"No, dude, it's okay. The floating deer head said dying on that rock will give me superpowers."
— Quote from a typical SBURB session, by silverleaf2431
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''.RPGStuck is a heavily modified variant of the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons based on the webcomic Homestuck. Unlike most tabletop RPGs, it operates on Reddit and Discord, using comment sections to play the game. The system is aimed at creating stories of Sburb sessions and its players' hijinks.
Despite using Sburb as a baseline for the campaigns, most Dungeon Masters (DMs) have expanded upon the lore surrounding it, or even altered aspects of the official canon.
The current rulesets can be found here (3e) and here (2.5e).
There are five official campaigns, with the fifth having started on October 12, 2019. The subreddit for it can be found here. However, provided that the rules of the main subreddit are followed, anyone can start their own "session".
This article talks about the rules itself. For the plot of the official campaigns, go to the Recaps page.
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The game provides examples of:
The Game In General
- Cast Calculus: Most sessions involve between four to twelve players, with only a few exceptions.
- Colony Drop: A necessity for most sessions. The first segment of the session requires that the player enters into the Medium quickly so that they won't be killed when the meteor shower of the Reckoning destroys the world.
- Dual-World Gameplay: Each player normally has a waking self and a dreamself. The waking self deals with the typical adventures, the dreamself often explores and deals with moon plots in lieu of combat.
- Dump Stat: Required, with the starting array.
- Early Game Hell: It often takes several levels before a character is really able to function beyond hitting the enemy over and over. Typically levels 7-9* mark the upswing in 2e, or levels 5 or 10* in 1e.
- Empty Levels: Aside from advancing your Ability Scores, most levels in either edition don't offer anything special.
- Establishing Character Moment: This is the purpose of Day 0, most of the time.
- First Contact: Any session that includes both humans and trolls will typically need to experience this at some point.
- Four Lines, All Waiting: There can be up to twelve players in a single session, and each one starts the game alone before they might eventually group up. Sessions of up to twenty-four players have been seen, though these fall apart quickly.
- God Save Us from the Queen!: The Black Queen counts as this fairly often.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: Almost every character has the capability to carry an inhuman amount of stuff of any size, and only equipped items are visible, this can be averted by giving limitations to the inventory, but the base inventory is always subjected to this trope.
- Improvised Weapon: A character can fight using literally anything, albeit sometimes ineffectively — and sometimes very effectively.
- Interspecies Romance: Considering the availability of both humans and trolls to players, this is far from unheard of.
- Magically Inept Fighter: Humans and highblooded trolls are terrible at psionics, but have increased stats to make up for it.
- Magic Knight: Minor Psions are versatile, having the ability to effectively use both psionics and weapon attacks.
- Massive Race Selection: Or perhaps Massive Blood-Color Selection. While the game uses two of Homestuck's prominent races (trolls and humans), the troll hemospectrum is counted as twelve different races, each with different racial bonuses. This is expanded in 3rd Edition, where every caste has at least two choices, with humans having four different racials to choose from. Future updates have promised even more.
- Orphaned Series: Happens unfortunately often when sessions shrink down to unsustainable levels.
- Psychic Powers: An equivalent to magic in other systems, psionics fulfills many of the functions of magic.
- Resting Recovery: Taking an extended rest allows characters to fully recharge their HP.
- The Six Stats: Somewhat of a given, seeing as the system was originally based off of Dungeons & Dragons 5e.
1st Edition Rules
- Awesome, but Impractical: The Harpoon Gun specibus has the highest damage in the game, at 3d8 per weapon tier. This means that at full strength, a Harpoon Gun does 30d8 damage. However, taking two standard actions to reload after firing it only once means its actual damage per turn is still somewhat below average.
- Fighter, Mage, Thief: Strength, Intelligence, and Dexterity builds, respectively.
- Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Psions in 1e have the ability to vastly increase both the strength of their attacks, as well as the rate at which they can repeat those attacks between waiting for their Mana to recharge. Eventually this reaches a point of being able to perpetually throw massive attacks that completely blow martial fighters out of the water.
- Mana: Psionic power points work like this, being a renewable resource used to augment psionic powers to different power levels with every cast.
- One Stat to Rule Them All: Dexterity, for martial characters. Intelligence for Psions.
- Squishy Wizard: Major Psions lose access to non-light armour, and have a significant penalty to Constitution.
2nd Edition Rules
- After-Combat Recovery: Vitality Gel restores a tiny bit of hit points after each combat.
- An Adventurer Is You: The Pillars are this, albeit loosely.
- Sentinel is the Tank of the Pillars, having HP-related pillar features.
- Striker fits into the Melee DPS role, mostly having physical attack-related features, as well as psionics-related features.
- Sniper takes on the role of Ranged DPS, having ranged attack-related features and psionics-related features.
- Specialist, unlike any other Pillars, does not fit into any specific archetype, instead being proficient in skills and psionics.
- Aquatic Mook: A few dedicated water-based enemies exist, such as the Crocalii.
- Awesomeness by Analysis: Path of the Mastermind, natch.
- Easy Exp: Entering the Game grants a level by itself.
- Elite Mooks: Carapacians, Undead, Alternian, and Grimdark all come with a warning to the DM that they are tougher than the average underling of the same tier.
- Glass Cannon: Major Psion Strikers and Snipers can have insanely high damage output, but they do so by giving up on any durability or sustainability.
- A Homeowner Is You: As per canon, players must build up their houses to reach their gates. However, their houses can be filled with buildings that provide a variety of services.
- Job System: Players can pick any paths as they level up, and even multiple ones. However, if they choose paths linked to their pillar and gain enough features from them, they will gain Pillar features as well.
- Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: This was originally inverted as opposed to first edition. Psions are widely known for being underpowered compared to their martial counterparts. This was undone as 2nd edition progressed. Psions have been brought back up to par, trading sustainability for burst damage and psionic utility.
- Magically Inept Fighter: Martials are proficient with multiple weapons and know all special attacks with them, but start with no psionics whatsoever.
- Magic Knight: Minor psions can be proficient in either weapons or psionics, but trades power for versatility.
- Magic or Psychic?: Usually psychic, though up to the DM's wishes. Sometimes they just have both.
- Mascot Mook: Imps. At one point in development, half of all new monster ideas were alternate takes on the iconic little bastards.
- Mook Medic: A few monsters like the Barber and Hive Queen can heal other enemies.
- Mooks: Unlike 1e, the current edition has a tremendous amount of variety, expanding on underlings, carapacians, and even Alternia far beyond canon, while throwing in undead and grimdark to boot.
- Sinister Scythe: Scythekind is the only weapon that can Rupture enemies.
- Squishy Wizard: Major Psions are this, starting with lower hit point totals and the inability to use more than basic attacks for their Strife Specibus, in exchange for demonstrating why one should Shoot the Mage First.
- Squishy Wizard: Major psions have stronger psionics and can pull off the strongest attacks, but are relatively fragile.
- Stealthy Mook: From the classic Mimics to Sagittas, there is no short supply of monsters with which to ambush hapless players.
- Video-Game Lives: As per canon, a player has their dreamself to fall back on. Once they reach godtier, conditionally infinite.
3rd Edition Rules
- Actually Four Mooks: Part of how hordes are represented, emulating the sorts of many versus one encounters seen in the canon.
- Actual Pacifist: With the rise of gambits and the dethroning of grist as the sole way by which players can obtain stronger equipment, this playstyle becomes mechanically feasible.
- An Adventurer Is You: The Pillars make their return, revamped and well-defined.
- Sentinel, the sole returning Pillar, remains the durable tank, but with a heavier focus on controlling the battlefield and its combatants.
- Slayer combines the Melee and Ranged DPS roles of the fallen Striker and Sniper paths, focused heavily on damage and damage accessories.
- Strategist takes on what was left of Specialist, settling into its niche as a jack of all trades with emphasis on confounding the enemy, preparing for a strife beforehand, and being the MVP of any team fight.
- Climax Boss: The Denizen serves as this or as a Puzzle Boss, depending on the circumstances. Sometimes both.
- Combat, Diplomacy, Stealth: With the gambit system, Stealth becomes entrenched as yet another way to overcome a challenge, without the all-or-nothing nature of the typical stealth gauntlet.
- Empty Levels: Averted in the core design philosophy. Every single level now offers something new for the player to use.
- Equipment Upgrade: With Boondollars finally seeing official implementation alongside rules for buying alchemy-tier items with them, alchemy is no longer the only way for players to obtain more powerful gear.
- Fantasy Character Classes: Evoked by many of the Paths, though the keystone Paths particularly fit into the niche.
- Battlemaster: Focused on weapon attacks, the Path grants abilities that take advantage of the game's Status Effects, alongside a medley of other Steps to round it out.
- Battlemind: With their iconic Ward, Battleminds specialize in soaking up damage while expanding their ability to debilitate enemies and support their allies.
- Berserker: The eponymous stance grants Aegis, while other Steps focus on augmenting existing defensive abilities or buffing their damage ouput.
- Courage: Taking advantage of the new Setback condition, this Path allows players to push themselves to finish a battle faster, before their accumulating Setback catches up with them.
- Harmony: The Wisdom-focused keystone returns mostly intact, updated and rewired to have its Balance Points resource work off each other. In other words, its Steps finally work together in Harmony.
- Martial Spirit: This Path settles into its niche as a defensive tank, with Steps for resisting enemy debuffs and more ways to defend for allies.
- Mastermind: Also mostly unchanged from its previous incarnation, Masterminds use Intelligence to aid their allies and outsmart their enemies.
- Protagonist: All players are protagonists, but some are more important than others, like these players, who exert their force of personality into tangible effects in the game.
- Thaumaturge: Sporting their well-known Beam Spam as an inherent tool now, these dreamers have Steps to round out their moveset.
- Tracer: Continuing to sport their trademark Trace, they are second to none in single-target damage.
- Final Boss: The Black King, fittingly, serves this role as the most powerful Adversary-type creature.
- Heavily Armored Mook: Some creatures have armor as a separate pool of hit points, requiring the player to skill check to bypass it, or bring siege-type damage to bear. A few have active armor that requires constant skill checks. Such creatures are better off being dispatched another way.
- Mook Commander: The carapacians have officers to lead their squads into combat. Naturally, such pairings are a formidable challenge for any player.
- Multiple Life Bars: A new addition, monsters can have a wide variety of multiple targetable parts, from destructible limbs like eyes and arteries, to various types of armor, and simply destroying their weapons.
- Multiple Persuasion Modes: Encouraged with the disposition and decor systems, encouraging players to leverage their decors and know their opponent's dispositions to stack the dice in their favor when dealing with others.
- Non-Combat EXP: Besides experience from strifes, gambits and story beats now share center stage. In particular, the story beats aren't connected to some specific game mechanic, like strifes or gambits. These are a tool for the GM to use to reward players for exceptional play.
- Puzzle Boss: Some Adversaries serve as this, defying conventional combat tactics.
- Shield-Bearing Mook: With objects being more represented on a creature's stat block, shields were inevitable. They still fill their same function, with the caveat that enough blocking will break the shield. Luckily, players have no such limitations on their own shields.
- Skill Scoresand Perks: The decor system falls into the Perks system, and Pillars and Paths too, for that matter.
- Subsystem Damage: A few creatures, notably the Siege Titan, have destructible limbs.
- Three Approach System: The three sets of non-sentient dispositions. The major/minor/martial divide. The damage/utility/summon fields into which fraymotifs can be roughly partitioned. The Intelligence/Wisdom/Charisma divides in Pillars and Paths.
- What You Are in the Dark: Given mechanical importance with Demeanor, where a player can equalize dire odds by drawing upon themselves.
