Alicornutopia

Honestly, Feral gets Bard instead of Prince because out of the two Destroy classes, Bard is far and away the more thematically Joker. Doom totally isn't; there isn't a single other Joker who gets it. But Feral gets Doom because it's a place Jokers can go, especially in that particular world.

I looked through the statistics for Joker classes and aspects, and I think my conclusion is that I need to go through and overhaul a lot of classpects with the full avaiable list in mind. XD Like, there's only one Pain! Can you believe it?

The two highest-frequency classes among Jokers are Will (6) and Fiend (5). Both of those make sense. Where Jokers get a superclass, it's virtually guaranteed to be Fiend or Jack, for the connotations - and indeed, the only other superclasses they get are Harley's Muse of Charm and Jun's Ace of Spark, each thematically appropriate to that specific Joker. What I have a little more trouble with is why there are four Swords. That seems excessive.

Their aspect distribution makes a little more sense, except for as mentioned not having enough Pain: four Charm, four Heart, four Hope, four Joy, five Flesh (a little much, but it thematically fits a lot of individual Jokers) and three Dream (I expected more, but there'll be time to add some). Two each of Life, Mind, and Change, and then a bunch of singletons, most of which are thematic fits for individuals. "Thematic fits for individuals" is pretty much the overarching theme of Joker classpects. They have high variance because they are a high-variance kind of template; as you mentioned, "being themselves" is their thing, but since I don't fold "being themselves" into a single aspect, different ones of them are the same essential-self in very different ways sometimes. :D

Now I'm inspired to go fill in more classpects. Maybe. And rethink some existing ones, maybe.

PS: With "Create" versus "Engineer": Creation means making something out of nothing, and Engineering means making something out of something. Essentially. They have a lot of overlap, but that's the primary thematic difference. In practice, Maid-Tonies are still little-e engineers, but often in ways that depart from the Tony norm a little, perhaps by involving magic. F'rex, this Tony plans to be a wandmaker when she grows up. :D

Kappa wrote:"being themselves" is their thing, but since I don't fold "being themselves" into a single aspect, different ones of them are the same essential-self in very different ways sometimes. :D

Ahh yeah, that makes sense. It's still weird to think about how limited your version of Heart is. And taking that into account, those Aspects are all very Jokerly aspects. And also it makes sense since you wanted to have more variation than the basic set would afford you. My way of thinking about alts is that templates would all get the same aspect but different classes, since that's how the Troll scratch went, but in your expanded suite of classes that's unnecessary cause everyone can get such cool new diverse roles.

Kappa wrote:Now I'm inspired to go fill in more classpects. Maybe. And rethink some existing ones, maybe.

:D Yeah, if you classpected a bunch of them before having the full suite in mind, then probably there are at least a few who would fit better somewhere else. I could certainly see a Joker being an Active Champion, but... probably not that many of them? I don't know them all, but so far the only one I've read who remotely fits that description is... War, maybe? I guess it'd depend on what precisely you mean by "Champion" as a verb.

Kappa wrote:PS: With "Create" versus "Engineer": Creation means making something out of nothing, and Engineering means making something out of something. Essentially. They have a lot of overlap, but that's the primary thematic difference. In practice, Maid-Tonies are still little-e engineers, but often in ways that depart from the Tony norm a little, perhaps by involving magic. F'rex, this Tony plans to be a wandmaker when she grows up. :D

Aha! That distinction makes sense. A wandmaker Tony definitely makes things in a different sort of way than most Tonies. Are there any Tonies where the thing they make is magic? I'm having a hard time coming up with a way to explain what I mean, but wandmaker Tony wants to make magic tools, and in general Tonies seem to be into making useful physical objects of various sorts. Are there any who the useful thing that they make is... like, made out of glyphs or spell components or the like? A Tony who puts together spells made out of magic in a particularly engineer-y sort of magic system? And if that's a way a Tony could be, would that Tony be a Maid, or would they get something else?

I can't think of any such Tony offhand!

I was going to talk more about some of this stuff but then I spent all day watching Madoka instead. >.> I'll try to come back to it later.

To be fair Madoka is awesome.

Yes. Yes it is. :D

Anyway - I have notes written down for some of the more obscure verbs, but apparently 'champion' wasn't one of them. I'll add it in and list them out:

• (no verb) Ace: Few specific broad-scope versatile powers
• (no verb) Jack: Just about anything, not very powerfully
• Exploit: Make the most of limited resources
• Steal: Take resources from others
• Amplify: Collect and strengthen resources
• Give: Distribute resources
• Bind: connect; restrict
• Champion: Fight to protect or support
• Tend: heal; help to grow
• Engineer: build, invent, innovate; create with parts
• Enable: cooperate; collaborate
• Regulate: arrange in an orderly way; rule fairly
• Cheat: exploit, circumvent, leverage
• Ignite: begin; illuminate; encourage; inspire
• Close: obfuscate; conclude; hinder; stop
• Germinate: conceive, cultivate, catalyze; propagate
• Carry: transport, assist; support in moving/changing
• Hold: reinforce, defend; support in staying still/same

In other words, I see the 'Champion' verb as almost like a paladin pair. Where a Guard is more directly a guardian of something, a Sword is more focused on going out and looking for trouble and then dealing with it, while still in a sense being a guardian - or, well, a champion - of their aspect or of the things that are important to them.

New pairpair added to the classes post! Carry (Bridge, Arch)/Hold (Throne, Seat). Those four have been hanging around in the classpects sheet waiting for someone to verb them for quite a while. XD

(I’m only following half this thread because I’m completely unfamiliar with Homestuck, so please forgive me if I say something stupid)

It looks like Alicorn said there would be two Bells with completely unique classpects in the entire multiverse. Given how big the multiverse is, and there only being 6*46=276 such unique combinations, this surprises me greatly. Most huge templates would still be lucky to have one. Other than being the templatiest template and being personally worth writing and reading about because of various perpersonality attractors, Bells don’t seem to be nearly as special as that implies usually. Am I reading this correctly?

For an unfounded guess, I'd bet Callahan or some other BEE is involved. Probably Callahan; her plans seem big enough for Celo and/or Aether to be multiversally unique.

The thing about classpects is that the system isn't really designed to be activated as widely as the Effulgence bunch are going to activate it. It's pretty rare for people to naturally come with a destiny that will activate their latent classpects; in fact, to my recollection it only happens in two Effulgence worlds and only one of those even contains a Bell. Everyone else 'has' a classpect only in the same way that someone who has never been to Alethia 'has' a daemon, i.e., not until someone comes along and forces the system to interact with them in a way it never would have by itself. So all you can really say when an Effulgence character activates a non-destined superclass is that at that time, in the whole wide multiverse, in the tiny fraction of those universes where genuinely destined classpects are a thing, in the tiny fraction of those universes' populations that were destined to have them, there have not yet been any people born who would have been e.g. the Ace of Spark, and now there won't be. And in the rest of the multiverse, anyone who absolutely would have been the Ace of Spark and can't be anything else is now unable to unnaturally activate their classpect.

“Unable to naturally activate”? Are there ways to artificially activate them, and could that lead to multiple Aces of Sparks?