Scheveningen

As above. You could literally, at round-start as an antagonist Unathi, turn on your claws and you won't be scrutinized on the OOC side. You know, help new players not get screwed over for being new as a non-antag Unathi for example?

Just highlighting someone posted criticism of a character asking questions already answered in the initial application. The application cuts the exposition and gets straight to the point of the only relevant information necessary to convey certain points. It's weird to expect a standard where your exposition must be THIS BIG, and then yet there's difficulty with reading, digesting and interpreting 3 paragraphs of text that already answers the questions you want to ask? Doing that in addition to character-bashing by calling someone's character a snowflake for no good reason or justification just doesn't make a lot of sense, not to mention the low-key transphobia that's lurking in some of the critics' posts here. Like, could you not, and take that elsewhere? It's not constructive. It's not useful. It doesn't afford the OP any ground to answer questions comfortably when certain individuals come in with "I think your character is garbage," and nothing else constructive.

+1. Stev's fantastic at role-playing interesting characters, even if the concept seems a little out there, he expands on 'different' and makes it practical and believable, but most of all his characters are, in general, fun and interesting to interact with. I like this character concept and it's not something I haven't seen before, considering a similar character existed before. It's still interesting either way, coupled with stev's stellar roleplaying ability I can certainly say I trust this character concept to do well. Slight tangent, though, the other posters in this thread would do better than to speak for the Unathi lore maintainer, especially considering he's capable of doing that by himself when he comes around to review this.

Oh god the notorious power point. It was enough that Abo enjoyed using Excel documents. Joking aside, I recall this was never released to the common public though and the standards specified in that power point were never applied as actual policy. oh god i would've hated this too. H-h-heww-w-w-wo. t-t-t-t-this i-i-i-is t-t-t-the h-h-head of s-s-s-security.

Much like a knife, you shouldn't be using your claws in a simple brawl. But in many cases when security has to break up a bar brawl, they're going to slap whoever did the most damage with the hardest time/fine, and whoever got their claws out as substitutes for punching is gonna get screwed the hardest because that's their species feature by default. But when an Unathi suddenly gets assaulted in a bar brawl, they have to delve into their settings by default to go to kicks and by then, their assailant has gotten a few hits in. The gist of it is that this becomes a saving grace for Unathi who have to defend themselves all of a sudden but also don't want to default to slashing/stabbing/cutting. You should have to toggle on claw attacks as a pre-meditated thing. Not so much as a "to help ICly moderate Unathi/Tajarans/Vaurcae who do get their claws out" but moreso to not set them up for failure because their default species feature replaces the typical harm intent punch with a set of hand-knives that cannot be disarmed without extreme measures. Also, those claws can cause internal bleeding (in the first strike, even - doesn't always happen but when it does, it's really shit for the person who has it) which is an incredibly serious condition. Using claws should be something you have to set intentionally, that way it's easier to convey intent to onlookers and your target in regards to what force you're using on them, without worrying about the OOC mechanics involved of what's default and what's not. It's a subtle way of helping communicate the severity of the situation without instantly setting up any xeno up as the bad guy for defending themselves with a default attack far more powerful than a typical punch. The status quo right now is that xeno players have to consciously remember each round to set their attack type to be anything other than claws. Which is not something they can comfortably do as well if they get battered by someone all of a sudden and they want to reciprocate a brawl. It's an uncomfortable amount of artificial difficulty to force a player to have to change their settings every round they play a xeno with claws, because their default attack is so much deadlier. That's objectively not a good status quo, especially not for newer players who don't want slice-and-dice as their default attack type.

The idea is that a claw attack is more escalated than a punch. A fist-full of a punch is of greater escalation than a grapple. A grapple is more escalated than a push or disarm. Seeking to unbalance/disarm someone is pretty much the initial form of escalation. A punch is a bludgeoning for the most part, but you mostly have to do 1.5x more punches than claw attacks to be at the threshold of potentially killing someone, as claws can hit vital organs upon exceeding thresholds of damage for an external organ. Since a single claw attack is nearly twice as damaging as a single punch, you should have to intentionally switch your H2H attack option to claws to escalate force from mere elbowing and slamming to direct usage of hand-knives.

Because xenos, that's why. At the moment, Tajarans/Unathi/Vaurca default to claw attacks rather than bludgeoning with their fists. This is an issue because they essentially have very powerful knives that can't be disarmed, but this is not so much a problem as the fact that this is enabled for them by default, so they can very easily kill someone in self-defense or in a brawl, the two most common RP-oriented fights. The aforementioned species should be defaulted to standard bludgeoning punch attacks instead, and have to switch their attack type to claws. This makes them easier to scrutinize in an IC sense because they have far less excuse for essentially stabbing/slicing someone up like this.

Citation needed. I do not think a single person here will accept "I've killed hundreds of space carp with my baton" as canon for your character and as a good excuse for you to essentially rush down a shark in a body of water. Have you ever tried swinging a weapon at a shark while your upper torso is the only thing above water? It's an incredibly unwieldy state to be swimming out to sea with only your shoulders and arms above water simply to beat a shark to death. I would think a shark is at its best in water. You would already know this, in fact, and it needn't be explained to you were you actually roleplaying with these factors in mind. No, you had to swim out to sea to acquire valids. Given your ridiculous behavior in that round and the shark-snark you've displayed in this thread, I really don't think you should be roleplaying here. There are other servers more suited to what appears to be your roleplay spectrum, and such servers also exist with a higher tolerance for acting like shitcurity.

What's your time-zone? I don't think I've seen any of those character names before. Were you here for yesterday's CCIA event?

I honestly think the event was fine in some respects but it had some weak moments. There were two notable groups of people: Flash mob and the actual vacationers. Flash mob was pretty much composed of people expecting a hyperactive round and being inevitably disappointed, so they just participated in drinking so much their liver had an out-of-body experience. If they had fun, that was pretty great, as long as they stayed out of fights, which ended up happening anyway. There is such a thing as having too much fun, apparently. The Vacationer crowd was mostly more chill, with people focused on just chair-RPing and socially interacting. Most of them intentionally tried to stay out of fights and didn't directly seek them out. The flash mob created a lot of fights, though, and I attribute this to the fact that there wasn't much of an active security presence as one officer decided to YOLO it directly into a shark and the other security staff left were mostly hanging out and socializing. It would've been better if there was a more active attempt on the security department to ICly moderate and deal with fights, in addition to responding to them. It was a great round nonetheless, although soured by two things: some characters excessively drinking and starting fights for the sake of it, and no active security presence to deter people from even thinking about acting stupid. It doesn't help that Shark Bait set the worst possible example on what to expect from sec though.

I played during this round and your conduct and roleplay level during this round as Nick was far below par. You charged a shark out in the open water with a stun baton in an attempt to kill it. It instead killed you. The CMO that round was apparently nice enough to bring you back to the station to be cloned, and then brought back to participate in the round again. I heard you actually sent an ahelp complaining that a shark killed you in the open water (?????). You then instigated a 1v5 brawl fight and lost. You died to internal bleeding and died twice in one round. Why are you instigating random fights on extended to start with? you probably should've been banned after you charged the shark and died, to be honest, considering that move is 100% following the security stereotype of officers being cavemen with stun clubs and very little processing power invested towards anything other than hitting things. It's surprising you got nothing for the brawl too.

omg i was styled on so fuckin hard. You will pay for this in time, UnknownMurder. Anyway, I just have a preference personally and I consider what UM made still pretty good. I will be happy with either but I love diona nymphs so much.

Does this mean we're getting the nymph on the flagpole?

There are oftentimes situations in rounds where things blow themselves out of proportion that your character isn't equipped to handle, even if you on the OOC level is objectively capable of handling it well, not all characters are created equal. Even then, sometimes issues have such complexity and implications of pressure behind them, and that particular detail creates a large variance in how situations are dealt with depending on the mood and how easy someone is to frustrate. For the sake of example, I'll begrudgingly talk about myself for a minute and how I view this. There are specific archetypes of behavior that my characters tend to be founded on. There's often very little to a lot of variance depending on the character, their adaptability and their personality; in addition to the severity of the situation. One character I play is stoic to almost a fault where they're expected to react with some degree of humanity... but oftentimes they just don't. It becomes difficult to distinguish them from a robot apart from seeing the obvious organic bits. There are cases where they have certain weaknesses in their usual stone cold personality, but I'd say 80% of the time... they're a rock wall. And that's just one example of a character. I don't just motivate myself to try to uphold a standard for a character in that regard, I do. I try to think, at least in the in-character sense, of the example I want to set for others, and not just doing it for myself so that I feel comfortable. Not everybody can be exactly me, though, nor can I always be me or even who I want to be, if that makes any sense. Having a sense of roleplaying fiber is something I find difficult to uphold oftentimes because I don't only get moods to play a stoic character, but sometimes I want to play just to play, and have some silly fun on occasion. And if I might let on a little secret, sometimes it's really fun to get really mad. Only sometimes. I feel guilty about participating in that later, though, as uncommon as I partake in that for some level of catharsis. Onto the actual round. There's not a lot I can say beyond saying, "I'd prefer not to see the same behavior repeat the way it did." Improvement is something I strive for, personally. And I define 'improvement' as not 'to be better' but rather, to be 'less bad than I was yesterday.' And that's something to keep in mind in regards to this complaint, at least. There is certainly a lot the player Avery could've done better or even just flat out differently and perhaps a little more interestingly as a result. It's hard to execute what you want sometimes, so often Occam's Razor invokes itself and you take what comes easiest to you as an option. Issue with Occam's Razor is that it is a gamble, and with gambles you often lose. By lose I mean "not winning" and by "not winning" I mean "getting disapproval for how you roleplayed in a round." Something to consider, at least. Keep in mind too that pratfalls in decision-making are very human and understandable, and often expected when you act without 100% assurance that something will go the way you want it to. I feel that while the behavior from the player during this round was quite ostentatious even within context, they're good examples of behavior that could be improved upon. In that regard, I would hope that's considered. The opportunity to improve. "To not suck as much as you did yesterday." So I hope nothing drastic gets done on the admin side of things but I suppose I wouldn't be surprised, but I would be disappointed.

lol, For clarity, he joined and saw an April Fools announcement from last year. I told him that was just an april fools announcement but there was a misunderstanding.

wot

Smol addendum: I'm as critical as I am about this subject because of the stuff I mentioned in my initial posts. I'm supportive of a hypothetical, progressive situation where this gets merged and is generally a cool and slightly-more-than-simple buff with some reasonable challenges added if necessary. The new PR that is up for it needs to incorporate the following: 1. Dept. Officers need headsets to their respective department and to security. The expectation for dept. officers is that their responsibility divisions are just like the difference between warden and officer, detective and forensic tech, cadet and HOS. Each of them has a different responsibility to attend to and their focus should be that on code green, and should evolve or adapt on different code levels. The idea that security through proxy of dept. officers is more involved in the affairs of each department and has a potential available witness with common interests and goals with security could streamline certain situations 5x easier. 2. Dept. Officers should not lose toolkit they had when playing officer before. Crowbar, handheld radio, maglight, at least 2 pairs of cuffs, etc. 3. Restore their basic access to security. They shouldn't be unable to walk into sec with a detained person from their department to have them processed by the warden for something internally criminal related. Self-sufficiency to a degree is important for any job role so that it's possible to be creative in those job roles. Arbitrarily restricting them because you can instead of because it makes sense, doesn't make them very fun.

It's fine by me, as long as the changes are made in good faith and their implementation is at least OK.

Gonna reply to this directly just so that everyone past this point reads it, because it's the best case for why the core premise of this suggestion, as is, is not suitable for gameplay. Many core facets of interaction and having balanced experiences just didn't exist with the departmental officers. If you were a science officer, it was objectively the best option to pick with a fully stacked science crew because there was a lot to experience in the department and keep an eye on. No, you cannot go, "Well that's the fault of the other departments being boring!" and call it a solid defense for why this should be implemented in the near future, because the purpose of the other departments have their focus less centric on exploration, discovery and mad science. Nothing can compensate for those core fundamentals the other departments will always be missing. When the round went code-red, the science officer was almost always kitted out with the best assortment of gear R&D could offer and was the first individual to acquire it, if not the only one. This majorly skewed the value of playing the other department officers against itself, to the point where there was often a fair bit of competitiveness and disappointment in the attempt of getting the science officer role. Departmental sec renders the role of the varying security officers needlessly complex while still being single-mindedly focused on one area and that's their own department. There's also the concern of bias involved, because departmental officers would commonly strike up rapport with the department staff and overlook mild-to-just short of egregious offenses. If anyone values ensuring character accountability is supported to the best of the ability of the game's design and crew line-up, they'd generally oppose this suggestion as-is, because departmental sec ends up creating even more complex tribalism rather than trying to dial it back. Other methods need to be tried to make gameplay and interactions better, and this suggestion is not one of them. I've seen much of the same weak interactions with departmental sec as I have with centralized security. If the feature was trying to change things up to influence people's approaches to how security was played, it failed in that regard. So what would be the point of implementing this if it didn't change anything in its test phase? We can't really invest in things that failed to deliver on basic promises in their initial testing phase, and people claiming the feature wasn't given enough time to 'see for sure' are missing the point. Implemented features need to have their effects more than just noticeable, it needs to strongly influence common approaches people normally take in gameplay. Implementation of gameplay features and having to wait multiple months for it to actually pay off in the long run are not good implementations of gameplay features. As-is, this needs scrapped. There needs to be revised perspective on how to approach the issue more carefully, because this is an entire department people are asking to be changed on the fundamental level. If you'd be pissed if someone tried to arbitrarily increase the difficulty of your favorite in-game job for the sake of adding more difficulty and complexity to the game, then for the sake of fairness you should have a bit more empathy towards people who have voiced their concern and dissatisfaction with this change. Remember telescience? No one who used telescience to positively benefit player-characters in the round actually liked the core change, which was making mild telescience failures near-lethal, and making usage of telescience even less accessible. And that's generally what we should care about: accessibility. Not at any cost, but hopefully we care enough about new players that we don't deliberately implement roles in the game that have clear gameplay and roleplay superiorities over others that are similar in function.

I dig it. It simulates things happening on screen. I play other games besides SS13 with more things going on at a time, so personally I'm used to this. It makes the game feel more active and helps it stick out more instead of looking monotonous and plain. I will miss the spin-jumps for people jumping with leg actuators though.

It should mostly stand to reason that it doesn't make much sense that Vaurcae eject inhaled phoron directly into the atmosphere just through taking a breath, because even humans exhale CO2 and not a lot of oxygen. The only reason they do right now is because lolbreathingcode. If this were to be fixed so that they exhale nitrogen into the air or something, it'd prevent use-cases where Vaurcae passively poison atmosphere because of breathing.