The problem with roleplaying Sburb
So, okay, setting aside all those grievances with that particular sort of roleplaying Sburb, I noticed sort of a fundamental problem with adventures and roleplays that seek to recreate the experience of playing through Sburb. Most of them just straight up ape Homestuck and all its running gags, and pretty much just dump their own characters into the existing "Hussnasty" format.
This, for a couple big reasons, doesn't actually work at all.
Firstly, and less directly important, is that you're kind of cheating. Like, if you want to tell your story about these characters and their experiences with this game, you don't want to go around duplicating the experiences the Homestuck characters had with this game. It's kind of lazy writing, and it takes some exceptionally interesting characters to make it work.
But more importantly, you can't really simulate the experience of playing Sburb by... actually playing Sburb. A vital component of that experience is discovering all these crazy mysterious mechanics, and exploring this totally unknown world and figuring out what you're supposed to do. When you just straight up take Sburb, you're revealing all that stuff ahead of time! Everyone's already read Homestuck, and we know in detail how most of it works already. There can't be a payoff of discovery when all the answers have been fed to you.
So how do you /actually/ recreate the Sburb experience for players?
The answer, I'm guessing, is to reinvent everything about it until you have a bizarro-universe counterpart where everything works completely differently. So, that's what I'm trying. I have a fistful of ridiculous ideas, a hat full of pretending to be a GM, and a head full of going to freakin' do this thing.
wow that memetic template really did not work out did it
