Kintsugi

this would be a good first coding project, if you'd like i could help you through the process of adding this on the aurora discor

The point of this thread is to gauge community interest and to generate discussion around the concept of debilitating injuries - anyone on Aurora who has experienced serious injuries ingame and survived will know that the health system in Aurora is not quite as sensible as it could be. Critical injuries, once healed via surgery, chems, or other treatment option, are essentially non-concerns. Due to the way the health system works, a character who gets down to 1% brain activity after losing half of their blood and breaking all of their limbs will be perfectly fine once they've recovered, in spite of the severity of those injuries and the timeframe of treatment. While some things ingame, such as bone repair and soft tissue regeneration can be explained by advanced futuristic technologies, this nonetheless is not very conducive to roleplay or gameplay in my opinion. It lowers the stakes of combat and encourages players to engage in risky behavior, as their wounds are meaningless so long as they don't die. Many people are familiar with playing security or other combat-facing roles and being treated for critical injuries multiple times, only to return to the fight immediately. A potential solution to this problem would be to add permanent debuffs after suffering significant-enough injuries for the duration of the round. Examples of this would be bones that were broken and surgically repaired being twice as fragile for the rest of the round, organs losing some effectiveness (especially stamina regeneration and capacity for things like the heart and lungs), or traumatic brain injuries after suffering massive brain damage that cause confusion and decrease overall abilities. The idea here is to add consequences to severe wounds which individually are not crippling, but nonetheless make you less effective, especially as injuries add up. In general, I believe this system would be an overall boon for gameplay and roleplay.

The purpose of this thread is to gauge opinion on the subject of an ingame voice babbler, which would play randomly-selected phonemes in order to generate nonsense words in a nonsense sentence. The most familiar example of a system like this would be Animal Crossing's dialogue, but other SS13 servers (IS12 and Goonstation come to mind) do have babblers. I'm of the opinion that a character's voice is one of the few things we have yet to capture ingame, and in failing to do so we've created an environment where certain things that might be a boon for roleplay (for example, overhearing someone speaking off-screen and using that to guess where someone may be, etc) are not possible. I think this system would obviously need to be a preference toggle, and you would need some degree of control over what characters sound like - I imagine the best way to do this would be with pitch modification. Distinct species could likely use different sounds to distinguish their speech.

folks, they're stealing our elections, we can't have a radical like RACIST TORVALD in charge of Biesel, they rigged it because they hate freedom - and the fake news media, they're not saying anything about it - because frankly, they're in on it, you know, the voter fraud in the CRZ - it's crazy, look at what's happening to Biesel, they're trying to make us like Sol folks, they're trampling all over our Biesel values, and, you know it, and I know it, and it's just, just so true.

I don't have much to add personally as I haven't really wanted much to do with SS13 at the moment, but I have to say that as an ardent proponent of the independent setting over the corporate setting, I think this concept obviously has a lot of merit.

I personally had the idea of adding an investigations version of the camera drone that journalists currently have that would be visible on the security network, but the conclusion that I came to was that giving security any form of camera like this would just be a tremendous nerf to antags - it just becomes all the more impossible to evade detection and dogpiling. I feel more or less the same about this proposal, unfortunately.

Shimmer makes a great point. Caseless ammo is absolutely going to undermine the visual spectacle of a firefight and I think we shouldn't have it. In fact, I see no point to the addition of caseless ammunition at all except how "cool" it sounds, but in practice it's genuinely much worse game design. Spent casings are an important part of the evidence/investigator gameplay loop. In general, I think this PR is a net negative. It doesn't really solve the problem of real-world calibers being all we have, merely shifting most of them around to much more LARP-y alternatives. I really don't see what this is going to accomplish meaningfully.

As the OP, I'd like to point out that the point of this thread was to make the XO into the ship's 2IC, not to make the XO into the ship's 2IC while maintaining the present species allowances - not trying to be a jerk, but at this point this thread's purpose has been achieved and discussion about species restrictions should probably be moved elsewhere.

What about (and this is very much a working name) "expedition tokens"? These would, ICly, be items issued on behalf of the SCC to SCC employees who participated in an expedition or SCC "operation" (again, for lack of a better term), as a token of appreciation on the SCC's part and to recognize an employee's participation in such. They'd be small coins or badge-like items that have no actual value but would have a unique item sprite and could fit in wallets and would have a description that briefly summarizes the relevant arc. You could also lean into the unfeeling megacorporation angle here too - maybe each token has an insultingly trivial bonus to it, like a 3% discount at SCC retail locations or something, and that's all the SCC gives you for risking your life (or something, just an example). Inspiration here are things like boy scout patches or, if you're comfortable with an example with a basis in a military tradition, things like challenge coins (frequently used outside of the military!)

I'm sorry, but this is a hopelessly pessimistic and self-defeating attitude to have over such a niche and essentially non-existent issue. The idea that we need to prevent the players from ever receiving any form of recognition at all because, potentially, a bad character could be recognized, is both at once completely overkill and completely inconsistent with how we treat things made by sketchy people (ie: half of our lore). I won't go into why I feel that's the case, because I feel Limette makes the argument very soundly above, but I wanted to point this out. It's not at all a reasonable ruling on the issue - at the end of the day, it's an excessively restrictive response to an extremely niche scenario.