Boggle08

Removing the role and redistributing the work is the most straightforward solution. The amount of time it takes to stock the fridge will probably get halved on average, since you're now more likely to get two physicians to tag team the dispensers. My only concern then would be addressing the potential powercreep that would come from this solution. For the pharmacist to stay, they need to provide some other service or utility that doesn't come from a chemical dispenser, besides putting on a belt and turning into a spare medical intern.

Advocate for removing the role instead. You by your own admission believe there's barely enough characters for the role to continue existing. Allowing the role to continue to exist when all the chems you listed in that physician list are pretty much my entire workload is a disingenuous compromise. I will never be behind this, unless you advocate for what you're actually asking for. Moreover, with the physician being able to self supply like that, while the pharmacist still exists is a disgusting overstep into their lane. You'd throw a fit if I started hoarding the GTR as my pharmacist, same here applies in concept. The difference is the only way to step back out of my lane is if you were to dump the entire fridge. I should also mention that being able to perform the surgery steps you can with the physician, in addition to being able to make that selection makes the physician extremely powerful and independent as a job role. There's very few problems you can't solve with a physician using a full chembelt. I can self supply and do GTR shit as a pharmacist, but it balances out, because I don't get surgery. I know that having no pharmacist is crippling, and I at the very least want to see physicians manufacture some rudimentary chemicals to compensate, but this interdependency we have in the department is intentional. You're not supposed to do everything, and if the medbay isn't fully staffed, it's not supposed to be this perfect machine that is 100% stocked and ready for every injury on the planet ever. If there's gaps in the roster, improvise. If you don't have a hammer, use a rock. The division and interdependency in medical is not for "realism" reasons, but because people used to hoard work and gatekeep people who didn't follow a strict, clique meta out of being able to help. We've been using this system for over a year or two now, and I've seen plenty of pharmacists. Population droughts or deficiencies come and go from departments as time wears on. Several months ago, engineering was so empty, they overcharged the master SMES to the point where no one even needed to set the engine. It turned out to be a bad decision and overturned. Now, it's bustling. The deficiencies you're seeing right now might just be a transient issue.

I chose peridaxon specifically because it can function as a less efficient stand in for the other specialized organ medicines we have. Peridaxon can fix a damaged heart, and it can fix broken lungs just as well if put into an auto-inhaler. I also put cryo chemicals up there, because you need to make them in order to make peridaxon, and because this will make using the cryo tube much more useful to a physician that doesn't have access to a surgeon or pharmacist. I'm wary about the physician being able to make the fortified versions of bicardine, kelotane, and dexalin, because this is a huge bulk of the pharmacist's work. If a pharmacist late joins with this arrangement, it can take all these medicines and quickly fortify them, instead of having to make stuff from scratch. The longer heal time might make it harder to manage pain. If so, this can be accounted for by giving the GTR another bottle of mortaphentyl pills to compensate. Coagzulog is easy. You just mix innaprovaline, dylovene, and cough syrup like you're making lean. The idea with my list is to increase the amount of people the physician can effectively treat and stabilize, at the expense of speed and needing to rely on unorthodox solutions. If there's no pharmacist, the physician can compliment a surgeon. If there's no surgeon, the pharmacist can compliment the physician. It would round out the physician as a generalist: jack of all trades, master of none. This is cool, Dexalin is extremely hard on the acetone to make.

I'm actually not that attached to the role, if it means I can just move my character into physician and do what they normally do + surgery steps. If you opened this thread asking for them to be removed and have their responsibilities merged with physician, I wouldn't mind. I don't like the wishy-washy idea of the pharmacist still existing, but the physician being able to completely step in and make everything medical needs to function optimally. Cut out the middleman. Ask for the pharmacist to be removed. If we're going to keep the pharmacist like what your initial post implies, I want there to be a solid reason to have it besides "flavor" or "delegation." When medical is just me and first responders, there's obvious gaps in what we can heal with our roster, and what we're able to achieve is a consequence of our mutual cooperation and skillsets. There's limitations to how well a lone surgeon can stabilize or dress wounds of the patients they receive. Physicians are generalists, and while I'm fine with the idea of them being able to make the chemicals I listed, I don't want them to be able to completely replace a pharmacist. This is equivalent to surgeons behaving like superdoctors and hogging GTR patients. TL;DR: It makes no logical sense to have the pharmacist exist if you're going to make them 100% replaceable with the physician. Either go all in and advocate for their removal, or have a plan for these guys to still be useful to medical.

Then advocate for that instead. I don't mind upgrading my pharmacist to physician at all, and the alt titles you're describing would allow people to grandfather characters that don't want to do that. Your proposal is going to make the pharmacist as an individual role obsolescent either way, draping it in half measures isn't going to change that. If you aren't going to do that, then I have a counter proposal in the form of a list of compounds that would be reasonable for physicians to produce without making the pharmacist totally worthless: Bicardine Kelotane Peridaxon Cryoxadone and Cloneaxadone Innaprovaline Dexalin(Normal dexalin) Dylovene Alkysine Thetamyacin This selection will be able to mostly cover gaps in medical when there's only physicians, and the access to peridaxon and cryochemicals means that you'll be using that as an alternative to organ surgery you can't cover with your surgery chart. No more than this. Interdependence is a crucial element of medical's design, and this will facilitate it without making the pharmacist unnecessary. ADDENDUM: No prescriptions either. That's strictly pharmacist turf.

Hi, I exclusively play Pharmacist. I don't see why there should be a place for the pharmacist in your plan, due to the nature of your proposal. Quantitative restrictions are going to be thrown out the window when medical gets pressured. The ones that you need to make in order to fulfill deficiencies in a physician/FR roster don't need to be made in bulk. Putting restrictions on these would completely defeat the purpose of this thread. Apidemencia, Pneumalin, Dexalin+, Adrenaline, Peridaxon, Mortaphentyl, and Alkysine. These are the important stabilizers medical is naked without, and this is half of my work as a pharmacist. One bottle of Adrenaline and Pneumalin completely fills every autoinhaler and autoinjector that's provided in the pharmacist locker. You're never going to need more than two or three bottles of most of these chemicals, with the exception of Dexalin and Mortaphentyl. Unless we make another Giga-chungus permission chart for what you can and can't make as a physician, Making the restriction tied to plausibility and records is not a restriction. I can, and will, make whatever I want because I'll just make a character that can feasibly do whatever I want. Lastly, the pharmacist's work on paper is just to stock the shelves. That's it. There is some tolerance for us to do GTR work, but you have to defer as much work as you can to the physicians or else you're going to get dirty looks, escalating up to intervention from the moderation. Unless I start the round as a pharmacist, most of the important work is going to be done before I join in; if medical has a beefy roster, I'm going to spend a lot of it sitting on my hands. More than I already do. The biggest reason why I like playing digital chemistry line cook is because my work matters. This proposal is just going to make the pharmacist into a vague utility if they don't join close to the start of the round. Why not remove them, and defer their old responsibilities to the Physician?

That looks really good. The U or square shape of the counter top was one of the best design elements of the previous kitchen, I always felt it had a round-table effect on conversations and socialization.

The reasons why I liked Goldman are the same reasons why someone else would despise him as a character, and argue for his incompatibility as a whitelisted command character. Many of the rounds involving him end up revolving around him, whether because the people who rolled antag decided to fuck with him on their own or if Goldman himself decided to make a command decision so absurd, incompetent, or unfair that it dramatically shifted the narrative of the round. He was unpredictable, antagonistic, and dangerous. His command decisions often blew up in his face, and he was often the architect of his own undoing. He was, and will continue to be, the only command character that actually embodied the hostile, inhumane nature that a corporate setting entails. I liked him as a character, and the effect he had on rounds, but he tested or violated nearly every precedent we have for command whitelist expectations in the process. @SleepyWolf If Goldman were to return as a Liaison, what would that look like? What would be some typical interactions between command and crew we could expect? How would Goldman as a "suggestive antagonistic force" manifest?

The most cursed ending, in relation to the context you're framing the Aurora OOCly, is if the Orion spur and every race, location, and planet inside of it is totally "complete", with every narrative possibility being explored for it. In response, the Lore-mind decides it's time to take the Horizon IV, and use it to explore the galaxy outside of the spur. Some new stuff is added to the Horizon IV to reflect this, and approximately 90% of all overmap content is either disabled or removed as it wouldn't fit the new setting. Antagonist content that is flavored specifically for the spur or only makes sense in that context is also disabled or removed. Because the Orion Spur is never going to be touched again, and because the lore for it is complete, the Overmind kills all of it's species development subroutines(with the exception of whitelist processing), and opens up several new departments to maintain species that the Horizon IV will encounter in the next galactic quadrant. The Lore overmind plans to add five new races to the game, but it has to start from scratch. Lacking both code and art assets, these new species only exist on the wiki, and people who apply for these whitelists are effectively applying for nothing but a promise. The Horizon IV engages in round after round of vampire, ling, borer, cult, extended, and traitor. The overmap content is nothing but empty planets and asteroids. The demands of the Lore Overmind grow more and more impossible. It's destroyed most of the game's content to make the new setting work, and it screams at the code servitors to make new sprites and code for the new world it's trying to build. The population of the server falls off a cliff as the code servitors aren't able to keep up the pace, and the Lore Overmind starts banning people that question it's decision to leave the old setting, or if they complain about how long everything is taking. Out of desperation, the Lore Overmind ditches the idea of using original art assets for the new species it wants to write, and instead takes the cursed approach of porting species such as Resomi, GAS, and Sergals and re-flavoring them to fit into the lore it's desperately trying to push out. The server doesn't go out with a bang, instead, with a whimper. The population dwindles down to Polaris levels as interest dies. In response, the server decides to pursue a policy of only opening up on weekends. When that fails, only on Tuesdays. When this fails, Mecha-Garnascus gets tired of the Lore Overmind's bullshit, and uses the servers to farm porbocoin instead.

Also this might be a silly idea, but instead of relying on beacons, we could also just implement a system where command hits a button and off-duty security officers from the lower decks grab shit from an auxiliary armory and take the lift up.

I think the biggest downside of having ERT's at the beck and call of command is that they make rounds cyclical and formulaic. Most ERT's are tough enough to put down most problems on the station by themselves, and they have whatever vestiges of the station that are still around to back them up. Because command would sooner reach for the ERT than arm the crew, this fed into a climate of having everyone except command, security, and medical sit on their hands and wait for things to end inside their departments. The station almost never lost, but it came at the expense of every round playing out the same once security became overwhelmed. I think the Paradigm for ERT's going forward is to make them less consistent and equipped to deal with all problems. Our best equipped ERT squads are practically canon event volunteers with ultrakill guns. Normal beacon response teams shouldn't be able to completely supplant the station's defense. The primary benefit of using the beacon from a round design standpoint is to have a chance at getting more able hands to help sort out a problem. The station can compensate for discrepancies in equipment using science and cargo, they can't do the same with crew depletion. The equipment these ERT's come with can be highly variable, and if they show up insufficiently prepared, It's the ship's problem to fix that.

Lore Impact (Small/Medium/Large): Medium? Type (e.g. Planet, Faction, System): Technology Short Description: Justifies the Horizon's engines, consolidates fusion tech into one place. How will this be reflected on-station?: Provides plausible logistical reasons for the Horizon to mount its current engines, rather than use a fusion reactor. Does this addition do anything not achieved by what already exists?: Besides justifying the Horzion's engine choice, this will hopefully serve as a reference for people to use when writing about anything related to fusion technology. Do you understand that the project may change over time in ways that you may not foresee once it is handed over to the Lore Team?: Yes Preface: If you play engineering for any length of time, you're inevitably going to get a co-worker that asks why we use extremely volatile engines like the SM or tesla, when our setting has had access to nuclear fusion reactors for several centuries. In the popular scientific imagination, nuclear fusion is this wholesome chungus post-energy scarcity technology that has barely any downsides besides a hefty initial cost, and a fuel requirement that necessitates space mining(not a problem in our setting). What this document proposes is to write in some logistical challenges to mounting fusion reactors in everything, while consolidating what we have related to the technology into one place on the wiki(Ideally, this will go somewhere on the technology page). Long Description: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1shh4kfMOnojol6JwDG17iY7XAHMrTpEELzv6cBztK7A/edit?usp=sharing

It's not bad over security comms, but it will be bothersome over command radio. We'll have two people who answer to chief now.

This will make differentiating between the Chief(CoS) and the Chief(CE) a little more annoying.

When the contact war happened, the Hegemony Thanos snapped the governments of at least half the planet out of existence, and left millions of Unathi stateless. Aside from consolidating the vestiges of a few major population centers, the hegemony has done little in practice to exert influence over the people still in the wasteland, or that have fled as refugees to other parts of the spur. The hegemony generates hundreds of stateless individuals each year as well. Guwan explicitly have their citizenship revoked, and heretics are presumed to not have it much better. Traditionalist nobles or other political refugees are going to have an easier time dodging the headsman's axe rather than trying to actually become a citizen. This is all compounded by the fact that the Hegemony is an extremely feudal power , whose backwardness is exacerbated by the apocalypse. Even if the hegemony had a functional centralized system, it was likely damaged severely by the catastrophe. Countless records may have been lost. Statelessness, effective or legal, is a rampant issue on Moghes, and it will continue to be in the foreseeable future. To accurately reflect this predicament, I'm suggesting we give people the option to put "none", "stateless", or some other special refugee clause or status in the citizenship field for Unathi. I think Dionae should have this as well, because they're all written to be in the same predicament as wastelander unathi. A large chunk of unathi character concepts exist on legal precarity, and creating an option in loadout that can reflect that is far more succinct and unrestrictive than having to explain in records what the citizenship you've selected for your character actually means.

I'm noticing delta being more common than usual, not just relative to past four months of deadpop. Every time it's called, it ends the same way: everyone drops what they're doing, and immediately start fleeing the station. Delta has the unique quality of maxing out escalation to the point where either side can reasonably give absolutely no quarter, but the short time window and stiffness of attempting to defuse the nuke means that the outcome is always just to flee. This is what the current nuke room looks like: It's less than a minute walk away from the bridge(very popular antag objective), and despite it's imposing walls and turrets, this room is extremely easy to get into once you have the spare and the disk. Once the nuke room's been consolidated, however, the room itself and the passageways immediate to it become an extremely narrow, lethal chokepoint. Especially with the placement of the fuel tank immediately east of it. The distance and ease of getting into this room and activating the nuke has effectively turned this into an "easy win" for people. Because it's so easy to do once escalation is sufficient enough, It just leads to a cheap, predictable round outcome every time this happens. I don't have a problem with the antag "winning", but I do have an issue with repetitive outcomes. If the nuke were made more contestable, it would create more possibilities and round outcomes than what currently happens when the lever gets pulled. This could be done in four ways: 1. Increase the amount of time it takes for the nuke to go off, and make it information you can actually track. I don't know what the default is, but I feel like most people don't know how fast it's going to blow. The last time it blew on us, it wasn't enough time to do anything else except run. 2. Introduce more methods of disabling the nuke. I think the only ways of doing it is just to reverse the process with a captain's ID, Hack it(might blow up in your face), or kill power to the room before the authentication disk can be put in. 3. Create more doors or openings into the nuke room, and expand the immediate area a little bit. We can already flank from two directions to get into the nuke room, but it's all down long narrow hallways or doorways. Right now, that area is in stark contrast with how punishing the bridge is for people that want to turtle. The nuke room itself has just a single door, but it's very open on the inside, and only protected by a single layer of reinforced walls. If the crew is permitted time in a manner as described in point #1, we probably wouldn't have to put in more entrances into it since the crew can just conscript an engineer to knock down the wall or bring thermite to get in. 4. Increase the distance of the nuke room from the bridge. This is the most demanding suggestion from a mapping perspective(which is why it's listed last), but this serves as a physical obstacle to antags reaching for the nuke, and gives the crew more chances to intercept them.

The intrepid would benefit from one of the crates it comes loaded with being stocked with a shit ton of bounced radios. Everyone always forgets about bringing them until the last minute.

Frankly, this will always be an OOC sentiment, as long as megacorporations exist in the setting. Pretty much everyone here, you and I included, hate corporations outside of the game. Everyone is at different levels of sentimentality on the matter. Because of that, I don't think the community as a whole can be objective about what megacorps need to be interesting, or what they want to see. Most discussions I see, people don't care and don't want to entertain possibilities beyond them remaining as generic villains. Looking over the material, the only time we ever see Megacorps capitulate their dominance over a planet/nation is if some macro-scale event hits them in tandem. Himeo squirmed out of Hephaestus control because of a massive interstellar depression that hurt their ability to project power. The SCC corporations were forced out of solarian space and politics only after the entire country imploded. If we're going with precedent, anti-corporatism is only a threat if the corporations themselves aren't doing to well as a whole. I would be more interested in Einstein's relationship with the rest of Sol and other nations, but the district(?) that Einstein managed to purchase out from Mendel city might be worth development. It could be interesting. The biggest criticism I see of corporations in our setting, at least from a writing perspective, is that they're boring. Having our corporations just being corporations means that the bottom line is always going to be making the line on the graph get higher. Growth and profit, that's it. The same, predictable motivation of every corporation that's ever existed. I think the best solution to this would be to reconfigure corporations to have a goals or missions outside of just biggering. We can already see vestiges of this in corporations like Idris, with their mafia family undertones, and Zheng-hu, with their weird post-human augmentation theming. Think blurring the line between Institute and Corporation.

I think it's fine without a whitelist, just because of how little impact they have over rounds. This is a Quartermaster equivalent, except it doesn't have nearly as many problems. The most mechanically complex service job I can think of is the kitchen, then maybe a toss up between the bar and the garden. We can trust people to use brainmed without a whitelist, I think we can trust them on this too.

Most service departments are either easy to figure out or are self autonomous. The departmental culture is far less belligerent than cargo. The XO has one less department to juggle in their headsets, so if something does come up, they're able to give it more attention. The SM doesn't have to try to pull rank or authority as hard as the QM did(think bounties and yield reports), because your job is really just to make sure everyone knows what they're doing, and aren't flagrantly blowing off work. I feel like the role is useful to me as an XO, because I can delegate most of the management to them, and occasionally step in if something comes up. About the breadth of the SM's mechanics, much of what service does is what people do around the house, like cooking and cleaning. While most of it in and of itself isn't rocket science, I don't think its a hard requirement to be a spectacular master of everything. Maybe just the kitchen. There are some Quartermasters that never fuck with mining's mechanics, or know just enough to get a new one started and out the airlock. The other thing is that the SM position isn't nearly as consequential as other roles that don't even have any authority on the ship. Fucking up at managing isn't the same as fucking up a patient in medical and they die, or someone botching the Supermatter round start and ending it at 00:30. Compared to some of the other jobs here, the SM is practically an inconsequential RP role. This balances out their authority.

When I first joined in 2019, Rounds would have a binary loop of hyperviolence, followed up with an extended round for reprieve, then back to hyperviolence. I feel like our population was much healthier then. When people suggest we acquiesce mechanics in service of more RP, It just kills interest in the game itself. We've never had more time for RP than at any other point since I started playing here, and it's miserable. RP is a mechanic that relies heavily on player involvement and population. At it's core, it's an unreliable mechanic because it depends on player commitment and interest. Just look at how our population tanks every time a new popular game comes out, or when College finals/midterms roll out. We only have one or two good rounds every day now, and that's because there's no reason to join low population rounds. People are content to probe the game throughout the day, until the mix is just right, then they can join. We have to embrace game mechanics, if we want to hold player interest. Especially at Lowpop. A fleshed out gameplay loop can be more consistent than population numbers. One of our priorities right now should be motivating people to join, regardless if the manifest is perfect or not. We could see more lowpop rounds snowball into larger ones, if things go right.

I think taking this idea a step further would be to organize the busy work into overarching linear missions. For these, the ship is given a directive from centcom, or must do something because of circumstance/necessity. Rather than it being one department, these are larger missions that rely on the participation of multiple departments in order to be completed. Some examples would be: -Answering distress beacons. -Flying to a fuel depot for a refill, resupplying in general -Ship escort -Outpost Construction -Resupplying other SCC star ships -Transporting sensitive cargo -Entertaining important delegations -Patrolling a region of space -Investigating anomalous activity on a planet -Surveying planet candidates for colonization -Trying to find Phoron -Even more, who knows Such a system benefits the departments that rely primarily on reacting to problems, like Medical, Engineering, and Security. On extended rounds, Medical has no one to heal, Engineering nothing to fix, and Security no one to Batong. This would give them something to react to and participate in. Security has precious cargo to guard, Engineering has an outpost to construct, Medical has a distress beacon survivor to heal. Besides those three, other departments would benefit from this as well. Science can finally have some immediate context and utility for the work they do, Operations will process more orders, move cargo around, and do other operations things. Service may have to cater for or facilitate important meetings and delegations hosted on the station. I could go on. This would also work for our current round antag system for many reasons: Having established a mission or linear narrative for the ship at round start takes a lot of pressure off the antag to carry the entire interest, motion, and story of the round. Antags with this system can still take their gimmicks in whichever direction they choose, but they will also now have a plot at round start that they can bounce ideas off of and work with. It will help people brainstorm, and give context to their presence aboard the ship as antags. It is my hope that these missions are just as imperative as the antag, and that they are normally only suspended in code red/delta scenarios. A violent antag usually falls under the jurisdiction of security, then medical. All other departments must sit on their hands. Having these missions still manifest priority despite the antics of an antag effectively turns the mission into a B-plot that can keep people feeling active, engaged, and useful.

Public garden needs tools, and a water source. The bridge cockpit area needs a request console and a intercom. When the bridge is at maximum command capacity, there's no where for the XO to sit, which is annoying.

I feel this. People who want their fix of shitty reality cyberpunk aren't going to the IAC for it. The tension and conflict for the faction would benefit more from external factors

The Luna convention is merely a suggestion, in practice. Many of our factions opt out, and the ones that opt in are written in such a manner that it doesn't matter anyway. As for the actual gameplay, these conventions don't exist at all. Antags are not beholden to morality, and the station security/command become more autocratic and extra-judicial as they move through alert levels. The only rules of engagement that exist are the ones the admins enforce. I think that rules of engagement and diplomacy for space will become useful later on, however. Things like the Luna Convention can't exist in a traditional SS13 antag round, but they can when interacting with 3rd party ships. Having conventions/rules of diplomacy when it comes to these interactions will be extremely useful at keeping both sides from just needlessly escalating into doing something stupid.