Pemander

I understand where you're coming from here, as it's not ideal for the service crew to be totally sectioned off from the antags, but I think there may be some potential here for the opposite to occur. Like Lilah mentioned above, most of the time when things are going to hell around the outer edges of the ship, people end up congregating in the central ring. Admittedly, I'm far from a seasoned antag player (and if anyone that is wants to weigh in and correct me on this, please do), but it feels to me like the design of the ship strongly discourages you from trying to push through the central ring or try to take hostages there. It's wide open, and there are entrances to it from various departments all around you, as well as both above and below. If an engagement does break out there, there's a high potential for things to get extremely chaotic. If, on the other hand, you manage to find your way into a space full of unarmed potential hostages that also offers you a tactical advantage, you're much more likely to choose that option. This could also make things more interesting from Security's standpoint; if things go down in the central ring, you have a million and one ways of getting in there to try to resolve the situation. But if the place the crew gathers is slightly out of the way and has fewer entrances and exits, then you have a trade-off to consider: do you leave some of your forces near the bunker to make sure the crew is well-protected, and risk being taken down in engagements elsewhere in the ship? Or do you go all-out on the offensive in the hopes of getting rid of the threat as soon as possible? I'm sure there are ways to address this issue that don't require the ship to be changed in some way, but I don't think it should be totally ruled out as a viable option. I'm also thinking about quantity vs. quality here when it comes to antag encounters during high-stakes events. Catching a glimpse of big scary person with gun and immediately running in the opposite direction is exciting, but it's not often engaging. If the crew is stuck in a room with the bad guy, it opens up more potential for the kind of depth that is often lacking in the current model of 'spend an hour hunkered down in the central ring, and then when you finally get more than a brief glimpse of the enemy, it's because they're a corpse'.

As a Head of Staff he seems competent, reasonable, and most importantly believable. Beyond that, though, I've had the pleasure of getting a more in-depth view of what Hawkins is like as a character and I can tell that Sharp/aboshebab puts a decent amount of thought into him. There's a lot going on there beneath the surface, and he's characterized with a level of consistency and depth that I think requires a great deal of skill as a role player.

I have to say I have no idea where the characterization of the new lore as "weird mom kink" or the business about binging k'ois addicts with manic depressive issues are coming from. Maybe I'm missing something, but I only saw the (admittedly strange) k'ois meme prayer referred to as an example, and that doesn't seem supported by the lore at all. It kind of seems like there's a disconnect between the way current Vaurca players are enacting the lore and what the lore actually says.

I wasn't really around for the Vaurca pre-revert (and thus don't have much of a basis for comparison between new and old), but I did rather enjoy the new lore and was strongly considering making a Vaurca character in the near future. Long-winded as the lore may be, I think that the current lore does a fairly good job of giving the Vaurca a unique identity among the Aurora's various xeno races. They're poets, warriors, and philosophers, and their highly scholastic culture and wonderful-seeming dreamland brain upload technology (that's a mouthful) contrast heavily with their past of bitter war and planet-ruining mistakes. The Vaurca as they are now strike me as a species that is currently in a sort of... ideological war. They're split into factions that all have a different idea of what's going to save the soul of their race, and are just barely managing to function on the same page using the social hacks of Discipline and Consensus. Overall, I actually really like them. Disclaimer: whether what I see in them actually matches up with what's there on the page is up for debate. Also, I can imagine that a lot of people would feel a bit overwhelmed by how dense the new lore is. Edit: Read the old Vaurca lore and it seems really bare bones compared to the new stuff. Not a lot to go on, doesn't really seem to have much of an established identity to it besides bugmen who really like VR a lot. Double edit: How many budding Vaurca-Human relationships are there on the station? The only one I was aware of was Lilah/Kzaya, and that was actually specifically going to come to a dead end (as far as I understood) because they were fundamentally incompatible.

Just wanted to note, Alexis Beck is actually my character. HunterRS's character is Alexis Thompson.