries to take a break by freezing everything, in an expanding area-of-effect. And since they have to be BTing to even use that ability, they'll A: Probably overdo it and B: Drag the entire team with them since it's an indefinitely expanding area of effect. Except they can't really pull off a complete stop, they just make it so slow it takes subjective days to reach them across what'd normally be a ten minute trip.

So this is what happens when you manage to inject that little bit of extra juice. And since for endgame abilities said juice seems to be inversely related to to controllability...

We're getting away from the original point though. Doing something like that on purpose as our solution to being forced to play the game is not a feasible solution.

[stanzicApparati]

Okay, stepping in to clarify something. The "time-stop all the things" as Time's BT? That's not actually in the FAQ. That's my headcanon of what Time's BT probably looks like. It could be that the player would just time-stop their planet and not go any further. Or they could cause time to go haywire all over the place. Could be, something entirely different would happen.

We don't know; it isn't canonized yet.

In any case, it would still be too easy for someone to find a way to fine-tune it so that they could give themselves and their co-players a respite from the game. After all, [Chaos Dunk] is Might's BT - and it's still something Might players can use; it's just an endgame ability, that's all - it's very expensive and maybe has a long cool down, but it's still something they can pull out in the endboss battle.

[tungstenTinkerer]

Yeah, let's no0t forget - then someone BT's they use endgame-level abilities, but that is not to say that said abilities cannot be used normally, with calm and access to fine-tuning.

[walkingUnwoken]

True, but endgame is a bit of an understatement for this shit. The vast majority of time players won't become near powerful enough to purposefully use and control the ability. Control being the key word. Also, depending on how you use it, at least the way my character did, it killed everything living in a session, including the user. And as far as BTs go, if I'm correct, there's no definite BT depending on aspect. It's just a loss of control, causing massive use of power that the fully conscious mind can't access; meaning that often BTs are similar with the same aspect, and sometimes they're the same, but someone, especially the people who don't learn abilities and just freestyle it, I think the faq mentioned them, what are they called, purists? Anyway, they would probably freestyle their BT, coming up with something new, and other players could too, potentially. Maybe the farther off the edge you go, the stronger the ability is?

[tungstenTinkerer]

Actually the FAQ also clearly says that even purists who don't learn abilities still don't get to freestyle their BT and will end up casting the same endgame abilities without actually knowing them.

[unstablephysacism]

can someone like... bring a version of the mayor and have him run it? i just really want the mayor to have a happy life somehow. he could even be like a weird kinda mascot. i dunno, i like to think of the mayor as being the one thing in sburb that is universally loved and cherished by veterans, with a sort of sacredity so high that even the most hardened of player killers hesitate to kill him. obviously he would be a rare npc, a glitch that may have been meant to be the antithesis of jack noir and he would only be in a few sessions.