On Titles [Headcanon;question/suggestion for GGTG]

[explodingFrogs]

Is the Sburb Glitch Faq ever going to have individual in-depth analysis of Titles like you've been doing for Aspects? If so, I've been thinking about how titles work (specifically the Mage title, since I play one) and I have some ideas. (If you are doing Titles and think these ideas are any good, I'd be interested in doing a guest chapter for Mages. Or I can just write an IC FAQ on the forums, I guess.)

Firstly, Titles do not directly determine the majority of a Player's capabilities. (Mages and Witches can be unholy terrors in hand-to-hand combat, and Knights and Guards can be long-distance "nukers", but frail up close.)

Neither the name of the Title itself (Mage, Knight, Thief) nor the name of its Archetype (Warrior, Caster, Support) have a very strong influence on the game abilities a Player learns. All player abilities are drawn from a common list for their Aspect. The Title's influence on this is to determine if and when a given ability is learned--a Knight of Doom will have terrifying combat skills right out of the gate, but might never figure out the more esoteric tricks a Witch of the same Aspect can pull, no matter how high up the Echeladder he goes. Similarly, a Seer of Space will know practically everything that goes on in her session right from the get-go, but will simply never learn the more destructive Space powers, while Wastes and Graces of any Aspect learn devastating skills that no other Class has access to.

Titles also influence the form game abilities take to a degree, imposing their "flavor" upon the power's manifestation. For example, the Thief and Rogue classes cause all game abilities manifested through them to take the form of the Aspect they manipulate being somehow "stolen" or "moved elsewhere". This has certain consequences: on the one hand, Thieves always buff themselves when they debuff an enemy and Rogues can do the same for an ally; on the other, no power based on creating the Aspect from nothing will function for these Titles. (For the most part, they simply don't learn such abilities, but because of Sburb's shoddy scripting, some make it through, and cause glitches ranging from the unfortunate to the critically dangerous when uninformed Players try to use them.

Lastly, Titles guide behavior--or rather, railroad it. Sburb wants you to behave in a certain way when you're a Player of a given Title, and misfortune follows if you don't fall in line. For example, Mages are supposed to act like their namesakes in folklore, fantasy, and bad fanfiction when it comes to freely giving information to their teammates: that is to day, don't. Withhold key information, hinting at it only indirectly, dropping clues so that they know you're not telling them something important but not what it is, and tell them that they need to figure it out for themselves. Arrange puzzles for them to solve to figure out what they need to know. How badly Sburb wants Mages to keep things from their friends scales with the importance of the information--in extreme cases, it may even require them to set an actively hostile guardian against their friends.

(Basically, all that shit players go through in dungeons, quests, and ruins? Mages have to arrange stuff like that anytime they want to clue his teammates in on anything really important. Thankfully, there are workarounds--Sburb is scripted shoddily enough that it won't notice things like the above-mentioned guardian being, say, a low-level imp, or even an annoyed Consort.)

[ExtropianDreamer]

We know that the sort of knowledge seers get is determined by their aspect. Terezi's revolved around choices, while Rose has favourable probabilities, if I recall.

Meanwhile, Rose and Vriska appear to use their powers in very different ways, despite sharing an aspect. Aranea appears to be different again. This leads be to conclude that Title probably has a fairly substantial effect.

[subsibilantPhotojournalist]

I think UU straight up said that classes shape the way your aspect works, making aspects secondary in canon. This is an AU though, so if GGTG wants to make aspects the main part of the title that's ok too.

[grindinglyGodliest]

First of all, I remember your name explodingFrog and I know that you're cool and I also totally forgot to answer some of your comments on the fic. So sorry about that. This forum makes it much easier to keep track of comments. With that out of the way:

May 18, 2012 15:28:57 GMT -5 explodingFrogs said:

Is the Sburb Glitch Faq ever going to have individual in-depth analysis of Titles like you've been doing for Aspects? If so, I've been thinking about how titles work (specifically the Mage title, since I play one) and I have some ideas. (If you are doing Titles and think these ideas are any good, I'd be interested in doing a guest chapter for Mages. Or I can just write an IC FAQ on the forums, I guess.)

I don't have any plans for individual chapters. I am soon going to elaborate on how Titles work in general. However, I don't plan to give them the same treatment as the Aspects.

If so, I've been thinking about how titles work (specifically the Mage title, since I play one) and I have some ideas. (If you are doing Titles and think these ideas are any good, I'd be interested in doing a guest chapter for Mages. Or I can just write an IC FAQ on the forums, I guess.)

I am 150% cool with collaborative work. It has been true so far and it hasn't stopped being a thing. However, you have some slight bad timing. I would feel terrible if I greenlighted your guest chapter on Titles and then, in my next update, I denied stuff that you wrote.

So it would be safer if you waited until I puked my headcanons about how titles work. I wouldn't have to make the hard choice of either making un-canon a bro's article or changing what I plan to write.

Though I gotta say, what I plan to write is pretty similar to your stuff. You are free to call me a thief when we get there.

[explodingFrogs]

May 18, 2012 23:21:00 GMT -5 ExtropianDreamer said:

We know that the sort of knowledge seers get is determined by their aspect. Terezi's revolved around choices, while Rose has favourable probabilities, if I recall.

Meanwhile, Rose and Vriska appear to use their powers in very different ways, despite sharing an aspect. Aranea appears to be different again. This leads be to conclude that Title probably has a fairly substantial effect.

I never said that they didn't. I said that a) Titles do not have a direct effect, which is admittedly an ambiguous distinction, and b) that Titles and their Archetypes do not determine a Player's combat style.

May 19, 2012 2:01:40 GMT -5 subsibilantPhotojournalist said:

I think UU straight up said that classes shape the way your aspect works,

Exactly. They shape how Aspects work; they don't have their own inherent set of game powers.

May 19, 2012 2:01:40 GMT -5 subsibilantPhotojournalist said:

making aspects secondary in canon.

I'd argue that this actually makes Titles secondary. Aspects are the source of game abilities, and Titles influence how those Abilities work. Although, given that there can be no Class without both Aspect and Title, the point is largely academic.

To be clear on what I was proposing: Every Aspect has a library of game abilities. All Stars Players will learn from the Stars ability set, all Heart Players from the Heart ability set, and so forth. However, barring glitches, no single Player is going to learn every single game ability for their Aspect, because of Titles.

Titles determine what abilities can be learned for a Player of that Title and Aspect, and when. There is a considerable degree of overlap: some "core abilities" are essential and defining to the nature of the Aspect, so all Players of that Aspect will learn them regardless of Title, at roughly the same rate. Others are learned much more quickly by some Titles than by others, but still fairly universal. Still more abilities are rather specialized and exclusive to Titles that match that specialty--combat-focused Titles such as the Knight or Guard, for example, or scrying powers for the Seer or Guide. And some abilities are absolutely exclusive to a given Title/Aspect combo. (You'd think that these would be the most devastating in the game. This is often true, but given Sburb's scattershot quality control, just as many are completely useless, whether due to being hopelessly glitched or simply being incredibly silly.)

All of this may be reasonably extrapolated based on what's already been written in the Sburb Glitch FAQ. I just codified it for the purposes of this theory. Likewise, Titles influencing/forcing behavior in some way was explicitly stated in the "Titles and Values" overview chapter, so that part of the theory was just me speculating on the details of how that might go down.

The only truly original part of this theory is the idea that Titles influence the manifestation of game abilities--that every ability has a certain degree of "flexibility" built into its function that the Title alters to suit its particular "tone". I came up with this when I considered that the whole Thief buff/debuff thing seemed more pervasive than a single exclusive ability or even a set of exclusive abilities, as if it were a modification the Title applied to all of the powers the Player knew. I then wondered if perhaps other Titles made their own modifications of this sort...

So, in brief: the Title does have a very strong effect on Player capabilities, but it's not a direct one in the sense of "being a source of game traits and powers unto itself"; rather, it acts as a kind of "filter" determining the nature of the powers the Player learns from their Aspect. And as the likes of Rose and Vriska demonstrate, it doesn't have much of an effect on the role one plays in combat in the same way that video games have conditioned us to expect titles like "Thief", "Knight", and "Mage" to define a character's combat role.

May 19, 2012 6:23:31 GMT -5 grindinglyGodliest said:

First of all, I remember your name explodingFrog and I know that you're cool and I also totally forgot to answer some of your comments on the fic. So sorry about that. This forum makes it much easier to keep track of comments.

If it's at all relevant, the last unanswered comments from my Mage character were in Chapter 43 (Article: pendant important glitches) and Chapter 49 (Article: skaian magicant).

May 19, 2012 6:23:31 GMT -5 grindinglyGodliest said:

I don't have any plans for individual chapters. I am soon going to elaborate on how Titles work in general. However, I don't plan to give them the same treatment as the Aspects.

Sounds awesome! I look forward to it.

May 19, 2012 6:23:31 GMT -5 grindinglyGodliest said:

I am 150% cool with collaborative work. It has been true so far and it hasn't stopped being a thing. However, you have some slight bad timing. I would feel terrible if I greenlighted your guest chapter on Titles and then, in my next update, I denied stuff that you wrote.

So it would be safer if you waited until I puked my headcanons about how titles work. I wouldn't have to make the hard choice of either making un-canon a bro's article or changing what I plan to write.

Though I gotta say, what I plan to write is pretty similar to your stuff. You are free to call me a thief when we get there.

Fair enough. I can't claim any credit for the similarity you mention; like I said above, most of this theory is just codification of stuff that's been scattered here and there throughout your FAQ already, and extrapolation based on that.

[ExtropianDreamer]

Sounds about like what I was thinking, now that you've explained it like that.

I support this approach whole-heartedly. ;D

EDIT I guess I should figure out how Bane affects it's abilities. It's probably focused around self-buffs I imagine, with a weakened version of the Aspect's scrying ability tied to one of it's senses? And if it gets any direct attack abilities, they probably exhale them, or channel them through a stare or roar? Very beast-like and savage, I think, possibly to the point of slightly transforming the player physically when they use certain abilities.

[genesisArtificer]

Like a bloodhound or cerberus maybe?

Bane is the shit, I think I am gonna make a Bane.