Non-Standard Roles

[horrorTerror]

General thread for mythological roles that by all code and sense simply should not be, yet are, because Sburb is a glitchy monster and there is apparently modding going on somehow. Yes, jumping off your myth arc into the arms of the horrorterrors like a frog away from an enemy into the safety of wherever it jumps is a perfectly valid option if Sburb insists you die. No, it is not a valid option to do so with the angels. bluh bluh horrorterror situation

Clowns, the other changed titles, unusual added aspects, added titles, glitching, variations on the class of aspect scheme, aspect of aspect, class of class, aspect of class, multiple titles, multiple aspects, things you should immediately Vagabounce right the hell out of grab a mirror right now before the game kills you and everyone else, things you Vagabounced into because your title plasticity hates you and/or you tried for something you shouldn't have or couldn't get, you get the point, anything the game is not supposed to hand people by default and therefore is problematic. Sound of Rain? Life of Guard? Mage of #*$&(%$? Corpse of Doom? Ward of Knight? Herp of Derp and Aderp? Everything of Everything and not in the Space of Mist sense? Space of Mist? Whatever, throw it at us!

Have at it, players.

also, here's a quick suggestions list for all those situations I brought up

SPOILER: Click to show

Clown? Immediately vagabounce to something else. Faun is a pretty good choice as it's the miles less buggy version of Clown that works as an active counterpart to the Maid no mass player killing sprees done. We all hate the guy who did that to the perfectly functional Faun title. May have an affinity for 'older' script designs like quest gen sections with name issues, and a disaffinity for 'new' script designs like classes or aspects that seem a result of session drift and cropped up later.

Most of the other edited titles are less buggy. Cataclysm classes are not that buggy, the cataclysm is intentionally game-mandated. Yes, Sburb is just plain horrible sometimes. Changing from Grace to Saint or Waste to Foe is not recommended as the interpretation changes a little to the point where it might tank your ARC even more than vagabouncy adaptation-fail reflex moments, plus Saint has a tendency to accumulate all these weird little/big 'moral' restrictions that look like a Law player decided to unleash the infinite cosmic powers of bureaucracy and politeness and purity on your face and problems for breaking them (plus the cataclysm is only a lot less problematic, not assuredly gone entirely, depending on your aspect, situation, and how well bouncing went), and Foe's interpretations tend to be arguably allow for being just as unwillingly damaging as the cataclysm if not worse and/or getting hate flak from your aspect and coplayers' lands, neither of which is a pleasant experience in any sense of the word unless you like enduring brutal permadeaths with much suffering.

Added aspects and titles? Get as much information as possible for how that class or aspect works, and if it's not got its own FAQ yet out in the servers of the ring it might be a good idea to just write one yourself. Asking your sprite and consorts and lunar libraries and any other safe information sources as much as appropriately possible for information is severely recommended, and plumb your revelawesomes as much as possible in hopes of understanding ability use when it gets added to your ability list if you have that abstraction.

Glitching? Try not to die. If you can get coherent responses out of anyone or anything and your abilities are not an immediate threat to you, your coplayers, or game-essential abstractions, it is basically an added title or aspect and the above ask-info-sources applies, with the caveat of getting weird stuff. Really, really weird stuff. Try to figure out the specific permutation of your title glitches, and you should probably compile notes in a log in case someone else by coincidence rolls exactly the same combination of glitched parts or a similar one.

Variations of role are complicated. Changing the word 'of' to anything that is not similar can lead to extreme problems if you're not careful but is thankfully almost never done. Ever. I have personally not encountered this being changed nor heard of cases where it has beyond vague horror stories in the distant memories of the Middling Gods concerning hell mode sessions and their great post-decay battles.

Aspect of Aspect basically functions as having two aspects and freedom to do virtually whatever with them tolerably within both their respective boundaries, with the aspect in its rightful aspect slot being more prevalent and the aspect in the class slot usually being given out less (but in exchange for title-specific stuff as well) and acting as the interpretation lens a class normally should and tends to be slower-mastered than the aspect in the aspect slot. There is some series of bugged half-assed unfinished-and-applied-anyway patches that include interpretational code to make aspects into workable classes and is probably why this is even a thing sometimes but even the best versions are bugged as hell (what isn't) and it doesn't work at all half the time. Yes, you get all the powers and whisperings of both. No, it is not always awesome, especially if the two whisperings utterly hate each other or are simply incompatible (Luck of Law abuses loopholes and manipulates probabilities both ways, but Law is going to be incredibly pissed half the time over the lawbreaking lunacy and Luck will be trolling nonstop and it will be your-native-hates-your-current except it never lets up ever and if your native is not one of those it will also butt in to complain angrily too and that's a fairly viable pairing since they work together, imagine the absolute chaos of a Space of Time as dimensional folds reached Furthest Ring complexity levels from whisperings beating each other up) and your ARC would probably end up sucking unless you restricted your arsenal to manual strifing and what fit neatly in both aspects' portfolios and thus won't trigger aspect hatefests against you as well as your other aspect (Sand of Might is going to be way easier to weaken your enemies and buff yourself but dear god it's gonna be an aspect anger party up there in your brain), so this tends to restrict people to a very limited area to avoid tanking their ARC, and cause severe personality problems as two conflicting ideals beat each other up and turn the person into collateral damage in the process. Even if neither of those aspects is Rain or Time it's still gonna be a battlefield (Time of Rain is just one big anti-sanity beam to the player and everyone around them). No, you-have-no-class jokes is not allowed (pretty sure gM's Etiquette FAQ is pretty clear about this) and will likely net you a punch to the face from the nearest thing with a spiked glove. Especially if that thing is a hostile Ringwraith and a prototyping glitch causes the tips of [RED MILES] to be covered in spikey gauntlets because Sburb hates your guts. Godtiering tends to pick the aspect-slot aspect for the ideograil of the quest bed and then sometimes superimposes the class aspect smaller in the middle like Sburb thought it should be there but didn't know where to put it. You get an incredibly neutral godtier outfit in your aspect-aspect's colors with class-aspect determining some stylistic features. It appears to be your dreamself default outfit with a color change. Passive-active spectrum shuts up, meaning no passive-active philisophical arguments with Sburb. In general, it's very conflicted. An aspect in the class slot generally filters shittily as 'use [aspect in class slot] something something to uh something also do [aspect in aspect slot] while you're at it' but the aspect in the class slot says fuck that and remains acting like an aspect instead because even your various swirly overlords are getting tired of Sburb's shit.

For example, a Sound of Rain would basically be a Rain player with non-Rain-based Sound powers plus a constant Rain/Sound Unite Synchro capable, using Sound as their interpretive lens for the Rain. This allegedly happened in range of someone who was on these forums so they could provide more details if their memory hadn't given out. Expect a LOT of Hardchorale and friends, since laughter counts as sound and as a Rain ability is considered OK by the Voices, plus abusing the Orchestra and the Voices together to create the most awesomely loud and insane one-person two-aspects musical production ever and then turning it into an attack because why the hell not. Space of Mist would basically be Mist as seen by Space and would probably be a viable replacement for the Space player. Besides freeing up a fogging slot from not having to keep a teleport ability for emergency escapes, you could probably use everything to do spacey stuff and reverberata would teleport everywhere and the player would rapidly end up keeping themselves as a massive cloud all over the spacey place simply because it was easier and better for their ARC to be everywhere at once.

Class of Class basically turns the class-specific techs and the base idea and all viable interpretations thereof of the class shoved in the aspect slot into a mutilated pseudo-aspect, which is then filtered poorly through the class in the class slot. This is even more of a clusterfuck than aspect of aspect because classes are not aspects and harder to interpret as such. Most of the time excessive automated abuse of connotations can get a working aspect for you, so it's not all powerlessness. You basically get a bunch of aspect-neutral variants of abilities, like Seer just gets generic scrying, Mage/Sylph/casterytypes/etc. gets the shiny magic powers of wizards that can be gleaned from alchemy of certain magic stuff, Knight gets this ability that summons a decently-rendered horse and puts you in a poorly drawn suit of armor (wtf) with an OP weapon for your specibus (is that what [Knight in Shining Armor] was meant for?), Maid gets....conflicting interpretations of maidship, Prince and Bard get all these powers to break stuff and ability cancels, Scout has pathfinding, Thieves and Rogues get all these theft and spying and espionage powers etc. Some of the abilities are directly pirated from aspects with really good synergy for certain mythological roles, possibly to keep the game magic quotient high enough to compete with traditional aspects. The aspect ideograil for a class is a Life-green perfect circle and color scheme on greys and sometimes beige, and the godtier outfit is determined by the class in the class slot with the class in the aspect slot adding things and stuff if it doesn't just multilayer derpily. The passive-active spectrum just hates this junk and abilities fizzling when used inappropriately according to passive-active rules tend to get really confused. Jokes about having all the class are not allowed. The class in the aspect slot tends to act as that class despite being in an aspect slot because the various lenses to interpret swirly overlords are not good at being said swirly overlords. For a whispering, a class usually acts a lot like the Null. Meaning it does absolutely nothing. In some cases it may stop being either Null or stealing wildly from the Infidel Whispering enough to DO something, in which it basically shoves a fuckton of that class's personality orders onto you and sometimes drives the nearby whatever into helping it.

Example, Ward of Knight basically gets knight techs and glitches and game requests, but has to be a Ward while doing so. Much struggle about Sburb being tsundere about its desires toward more Knightly or Wardly goals ensues, but a mutually tolerable agreement can be reached with some practice and abusive stretching of definitions to as wide as roleplaying bonuses allow.

Aspect of Class is surprisingly one of the least broken misapplied descriptor glitches. You basically get the mutant class pseudo-aspect, but retain valid regular aspect powers and use that to interpret the concept of the class. A surprising amount of interpretations with some change still work well enough to get your ARC working, possibly because Sburb sobers up enough to shittily bugfix certain events back to where they should be. Jokes about negative/super class will be shot by the nearest Void and/or Sound players. Passive-active status is mostly based on the class acting as aspect. Mostly. Sometimes it bugs out enough to tolerate shenanigans against its activity strength if they fit well enough within the aspect-as-class's portfolio. Life of Guard guards using life for example. The class-in-aspect-slot cedes whispering jobs back to the aspect-in-class-slot simply because it frankly has little or no idea what it's doing there and the class wants to be a class and the aspect wants to be an aspect. The inappropriately slotted things act as above, except slightly less buggy and switching back to their rightful spots as much as the game lets them besides the whole role thing they're stuck with you for. If you roll Light as a class and it doesn't particularly take a shining to you the Shine will be extremely supportive of you speedruning and GTFO so it never has to do this buggy shit with you again until you reroll it and throw a fuckton of luck at all of your luck stats, even moreso than it already tolerates the slight deviancy/mostly acceptable behavior of a speedrunner of Light and dumps a shower of lucky blessings on the faces of those it likes, though other aspects remain just as intolerant of abuse as ever, if a bit more lenient in other areas to accommodate for game stupidity.

I don't have concrete information on Vagabouncy. It's a sensitive enough process as it is and even the most corruption-prone of people have the sense to avoid letting the codebreaking squiddles anywhere near something already so buggy. Just...If it breaks and you're still alive somehow, please finish your session and reroll.

Multiple-section titles are less buggy aspectwise than misplaced ones since they are still being located appropriately, but having multiple classes can get awkward and multiple aspects silly and awesome depending.

Multiple classes is annoying. The two interpretations of the aspect vie for supremacy and you will have to reach a decent balance of both and survive conflicting unchangeable requests. If they're on the same side of the passive-active spectrum this will be easy. If they're on opposite sides, it will be hard (unless they're the same class type, then the passive-active spectrum usually gives up and you can abuse title powers freely without concern of fizzling). If the functions of the classes are wildly disparate, if they sync well awesome if they don't well shit.

Multiple aspects is a more balanced version of aspect of aspect. You have to use your class to interpret both problems, and both aspects happen. If they share a quest bed, good! If they don't, have fun dying or being unable to godtier unless you can somehow be on both when you die (abusing magnets on your Sacrificial Slab quest bed in the moon works, apparently). There are several different things that can happen here and they usually argue or have one aspect do most of the stuff or both. Eugh. There are people here who've had that problem, so you can ask them how the hell it worked and they'll answer better than I can.

If some new issue like rolling Land as a title comes up, let's see it. ohgod would you have little consorts riding on you and giving your coplayers quests my god that'd be weird and then they'd have to grab the miniature denizen from your head and beat it up and you barf up creative potential skaia-needs-this-grist lol that'd be terrifying.

[horrorTerror]

Rare Adapted Classes

Rarely, the game devs up new classpects.

Among them are some newer classes, lacking good explanation. I'll TLDR what I know, but some of it is in other threads as it is.

Nurse/Medic class pair 'healer': "Heals and/or promotes the/through/with [aspect]." I've gotten conflicting reports on this class duo, especially its active v passive ratings, so it is still developing in metacontinual attemptphases. It is basically 'designated healer class', taking elements from the healing variant of Sylph, and some Life, Blood, Flesh, etc. abilities modded into classtech form. Your land will usually host quests to teach you basic medical principles, the ones that do not rely on game magic being actually useful preentry. Most of the time its player quest means literally healing the land, studying its biogeology and ecology and verdancy to help it do what other lands should be doing in a much more literal, direct, medical, and generally more immediate sense than other land quests, with the feeling of a sick and dying world much more evident than many other quests. Unfortunately, world biology is all sorts of fked up and in a game like Sburb it is even worse than normal and you will likely need to learn and apply more technical things than you ever will want so hope your brainitude is up to snuff.

When the aspect is one with a focus on healing, curing, or boosting normally, or even tends to be the more 'friendly' of the aspects (i.e. Does its immediate manifestation set have a form that doesn't kill you or even provide benefits), it plays normally enough, though it tends to have lackluster offensive powers relying on poisoning or 'malpractice'-like precision strikes to end an obstruction as a surgeon-murderer would end it; excise something vital or break what makes it an enemy to fix the disease that is the situation, sort of taking more elements from the assassin playstyle of sylph as a callback to the class it mutated off of. Nurse may be more passive, setting into libraries and standing back as a healer in the rear of the party, or Medic may be more active being right behind the tank but not too active, but much evidence points to it varying by session at this timestamp and frogen and currently being biased to more passive but also neutral.

When playing as an aspect which does not come easy to being a healer and fixing what is wrong, the other end comes into play. Promoter of aspect. You are supposed to resolve things in such a way your aspect comes to grow, having primarily supportive powers rather than slamming it into play or into your enemies. Actively, this manifests as an over-time effect that most of your actions can drive events to involve your aspect somehow. Passively, this manifests as planting seeds of effects which are not notable until later through only a little effort. A nurse/medic puts in their little effort to fix what they can in someone's favor/disfavor through and with their aspect, and often enough a larger benefit or detriment can leak into the larger session. They are a little bit the scheming classes, but they take more immediate and precise effort to accomplish and often must set up apparatuses or situations where what power they have can affect a larger situation.

A nurse/medic of a more 'destructive/limiting' aspect such as doom, law, sand, or sometimes rain getting gory (void has a better chance to get away with simply erasing the lack as a displacement does, and you cannot really make Rain be defined all the time and sometimes it even makes up healing powers just because they want to) has a harder time. They have neither the ease of straight healing interpretation or the firepower to obliterate anything wrong with barely a casting, but all healers have great plasticity of interpretation and make up for everything with fine and often even instinctual levels of control. A healer has a shorter period of time until they learn the ropes of their aspect; if not yet experienced, they start with a measure of talent if only to avoid failing early and hard. Here the scheming gets evident. A healer of doom or void can be a displacement of sorts: steal their doom and injury away unto void, in the case of doom turn it into a bottled-up poison charge to ruin things with later, like the Black King's health vial, and heal the person normally. A nurse of Law forbids harm on their allies, and hexes the possibility of failure in recovery because it spites Sburb and is thus 'bad luck for someone'. A nurse of Sand weakens diseases and attacking forces to the point they are swatted away by the immunities and cures of the world, and also makes it weakening to attack their allies. A gorier Rain can simply make their allies restorative armor of rainbowy flish and hone their skills like an insane Mind, and that ignores what Hardchorale sharing does already.

Get creative and conceptual because you have to. Nurses and Medics of Time and Space step in through traveling their aspect to prevent death. Nurses and Medics of Mind become a wealth of psybuffs and stat boosts to reaction speed and back their aspectual psychotherapy act with quest-mandated actual medical knowledge. Nurses of Life make it practically impossible to die if they know what they are doing and get there in time.

-

[horrorTerror]

Defeated class: Failure/Corpse.

The Defeated works by being defeated. The active Failure tries and messes up and loses on a fumble and it either ruins everything or is useful in other little ways, while the passive Corpse tends to die or get abused. Much like a tactician's oversight or a cataclysm, the Defeated is mandated to cause a 'plot-relevant' death, where a Failure succeeds for once at killing someone or their failure leads to someone dying rather directly, and a Corpse must die in some form to satisfy their title quest. Both of these can handily be resolved by godtiering another or themselves, and it is practically necessary in the case of a Corpse as dying is their favorite pastime even more than it is for the rest of Sburb. A Defeated is very average if not below average, with no particularly beneficial above-and-beyond proficiencies other than screwing things up horribly in a way that is interpreted as a fail for them but possibly a boon for allies and a bigger fail for enemies. They're okay defensively as they have to have some measure of durability to be the universal butt monkey of every joke and torture it can throw your way, but tend to rival Time in deep need of psybuffs because getting traumatized constantly for months tends to be stressful after a while, and their offensive power can sometimes be summarized as 'strong but horribly inaccurate' or 'worf barrage useless distraction' depending on playstyle. The Defeated titles are usually handed to someone who has had all the favor and needs to learn that not everything can go their way, though as Sburb is a horrible game full of dying and failures in the first place the Defeated is rare outside of post-Light players or sometimes particularly convenient Life players, but a cushy native role about accepting power supported by (or simply having) a preentry plush life can lead to it. Sometimes it is assigned if natural maturity or at least a sense of identity achievement was reached without the damnable game interfering. A high-ARC Defeated tends to look like a Law player and a Light player are violently fighting over this player's luck rolls as they slip up horribly only to somehow slay all their enemies and get out relatively fine in the process. It looks like two people with [ Dance of Thorns ] are occupying the same space and it is simultaneously trying to protect one and kill the other with absurd results after a while.

The Defeated have a special knack for ending up in the murky area of the rules where godtier deaths are not heroic nor just, which ironically puts their survivability slightly above that of a regular player once godtiered if they have access to healing items or a Life player or a strategically positioned Nurse. A godtiered Corpse especially exploits this effect, and more often than not unless it would be bad for progress overall or emotionally traumatize someone they simply will not permadie once godtiered unless it's a very clear-cut heroic sacrifice falling exactly within the rules for defined heroism with not a trace of evil or unheroic thoughts in their heart of hearts or they just murdered all their coplayers and did everything Sburb thinks is evil just to make it stick, possibly wracking up a deathcount in the dozens relatively quickly if they are not a goodie-two-shoes or a demonic monstrosity or keep ruining their own attempts to be so as a survival mechanism.

For most Defeated, their failures/deaths spread their aspect or interrupt their aspect, as their title means 'defeats/defeated by/with/the/releasing aspect' for the most part. Corpses of Time tend to use their doomed timeclone corpses as human shields that randomly end up saving other players, but possibly add more doomed timelines to the fray. Corpses of Doom tend to abuse [ Even in Death ] beyond belief and take lots of abuse. Failures of Breath are absolutely glorious at ruining everything around them especially pickle jars but it DOES end pretty well. Defeated who fight/interrupt their aspect tend to make everything related to it end in tears as they sit somewhere between displacement and destroyer, sometimes even utterly wrecking their own Skaian Summonings by complete accident as the ARC snowballs as Sburb itself forces the Aspect to comply with its unwanted mission of self-hatred, and are second only to Clowns, Cataclysms, [ RED MILES ], Denizens, Berserk Triggers, angry destroyer classes, etc. and Breath for sheer offensive output against things that simply you do not want to be destroyed if their playstyle fits well with the Game of Worlds and Murdering Them. Defeated whose many failures/deaths spread their aspect tend to end up much better, and a Corpse of Life sometimes just gives up entirely and freestyles an ability so you can cannibalize them for heals and watch them regenerate no worse for the wear. It's pretty impressive.

Overall it's nothing particularly special, but an okay class to utilize properly and a terrible one to be.