Post by Dex on Sept 30, 2016 10:20:28 GMT -4
Artist of Time, of course. Stories are important to you because stories are like time because they show a number of ordered events. Time also involves time-travel which is often necessary in sessions due to people fucking up shit. Because you rolled Time chances are you're the kind of person who dislikes being held accountable or you have no willpower to do anything anymore.
In either case, Sburb's a dick because Time is the aspect of responsibility because the success of an entire session and the lives of everyone in it, a thousand time over, depend on you. You cannot afford to be irresponsible or lay down and await death. It'll teach you to accept your burden of responsibility and move forward but don't be mistaken, if Sburb is trying to teach you maturity giving someone Time duties is one hell of a traumatizing way to do that. No one ever said the game was a good psychologist.
Time is one of the two cardinal aspects, together with Space so that means, most sessions have a Time player. Why? Because Sburb runs on an idiotic model of time that was probably written by the world's most intelligent equipe of typewriter monkeys on drugs.
In normal metaphysics that don't involve Sburb, you'd generally find two main models of time:
1) The Predestined One: where every event has already been written by God (or into causality, either works) and time-travel cannot change the past. If you go back in time, you'll end up doing what was planned anyway. Freedom of will is an illusion.
2) The Branched One: timelines exist and trying to time-travel will make a new branch on the tree of timelines or maybe all the timelines exist and every possibility is true in a parallel universe.
Either model generally tries to avoid paradoxes and they're both fine when taken by themselves. The problem is Sburb's time model is neither of those but a mishmash of the two that makes no sense and gives me an extra reason to want to throw whoever decided to code this thing out of an airlock.
3) The Sburban Mess: Sburb has a List of Things That Need To Happen. Let's call it the Skaian Agenda, for brevity so as long as those things happen all is well and anything that doesn't contradict any point in the Skaian Agenda is allowed to happen.
If any of those points is contradicted, the timeline and the players within it are flagged as doomed which means it's up to the Time player to go back in time and fix it. Then they will die as well as everyone in/from the offshoot timeline but all is well because the alpha timeline is saved and the corpse pile keeps getting bigger.
Additionally this time model instead of avoiding paradoxes includes them as a regular part of your everyday Time duties. It's not called Paradox Space for nothing but in any case time paradoxes come in two kinds:
1) Bootstrap paradoxes: Also called time loops, one example is ectobiology: You're sent to Earth via meteor, you grow up, you play Sburb, you perform ectobiology and you send yourself to Earth via meteor. It's a closed loop with no beginning or cause, it just is and the worst thing is Sburb actively embraces these. You'll find them everywhere so self-fulfilling prophecies are another example. Not to mention the messes that can happen with timetravelling chat programs but in any case, do not break these loops for instance, do not prevent ectobiology from being carried out because that will doom the timeline.
2) Grandfather paradoxes: Here come the dead 'pops. These are named after the famous paradox where you go back into the past and kill your own grandpa which would cause you to not be born in the first place. If you ever make one of these, congratulations you've just doomed the timeline and note not fulfilling what a prophecy said would happen is paradoxical too because a prophecy is basically time-traveling information from the future. Either that, or a peek directly into the Sburban Agenda.
To wrap it up in order not to doom the timelines you should:
- Never break a stable time loop.
- Never cause a grandfather paradox.
- Never contradict the Skaian Agenda.
Some time loops are easy to spot and it's pretty easy to go with the flow. You see yourself popping out of thin air and aiding you in battle? That's you from the future, after a while timetravel back into the past and do as you saw. Bam, loop completed. Just don't contradict it.
Others like the thousands upon thousands of prophecies stored in the Royal Libraries on Prospit and Derse are like invisible tripwires. Unless you spend time reading up (which I suggest you do), you will never know if you will doom the timeline by picking orange juice instead of apple juice as prophetized and that's one more bad experience for one of your selves. One more corpse in the pile but luckily some abilities and some other aspects can help you.
Grandfather paradoxes are another issue: doomed timelines aside, you can't change the past if you didn't see yourself appear from the future to save the situation the first time around. If you see a session-mate die then go back in time and prevent that from happening in front of the eyes of past-you who should then be the you that eventually timetravels back, you've created a grandfather paradox and doomed yourself, the timeline and everyone in it. So now your friend's dead. Move on, Time can't fix what has happened unless it happens to go against the Skaian Agenda; in that case it is exactly your job to fix the past.
The Skaian Agenda itself is a minor worry if there are no timetravel shenanigans involved. It'll just happen that every once in a while you will derail too much from the plan and a corpse or two will join the party.
Obviously you'll want to minimize the number of corpses invited to the party. There's a few things you can do if that is what you want:
1) Read up on prophecies on Prospit and Derse. It's kind of creepy how many freaking details are written in those but it's not like you won't either follow them (with awareness or not) or doom the timeline so it's better to have foreknowledge.
2) If you have a sessionmate who is Fate, Mind, Light, Law, Stars or to a lesser degree Life or Doom they can help.
- Fate can use [Rediscover Fusion] to tell you what to do to reach an outcome like "not dooming the timeline" or something.
- Mind can help you sort through scenarios with scrying abilities like [Neural Climb]. They also have the raw brainitude to tell you how to untangle very complex temporal messes.
- Law can use [Negative Aperture] to warn you in advance of things you should really not do like stumbling upon the invisible tripwires of prophecies.
- Light is similar to Law but arguably less useful. It can guide you towards optimal use of your powers to try to make sure things go well but they don't have as much knowledge of the metaphorical tripwires.
- Stars can tell you what outcomes and actions are attracted to a given anchor point so it's kind of a roundabout way of doing Fate's job.
- Life and Doom can craft prophecies.
One item that is pretty much a must for any Time player worth their salt is the uncreatively named Time Machine. It's basically a miniature version of your Scratch Construct that is imbued with [Stitch In Time]. Having one of those handy makes it a lot easier to manage your loops because it makes short-range time-travel a lot less pluck-draining. To obtain one, you can mess around with alchemizing stuff related to what your construct is or you could also occasionally find one in a dungeon on your land but this is in the middle-late game so I recommend the alchemy route but if you want a surefire, pretty easy way to make one all you have to do is get the captcha code of your Scratch Construct itself which is easily feasible with a captcha-camera or the right sylladex modus.
However, one IMPORTANT note: these items allow ANYONE not only Time players to time-travel. This can be a very, VERY serious issue as if it lands in the hands of someone who doesn't know the ins and outs of the delicate art of temporal manipulation and will proceed to repeatedly doom the timeline or even worse someone with bad intentions. I shiver at the thought of a PK that secretly owns one of those.
These dangerous items should under the right circumstances fall in the hands of a non-Time player as long as they're sane, careful, well-intentioned and know what they're doing.
- If you, Hygenist are dying/dead, handing down your Time Machine to the sanest, smartest person you know is a good idea.
Some final notes:
- Some titles are better than others as surrogate Time players. Mind players are especially awesome due to their very good understanding of "this could have happened if we made that choice" stuff and high brainitude but really all the aspects I mentioned are at least decent. Being a Seer or Sage is also a nice plus.
You might notice while exploring your land that you have some huge structure that resembles a music-related item floating above the ground a couple dozen meters. It is your Scratch Construct and it replaces the Earthsea Borealis while giving your land the function of an extreme emergency panic button.
The construct which can be anything from a turntable to a compact disc to a music box or an audio-cassette is meant to be scratched with a seriously, seriously hard object. You'll want something made of a material like corundum, diamond, titanium or just bullshit hard stuff like the enamel that covers the Quills of Echidna that stuff is basically indestructible. After you've dealt sufficient scratch damage to your Scratch Construct it will ascend towards Skaia and then, upon contact hard-reset your session. It'll get new players and you'll avoid dying and becoming a soul that wanders among the void inhabited by the Others. Sure you'll stop existing (not actually sure) but that can't be so bad right?
Like any other player you have a toolbox of abilities you can use in your burdening quest to ensure the session doesn't get screwed over while beating enemies to death with your specibus of choice. I'll give you a run-over of your main assets and it'll be a VERY boring and rather obvious list at least at first. You've been warned.
[Humphrey's Lullaby] Slows time in the area around you
[Moment of Pause] Freezes time in a radius but pluck-costly.
[Clockstopper] Like [Moment of Pause] except for one enemy only. More pluck-efficient and precise and t also has this cool red clock animation with roman numbers.
[Thank You For Your Valuable Time] Slows an enemy down and makes you faster.
[Time Out] Suspends you into a zone outside the rules of time to take a breather. When you're done just use [Time In].
[Sweet 16's Turned 31] Pretty pluck-expensive it supposedly speeds up time a bunch and makes enemies age into frailty which doesn't make sense because I don't think underlings actually age under normal circumstances? It's a temporary effect by the way.
[Stitch In Time] Time-travel into the past, short range (up to 1-2 days) and has a medium pluck cost.
[Chartreuse Rewind] Time-travel into the past, medium range (up to few weeks/one month) but has a pretty freaking high pluck cost.
[Years In The Past] Time-travel into the past, long range (I'm not even sure it has any hard cap) but it has a very, VERY high pluck cost.
[Back To The Future] Brings you right back to where/when you were before using any of the above abilities using fast forward and teleportation.
[Skip To The End] Zoom forward in time by accelerating it but short range (up to 1-2 days).
[Time On My Side]: A time-travel ability made for combat. Very short range (10 minutes) but very pluck cheap.
[Time Attack] Create and shoot red gears of any size you want. You can make a bunch of tiny ones and shoot them like bullets at high speed or two big ones to try and grind some bones.
[Split Second] Make two parts of an enemy move in time at different speeds and the result is that the enemy gets cut in twain if they move however it is very pluck-costly.
[Tomorrow's Greatest Hits] Charge your weapon with this ability and the next hit you deliver will make the enemy time-travel forward or backwards in time. You can basically punch an enemy into next week. The more the hit would have knocked them back, the more they time-travel so you'll want a bludgeoning weapon for this. BE CAREFUL with this it can cause terrible messes if used thoughtlessly.
[Chronoautopsy] Gives you the memories of a doomed time-clone by touching their corpse. You've basically always had this one but most people find out the traumatic way.
[Time Heals All Wounds] Makes the memories inherited from doomed time-clones feel distant, emotionally muffled and not yours. Basically it's there to save your psyche or else you'd be so fucked. This is transferable but you really want to generally keep it on yourself at all times.
[Time Trial] Share knowledge from ONE doomed time-clone with a friend. Unless you give them your [Time Heals All Wounds] they'll be susceptible to the psychological effects though luckily the effect fades in a day or two. It works surprising wonders for stopping PKs by sharing horrible memories though.
[Overbook] Get rid of any debuff by procrastinating and giving it to future-you. It might pop up right back in a bad moment though so be careful. It can be fatal if overused.
[Candles and Clockwork] Lets you get a look at the structure of spacetime. You'll be able to see the branched timeline structure and if you aim this at the Furthest Ring you'll notice that time there is majorly nonlinear AKA a nightmare nutjob.
[Look Into The Future] First think of a topic you want a vision of then activate this ability and expend X pluck. If available, Sburb will give you a 1 minute vision of the future related to the topic you were thinking about and the vision will be further into the future the more pluck you expended. It has a lower limit of few days and if it can't find anything relevant to that topic it'll either show you random bullshit or drain your pluck in vain. Try to use it wisely because the moment you've had a vision, that becomes inevitable. This is basically giving up your free will in exchange for foreknowledge.
[Eternity Served Cold] If you see Hygenist's eyes flashing rainbow colors and the Time ideograil rotate behind their head like a halo it's time to RUN LIKE HELL. The next living being they touch will spend a VERY long time isolated in an empty pocket dimension so it'll be one hour outside but tens of years inside. If they're not god tier they'll probably be corpses by the time they're back due to either starvation or old age. If they're god tier they will come back completely out of their mind in a way or the other. It's not a nice fate at all.
