TrainTN

The only example I can think of is when Mars exploded and I decided to retire my Martian character since he was barely established and it felt too dramatic to deal with if it ever came up. I didn't want to roleplay a guy stressing over whether or not his entire family back home was dead. Took my interest out of the character. Otherwise, I never paid much mind to the ongoing narratives and current events, because--as I played mostly ordinary human Biesel citizens who just wanted to do their job and eke out a living--they never felt all that relevant. I fell inactive at around the time the Sol breakdown happened which would have probably affected my Solarian character but that never came to pass for me.

"Chief Security Officer sounds like middle-management." It pretty much is middle management. You are the middle manager between the Captain and the rest of Security. You aren't the Chief of Police of a city, you're in charge of a handful of guys on one spaceship. Though I do agree with the post that "Chief Security Officer" is already used elsewhere in the lore so it'd be strange to use the same title here, and for that reason Chief of Security or Security Chief would be better to avoid confusion.

Two cooks, two servers, servers effectively being bartenders. I think that could work.

I assume the IPC is overclocking itself or something similar in order to generate enough physical force to break the handcuffs. It is burning more energy than usual for an immediate boost of raw power.

Nice idea, but I don't think the charm would last long if absolutely everywhere was dim and moody all the time. It would get old, I think.

After a couple rounds on it, I don't think I'm a fan of all the decorative staircases with railings everywhere. Yeah, it's adds some variety to the ship's looks, but it also makes things more tedious to get around, and the place is already rather cramped in some areas. I forsee people getting stuck in some circumstances. Speaking of stuck, there's a glass door in the northwest corner of the Intrepid's hangar that hangar techs have no access to. I'm also confused on some layout decisions. There's two bars, and two lounges. The bathroom with the stairwell was mentioned earlier in the thread and that's outright bizarre. The crew quarters is scattered all around the second and third decks on both sides. Getting around is really confusing with how everything is arranged, sometimes it feels like every department is haphazardly jammed together. Maybe I should look at a map to try to better understand how the ship is organized. Also, shouldn't the topmost deck be Deck 1, and the lowest deck be Deck 3? Isn't that how it's sorted on ships or am I misremembering?

Question: if this was done, what would be the purpose of the Intrepid, then? The two departments most focused on leaving the ship would not need to use the Intrepid to leave the ship. What uses would it still have that justify its existence?

It's not persistent blood, it's just things like blood and vomit are converted into a generic grime for the next round. It always felt a little odd when after a particularly violent round, the next round Medbay and the hallways would be completely caked in filth all over.

Sounds great. Would love to see them merged.

People expect too much of antagonists. Do this, do that, don't do this, don't do that, be interesting, be original, create a story, be able to improvise all of these things within 2 hours multiple times a week without hurting anyone too much. It's too much pressure, too many demands, too high expectations, too little tolerance for mistakes. It's why I never tried playing antag. It's why a lot of people don't play antag. It's why a lot of my rounds were spent sitting around quietly with very little happening to react to, and that's why I got bored. Antagonists exist because conflict is interesting. I might get salty over being killed but if I had to choose between 2 hours of nothing or 5 minutes of being made into a murder victim, the latter is infinitely more captivating.

It doesn't feel very grounded or believable, and I have a difficult time taking it seriously. It reads like something from a 20th century sci-fi pulp magazine, and while I expect and want some of that from SS13 - we have robots and lizard-people and psychic powers and all sorts of other things - something about it strikes me as jarring, compared to the rest of the setting. But this is only the opinion of someone who just now read the article for the first time and has never seen/noticed the lore used in practice.

I don't like the Investigator uniform. I can see what it was going for, a rugged double-breasted coat with a belt tie, but I don't think it works. It hangs weirdly low and the details muddle together. My opinion, give Investigator something more semi-formal, or perhaps a CSI-esque jacket instead of a big coat. Hangar Techs wearing shorts is silly. I think First Responder needs something to stand out more, to be more recognizable as an EMT. It doesn't really look like one. I'm concerned the different companies in Security have such different color palettes that recognizing all of them as Security will be difficult, mashing them all together is going to look very inconsistent. Same for Engineering but to a lesser extent. This is a minor gripe but I feel like the learner roles (security cadet, engineering apprentice, medical intern, lab assistant) all look too similar to the main roles. It's hard to distinguish them at a glance.

I think the Med and Sec ones look a little too similar. Maybe for Med, you copy Sci and add a white stripe? Or invert it and make it white with a blue stripe?

It's one thing to not like the game mode, as you very obviously don't, but it's absurd and childish to equate it to ERP and IRL abusive relationships. It's a magic space vampire in a game of 2D spacemens on a space station. You are also accusing people who do enjoy the mode of being abusers and sexual predators, and that's extremely insulting and unreasonable. In fact, I'd call it disgusting to throw labels like that at people over a video game because of magic vampires in space.

I've always wanted to see more dedicated spooky modes in SS13. It lends itself well to suspense and horror.

This is a good point I didn't consider. Humans are the default, there has to be a default to compare everything else to. Changing humans changes what the default is, they're still going to be the default. Ultimately I don't think humans need anything to make them special, and on further thought, the only thing I support is giving them a somewhat longer sprint or maybe a faster-recharging sprint instead. But even that much isn't necessary.

A longer sprint and slightly sturdier organs seem like enough to me. Basic, but useful,

Yes, it's my personal view that the quality of the Medbay is justified by the presence of the Science Department. Replacing miners and security guards is easy, but replacing scientists, not so much. This is a mining and research station and the research is, at least in-universe, very important and worth expenditures to maintain. As for the setting, I see it as a partial dystopia, but I see it as mostly an exaggeration of modern-day problems taken to a much broader scope. Inept and corrupt governments, corporations recklessly chasing profits at the expense of lives and environments, class struggles, worker exploitation, amoral science, etc. etc. The setting just dresses it up in futuristic sci-fi. It's all stuff that already exists, it's just bigger, but at the end of the day, people can still have normal and decent lives in normal and decent places. A setting that is completely good is unrealistic, but so is a setting that is completely bad.

I've never filled in character records, because I find it to be a slog of largely irrelevant information that I would probably forget a few days after writing it. I find info like home address, family members, last doctor's physical to be trivial and dull to write out unless I'm going out of my way to make it an important detail. That's a flaw with me, I'll admit it. If there was a system that made it easier to plug in basic info (place of birth, education, etc.) for fleshing the character out to a better minimum than "blank slate" without demanding a lot of time and effort, then I would be all for it. Of course there should still be options for those who aren't as lazy as me and fill in their records in their own style, but I doubt anyone is planning to take that away.

I'd like to be optimistic and give it a chance but the way I see it, there won't be a dynamic. "Dynamic" implies something would actually happen. The service department consists of the bartenders, cooks, gardeners, and janitors. Their jobs are simple, straightforward, easy, and require little coordination. They manage themselves, so they don't need a manager, and I strongly doubt they want one. At most, the role would be an obnoxious nanny; at least, the role would be glorified furniture.

Lights that blink whenever the borg/robot speaks or emotes?

This is a minor nitpick but I feel like the engineer and atmos tech jumpsuits should be switched. The coveralls seem more fitting for engineers, and the engineer uniform as-is looks like a firefighter's coat which would better fit the atmos techs.

Drastically reducing the blood boil aspect of burn damage seems like a fair idea to me. Maybe even remove it entirely if others think it's good to go that far.

I agree with all of this. I understand the intent in keeping a low-intensity middle-management role like the QM for players to dip their toes into a leadership position, but Service is a department that requires little to no management the vast majority of the time because they regulate themselves perfectly fine. They don't need a manager and I doubt they want one, and such a role would be so un-intense that I strongly doubt anyone would learn anything from playing it. I can't see a "service manager" ever doing anything of importance, nor can I imagine anyone wanting to play such an inconsequential role for long. Axe it and have the Service department answer directly to the XO, who will have a lot of free time anyway since they won't be managing Cargo anymore. Edit: On a side note, I also agree with renaming the Head of Security to the Chief of Security or Security Commander, but I understand that this relatively unimportant and should be saved for after the NBT is implemented.

I agree with the suggestions of including Nanotrasen in Cargo. Yes, this would tip the balance towards NT, but I feel it would be minor enough that it would prove ultimately unimportant and non-harmful to the purpose of the NBT, and that players' creative freedom should be more of a priority. Plus, it makes perfect sense for part of the mining team to be on NT's payroll considering NT's history of Phoron mining as well as exploiting any other resources they can find, they probably have swathes of experienced prospectors they can assign to the ship.