jackfractal

Boo! That sucks.

Hmm... I could see a use for an improvised version of this with reduced range for non-potato antags like cultists, lings, and most revolutionaries. What about two radio signalers tied together with wire, connected to a power-cell? It would only last as long as the cell had power, and would be considerably larger then the smooth syndicate version so you couldn't fit it in a pocket or a box. I'll do the code if you think this is a good idea.

I don't know, adding a clear meta-level overlay to ssd / afk people could help.

Ooh that's nasty. I love it.

The Paradise Karma system is structureless due to it's lack of criteria. You give people Karma for doing stuff that you like. That's it. "What you like" is entirely subjective. This means that rather than rewarding specific behavior, it rewards behavior that pleases the collective. Over time, those people who gain a lot of karma do so because their actions are in-line with the unconscious biases of the community at large. Sometimes that's by playing a particular role well, but usually it's for things that are funny, or silly, or unique. The guy who replicated the Hotline Miami murderspree's while wearing a jacket and a chicken mask got a lot of Karma despite murdering literally half the station. In addition to being unfocused to the point of not being a useful tool for shaping behavior, the karma rewards themselves are... limited in scope. The roles available are marginally important, with the possible exception of the Blueshield, and the alien races, while sort of cool, are interesting primarily due to being an obvious way to show off. They're also reeeally slow at adding new rewards which means that, older players effectively graduate from the feedback system after they've purchased the rewards that interest them. In short, I feel like the Paradise Karma system is sort of gesturing in the right direction, but it's still missing some key pieces to be really effective.

The problem with the crew vs antag situation is the same it has always been. Victory goes to the person who plays the least fair and who offers the opposition the fewest opportunities to act. "But you're not supposed to play to win!" yells everyone. Sure, whatever, but everyone keeps playing to win because losing sucks. Losing involves being dead, or being in jail unable to act. Winning, on the other hand, is great! You get to keep running around, keep interacting with people, keep playing. As an antag you get to keep spinning your gimmick, or running from security. So of course people play to win, expecting them to do otherwise is to ignore the most basic concepts of game design. The core tenant of making a game is to incentivize desirable behavior. You want to reward people for doing what they should be doing, and what they should be doing is making the game fun for everyone involved. For example, in Team Fortress two, the medic class gets points for both healing AND they for kills made by their partner. You want the medic to heal lots of people, so you give them points for that, and you want medics to pair up with dangerous players to kill lots of the enemy, so you give them points for that. You incentivize both beneficial behaviors and that's what people do. This works even without explanation. If you give people a way of keeping score, and you reward them for certain behavior, they will do that behavior. It's not rocket science. If we want people to give other players second chances, play with good sportsmanship, and buy into other people's role-play scenarios for the good of the round... we have to incentivize that. If a plan you've spent an hour and a half setting in motion can be destroyed by a single taser shot, you are not going to want to give people the opportunity to take that shot. You are going to get them before they get you. The game we're playing punishes all the behaviors we claim to want, and it does so brutally. Until that's fixed, we can have as many threads about this as we like and nothing will change. We can try to keep patching the social context with rules, time limits, white lists, and punishments and they might mitigate the issue somewhat (I remain dubious of their effectiveness), but these tactics treat the symptoms, not the problem itself. tl/dr: SS13 is not well designed for the kind of play this server wants. To fix this problem you must modify the game so that it incentivizes the playstyle you're looking for.

Really? That's... an odd thing to like.

The RNG for byond is not that bad. Any randomizer will throw out sequences because the existence of sequences are an inevitable outcome of randomization. I was sure I was right, but byond IS pretty weird so I ran a test. This is my test code: /client/verb/rng_test() set background = 0 set category = "Testing" set name = "Test randomizer" var/list/results = list(0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0) for (var/x = 0; x < 1000000; ++x) var/index = rand(1,10) results[index]+=1 world << "Randomization results:" for (var/x = 1; x <= 10; ++x) world << "[x] = [results[x]]" For those of you who don't speak Byond, I rolled a random number between 1 and 10 a whole lot and recorded which number was which. This is the results after rolling a million times: Randomization results: 1 = 99290 2 = 100134 3 = 99938 4 = 99614 5 = 100647 6 = 100110 7 = 100267 8 = 100296 9 = 99375 10 = 100329 So yeah. The byond rng is fine. I'm in favor of a pure weighted die-roll like the OP suggests, without the caveates of 'if most people vote for a thing it goes in automatically'. The point of the die roll is that there's no point to strategic voting. I really like that idea.

Hehehehe.... what if the description in Examine changed every time you looked at it. "A strange symbol, crudely drawn in blood." "Graffiti, nothing special." "A painting of three dogs, playing poker. The boxer is winning. The chiwawa is winking at you." "A mathematical theorem daubed in blood. It's proving... something. You're not sure. You feel as though you almost understand. Perhaps if you looked closer..."

I have actually done that before using candy, iron pills, and a humonkey on Paradise. I needed their sweet sweet monkey-blood for synth-meat production due to the fact that I had to clone like THIRTY FIVE PEOPLE. It was a crazy round, the kind of crazy round you only get when both security AND the people's revolution have fully upgraded cloners. I think this machine is a cool idea, but only if you need to feed it equal amounts of nutriment and water. As mentioned, more magic is, while not exactly unexpected, something to be avoided where possible. As for cargo, what about being able to order 'blood toner' packages? Little tear-away packages full of powder that you can empty into bags/bottles of water to convert them into blood substitute. They'd be relatively cheap, but they'd take like thirty seconds to 'steep' until the blood was usable. Lorewise, they'd share technology with monkey-cubes. Useful for those rounds without a botanist.

Ah! Better trauma medicine that doesn't heal you but stops you from dying? I am all over that. It does need to be looked at carefully 'cause otherwise you could end up in the coffee-powered spacewalks situation, but yes. This is good plan.

In addition to what everyone else has brought up, I'd say to know when and how to recuse yourself. There are going to be times when you're going to be in a position where you're dealing with stuff you shouldn't be dealing with, either because you're involved in some way, or because you're missing information, or because you're just too busy with other stuff. Staff need to be able and willing to pass things off to each other, and should be able to call on each other for support.

Part of the issue with slowing down how quickly you snuff it is that it will lead to knock-on behavior that is hard to predict. Remember when you could use coffee to space walk? That kind of thing. To keep this from getting silly you'd have to extend the period of time where people are non-functional but alive, which while more interesting for medbay, is less interesting for the wounded people. Once you die, you get to see deadchat and float around, while you're unconscious and dying you're able to see and hear nothing. In this game, it's almost always preferable to be dead then stuck perpetually dying.

Medbay, specifically the lesbian in medbay, were the thing that everyone got off on hating before everyone started getting off on hating Tajaran. My personal opinion on the topic of this thread is that my personal opinion is pretty irrelevant. As this thread demonstrates, 'role-playing' is a term that has an enormous number of only tangentially overlapping definitions. Part of the challenge for someone creating a role-playing community, whether that be a small tabletop group or a large community like Aurora, is offering a clear definition for what is and what is not expected of participants.

I like Lady's proposed modifications with one caveat. If the vote goes to extended, it should say it's extended. I like extended, but secret extended is very different then voted extended and also it is the worst, by the hour and a half mark, 75% of the crew have gone SSD.

I have wanted this voting system for quite a while. It means that even if you vote for an unpopular game mode there's still a chance that you'll get it. It would also remove secrextended, which is the dullest.

Considering the vast disagreements in this community about very basic things, I suspect that the definition of 'being a dick' is quite diverse.

Poor Roots. He has a tough life.

That's my opinion too. I get that this is a problem, but it's already forbidden both IC and OOC. Adding game mechanics to absolutely forever-ban it is unnecessary.

Yeah, this is like blocking someone on twitter. All of twitter hasn't imploded as a result. It's not that bad Garnascus.

Yeah, I wouldn't use them directly. I'd use the same concept, duplicate rooms on other z-levels that get copied across (the machinery would probably need to be treated separately).

There are, but like your proposed grenade test, it's mostly along the lines of 'how deadly is this very deadly thing?' I do really like the idea of science being more outward facing. It's a bunker right now, and that's unfortunate.

We do it for the holodeck. It's just a matter of repurposing that tech to let us build multiple copies of the rooms of the shuttle. I think it's doable.

I don't really see why science ability to create firearms is different then any of the fifty other ways to destroy the station. We don't prevent atmospherics techs from wrenching pipes without command-staff approval despite their ability to cause mass casualties with far less difficulty then a gun does. Everyone is talking as if this is something that happens every round and is a significant gameplay balance problem. I admit I haven't played much in the last little while, has this suddenly become really common in the last... say week?

OK, so this is an idea I've been kicking around for a while and I'm pretty sure it can be done. So right now the Nuke Ops have variable equipment through the use of their telecrystals, but the stuff they get from their ship is pretty static. What if we made their ships various rooms cost telecrystals but have several different possible forms? When I say different forms, I mean the dimensions would be the same, but the contents would be different. Like, say a 'basic medbay' like they have now, would be thirty telecrystals, but an 'advanced medbay' would be 45 telecrystals. The default load-out room with it's jetpacks, pinpointers, and carbines might be 50, but a 'basic' load-out room that has only standard softsuits without weaponry could be as little as 10. This would let people play gimmicks with Nuke a lot easier. Just choosing a 'luxury cabin' for a person playing a VIP, or a 'hoard of treasure' for people wanting to trade, or 'slave cells' (which would include cryobags for transporting prisoners) would offer a lot of variety. The number of available telecrystals would of course be adjusted to reflect the additional costs. What do you think? Worth trying out?