Karhast

You're a primary admin, which means you very well know that dismemberment isn't currently in the game. Please, please, please stop playing dumb. It doesn't suit you. > target hands You now have foiled any attempt at using the cult robes well, congratulations. It doesn't matter that you can take a baton to the chest and keep going when cult robes don't have gloves. Please. Please. I'm not this dumb, and neither are you. Carbines are lethal weapons. Carbines are extremely lethal weapons. Do you disagree with me here? > then it was suggested Firstly, you're the HoS. You call the shots. There's nobody who made that decision but you. Secondly- See, this message and the last is what I get at. You very conveniently end up getting a good excuse to hand out full riot gear and lethal weaponry. Then you very conveniently take away the two items valuable to any cult member, his book and his PDA. Your character has no idea what these books are, they're not allowed to know, it's just weird scribbling, but nope. Cult man bad, take it away, yoink it off him. At best, it's an understandable lapse of judgment. At worst, you ought to know better, you did what you thought would win you the round, you broke the server rule which very clearly states you don't get to know what antagonists do, and you powergamed your way through the round. The one thing I did miss was your reason for ordering me searched again. After you'd done so very recently. What was that all about?

BYOND Key: Karhast Game ID: b8z-b1W6 Player Byond Key/Character name: - Yari Vorimankov Staff involved: None. Due to a mishap, none of the staff was able to be reached this round Reason for complaint: Powergaming Did you attempt to adminhelp the issue at the time? If so, what was the known action taken by administration/moderation? No, it genuinely wasn't possible to. Approximate Date/Time: 16:00 CEST, 10th of august, 2020 The gist of my complaint is in the reason I gave - the HoS did everything they OOCly could to squash our cult, and I don't think they should have gone as far as they did. I'll write down the events as I saw them unfold below. We had a cult going on, and it was one involving mostly new cult players. We did nothing loud, at all, until the barkeep tried(and failed) to use some talismans to kidnap some people. This went entirely wrong for him, nobody got hurt except the barkeep himself, and he was then brigged for a good long time. It took us a while, but we got him free with some runes. Huzzah. Yay. This is the point where I say we should make a base, so we head for a large room in maintenance. We make the barkeep into an artificer, we watch him build some stuff, and.. The corporate reporter walks in on us(why is he even up in maint?!) before running right off. I try to cut him up a bit, but cult swords are hilariously unrobust, so he runs off.. At which point I dump my sword and go about my own business, feigning innocence, and thinking I'll get away with a fine at most while nothing can be proven. What I get is a team of officers, headed by the HoS, all decked out in riot gear + lethals. I get searched entirely, my book gets taken away(WHAT AN INTERESTING PLOY, MR HOS, IT'S JUST A BOOK), my PDA is nabbed, and I get told to fuck off. That's neat. That's lovely. So, to recap - one new blood grabbed at some people and got summarily magdumped with rubbers. A reporter got attacked with the very weakest of antag swords, could prove nothing, and got away just fine. Because of this, the HoS saw fit to deck his people out in full riot gear and lethal weaponry, because... Proportionality. By this point, the round is pretty much fucked. I even get searched an additional time, out of the very blue, despite having done absolutely nothing. Even the officer agreed that it was stupid, as evidenced by the first of my two screenshots posted below. We get next to no recruits at all because nobody ever does, it's cult, everything falls flat on its face, and the HoS' player decides to pretend that carbines aren't lethal weapons because 'they have a stun setting'. That's nice. People might almost fall for that. I don't have too much else to say. The antag rules make it exceedingly clear that antagonists are around to drive a story - the story we got was one where the HoS smelled blood and did everything they could to go Cult Man Bad. The gamemode is already exceedingly harsh on the cultists due to its weak tools, and I genuinely do think that stamping it out as was done is extremely poor form.

What cult rounds are you playing that anyone actually converts into the cult?

Could we just see cult swords become actually dangerous? Please? The last few months have seen ranged combat be immeasurably more powerful than melee, and cult only has access to the latter. The swords are very, very, very weak, and I'd appreciate it if they were viable at all.

I'm still definitely interested to see if this works out, even if I doubt it will. Updating the wiki is always a good plan, but yeah, fingers crossed. As it is, I believe the issue stems mostly from people's (valid) preference to be the good guys over the bad ones, and I doubt these changes are going to shift the general rev round's development very much.

Alright. So how, again, do you intend to see more people play an antag role they appear to dislike(revolutionary) with these changes you proposed? I genuinely think that in its current shape, you're not going to get much play out of this at all.

Okay. 1. Those guys had authority as compared to the screeching protestors they were up against. I still doubt it'll change much, but again.. I'm open to being proved wrong. I'd be happy to, in fact. 2. That's fair, I can't really blame you. 3. I don't think gamemode changes are going to change the way people think but again, I'd be pretty happy if that actually worked so do go ahead.

I don't think authority is the problem - if it were, all you need to do is make an announcement which says 'command Super Duper Lost Its Authority, Guys.' It's been done, doesn't work. I think people hate to lose, that they aren't stupid, and that they know the odds. Your dumb revolution is going up against the department which has both the most people and the most guns the majority of shifts, a bunch of people who mostly main security, communicate better than you do, have more coherence, experience, and are just going to do a better job. A security crew backed by a force of apathetics who 'aren't technically security but maaaan these are my friends and why do you have guns ' and so forth. The odds are very much against you. So, I'd be interested for me to be proven wrong, but I don't think it's a lack of authority that's the issue. Tough. Vote extended if you don't want to have a blood cult sweep across the station; few enough players vote that it's really, really, really easy to sway it with even three to five people. If so few people are willing to step up for a gamemode, that even those drafted into it cryo instantly, that nobody at all is willing to join the revolution, the gamemode absolutely has a problem. Or the playerbase does, but telling people they're having fun wrong makes for poor game design anyhow.

I don't think command crew spawning is going to help too much. How would you reckon it'd get people to join up with the tide more? Why? It works for cults. So, fun story, that rev round earlier wasn't meant to be rev. It was going to be cult, not enough people were available, then it went for rev. And then the other guy cryo'd, leaving me all alone as the sole antag for it. If so few people are willing to Be Cool, there's a problem with the gamemode, not with the initial starting amount(though I would appreciate more for sure.)

This thread coincides with the end of a revolution round some thirty minutes before I started typing this, so. Hi. I played Klazyn Oslek that round, head fellow. The round proceeded as follows, and it is a good average for how these rounds tend to go: 1. The other head said he was ahelping to be removed entirely. I was on my own. 2. I approached many people with the intent to have them join. I used the radio message for some perfectly good Stalinist old revolutionary fervor. 3. I converted one guy. One. Out of very, very, very many. 4. Round's almost over so I try to do something, anything, to shake things up. I decide to redistribute station funds among the people around 5. I get caught by the AI and security dunks on me Point 3 is where things go wrong: nobody goes along with revolutions. Ever. It doesn't happen. In the very best case scenario, some people who have long since befriended one another band up and RP a bit. In the ordinary scenario, some revs try to do tacky shit and go nowhere. Worst case scenario, which is still more common than the first, everyone gives up and you get glorified extended. Yay. The kicker is, I don't even know why this happens. If the round type is secret, there's surely people out there who acknowledge it and would want to get involved, but.. Nope. The sturdiest of brick walls, the most painful of pulled teeth, pissing into the strongest of winds - revolution. Synonyms all. My own preferred fix would be one not even on the list, and it'd be to give the revolutionaries a (limited) supply of forced conversions. Anything, really, to get past that initial hurdle. As it is, revolutions fail nine times out of ten through sheer apathy, and it doesn't even have cult constructs for people who don't get the message. I don't enjoy it much, and I really wish things were different than they are.

Thank you. This can't have been an easy round to investigate at all, and I appreciate your effort in doing so.

I'd question why you bothered to turn on your raider antag pref at all in such a case. Still, it beats the guys who got on-station, shot people, took one, and proceeded to gloat about it for an hour. There's several things you're saying next so I have a couple of them to unpack here. Fair to say that it's an IC dick move and a case of betrayal. Yep. OOCly - ehhhhh. I don't feel sufficiently tied to my character's actions, or an intruder antag, that I'm gonna call the ERT/security team's actions an OOC issue here. You can break the rules, I guess. And get banned again. Just as I could select warden and hand off lethals at roundstart, and get banned. If you're asking me whether or not I'd rather see you break the rules, I'm going to ask that you please don't, because you're a good player in all likelihood and I'd rather not see people leave the server. Now, as best I could tell, you did in fact beeline to vent the armory, which is a VERY GOOD EXAMPLE of making sure security doesn't have a way to actually harm you. I don't really mind, because I was raised on harsher shores than Aurora's, but it's also a far cry from pistols-at-dawn style honorable combat. In either event - I, personally, am in favor of seeing the ganking rules relaxed. I'd also be in favor of making security less toothless in the event there's no HoS/warden or the armory is busted into. I suppose it may not be the answer you were hoping to hear, but yeah, I wouldn't actually mind seeing the server's octane content raised rather than lowered. No. In fact, I don't want to play against any murderous ninja, and neither do many of the other security mains; the department just going into cryo en masse upon sighting ninja got bad enough that the odds of ninja gamemode being rolled were fucking axed not so long ago. My issue here is with the sheer disparity in power inherent in some gamemodes as opposed to others: raider is likely too weak, merc is just about right, ninja is too strong. I'm in favor of powergaming rules' existence - don't drag a locker behind you everywhere you go, your security officer isn't a master engineer, don't kill people just because - but their extent here overreaches rather than underreaches, if you'd ask me, and I don't think tightening people's leashes even further is worth the tradeoff you get for such.

I was there for this round. I was one of the officers, even, who ended up shooting the Vox in space. Let me give my account of how the round went before I get to the actual points Naelynn is trying to make. First off, the event with the tunnels happened very differently from how you stated it did, and it went exactly the fucking way your regular non-hero person should do these things. Don't lie to us. An officer is in maint, sees Vox. Runs off while warning security, gets shot at, butts the hell out. Note the absolute lack of stunbatons, of heroics, of anything dumb here: they saw some well-armed creatures known to be pirates, didn't try to shoot anyone, ran off because yikes, man, guns, and weren't an idiot about things. So, point for security. No dumb heroics. No suicidal charges. No metagaming to reveal gamemodes. Officer sees vox, officer runs off, officer still gets shot at, officer meets back up with her fellows. Do tell me again how any of this is poor RP in any way. The very next thing that happens, before anyone can do anything, we have the same vox breaking into the brig. Again: no heroics here. The HoS got captured, everyone else just runs off from the people packing bigger heat than we can match. The HoS is taken captive, the captain is taken captive, and not a one officer does as you imply we do. Not a one unrelated person plays hero. We hole up in cargo, we order guns, we make plans while the HoS, specifically, tells us over comms that we are not to care about his wellbeing. We get barely any communication from the raiders. At all. Just a stand down, we won't hurt anyone. That's basically it. A full hour passes by, we get an ERT, and only then is there some semblance of negotiation. Which goes by fine, things are negotiated, the Vox are only put down after the captain is secured, woohoo. Beautiful. If the vox had been more clever about handing the captain over they'd have made it off just fine. So, to recap: you had ample opportunity to do as you wished. You had PDAs, you had hostages, you have a ship that can move places, and you had literally vented the armory to make it hard for us to even arm up. You did not choose to use these opportunities to engage people, to talk over communications, or to seek interaction - you instead do nothing of the sorts, only make demands very late into the round, and then get gunned down because people have armed up. You know, exactly as they would when hostile, noncommunicative pirates are on board the station. If this is an example of peaceful or roleplay-heavy antagonists being shut down by unfair play, I don't see it. You didn't do poorly, your choice of antaggery was perfectly fine, but so was the response you got in turn. I agree that raider is a difficult gamemode, that many antag modes in fact face steeper odds than should be the case, but you make a really, really, really poor case for it here today. tl;dr: yeah you're salty and should've come up with something better because security did no wrong in round related.

Yeah. I spoke to Géneviève, and apparently she hadn't gotten around to killing you (yet). My bad in such a case. The difference between dying by sword immediately or dying by gibbing 30 seconds later isn't a large one, but it explains why I couldn't shard, which irks me. I explained my reasons for gibbing the other people a couple posts up, namely because a bunch of people decided it clever to bust into the chapel covered in blood and gore, and I'd rather not see them interrupt any summoning. Yeah. I wanted, and was going to, play up the blood cult gimmick of blood cult, where you talk about THE UNQUENCHABLE HUNGER OF THE STARS and whatnot. I SSD for ten minutes, return, and all of security is looking left and right for cultists, with the AI bolting people in before they proceed to stun and fight even more. I entirely agree that another style of round would have been nice, but I'm not the one behind the initial escalation here. This is pretty selective, man. Do you have the logs of that day's round? If so, you know as well as I do that a handful of bile getting flung cult's way in OOC preceded that. Or, you know, Garn spamming 'deal with it' by way of admin announcement, but I'm sure that's more mature than what I said somehow. I can't in fact force anyone to convert as cult, ever, because there is nothing stopping you or someone else from deciding not to convert. The very first thing you did was screech at us over LOOC how you hate cult and never wanted to join and that you weren't gonna go along. The difference between cryo and sacrifice is minimal, given that both permanently take your character out of the round. You wanted to leave the round rather than join the cult, so I.. Made sure you'd leave the round and not join the cult. I wasn't yet aware at the time that sacrifice does nothing, so I figured it might give us some manner of aid, but that's not something I'm going to be doing again.

Stun convert ganks get you antagbanned, as I've seen happen to myself and others. Stun convert roleplay is common enough, which is exactly what you want from a cult. That said, the stun talismans are, indeed, extremely robust, so I don't mind seeing their duration nerfed.

For clarity's sake, this post is directed at @Bear There's gimmicks and there's gimmicks. Antagonists don't need to be a scientology or a singularity or a pyramid scheme cult; if you're a blood cult, do blood cult things, do the blood cult RP, you're golden. Simple. I sacrificed you, but I didn't kill you. I see someone else kill you, try to shard, fail, and then sacrifice. If you think you were killed with undue cause you can take it up with Géneviève; given that you were dead and unshardable, I'm just going to sacrifice you instead. Round's already over for you by that point. By the time we were running about in the halls, the AI had already forced our hand. If you're going to screech at everyone there's a cult and bolt them in left and right and send bounds to halt them, then yeah, the cult is going to behave like the cornered rats they've become. It's the same as what I did in the brig: if you're gonna lock me in with people and tell them to bring me in, I'm not in fact willingly coming along to be brought in. I'm a psychopath trying to bring about the end of the world station as we know it, I'm not going to meekly get myself arrested. I didn't gank anyone in the halls so take it up with someone else. Doesn't apply to me. I did talk about being able to summon Nar'sie now, yes. Staff asked us over AOOC to get some actual blood flowing before the summons, because stealth summoning Nar'sie wasn't something they found kosher. We therefor went and.. Went loud a bit, challenged people, summoned Nar'sie. My line about summoning her now was the observation that the people whose job it was to stop us, died. Yay. I'd rather summon Nar'sie than spend twenty more minutes to kill defenceless people, so yeah, summon it was. Cool story flinging insults my way. 'Bullshit'. Classy. I don't appreciate the lack of intellectual charity. By the time we got to the chapel it was literally because we wanted to summon Nar'sie there, so yes, anyone who busted into the place (with blood and guts and constructs and murder and cultists in robes) was both an absolute madman for heading FOR the place and in entirely the wrong place insofar long lifespans were concerned. If you have any more specific events pertaining to myself, do tell me. The round is a while ago now, but I'll respond as best I can.

That's fair, but also not something I did, so I can't comment on it.

I'm one of the people called out here, Jaydon Lafortune, and I can clear up some of the things I've done and the reasoning behind them as well. I was one of the cultists at roundstart. We tried discussing a gimmick over AOOC, but we'd eventually settled on just playing up the actual blood cult thing, rather than anything else. That's fine. No problem. I did, though, had to go for 10-15 minutes, so I get stuff done ASAP and return to the game. Fucking. Alarm bells. Everywhere. Fellow culties are being brigged left and right. The AI is locking people into places. We've been exposed, and we've been exposed bad. So I'm in the brig still, with a bunch of other sec people(Leila and Géneviève) being converted and some being.. Well, not. I try to get people kinda out, but no! No sir. The AI bolts every fucking airlock that it can and locks us in with the loyalist officers, screeching about cultists and telling people who did what, constantly, all the time. Lovely. Being cornered rats, we fight and win; I can say that I literally only stunned one armed person, offering them a choice between conversion or sharding. I got a LOOC saying that they just hate cult and wanted neither, and to just kill them. Cool. Sacrifice it is. @Brutishcrab51 I tried to convert one person in medbay. One. The emergency physician was telling a nurse she could use me to practice checkups and such, so he takes us to an examination room. Once there, I tell him before anything else that he sure has good taste in victims, do a maniacal cackle, and only then stun. Physician man had the 300IQ idea of sticking the stuncuffed person with sopo then, which is ridiculous, but also not something I could stop him from doing. At any rate, leading someone off to corner them for conversion is entirely by the books cult RP so that should be fine. Anyway.. Eventually, things have been loud enough for a while, the admins tell us that yeah things are cool, summon away, so we choose to head to the chapel for the summons, informing all cultists to come over. AND EVERYONE WHO ISN'T A CULTIST IS BEELINING FOR IT AS WELL TRYING TO STOP US As Géneviève noted, she gets attacked with lethal gear by a miner, at which point she lethally responds. I only see the tail end of this, decide we're summoning anyway, and move to sacrifice what is already a corpse after determining I can't shard it. So, we have cultists in the chapel, and more filtering in. We try to herd people together on the summon rune, and Again In the chapel full of blood and guts In the chapel inhabited by creepy people speaking in tongues, bearing swords In the chapel where people have already died and there is a construct floating around a bunch People keep. Fucking. Busting inside. The rules are VERY CLEAR on playing hero being bad. A person who's no officer or related job has no business trying to bust in and do anything about the cult. We were moments away from summoning, and I really didn't want to see the summon interrupted by a stupid toxins bomb or smoke grenade or what have you, so yeah I sacrificed the people trying to interrupt the final summoning. Absolutely. I didn't know yet at the time sacrifice does nothing; I only learned that with the advent of this thread: and no sooner. I did have some people STUPIDLY enter our summoning ritual to deal with, and I chose to do it by sacrifice. These weren't people who had to miss out on a whole round or go do something else for an hour; not two minutes later, we completed our summons, and the round ended with it. Joy. My total tally of sacrificed people this round is 1 security person who was securing two of my allies and didn't want to be converted/sharded + some people I saw as trying to put a stop to our final summons. I don't feel particularly guilty for either save for sacrifice just being absolute garbo, so, yeah. These were my actions, make of them what you will.

Rebecca has given me one of the more interesting ways in which to incorporate antag RP into an otherwise normal character, and I really appreciate that.