Post by stanzicApparati on Jul 4, 2012 0:26:24 GMT -5
Basically, a few of my ideas about Time and how it works, in FAQ form.
[Tendency: Emotional burnout]
Time is a hell of an Aspect to get. By which I mean, it will put you through hell even more than the game usually does and I say this as someone who rolled Time for their first session; the amount of shenaniganry you can get up to with Time, especially when the Beat likes you, is awesome. But it doesn't make up for the fact that getting Time is SBURB's way of saying you need to start facing the fact that some shit is just inevitable. Like death.
Time players are the life of the corpse party. They are the star, it is them. So they're busy time travelling, all day every day, and racking up the doomed timeclones - which they then have to bury so that you, their co-player, doesn't flip off the handle when you trip over their dead selves.
All this is by way of explaining that sooner or later, even with all the emotional support and psy-buffs you can drop on them, most Time players are going to just...burn out a little. Yes, your Denizen is an asshole (whose isn't?) and the underlings are a real pain - but they had to bury their own corpse five minutes into the session, unless they're exceptionally lucky, and they've been having to do it every five minutes since then. Don't ask them to sympathize when your Denizen is snarking at you, but do listen to them when they tell you not to do something - especially if it's couched in the terms of "I don't want to see you do that again" and you've never even considered doing it before they mentioned it.
Don't ask them about their doomed selves, by the way. We don't want to talk about it.
[Tendency/Trivia: Me's a crowd]
You've probably read GG's guide (and if not, what's wrong with you, go read it now, I think it's upped the survival rate for first-time players from 7% to around 10% - but I don't mess with numbers like that). But anyways, if you've read it, you've seen the whole bit on how Time players, among others, tend to have weird shit going on with their ping response if you get hold of their pendant.
This is because Time players, like Rain and Mist players, are going to have at least a dozen timeclones running around and keeping up loops so that you don't all end up in a doomed timeline. On top of that, there's generally at least one doomed timeclone, probably more. Basically, there are many of them and the pendant gets confused about which one you want.
[Trivia: Doomed selves]
Okay, remember how I said that Time players really don't like to talk about their doomed selves and what's up with that? And if you've been paying attention to your Time player, you've probably noticed how they tend to show up and smack you upside the head right when you're planning on doing something really stupid - like going and having a stab-off with Noir, or talking to the Others.
Yeah. This is the part where I tell you what's up with that and why we Time players tend to emotionally shut down or go crazy a lot.
The short story is, SBURB is more of an ass to Time players than usual. While Mind players can run a mental sim of what'll happen if they pick one choice over another, Time players don't get to do that. We have to see the results manually.
Y'know. The hard way.
And when our doomed self shows up - usually horribly dead by the time we find them - as soon as we interact with them, we remember what they remember. Right up to the point where they died.
Yes, this means we have the memories of dying a lot. You'd shut down or go crazy too, if you had that in your head.
And in case you're going "Oh, this must be a bug, I'm sure my Time player will be just fine" - ahahaha, NO[/b]. People have poked through the code and it turns out, this is entirely deliberate. It's a passive effect called [Ain't No Rest For The Wicked] and it doesn't show up when you check what buffs are running because as far as the game's concerned, it's not a buff. Anyways, what it does is make it so that as soon as you interact with a dead you? You know what they knew, right up until their heart stopped beating. And don't think that you can pull off some shenanigans to help avoid your Time player from interacting with their personal corpse party; it's like trying to keep enemies from spawning when you aren't looking: the game will get increasingly convoluted and over-the-top to make sure that the thing it's trying to do happens. You try shoving the corpse in your sylladex? It'll "just happen" to pop out right when your Time player shows up, even if you buried it under a million other things.
Also, it is very loose about what counts as 'interaction'. Just looking can be enough, sometimes. I think [Be All My Sins Remembered] uses the same line of code as corruption does, when it comes to testing if you've interacted or not - but I don't have any proof for that theory beyond "mage intuition".
Anyway, yeah. That's what's up with the doomed selves. If your Time player thinks you need to know anything from the doomed timeline, they'll tell you - otherwise, just don't ask.
[Trivia: Corpse disposal]
I've seen people saying that they've caught their Time player dumping corpses into the Forge or doing weird things with them. This is usually because a) they ran out of room to bury them all on their own land (no, seriously, this can happen) or b) their own land just kinda...isn't set up for efficient corpse disposal. Say your Time player got the Land of Ice and Water. Yeah, they're not burying shit there; they'll just get a geyser of corpses when they're done the Terraforming. So you'll probably catch them bopping over to your land to dispose of their timeclones' corpses, especially if your land has the Forge or volcanoes.
That said, if your Time player is trying to alchemize stuff out of their doomed selves, or building things with the corpses, remind them that that shit's creepy as hell. It's one of those things that's easy for us to forget, under the circumstances. If they're mutilating their own corpses, they're probably suffering some kind of corruption. Or crazy. Either way, make sure they can't stab you before you try hugging them.
[Glitch: Playing to an audience of one]
You know how the audience effect only kicks in if you're questing with someone? Yeah. Thing is, the game only checks to see if there's someone else there. It doesn't run a check to see if that 'someone else' is a timeclone. Presumably, Rain and Mist players could get the same benefit. I would only suggest using this to practice getting in character for your role, though. You can't form an Unbreakable Union with yourself, and you're really going to need those Revelawesomes.
[Berserk Trigger]
Time players are more at risk for Aggrievance than anyone else. They're definitely going to get it at least once during a session unless you're speed-running. Unlike most other players, though, where you can spot if someone might have caught Aggrievance because they go offline and stop talking to anyone...well, with all the timeclones around, they are never offline. So unless they make a point of remembering to mention that, oh hey - one of you needs to go hug them so they stop moping around in their Homefree? They can vanish without you even noticing something's wrong.
This would be a bad thing even under normal circumstances. It's worse for Time players, because if their case of Aggrievance is neglected long enough, they start acting like they have knight syndrome and start wanting the game to really, truly stop. So they go Berserk and start using their Aspect to try and make the game stop. I'm sure you've probably seen them do [Time on My Side] at least once and noticed how it makes everything within 10' slow down or stop except them. That's because it doesn't affect them.
When a Time player berserks, they start casting [Time on My Side] and the effect keeps spreading. Which makes it tricky to snap them out of it, because if it takes you more than a day or two to notice, you're going to find it takes upwards of ten minutes to get through any portals leading to their land. The Magicant seems to be the only area that isn't affected by this, but the Magicant is weird as hell as far as temporal and spatial reasoning goes.
Your best bet, if you have a Hope player, is to send them in with [Dreams Don't Die] running; denial can be a very powerful thing. Otherwise, have your Space player portal you - or themselves - in beside them or get a Star player to use [Bridge of Stars]. Failing all that, have one of the timeclones go in, or kit yourself out in Time-aspected clothes and head for their Homefree. It won't be perfect - you're still going to move like you're walking through molasses, but you'll probably be able to get somewhere in reasonable time.
Once you get in, apply a drop-kick upside the head to knock them out so that they stop casting. Hugs can be applied after they wake up.
[Tendency: Emotional burnout]
Time is a hell of an Aspect to get. By which I mean, it will put you through hell even more than the game usually does and I say this as someone who rolled Time for their first session; the amount of shenaniganry you can get up to with Time, especially when the Beat likes you, is awesome. But it doesn't make up for the fact that getting Time is SBURB's way of saying you need to start facing the fact that some shit is just inevitable. Like death.
Time players are the life of the corpse party. They are the star, it is them. So they're busy time travelling, all day every day, and racking up the doomed timeclones - which they then have to bury so that you, their co-player, doesn't flip off the handle when you trip over their dead selves.
All this is by way of explaining that sooner or later, even with all the emotional support and psy-buffs you can drop on them, most Time players are going to just...burn out a little. Yes, your Denizen is an asshole (whose isn't?) and the underlings are a real pain - but they had to bury their own corpse five minutes into the session, unless they're exceptionally lucky, and they've been having to do it every five minutes since then. Don't ask them to sympathize when your Denizen is snarking at you, but do listen to them when they tell you not to do something - especially if it's couched in the terms of "I don't want to see you do that again" and you've never even considered doing it before they mentioned it.
Don't ask them about their doomed selves, by the way. We don't want to talk about it.
[Tendency/Trivia: Me's a crowd]
You've probably read GG's guide (and if not, what's wrong with you, go read it now, I think it's upped the survival rate for first-time players from 7% to around 10% - but I don't mess with numbers like that). But anyways, if you've read it, you've seen the whole bit on how Time players, among others, tend to have weird shit going on with their ping response if you get hold of their pendant.
This is because Time players, like Rain and Mist players, are going to have at least a dozen timeclones running around and keeping up loops so that you don't all end up in a doomed timeline. On top of that, there's generally at least one doomed timeclone, probably more. Basically, there are many of them and the pendant gets confused about which one you want.
[Trivia: Doomed selves]
Okay, remember how I said that Time players really don't like to talk about their doomed selves and what's up with that? And if you've been paying attention to your Time player, you've probably noticed how they tend to show up and smack you upside the head right when you're planning on doing something really stupid - like going and having a stab-off with Noir, or talking to the Others.
Yeah. This is the part where I tell you what's up with that and why we Time players tend to emotionally shut down or go crazy a lot.
The short story is, SBURB is more of an ass to Time players than usual. While Mind players can run a mental sim of what'll happen if they pick one choice over another, Time players don't get to do that. We have to see the results manually.
Y'know. The hard way.
And when our doomed self shows up - usually horribly dead by the time we find them - as soon as we interact with them, we remember what they remember. Right up to the point where they died.
Yes, this means we have the memories of dying a lot. You'd shut down or go crazy too, if you had that in your head.
And in case you're going "Oh, this must be a bug, I'm sure my Time player will be just fine" - ahahaha, NO[/b]. People have poked through the code and it turns out, this is entirely deliberate. It's a passive effect called [Ain't No Rest For The Wicked] and it doesn't show up when you check what buffs are running because as far as the game's concerned, it's not a buff. Anyways, what it does is make it so that as soon as you interact with a dead you? You know what they knew, right up until their heart stopped beating. And don't think that you can pull off some shenanigans to help avoid your Time player from interacting with their personal corpse party; it's like trying to keep enemies from spawning when you aren't looking: the game will get increasingly convoluted and over-the-top to make sure that the thing it's trying to do happens. You try shoving the corpse in your sylladex? It'll "just happen" to pop out right when your Time player shows up, even if you buried it under a million other things.
Also, it is very loose about what counts as 'interaction'. Just looking can be enough, sometimes. I think [Be All My Sins Remembered] uses the same line of code as corruption does, when it comes to testing if you've interacted or not - but I don't have any proof for that theory beyond "mage intuition".
Anyway, yeah. That's what's up with the doomed selves. If your Time player thinks you need to know anything from the doomed timeline, they'll tell you - otherwise, just don't ask.
[Trivia: Corpse disposal]
I've seen people saying that they've caught their Time player dumping corpses into the Forge or doing weird things with them. This is usually because a) they ran out of room to bury them all on their own land (no, seriously, this can happen) or b) their own land just kinda...isn't set up for efficient corpse disposal. Say your Time player got the Land of Ice and Water. Yeah, they're not burying shit there; they'll just get a geyser of corpses when they're done the Terraforming. So you'll probably catch them bopping over to your land to dispose of their timeclones' corpses, especially if your land has the Forge or volcanoes.
That said, if your Time player is trying to alchemize stuff out of their doomed selves, or building things with the corpses, remind them that that shit's creepy as hell. It's one of those things that's easy for us to forget, under the circumstances. If they're mutilating their own corpses, they're probably suffering some kind of corruption. Or crazy. Either way, make sure they can't stab you before you try hugging them.
[Glitch: Playing to an audience of one]
You know how the audience effect only kicks in if you're questing with someone? Yeah. Thing is, the game only checks to see if there's someone else there. It doesn't run a check to see if that 'someone else' is a timeclone. Presumably, Rain and Mist players could get the same benefit. I would only suggest using this to practice getting in character for your role, though. You can't form an Unbreakable Union with yourself, and you're really going to need those Revelawesomes.
[Berserk Trigger]
Time players are more at risk for Aggrievance than anyone else. They're definitely going to get it at least once during a session unless you're speed-running. Unlike most other players, though, where you can spot if someone might have caught Aggrievance because they go offline and stop talking to anyone...well, with all the timeclones around, they are never offline. So unless they make a point of remembering to mention that, oh hey - one of you needs to go hug them so they stop moping around in their Homefree? They can vanish without you even noticing something's wrong.
This would be a bad thing even under normal circumstances. It's worse for Time players, because if their case of Aggrievance is neglected long enough, they start acting like they have knight syndrome and start wanting the game to really, truly stop. So they go Berserk and start using their Aspect to try and make the game stop. I'm sure you've probably seen them do [Time on My Side] at least once and noticed how it makes everything within 10' slow down or stop except them. That's because it doesn't affect them.
When a Time player berserks, they start casting [Time on My Side] and the effect keeps spreading. Which makes it tricky to snap them out of it, because if it takes you more than a day or two to notice, you're going to find it takes upwards of ten minutes to get through any portals leading to their land. The Magicant seems to be the only area that isn't affected by this, but the Magicant is weird as hell as far as temporal and spatial reasoning goes.
Your best bet, if you have a Hope player, is to send them in with [Dreams Don't Die] running; denial can be a very powerful thing. Otherwise, have your Space player portal you - or themselves - in beside them or get a Star player to use [Bridge of Stars]. Failing all that, have one of the timeclones go in, or kit yourself out in Time-aspected clothes and head for their Homefree. It won't be perfect - you're still going to move like you're walking through molasses, but you'll probably be able to get somewhere in reasonable time.
Once you get in, apply a drop-kick upside the head to knock them out so that they stop casting. Hugs can be applied after they wake up.
