Scheveningen

BYOND Key: Scheveningen Accused Players Byond Key: Landyn Helm Time of Act: 3-5PM EST. bSQ-c9TR, Changeling round. Reason for Ban: Extreme greytiding play. Throughout the course of a changeling round, self-antagged as a security cadet (their ckey was a similar name in-character) to some pretty serious degrees and also IC'd in OOC plenty of times. Seemed really new at first glance but they slowly got worse and worse throughout the course of the round with the displayed intent of their actions. Such as choking a fellow officer in "learning" how to grapple and then stopping as soon as the officer cried for help. Threatened suicide at some point in the round for a reason I don't know why, I think he got arrested and threatened it. Also threatened to murder the bartender during the round for an IC reason but it was kinda escalated to a point where it didn't make sense. Evidence: I had to reopen my client due to a runtime error. Aboshehab, the player Worthy and some other folks who played the round.

Brig equipment room, armory, security firing range, library, primary tool storage, bridge, science firing range, engineering sub-level. There are some others I've missed but don't commonly use aside from the ones I mentioned. The rechargers that are not wall-mounted may be unwrenched and moved from their initial location to another one for convenience's sake, drawing on the room's closest power source. Yes, I will trivialize it, because weapon rechargers are not uncommon or inconvenient to get to. Assistants, as an example, can open the library slide door and not only hijack the librarian's computer but also steal the recharger to either charge their laptop or the AEG they nicked from R&D. It doesn't really make sense as to how a weapon is chambering its rounds from an energy capacitor. It is unintuitive and uninteresting. Or lazier. Not really an issue to me, it seems balanced that someone would struggle in running out of their dedicated ammunition type that's intended to be sparse to begin with. Being able to recharge it instantly seems to be the opposite of having any kind of tradeoff and does not seem intuitive. One would probably better off not spamming away with the low-capacity ammunition types and people should be cognizant of how much ammunition they have left instead of pretending they'll never run out. People have to do this for changing magazines for ballistic weapons and it requires more input than simply pressing "T" and typing out whatever fallback ammunition they have left to use. I have not been one as of recently to suggest to outright remove the power of something without giving counterbalanced buffs in turn to make it still strong. Exceptions being in cases where a feature is so overwhelmingly strong that it'd be arbitrary to suggest it needs any more power than it already has. I prefer making balance suggestions that still keep certain features in a nice place that would make them particularly good at a few things that they were intended to be good at and weaker or irrelevant in using in other situations. I'm even fine with flexible features as long as their versatility is not so overwhelmingly strong in the versatility it possesses that it becomes the go-to because using anything else would be gimping yourself. Such as what I did with the laser rifle in dropping its overall capacity. The ability to hold at most 2-3 lawgiver magazines is a decision someone needs to be cognizant of (provided they don't have a bag of holding) because the tradeoff is holding more ammunition at the cost of heavily reduced utility in storage space. Deciding to dump a medkit and a crowbar in favor of a large magazine is not a decision I would make, but to me, that's entirely fine if someone thinks they can get away with playing more aggressively but they'll need to accept the consequences in having reduced survivability or utility. Also note that the lawgiver itself does not fit in holsters and can only fit on an armor slot or in the bag. If put on an armor slot that isn't a hardsuit, you sacrifice having a reliable light source mounted and cannot traverse the dark in a reasonable fashion without NVGs. I don't believe that was what I was arguing for so sorry if that's how it came off, but that was definitely not how I intended to phrase my reasoning.

Haven't you guys been nerfing them? Mind you, I don't really play them, but I thought you added like flash vulnerability and some stuff. The last change I made wasn't so drastic so as to make them incredibly vulnerable. The nerf was targeted to make them more vulnerable in a vacuum without suit-cooling, rather than outright making them weaker to burn on purpose. a .1 damage adjustment doesn't really matter that much when considering laser beams but it matters a lot when an IPC begins to cook internally in a vacuum. Flash vulnerability is hardly such a glaring weakness for any species. Might be a good idea to consider playing an IPC yourself and understanding what their strengths and flaws lie.

A major balancing issue at the moment with the Lawgiver is that it is treated as an energy weapon in how it recharges its ammunition. Shoot it some times, stick it into a charger, voila, you get all of the ammo back. This doesn't take someone like me to write multiple paragraphs in order to understand how problematic that is. Thus, I have a couple suggestions to go about this. Lawgivers spawn with an empty magazine. For consistency sake it might be worth it to also force all of the other prototype ballistics to spawn with nothing, too. Make the rest of the magazines 15% cheaper than they are now to compensate. Unlike the other ammunition magazines, Lawgiver mags should be pretty expensive and bulky to carry. Lawgiver mags can have a w_class of 2, as in-canon of the judge universe they carry up to 50 rounds of ammunition that can be converted to other munition types also stored in the same magazine. And of course, make them eat a lot of diamonds and steel. Total ammunition in a magazine should be 30 standard rounds (sourced from single shot/burst fire modes and tracked appropriately), 15 stun shot, 15 Armor Piercing (use the bulldog rifle bullet) 10 hot-shot and 5 explosive shots. It might be a bit tough to have a single magazine contain and track usage of separate ammunition in one magazine, but I might be wrong. 75 various rounds in a single magazine may seem a bit much but in the Dredd canon a MkII had a total of 120 in a single bulky magazine. Make incendiary rounds actually act like projectile molotovs. By this I mean upon contacting with any surface they should detonate and light either between a 3x3 or a 5x5 area on fire. 7x7 would be true to canon but perhaps a bit extreme considering how in-game molotovs don't behave like that. Make explosive shot a little more explosive. It'd be neat if the explosive shot could be used for "architecture rearrangement" in terms of usefulness rather than what it is currently, and that's just a stunlocker. Reducing its available usage to 5 rounds per magazine would also help fulfill its niche better. Examining magazines or a lawgiver MkII loaded with them should have exact indicators of how much of each ammo type is available. QOL reasons.

+1. Multiple times I've worked on character concepts with Nursie and vice versa, and I think through that we've not only created really interesting characters for ourselves but inspired others to do the same. I really find Nursie's attention to small detail is far from wasted effort, as I find that details, even when it seems like it's not useful to add to the overall lore as a roleplay nuance, it's a bunch of smaller things that add up to create a really interesting product. Nursie's certainly someone who can put her foot down and make her own decisions, not necessarily resigning themselves to the "lore secretary" meme, so I think with time she'd be an excellent partner to Cake.

Title.

I didn't respond to any of it as it contained no substance worth responding to. All you did was just generalize every round type, which is disingenuous to say the least. Any degree of stun measure security has is more than enough to incap threats you aren't intending to be killing. Conversely, if you die with a laser rifle as security you must be the one doing something wrong, not the antag. As opposed to ERT being largely unopposed free reign to march around the station hunting down antagonists with their high-quality validhunter gear as a reward for dying? I'm not sure how it's fair that the people who died in the round and most likely did something to deserve it get a second chance to take revenge on the same people that killed them. That seems like pretty poor balance to me. Who told you that? That's not true at all.

Naturally if an order sounds stupid, you'd be an idiot to follow it blindly and not ask for clarification.

Sunglasses already make you unable to examine objects/mobs/etc directly in the dark.

Anyone who dies just respawns in better equipment, better guns, and better access and you act like none of these factors aren't a big deal when comparing them to regular officers, though. You have a gun as ERT. You have authority as ERT to use it at your own discretion to handle the emergency. If someone so much as tries to approach you, you drill them with bullets or lasers, because that's the expectation of ERT during an emergency where shit has gone down. By the time the entire security team dies, the round antagonists may have already taken considerable losses. At which point command just giggle as they call for a very substantial amount of reinforcements more than likely using the exact same players that had just died minutes ago. It doesn't matter if the ERT are any good. They will respawn with the sole objective of killing the round antagonists, and the antagonists overall gain nothing from having killed the entire security force. All of their efforts and resources are wasted and they have to prepare to be assaulted by a team of people that just died or were just observing that will be suited in hardsuits with a wide variety of options for hardsuit-mounted weapons and utility to render antagonists super-dead with. Does this not seem like a ridiculous thing? To be able to call reinforcements in the manner of just instantly respawning those that died into overbuffed security officers? Don't make it sound like ERT is hard, either. If you manage to get a fully kitted hardsuit, you by yourself are very hard to kill, when comparing it from team numbers varying from 2-6, you suddenly have far more variables to contend with than would considered to be reasonable to be able to deal with. ERT gets kitted out like a deathsquad and calling for them is almost always used as a panic button when the station starts to take losses against the antagonists. ERT is the major reason why heist/merc teams will often just leg it the moment they arrive as there is no fighting an entire ERT team and it is rare they will ever split up when they're intent on hunting antagonists down.

It is vandalism when considered under regulations, however.

I do not care about the minority of antagonists who are too afraid to do anything, this is a change being promoted on the behalf of the antagonists who actually want to do something in the round without command giggling like schoolgirls and gently slide their shiny slick ID cards into authenticators the first chance they see an antagonist performing the slightest bit of impact on the round -- demonetized by the way -- because frankly it's pretty pointless to have antagonists on a server where doing the slightest bit of antagonizing on the station will be inevitably met with command staff crying for massively overequipped security officers sourcepooled from a bunch of angry ghosts who want to ruin the round of antagonists that also "ruined" the round of theirs to begin with. Why is it even a thing that ERT exists to be commonly summoned half the time? Like, isn't this HRP server heavily defined by antagonists doing shit more than actual roleplay? Forgive me if I say this after many years of believing otherwise but I'm trying not to be delusional and rejecting that times change to suit the new community. Why the hell does it need to be so hard for antagonists to do anything if our design is almost dependent on an antagonist model before a roleplay model? You don't need skill to cause the round to radically change in your favor. Calling ERT basically spawns up to a group of six Slab Beefchunks with access to power armor, a wide array of utility that keeps them alive better than what security gets, and plenty of guns they can use at their disposal to kill the entire crew if they wanted to.

They'll just grab the crayons from tool storage anyway. Regulate them ICly with security.

Someone would inevitably abuse this for macro spam, unfortunately.

That seems to be quite an extreme example. Were those all blood boil/wall runes? That's sort of hilarious but a bit silly at the same time. Limiting it for each cultist to be able to keep active (like 10-15 per would be fine) seems like a more reasonable solution. Should be able to examine a rune as a cultist and know who wrote it too in that case for visual clarity.

The implementation of chronic stuttering as a mild speech quirk is always an interesting one, as it's a rather frequent trope in terms of character design on roleplay servers. Note I say chronic, as chronic stammering is extremely distinct from stammering caused by nervousness, so forgive me if I falsely assume Leah is a sufferer of chronic stammering. I'm not terribly good at noticing things and committing nuance to memory, but I'll assume you do the following with your character's mannerisms in terms of stammering: -You don't over-excessively accentuate the stutter to a point where it is noticeable, such as: “O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-okay. I-I-I-I-I’ll d-d-d-d-do i-i-i-it.” or “Th-th-there i-i-isn’t o-o-o-one.” -You ensure the stutter is incorporated as a condition that your character was born with, as in reality psychogenic stuttering is not only extremely rare but really unlikely to ever develop as a result of trauma. Stammering may be accompanied by emotional trauma but it is not caused by it. -It's established by you as a long-term condition that hasn't ever made significant progress on to fixing. A major thing to know is that chronic stammering is a difficult quirk to hammer out of someone, even with speech therapy there's a chance it will be ineffective. Otherwise it'd be too easy to simply retcon out of your character, thus making the detail completely nuanced and voiding it of any importance as a quality! Smaller negative quirks of a character cause conflict for a character, the especially prevalent ones also happen to create interesting obstacles for the character to overcome. It's these tiny problems that make a character seem real and relatable. A very difficult thing to execute in terms of writer skill, as it's too easy to succumb to the pitfalls that need to be avoided. -You incorporate more than a few aspects that involve chronic stuttering such as sound prolongation, especially for words that begin with a soft S, such as 'snake'. Thus, it'd be enunciated such as "ssssnake" though hopefully distinct in a manner in how Unathi slither when enunciating soft or hard S in basic. ss-ss-snake functions well enough for this purpose, as an example. Repeating the same word once or twice and also incorporating interjections (such as uh, um, like, but, etc) into your speech patterns also reflects further as to how the character has a bit of trouble tripping over their own anxiety when they notice they're stuttering a bit, thus exacerbating it even worse for themselves. -You hopefully make it so that your character is very self-conscious about their stuttering and loathes it to death, and as mentioned, a stutter that happens once will most likely just increase the rate at which your character stutters if left for too long in a social encounter. For some people it's very, very embarrassing and they don't know how to deal with it. Don't let this stop you from making Leah proud of what she does, of course, as it could create interesting plotlines. I apologize again if I've made any inaccurate assumptions, I only know so much from what I've seen and haven't really interacted with you meaningfully on either an OOC or IC level.

I've never heard of there being a limit to cult runes you can place. What are you referring to?

No. Security is not a job that requires competent people for in-game progression. Command requires far more in-game and social knowledge to appropriately play, especially considering it is a high-responsibility leadership role, whereas security holds only as much authority as command staff are willing to grant them. Having a baton doesn't make you God. It really doesn't.

I mean. If it was tied to the database for characters or something and their attained powers/trees save permanently to that character after the initial modification done in science, that would be fine with me, provided that the maximum limit of psionic powers that can be carried over to the next round is at an adept level and not an operative one. Powergaming the higher levels in a round and succeeding in levelling up to that degree with willpower should cause some serious shit to happen as a consequence, though. Such as random psion hunters deploying from ghosts to kidnap and/or permanently disable those psions because of how much of a threat they could become with that power.

Noooope. Human-type mobs have 200 health overall. I honestly think a better idea would be able to twist any weapon that can embed in a wound to cause like half its force or something.

As title says. ERT's quite easy to call and given that it's usually called when people happen to die, there's never a shortage of dudes who are always ready and raring to suit up in arguably imbalanced equipment to crush antagonists with. It is not fair for a guaranteed respawn of salty dudes who want to get revenge on the antagonists for having killed them. If the authentication fails, CentComm will print out a response message that ERT is currently tied up dealing with [insert random excuse] in [nearby sector] that also supplements a 20-30 minute cooldown. 15 is too little and perhaps anything over 30, or even 30, is too much. A failure to call for ERT reliably will force the crew to resort to actually caring to fend for themselves and making an invested effort in staying alive long enough to be able to hold out against impending doom. This would also, on occasion, give antagonists a neat little power spike for a short while to be able to do whatever they need to in order to accomplish their devilish ambitions.

This is an absurd amount of damage. This deals enough damage to instantaneously destroy any limb.

I'm not sure what the outburst was for, Sytic. That seemed quite unnecessary and immature. I'm also not sure if we should be using Warhammer's psykers as a format for psionics, considering how Warhammer does not merely border on absurdity in mechanics but thrives in it for the sake of entertainment value, at the cost of roleplay immersion. StarCraft, Bioshock would generally be better to source from, as psionics is traditionally a sci-fi narrative motif rather than a science fantasy one. All of what Kaed said in their recent post is effectively my thoughts on how it could be implemented in a fashion that makes sense, in a way that simply says, "It already existed, but the potential for psionics was completely untapped until recently". It'd be an interesting way to revive genetics into something far more fleshed out and actually unique to our server, at least, provided it becomes realized. I believe an easy way to handle this is by not allowing anyone to be granted these psionic capabilities roundstart and deadlocking it through a unique branch of research instead. Especially not anything near an operative level, considering the implications.

Psionics with drawbacks/consequences would be necessary to have them make sense. Granted, I love psions, alright? I hate when people are reductive and just say it's space magic though. I'll use their rhetoric against them to make a mildly entertaining post or something. But, for the sake of examples and setting tone. Take the StarCraft universe for instance. Similarly to how this is proposed here, every living being is capable of psionic potential, though some individuals may be born completely numb to it whereas others are like tuning forks to psionic energies. Both of these extremes have their negatives and positives, as do some of the moderate cases. Humans/terrans can exhibit powerful psionic potential and are merely a few steps away on the evolutionary scale to actually becoming a formidable psionic power to compete with the other races in the game universe, though few are capable of actually wielding it. Those that can are often whisked away by government agencies to be forced into the Ghost Program, in which they become powerful psionic operatives for their associated governments. The Terran Confederacy and the Terran Dominion in the canon both enforced this to a degree that very few psionic-capable children slipped through the cracks in being pressed into the ranks of the Ghost Program, those that did were more than likely inhabitants of the Frontier worlds. Despite this, few humans surpassed the Psi Index scale of being able to harness pure kinetic energy with their minds. Which, if left unchecked, is capable of destroying entire populations or worlds. Contrasting to the protoss in the StarCraft canon, who are so familiar to psionics that the only reason they don't obliterate shit on a more regular basis with their psionic capabilities is that they've existed for an extremely long time and have likely already been there and done that, that they've embraced the futility in wanton destruction and merely use their psionics to promote a better way of life for their people and develop new technology to do so. The protoss are considered so psionically adept that nothing short of an even more powerful psionic precursor entity is able to overwhelm their psionic latency. They are equal parts highly sensitive to psionics but also adept with it, that their sensitivity cancels out for the most part when facing less adept psionic foes. Then we have the cliche Devouring Swarm of the Zerg. The Zerg are comparative to a hiveminded race of pack beasts that hunt together, think together and overwhelm together. Limited telepathy interlinking every organism in unison obviously implies psionic potential. They're highly sensitive to psionic energies (and highly powerful psions themselves) and thus are drawn to it naturally. It's a theory in the fanbase that the only reason they evolve at such a ridiculous rate in response to certain stigmas of environmental conditions is due part to a limited psionic latency in addition to their inherent sensitivity to it. Various Zerg organisms have different roles in the Swarm and may have various psionically-charged capabilities in order to help them devour organisms in their never-ending quest to evolve to a swarm of apex predators. If the Zerg were capable of actually besting their more powerful psionic opponents and consuming their essence in order to adapt new techniques, it's very possible they could become deadly psionic opponents themselves. I should also mention that their psionic sensitivity leads them to be very vulnerable to certain psionic techniques, such as psionic storms ripping their brains apart in instants,. The same-ish sort of happens to humans affected by the same psionic power. Tl;dr to the above, shit is different depending on the race when it comes to psionic latency vs. psionic sensitivity. A psionically latent being is always going to be an equally sensitive one, but a psionically sensitive being does not have to be a equally psionically latent one. Interesting, huh? Now we arrive to the problem. Even in the StarCraft universe, your average terran marine or scientist is not going to trip above a 2 on the Psi Index. No powers. Sensitivity, maybe. If you trip a 3 the only special thing you can do is detect more powerful psionics. In StarCraft, these people get recruited as Wranglers in order to capture rogue psions or bring in psionically latent children. Depending on how they rate on the Psi Index this either can be a very easy job or it's a suicide mission. You trip over 5 and you're capable of telepathy. The power of the telepathic latency varies between 5 to 8. 5 is a "These are not the Shells you are looking for", 8 is a "I literally can control your mind to such a skilled extent that I'm able to manipulate your bodily functions to shit your drawers, take out your gun and blast your friend beside you in my cell, release my restraints, then I can tell you that everything that just happened was all your fault and I can hypnotically suggest that you need to space yourself outside an airlock." That's how fucked some Teeps can be, and it is why the Terran governments in the Koprulu sector jump at the chance of acquiring or kidnapping psionically latent humans if they have to, because 99% of the time they're either going to put a handicap on them and just use them as a slightly neutered psionic operative, or they're going to turn the dude loose on the galaxy after sufficiently brainwashing them to serve the cause. You trip over an 8 and you're a teek, or a psion who is not only capable of telepathic suggestions or controlling minds, but you're also capable of manipulating psychokinetic energies out of fucking nowhere because space magic, which depending on your rating between 8 to 12, can mean you can shoot cute fireballs at terrorists or you can rend an entire planet barren with a psionically-charged explosion that wipes half the entire planet back to the Stone Age. The protoss are considered on this scale due to their adept usage of psionic storms and usually average between 9-11. Only one human has ever reached 12 or beyond that level but that's completely irrelevant because it has more to do with a typical anti-hero story where they gain the power of a psionic God to save the universe. So, tl;dr for the above at this point, psionics in this universe would hardly be treated differently by the local governments. The Alliance would see them as freak mutations that turn average people into genetic abominations capable of mind/world-destroying space magic if left unchecked, as a major example. But everyone's a hypocrite even in-lore, so obviously if the Alliance has a chance to gain a mind-destroying teep on their side to use and abuse for covert operations they would do it because god damn who in their right god damn mind would put power like that to waste. At least in the context of humans. Baby jesus, take the wheel, because there's a second issue. So assuming psionics did exist in-game, -- which honestly I am still wholeheartedly supporting as a concept! -- It needs to be understood that not everyone who comes into work is going to have even a lick of psionic latency. Those that do, it is in incredibly minimal amounts that it goes completely undetected due to how lacking in fantastic abilities they are in the first place beyond having a minor inkling that the dude waving their hands around and convincing people to go space themselves out an airlock might be a little too unusual. Teeps and teeks? You wouldn't see them on station. They would get hunted down like dogs by the initially conscripted government-agent psions whose job is to make another rogue psion disappear from the public eye. Unlike in the StarCraft canon where everyone and their mother knows what a psion is because they've experienced having their colonies zapped by space magic or overrun by deadly telepathic space dragonlizardbugthings for the past several generations, having it be common knowledge that psions exist in this universe is a bit of a dubious proposition to be making. Maybe command staff can know about the rumors of it or something, but they aren't allowed to tell anyone else about it under penalty of being whisked away by NanoTrasen mysteriously. Then have it so that people can learn about them as lore progression goes along as psionics are finally unveiled to the universe through super fantastic governments failing to do their job correctly in suppressing the media about those dangerous space brain magic users causing a lot of hubbub in the local galaxy. It's a neat idea. Wholeheartedly support the idea but I believe it needs to be taken at limited steps at a time, because unloading psionics onto the server immediately will cause some havoc on the server culture and the overall state of the lore. Hell, it'd be neat if there were Zerg knockoffs in the sense of predatory animals hunting down very latent psions or something, as they're drawn to that sort of sensitivity or whatever. *Disclaimer, for anytime I've said "space magic" in this post, I have not meant it literally. Psionics is referred to ignorantly in the canon by observers as space magic without understanding the major appeal that comes from psionics is that it is induced entirely by the mind, and not by completely unexplainable means.

I honestly love this idea. Jawdat happens to be a very entertaining proselyte of classlessism and he's quite engaging enough with it for actual discussions of it to occur on common comms, something that rarely happens with political topics being discussed ICly. +1