Bauser

I'm concerned about the introduction of roles that will occupy players without interacting with the round. These people who will be playing molemen are people would otherwise be playing cargo techs and security cadets and roboticists and bartenders... This is especially alarming because the format of the Talpi gameplay is based heavily on interaction within and between tribes - meaning it depends on having a bunch of players... who will spend 95% of their time digging rocks and infighting without ever seeing the glimmer of a manufactured floor tile. Obviously, yes, it draws from the ghost pool, but wouldn't it be enough to inspire some people not to play a round proper? And we don't have the numbers to be throwing that potential away. What are we gaining here, in exchange for what is lost? Also, how are they supposed to make trades with the station if they can't speak the same language? Is meaningful interaction between the station and the Talpi going to be gated behind the construction of a universal translator?

Cloning, a process which exists in real life, does not deal with the transfer of consciousness. When you grow a human in a tube like our spacemen do, it doesn't need to 'take' a consciousness floating around in space somewhere - it simply is conscious by virtue of becoming alive. Already, we acknowledge that clones don't remember what happened to cause their previous death - the fact that they still remember their job skills and personal history can be hand-waved by saying they were scanned at any point PRIOR to the round starting (a likely scenario - it's possible that a company like NT would even mandate such a thing).

If the other ongoing sunglasses suggestion (making them darken your screen) is implemented, that would generally offset the mechanical imbalance of being able to block sec flashes whenever, so it would be nice if both of these suggestions went through concurrently. I don't think it's amazingly fair to have an item that just cancels one of the main security items, but it's even more unfair that anyone can tap you with a little laser light to send you sprawling onto the floor and dropping anything in your hands. So this sounds good to me.

Pretty self-explanatory. Moving dead people around happens a lot, and it would be proper if they could be placed on a stretcher even when in a body bag. You know, to keep everything pretty and modest. And, if they happen to already be in a body bag and you just don't want to look cruel dragging them on the floor, this would be ideal.

Or even better: add the click but don't bother making pens actually require activation to use. It can be reasonably assumed that when you use a pen on a piece of paper, you can write something and your character would know how.

Have to make it at least so that the blood goes away as it melts things, so a single drop doesn't eventually vent a room. So I guess each like particle or blood object would do a certain amount of damage and then disappear? And I assume it would track and leave footprints like blood already does, so if you walk through it, your shoes/feet will burn and you'll spread the acid to other tiles? I think this could be a great idea.

Considering the high number of players, unless you want 50% of every radio message to be "masculine human voice," the only way I could even imagine of enforcing this mechanically would be to allow people to select their own voice descriptors in character set-up. ... etc. But ultimately... this sounds like a whole lot of work for a mechanic that could be quite problematic and, for some, wholly undesirable. I like it, personally, but it really constitutes a fundamental change to our whole in-game concept and execution of character recognition. I mean, what if you're looking at two strangers who have the same voice? They both say something and you can't tell who said which even though they're on opposite sides of you? That's an isolated example, but this idea would be FULL of problems like that.

... Except, there frequently are reasons to rush. Other people are playing, the machine is in motion, antagonists do not have a blank chessboard to plan out their perfect escapades. If they act too slowly, it's boring for others and people hold it against them, so we shouldn't make it even harder to pull the quick tricks that are often fundamental to how the round plays out mechanically. I know you say "oh, there's such a thing as roleplay," but roleplay goes out the window for so many people as soon as you enter a confrontation scenario, where slowing down to communicate nuance is just going to be abused by others as an opportunity to gank you in any way possible. And that's perfectly within the rules! This change attempts to fix a problem that doesn't exist. And it's going to make problems if it goes through.

Fortunately, even in that case, some of your pixels would still be visible since the mob sprite is a little longer than the table sprite. So as long as a table isn't 3x3 (which does not naturally occur on the station) with you hiding in the center, you would still be reachable in some way.

I know that IC-in-OOC rules are still in play over AOOC; I'm saying that using AOOC at all imparts a little bit of IC knowledge because of the names you see. Even though it is ALSO true that I have seen some terribly grievous examples of IC-in-AOOC even in just the last few days.

This is like the one edge that a non-weaponized antag has in the presence of an already hypervigilant security force. Although the change has some grounding in reality (not that it's difficult to stealthily slip something into or out of your pocket, even directly in front of someone), I really think its impact would end up more negative than positive.

Hiding under tables is a realistic response to a white-collar worker ending up in an active shooter scenario. We should let people hide under tables by lying down and using the click-drag crawl to pull themselves onto the table's tile. It would place their sprite behind the table's, just like how crates are hidden when pushed under them. And I assume it would disallow standing up until the person crawled back out or the table was flipped. Be pretty cool to have people hiding under tables from danger, and having that danger running around knocking them over looking for them.

If we get computer viruses for IPCs, does that mean we'll see the addition of some "computer virology" framework to research and "cure" them? I heard that some sort of IT role is being considered - a function like this could go a long way towards beefing it up with content.

Vines and kois, major biohazards in general, aren't present enough to carry an entire role. My point stands that if half the function of a janitor is upgraded to its own role and the other half is downgraded to its own role, what you'll end up with is two roles which barely have anything to do. Especially since the real biohazards - vines, kois, and blobs - can barely be fought by janitors and need to be torched by engineers instead. The idea that janitors can even fix those events is an wishful thought not grounded in reality. So by your suggestion, we'd end up with at least one janitor who's supposed to do normal janitor things (but is now slightly worse at it) and at least one janitor who's supposed to help with major biohazards (and is completely useless because of it)

I had always assumed lab assistants had robotics lab access - they really should. This functionality is important because a lab assistant would realistically specialize in a field just like anyone else who works in science, so disallowing them from entering robotics means disallowing the existence of interning/training roboticists. There's no good reason for this limitation, as-is. Yes, it's true that the roboticists proper don't typically need an intern, but these assistant roles don't exist to be any more helpful than their mentors - they exist because it's realistic and opens a lot of doors for new players or new characters to transition into the bigger roles. And that's beside the RP aspect of it, which is similarly important - allowing people to play the character and role they want.

AOOC is inherently problematic because it can't abide by the classic separation of IC and OOC. By making an OOC channel that's only for antagonist use, anyone who uses it is necessarily communicating ingame information (namely, that they're antag) which shatters the immersion each player experiences precisely because they shouldn't know whatever they find out through it. Even rev rounds don't need AOOC if the revolutionaries and loyalists actually do the HRP work of communicating their goals and motivations among their followers. I would be perfectly content if AOOC were terminated entirely.

The logical conclusion to your argument, in your best-case scenario, would be to add an alt-title to janitor that ostensibly reports to the HoP (and possibly give them a service radio to suit this). Since the comparison you're making is one where the supposed problem was solved with an alt-title. Which honestly sounds like a reasonable solution. Let the janitor choose who to report to just by the radio they pick up, so people who want to play it either way can be satisfied. It'd be a novel case of interdepartmental collaboration, but I don't see that it would be particularly damaging in any way. And if the HoP in a given round wants a janitor, they can just tell the janitor to be on their side for a bit. It's not like chief engineers are generally desperate to keep their cleaners on a tight leash.

Okay, what if your proposed system was implemented but with the ADDED option of actually writing something for staff to see? That immediately removes the pressure on staff to respond, since there's a prescribed system for automated rewards - but also keeps the opportunity for staff to respond only if they WANT to, and keeping the aspect that it encourages the scientist to be creative and engaging.

Conspiir, your analogy doesn't hold up because surgeons and medical doctors are just different alt-titles for the same role. Their functions in the game, though flavored differently, are still largely the same - with good reason. And for the same reason, janitors shouldn't be separated into one "custodial engineer" and one lowly sweeper class. They do the same thing. If you want to do it differently, just play it differently. The janitor still has a mop and bucket; you don't have to strap on engineering colors and breach&clear every room with cleaner grenades. Additionally, it would be excessive if there were any more slots for the role of cleaning the station (which would be necessary if a new job were created). Instead of having two janitors who are moderately busy all the time, you'd have two sanitation engineers and two custodians who, altogether, barely have anything to do at all.

The whole "sitting in one spot not interacting with anything for five minutes" makes this pretty dubious from a gameplay perspective. Who wouldn't just tab away from BYOND and do something else while their spaceman writes their paper? Completely removes the player from the round, extremely boring. And yeah, I know writing a research paper really is extremely boring, but we don't have to simulate that. If you want to make an intelligent research-making mini-game, it necessarily can't just be static/random chance. What if instead of using some basic equation with probabilities to determine the result, submitting a research paper relied on staff to gauge its merit and respond? We have this capability already expressed for, say, captains and wardens who can fax CentComm, and for chaplains who can use the "pray" verb. So what if, in order to write a research paper, you actually had to write something plausibly academic? This makes the process engaging, it allows the entire department to contribute, it gives the scientists something valuable to do that isn't mind-numbingly repetitive like everything else, it would force you to be invested in the process and actually care about what you're submitting, and crucially, it allows the rewards to be freeform and contextualized by the staff responding. So it creates a lot of opportunities for emergent story stuff in addition to the tangible rewards. You could even use a portion of your submission to explain why you've chosen whatever research topic you did, and subtly suggest what rewards would be desirable or help with your continued research. I know it's not a small thing to ask any more from the staff, but a dedicated system for turning honest creative effort into rewards would represent a massive level-up for the entire science department. In addition, the staff involvement could be as minor (giving grants or sending cool toys on the supply shuttle) or as major (promotions! celebrations honoring the accomplishment!) as desired in the moment.

Kinda just seems like a basic function of the security role, should be second-nature when confronted with a person of interest. Like... it'd be like making an icon appear in medical HUDs reminding doctors to use a health scanner on someone.

You can close mobs into lockers - why not into crates? I make this suggestion for a very specific reason, which is: I believe traitor janitors should be able to move a body using their trash carts. This would also be useful for disposing of all the dead giant spiders.

Would it be possible or preferable for the fake announcement purchase to come with a sort of OOC disclaimer? Just a little "Think about what you're doing, where this information is supposedly coming from, and how people are liable to react to it" sort of thing.

Would the airlocks effected become completely inoperable? Or maybe they could still be pried open with a crowbar? Or maybe just make it so that a damaged airlock only opens slower (E.G. requiring a progress bar to complete before it opens), instead of locking it shut? Because any event that can nullify doors seemingly at random could be extremely problematic for the vast majority of the crew that isn't engineers. Suddenly, every round you'd get instances where players become trapped in boring areas for no reason. Quartermaster want to check in the warehouse for a minute? Oops, guess I'm stuck here for 10 minutes until an engineer shows up - or for 30 minutes, until an engineer joins the game. Phoron researcher want to use the viewing room? Welp, now I get to stare out this window wistfully until one of my scientist coworkers escorts someone in. There just doesn't seem to be a need for this functionality, even in the name of realism. It is, after all, a high-tech research outpost. And at the beginning of every round, it is ostensibly in perfect working order (excepting a few areas like the construction zone and the trashy maintenance tunnels). Why would it break in a couple hours? Or even a day?

Another solution to how ridiculous it looks for IPCs to wear standard eyewear would be to make it impossible for IPCs to wear standard eyewear. Like... how does a big computer monitor even put on a pair of glasses?