Hit By The Frame Bus And Now I'm In A Poorly-Coded Fantasy World [Signups/Interest Check]

It's kind of like Sword Art Online... Made by Bethesda; A fantasy world isekai where the only limits to your power are that someone hasn't done the same trick first.

Imagine a bus that leaves every 21 frames, roughly every half-second; And that bus is also a hat being worn by a very fast naked person underneath the street that incorrectly pathed through a wall and collided with a squishy human at excessive speed. That is how you died, in your modern and better-formed world. But you didn't die did you? Because when the black of unconsciousness lifted you found yourself, like so many do, inside the land of Astratamere but more specifically inside the prison of the soon-to-be-destroyed town of Raykbay. Freedom will come, but for now... Who are you?

In Hit By The Frame Bus And Now I'm In A Poorly-Coded Fantasy World, you will play ordinary people transported to the fantastical world of Astratamere. It is a land of adventure full of grand cities and ancient ruins, factions to gain fame with and quests to undertake...

It is also full of game glitches, mechanics exploits and other poor QA or design decisions. But thankfully whatever beings created this world left behind a means to prevent everything from falling apart: The Patch Engine, a machine of enormous power with the ability to read what people do and patch out any immersion-breaking problems... If it wasn't also badly-coded; There is a fault in the Patch Engine that whenever it finds and fixes a problem it is meant to credit the person who found it, this credit by accident allows that person to still use that glitch. In this way, glitches are kind of like unique superpowers (or one of a number of references that could be made).

And now, onto the signup form.

• Name:
• Age:
• Gender:
• Species: [Astratamere contains many strange and wonderful sentient races, but the majority of them are variants of humans, elves, elemental beings or quasi-bestial humanoids.]
• Appearance:
• Personality:
• Ect:
• Skills: [Astratamere is a place where a wide variety of adventurers can find glory, from robe-clad mages to armor-clad warriors to almost-too-powerful stealth archers. What abilities do you have that are considered an intended part of the world?]
• Glitch Power: [A singular glitch or exploit you discovered that grants extraordinary powers and has been patched away from everyone else by the Patch Engine. Get creative but remember to explain how your ability works. Feel free to give it a fancy name.]

Accepted Characters:

• Lana G. Gran, user of Jav Clip 463
• Aoife Sheehan, the Airwalker
• Runicas Fan Raem, master of Duplihaste
• Galdra Bureus, wielder of the Ping Flail
• Maaris Polaris, she of the Perfect Steel Defense

Edited by Pentigan on Jan 28th 2020 at 3:11:28 AM

• Name: Lana G. Gran
• Age: 23
• Gender: F
• Species: Human
• Appearance: Lana is broad and powerfully built but very short at about 5'2. She wears a lot of patterned woven cloth to supplement her armor.
• Personality: Lana hasn't been in Astratamere long enough for the reality of the situation to sink in. Right now she's operating on the assumption this is some kind of videogame dream from watching all those speedruns before bed and she's staying very blase about it. Not that she doesn't dig what's happened! Lana's a fan of treating herself since her skills let her get spending money really easily; she loves beer and weird fantasy cuisine, and she's really liberal with the use of her Glitch Power to get what she wants.
• Skills: Lana has advanced across the "Militia" skill list—essentially a fighter/commoner hybrid. She's trained in light to medium armor use, fighting with weapons, and the basics of civilian life: she understands farming, construction, cooking, and cleaning.
• Glitch Power: So, we call this Jav Clip 463 because it uses javelin throws and no other reason. Basically, if you're left-handed, and you sidestep into a wall while you draw a polearm off your back slot, then aim it like you're gonna javelin toss it, your arms and legs come down partially inside the wall. Do that like three times and you'll gradually clip inside the wall. Collision and models are one-sided so once you're inside the wall you can just walk out on the other side and see where you're going because you just look straight through the wall. Just make sure you're doing it to stuff like trees, rocks, and props, because if you do it to terrain like hills or mountains, except for the mountains that are actually coded as upscaled boulders, you'll fall out of world and respawn at the last bed you laid down in, which we do use for a warp skip at one point but for the most part it's a huge time loss.

• Name: Aoife Sheehan
• Age: 20
• Gender: Female
• Species: Elf
• Appearance: Wears mostly flowing robes, forsaking actual armour in favour of her magical defenses◊. Slim, tall build. 5'10".
• Personality: Typically kind and gentle by nature, but has a notably mischievous side and loves to exaggerate her ‘powerful mage’ persona. Aoife usually plays these types of fantasy games for escapism, after all, and this habit is reflected even when she's literally inside one. She has a degree of vanity to her but she primarily focuses on being cheerful and carefree, yet in dire circumstances she is quick to snap into a more serious mindset and doesn't hesitate in defending herself or her allies when the situation calls for it. Aoife is quick-witted and intelligent enough to hide most of her abilities, but she isn't exempt from showing off from time to time in her own way—in contrast to her usual role off the battlefield as a calm listener. In terms of her Glitch Power, she is surprisingly careful with its use—she almost seems ashamed and somewhat afraid to cheat, especially as it can be easily used to sequence break.
• Etc: Notable Irish lilt, which usually makes her voice sound softer than it actually is.
• Skills: Aoife's abilities are that of the typical mage class, primarily focusing on support in the form of defensive shields and healing buffs towards those whom she is partied with. Despite this she doesn't lack at all in terms of offensive capabilities, and is building herself up to be a destructive tank—though she currently resembles more of a Glass Cannon. In terms of offense she has a variety of fireball spells that includes orbiting flames for contact damage as well as the ’homing rockets’ variety, and she's working on expanding her spell list to include more useful utilitarian functions. As of right now she's a specialist in support and offense, though her explicit focus on ranged spells means she is hilariously lacking in the close combat department.
• Glitch Power: Airwalking. In short it's a result of tricking the game into thinking the player character is walking on a flat plane, even if they are technically over empty space. The glitch is performed by the player carefully aiming their jump at a small ledge in such a way that the character catches onto it and scrambles up it, but midway through the jump unholster their weapon(s)/activate their magic so as to shift their player model into a ‘combat-ready’ state. If performed correctly, the player character will scramble up the ledge while the animation for deploying their weapons or magic is also playing, and as such confusing the game into thinking they are in fact perpetually standing on a flat surface once the scramble animation has completed. The player character needs to be continuously moving and aiming immediately afterwards in order for this glitch to work, and they can even use slanted vertical terrain so as to further increase their height (though this is difficult due to the existence of invisible walls around a lot of the landscape meshes; which can often end up pushing the player back down instead). The player character also cannot jump or put away their weapons, or they will immediately fall back down to the intended ground level and possibly take falling damage (or other types if they're unfortunate enough not to be airwalking over solid ground). This glitch is useful for crossing large gaps and skipping whole areas as a result, however it does require there to be an accessible ledge of a specific low height in order for the desired scramble animation to be activated.

Edited by Enirboreh on Jan 25th 2020 at 6:57:45 PM

• Name: Runicas Fan Raem
• Age: 21
• Gender:Male
• Species: Half Elf
• Appearance:A young man of average build, white hair totally befitting of his race, and a nicely rounded face set with hazel colored eyes. His ears are pointed and curve upward slightly. Usually seen wearing some form of a leather breastplate with chain plated boots and underclothes.
• Personality: Usually seen an an introverted NEET, Runicas (formerly some guy named [REDACTED]), has had to develop his people skills at a rapid pace to keep up with times and hold some semblance of a job after being kicked out of his home. Show him a dog, cat, rabbit, or cute animal in general and you'll get along swimmingly.
• Skills: Heavy Siege Archer. A medium weight unit capable of wielding the Crossbow, Repeater, Arbalest, and balistae. Also has proficiency in status magic, herbalism, and fletching.
• Glitch Power: Duplihaste. Due to the strange interaction between item interaction speed and the since removed spells of Haste(1s), Haste(5s), and Haste(10s), weapons, potions, and other items could be duplicated each time they are "grabbed" (interacted with) during the duration of the spell, with the duplicates quickly. This led to near infinite money, healing items, and ammunition to be acquired in a short time.

Edited by Skyzerk on Jan 25th 2020 at 5:03:22 AM

• Name: Galdra Bureus

• Age: 20

• Gender: Male

• Species: Neko (Maine Coon)

• Appearance: Galdra, being a neko, has cat ears and a tail, that of a Maine Coon cat. He has another set of normal human ears, meaning he has four. He has turquoise hair and fur, fangs, and blue and pink eyes. He has big paws. He wears a ponytail. Very pale skin, 5'5, slim build, girly figure.

• Personality: Galdra, being heavily bullied as a child in his previous world used escapism as a coping mechanism. He finally gets the chance to show the world what he's truly all about! He's not meant to be the pitiful kid anymore, y'see. He has bloody superpowers now, so he will not hesitate to use them!! ...Is what he thinks. In reality, he can't even come close to killing a single slime out of pure guilt. This has left him in a near-constant struggle of having poor defensive abilities and strength in general. He compensates by doing non-combat related chores that raise his experience, such as mining, farming, and monster taming. He does, however, have a taste for adventure, which is also fuelled by the need to impress and feel appreciated by his peers. This tends to leave him as somewhat of a walking doormat. Treasure hunting is his hobby.

• Ect:
  • Galdra is currently a wizard at a magic university. He is often sent on magical adventures as homework, which he loves.
  • He makes money by selling useful drops that he already has duplicates of.
  • Due to being a neko, he often speaks in the Nya Dialect.

• Skills:
  • Galdra, well-aware of his somewhat weak stats has instead consistently raises his most powerful mage abilities. These include his Cat-Ability: The ability to do whatever a cat/neko can. This includes night-vision, which now allows him to see the dark as though it were daytime, and enhanced balance. By rubbing his scent onto objects or people, this acts as an effective monster-repellent, but it's not effective against the more stronger monsters.

• Glitch Power:
  • Flail Ping: By patching a morning star◊ that kept on doing the things it was meant to do rather late, Galdra gained the ability to to cause things and people to lag, allowing for semi-effective time travel. This effect is activated by using the now pink and black-checkered flail as a weapon. While the morning star is in this mode, Galdra can raise ans lower the level of Ping. He accomplishes this by using the morning star in rapid succession. This causes people to either re-do their actions or teleport all over the place, as well as objects, so long as the flail hits said object or person. Galdra can abuse this technique to teleport and confuse his enemies, causing nausea and many, many headaches. He can choose to stop the lag when he pleases. Sometimes, the hit object or person actually finishes their action.

Edited by KingOfStickers on Feb 8th 2020 at 11:06:43 AM

• Name: Maaris Polaris
• Age: 22
• Gender: Female
• Species: Gel (an elemental variant)
• Appearance: A light blue semi-solid gel in the shape of a long haired blue eyed young woman◊, prefers to wear casual clothes unsuited for combat but sometimes wears scrapped pieces of 'armor' over a tanktop and shorts while questing to preserve her clothing budget.
• Personality: An avid gamer of both electronic and tabletop games and a bit of a min-maxer, Maaris (formerly Mary) thinks of herself as a strong and confident adventurer able to take on challenges far beyond her "level" and manipulate NPCs with her charms. In battle this is mostly true, she quite enjoys fighting monsters for real thanks to her species' speedy recovery and the exploit she's discovered, but the culture shock of dealing with real people as a non-human combined with her limited 'real world' experience has made the social and mundane side of Astratamere a bit more difficult to deal with than expected.
• Ect: As a Gel, Maaris is capable of manipulating her form allowing her to squeeze through smaller openings or around things like bars and grates. But being new to this she prefers to avoid doing that and stick to her humanoid shape if possible.
• Skills: Maaris' skill set is geared toward an agility based DPS specializing in unarmed/hand-to-hand combat. In other game settings, basically a monk. Thanks to her glitch power she prefers to fight more like a tank class, buffing her physical defense up and just slugging it out while relying on evasion and mobility skills to rush in and take out magical threats before they can inflict much damage. Perhaps notably she has been avoiding the 'boring' skills like crafting and gathering since she doesn't need equipment to fight.
• Glitch Power: Perfect Steel Defense: A numerical glitch caused by using the self-buff skill 'Steel Defense' while wearing equipment with zero or negative defense value. Normally the user's physical defense would be multiplied by a percentage, but with the invalid equipment defense value the result bugs and for the duration of the skill Maaris takes on a metallic texture (intended to be a brief activation animation) while her defense is treated as if it were totally maxed out.

Edited by BlitzTrain on Jan 26th 2020 at 3:25:14 AM

Can I reserve a spot and I'll write my character sheet tomorrow after I take an exam?

Sure you can. I'll check it out when it goes up. Speaking of sheets though!

• Taco: Looks good and an archetype I very much expected to see. Approved
• Enirboreh: That's a well-built mage character. Approved
• Skyzerk: A fairly brief sheet but gets across everything needed. Approved
• KingOfStickers: I was concerned about the sheet earlier but you edited it since then and it looks pretty much okay? Approved. Though the pic for the flail is broken (getting a 403 error)
• BlitzTrain: Slime person is a cool choice of species and offsetting high combat with low social helps. Approved

I'll get these approved characters up on the first post and I guess check back in once there's some more to approve or remark on. Though I will admit I'm not sure how many characters to approve before actually starting the adventure.

Edited by Pentigan on Jan 27th 2020 at 10:51:40 PM

Okay, you should be able to see the image now.

In the accepted characters list, you missed out the 'r' in "Galdra".

I feel like the amount of characters we have are ok atm, if that matters.

EDIT: I edited my character's bio again as well.

Edited by KingOfStickers on Jan 27th 2020 at 9:09:16 AM

Sweet! I was a little worried about making things too Min-maxy, so if there's anything you want me to keep an eye on, word better for possible limitations, etc, let me know. Probably easier to refine those things now than once the main thread is up.

As for roster size... Well I'm not too good at GMing, but 4-6 seems like a decent medium-ish size group from what advice I remember. But that pretty much depends on how many characters/scenes you're up to keeping track of at once.

I was wondering though, are all the characters supposed to be waking up in Raykbay Prison on their first day in Astratamere? The opening made it sound like that, but our sheets kinda ended up being from the perspective of the chars having been around at least long enough to discover their glitch and lay the foundation for their fighting style/skillset. Not sure which mindset I should be looking for when things start or how to mesh the two.

honestly, I got the impression that our characters have a backstory, but our characters possessed their bodies after death...

My understanding is we were just thrown in prison for various crimes, and the beginning of the RP is breaking out.

We spawn in prison

Those could work. Either way I guess it doesn't hurt to come up with some potential reasons to be sent to prison besides/in addition to plot mandated party gathering.

Alright folks we are live! I'll be keeping the signups open for anyone else that wants to join up but our first batch of accepted folks can head over to the in-character thread or hop in the discord server and get started.

Everything still open here? You didn't post a signup close notice and the rp seems to be still chugging, though I'm not sure how you'd handle a new person at this point so I thought you'd ask.

Also your discord link is expired just fyi.

Signups are theoretically open but I'm having a hard time coming up with a way for new characters to join the adventure without having to go through a repeat of the same intro.

Outside of our glitch power, we have a class and method of attack, correct?

Edited by dusk0bish on Mar 30th 2020 at 1:33:12 PM

Yep. Doesn't have to be too strictly-defined.

Name: Thia Moonbrook

Age: 21

Gender: Female

Species: Elf

Appearance: Caucasian skin, blue eyes, light olive-colored hair, wearing mostly blue mage robes, with some lunar lines across the robes.

Personality: Generally reserved and calm, she changes into a much more hyper/chaotic personality when adventuring, usually resulting in death for any unfortunate nearby monsters.

Ect: Currently, Thia is an adventurer that makes money through selling the drops and unneeded loot she picks up. She also attends a mage school, but she's made it clear that she only cares about classes that teach offensive spells.

Skills: Thia is very competent in offensive spells, but usually uses ice, fire, and lightning magic, as well as the essential magic missile spell to constantly abuse her glitch power.

Glitch Power: Spell Switching: A rather simple and effective exploit, which switches between two offensive spells rapidly to do the damage and hitbox of one of the spells, while inflicting the mana cost and cooldown of the other one.

Edited by dusk0bish on Mar 31st 2020 at 10:34:04 AM

So I know it's been a few months since we've fizzled out but after talking with a few of the players again I'm deciding to start this thing back up by skipping ahead to the main city where a new batch of characters can be met. Thus, I'm re-opening the signups! I am also opening up a new type of player character you can specify you are in your signup: The Unimmersed, the avatars of living people who are playing the game of Astratamere from outside of it. While they don't have the total freedom of being a physically inside the digital world, they are still capable of obtaining a Glitch Power and have the ability to do things 'outside' of Astratamere such as conduct internet research and use some more of the purely-UI features of the game world.

If you're still here Dusk your signup looks fine and if you still want to be in I would be pleased to have you along.

Edited by Pentigan on Aug 14th 2020 at 10:09:30 PM

• Name: Maria Krillia
• Age: 27
• Gender: Female
• Species: Human
• Appearance: An short-haired brunette with curly hair. She has an...Miko uniform...Betting the one of the devs really liked anime..She also has circle-form glasses, green eyes, and freckles.
• Personality: A mild mannered sort. Somehow...accepts the glitches around this world. Despite her calm attitude, she also tends to have a sarcastic attitude, so Deadpan Snarker personified.
• Ect: Used to work at the local cafe, where the weirdos go...May be why she's so okay with the glitches...
• Skills: Magic. In particular, Pyromancy. She can also fly on her broomstick. and may/may not can fire bullets
• Glitch Power: Wall-Clipping-Teleport, due to an mapping error, by a complicated maneuver of clipping, which is basically the BLG, Maria can clip through a wall, and goes into the area the wall was blocking, even if it was invisible. Alas, she cant bring people with her..