rrrrrr

I feel like this is an absurdly bad-faith way to view the people who actually play antagonist. The idea that actually being antagonistic is an "OOC d-head" move. Not a lot of people play antagonist. This is why "antag main" is a thing --- because so few people actually decide to play antagonist roles that just toggling it on is enough to consistently get traitor, changeling, rev, whatever. Keep in mind that these are the people who try to keep everyone entertained for two hours straight, for better or worse, with more limited abilities than staffers and little-no planning. Antagonists are not staff running an event. The best antag players can make what they're doing feel like that, but they're not. Someone keeps escaping... okay. There are weak points built into the brig. Escaping means that the gimmick, whatever that may be, keeps going. Give the people who actually decide to play antag some grace, 'cuz they give everyone else a whole lot. I almost wrote a whole compare-and-contrast list, comparing how this server and another server that I won't name does this, but I'm not gonna post it, because it sounds negative. (I enjoy playing this server.)

Think I personally witnessed example number-one, here. I was leaving the ship (Coalition surveyor, got stuck, it's a long story) and had talked to the mutineers a few times, mostly because I also wanted to talk to the Captain and work out how I'd pay for the medical treatment my character had received and negotiate leaving. Anyways, on my way out, I see the Warden getting rolled out of the medical bay, and they shout at me: "GADPATHURIAN! HELP!" It was pretty nuts. Anyways, both of these examples sound like poor play by the people responsible. Like, "shoulda ahelped" levels. Just my two cents.

This is only partly related, but I think it's a cultural problem where people will see an antag's gimmick and go "this is dumb. This is so stupid. I need to prove this wrong, immediately." Revolutionaries taking action? "Um, who cares? Bad idea? We still have jobs? You're dumb?" Traitors traitoring? "Ummm, you realize you're gonna die, right? We're gonna kill you? So stupid." Mercenaries? "You know we have a giant railgun, right, dumb-dumb? You big dummy. Shoulda just stayed home." Gonna be blunt: this is weird Reddit behavior. I do not play antag and I groan every time I see this. The fact that they had to make a new policy so that command just doesn't go "source?" at every out-there announcement that ties into the traitor's gimmick speaks volumes about how most people deal with antags. The genuine hatred I see for people who play as antags is weird, too. Super weird. Yes, a lot of gamemodes have issues. No, that doesn't mean they should be removed. I've seen very few bad antags. Quite a few boring ones, quite a few who get captured by the largest department in the game whose entire job is based around hunting them down, but none that I would call bad. A heck of a lot of great antags, too. I think it goes without saying that people dragging antags to the roboticist's lab within minutes of capture probably stems, at least in some cases, from an OOC dislike of antags.

In reply to the post above mine: ironically, characters being incredibly callous/mocking about people having their brains surgically removed and put into a mechanical slave-body is very, very grim. I think it's less that we're playing in a lighter universe and more the fact that things look lighter. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Horizon looks a lot less run-down than the Aurora. It's a big white spaceship flying around the galaxy on a noble mission (to make money for shareholders.) It has guns. There are a lot of windows everywhere; it's like an open-floor office, in a way. It has a big central atrium (that's an absolute nightmare to deal with if it becomes depressurized.) It's the SCC's flagship. Part of this is just my personal aesthetic preference leaking in, but the Horizon looks a heck of a lot cleaner, nicer, and more pleasant than basically any other SS13 map I've seen. (I think this is a bad thing.) It's sort of at odds with the fact that every character on the ship works for the setting's equivalent of Weyland-Yutani, a soulless conglomerate of megacorporations whose only goal is to make money. It's kinda baked in, at this point. I'm not sure how it'd be "fixed."

Regarding marooning: we're on a space ship. It's the law of the sea... well, stars, I guess, that people who cause a lotta trouble get tossed overboard. I'm not sure what the timeframe is between the Horizon's various ports of call, but if you're going to be weeks, months in space without hitting any semblance of civilization and you've got a criminal onboard who's showing zero remorse and keeps trying to escape the brig --- you toss 'em overboard. The game's setting is a corporate dystopia. Megacorporations are borderline or de facto governments, in some places. You character probably signed a waiver agreeing to this kind of thing.

1. Let's get more than recent, honestly. The Contact War and the subsequent nuclear holocaust only strengthens Rezak's resolve to make as much money as lizardly (not humanly) possible. At twenty-eight years old, Rezak has no coherent memories of what Moghes was like prior to the Contact War. This upsets him. He would not associate with anyone who is openly against the Hegemony --- not because he particularly loves the Hegemony, but because the Hegemony weren't the guys who lobbed a bunch of nuclear bombs around. (Rezak's traditional in the sense that he's culturally traditional.) Rezak finds the sequence of events that led to Not'zar's coronation suspicious, but also mostly agrees with his policies. And not even in a 'pretending to agree with the current ruler to conform' way, Rezak genuinely believes that Not'zar is a good king/hegemon. He also believes, without zero evidence, that he and Not'zar have much in common. He was secretly glad to see the civil war start, given that it would allow Not'zar (long may he reign!) the chance to clean up the Hegemony and get rid of those churls who wish to stand in the way of progress (and also he would mumble something about honor.) The expansion of Hephaestus is another fact of life. More aliens on Moghes. Business as usual. Rezak finds life on Moghes deeply unpleasant and the rationing is just another example of that. (He doesn't eat a lot, though.) 2. Rezak finds humans to be creepy and unpredictable. There's something deeply off-putting about their eyes, not to mention hair, which he finds strange at best and positively repulsive at worst. Skrell, perhaps, are even worse: they're too "wet." Still, the aliens are paying him, so it can't be that bad, can it? I mean, they are a more advanced civilization than his own. Maybe after a while, Unathi will be more creepy, more moist, too... and colonizing their own star systems, more than they could have ever hoped for? (Yep. God bless the glorious Izweski Hegemony.) Aside from his own instinctual distrust of aliens, Rezak has readily adopted some facets of human culture to better fit in: he uses the term "haters" to describe essentially anything and everything, even inanimate objects, that displease him. He also calls people "bro." Rezak, paradoxically, likes most people he encounters, so long as they're of a similar disposition as him. 3. Rezak believes in God insofar that things are going well for him. As of late, working aboard an alien space ship, makin' a whole lotta money pushing crates around, things are going well. He has no particular faith on the Aut'akh other than what he's heard every other person around him say about them: that they're a buncha freaky soul-mutilating outlaws. In his darkest moments, Rezak believes that Juzida Aizahi is right about almost everything.

Is this dead/denied? This is way, way, way better than what the setting has at the moment. Leagues better. I want to take my own crack at it if it's denied.

Please give the windows some transparency back. It may have been a mistake, for all I know; going off of my experience, DM does not behave when you paste an image with transparent elements into a DMI. You have to manually go about that sort of thing.

Have interacted a bit with Iota, less so with Ulery. I only have two things to say: your sentence structure and syntax feels off in a way that I can't really put down to character. This is a game based almost entirely around writing and clicking on things (and no one's perfect), but I feel like the dialogue you write in-game is somewhat lacking --- this would be problematic in a role like XO, which doesn't have a ton to do mechanically. Again, no one's perfect, and this is a pretty odd criticism to make, but it's something I've noticed. (And not something that really matters. Improper grammar isn't against the sever rules, and a lot of people in this community speak English as a second language.) My second thing to say is that you talked about getting put into a positronic chassis as Iota; this is outright mentioned as impossible on the wiki. A pretty minor slip-up that I think probably stems from people suggesting that in-game and probably not your fault, but one that seems worth mentioning. All that said... yeah, +1. Give Airlines7 a shot. A chance. Put him in, coach!

BYOND Key: Timby Character Names: Maja Gretzsky. Species you are applying to play: Unathi What color do you plan on making your first alien character: I find this question funny... green, the classic color. Have you read our lore section's page on this species?: Yes. Please provide well articulated answers to the following questions in a paragraph format. One paragraph minimum per question. Yes, teacher. Why do you wish to play this specific race: Because outside of a few months in 2014, I have never played an alien. Identify what makes role-playing this species different than role-playing a Human: Aliens are inherently different from humans in terms of culture, biology, and a lot more. This question's pretty broad, so I'll try and answer it to the best of my ability: basically, everything. Outside of the absolute bare-basics of good roleplaying, everything. Absolutely everything. Body language and culture are the two biggest things; I'll talk more about culture. Essentially: as a species, the Unathi have gone through, in three or four generations, what humanity has gone through in four-hundred years. Space-travel, contact with aliens, a world war, nuclear holocaust, and so on... life's rough. Being an Unathi is not a pleasant experience. The society you come from is, at best, a somewhat technologically advanced feudal autocracy and, at worst, a bunch of guys walking around in the desert and trying not to die. It's a time of a great change. That's really scary. Character Name: Rezak Krazul Backstory: Rezak comes from a coastal village a few kilometers north of Teht and he is entirely, fully fucked. He was born fucked. His clan is weak and small in number, having gradually dwindled down to only fifty-some members; their traditional occupation is unglamorous. They have serviced and tended to a number of lighthouses along the coast, ranging at times from twelve and down to the current five. Most of the men and a handful of the women on his clan suffer from kaasilik, an embarrassing but otherwise harmless condition that renders them utterly hornless, hoodless, and without frills. Perhaps worst of all, Rezak was particularly small growing up and stopped growing early on --- at five-eight, he is unremarkable among men and noticeably short when among his kind, something that bothers him deeply. Being Rezak is deeply unpleasant. He makes sure of that. His outlook on things is so negative and, for lack of a better term, bitchy, that it's impossible for him to not feel unwell at almost all times. He had little contact with those outside of his clan when he was young, and when he did, it was mostly negative; he was bullied and mocked for his clumsy, awkward gait and being horrible at sports. He grew into a wiry, hateful thing. Rezak does not like his own species. Rezak does not like any species. Rezak doesn't even like himself. He pretends to be traditional, of course, and plays at being a devout Sk'akhist --- but it's all a put-on. Deep down, Rezak sees little point in such things, given that all of them led to his current condition: being who he is. That all changed when his clan arranged a marriage for him. Perhaps life had meaning...? Perhaps, after all, God was real? Rezak has yet to meet his wife, having either decided to (or been forced, owing to his churlishness, depending on who of his clan you ask) seek his fortune outside of Teht, and certainly outside of Moghes. Only time will tell if he can earn enough money to return home and prove all of his haters (a human term he has readily adopted) wrong. That day may never come. Rezak works for Orion Express. He works in the hangar. Rezak is never going home. Rezak, in all likelihood, is going to die in outer space. At least that's what he thinks, every single night, before going to bed. There's a chance that he might come home a (relatively) wealthy man and return to his clan's traditional occupation of making sure boats don't crash into rocks, with a wife... still short and without any ornamentation, but hey, money talks. Anyways, if you asked him, he'd probably say something about not wanting to think about it. What do you like about this character? I think playing a short, hornless green guy who's deeply negative could be fun. The lizard equivalent of Arnold from The Magic Schoolbus. How would you rate your role-playing ability? There's no way to answer this question in a way that isn't self-effacing or humble-bragging. Skip. It should be removed. Even this answer is self-effacing.

This would be really, really nice for space/zero gravity... if it were limited to that? This would be awesome. For actually moving around on the ship, it feels weird and off-putting. I have been informed by the server's best and brightest minds (OOC: William Murdoch) that it's not actually slower, it just looks and feels slower. I think the fact that everyone's initial reaction is either correctly calling it out as slower (it sure feels like it is!) or apparently mass-hallucinating that it's slower is, uh, not great. EDIT: For the record, I do think that it's just an illusory slowness, upon looking very closely at how fast I am going. That said, the gamefeel is totally off, now...

I suspect that I'm weird in that I'm both highly pro-Pun Pun and pro-killing him off forever. I'm also a pedantic freak and feel the need to correct the idea that monkeys were a "meme" in early SS13 (i.e, 2009 - 2011). The bar having a monkey was a Goonstation original dating back to, I think, Devstation, the second map and the one that Boxstation (which still sees wide usage) descends from. The monkey was named Mr. Muggles. It was /tg/ that made the name a reference. The justification is the same as the Alien crew having a cat: good for morale. Monkeys are fun. Everyone likes monkeys. The station has a lot of them. Let's hang out with a monkey in the bar. (Of course, times have changed. Way less monkeys onboard, now.) Random aside, but I've seen some people call Pun-Pun a chimpanzee. He's obviously not. He's a rhesus macaque, probably, or some other kind of Old World monkey, or, more likely, a genetically engineered primate bred for docility to further ease of usage in medical testing. Aside from that, I guarantee you that inside of a month the novelty of having a capybara will wear off and the poor beast will be in Pun-Pun's current position: trapped in a four-by-four holding cell, slipping on a banana peel, forever. Put Pun-Pun out of his misery. Make it canon. No replacement. His tiny suit and waistcoat are too large to fill.

Also, the capybara is named 'coconut' in the .dmi, a reference to the 'coconut doggy' meme. Capybaras are no more or less a meme than monkeys are. They're both funny looking dudes, which amuses people.

-1. Pet bloat has been a long-term problem ever since Ian was first added to /tg/ in 2012~. Kill Pun-Pun off and don't replace him. He almost never sees any usage, which is tragic, because I love monkeys. Other people have pointed out why putting a capybara into a cramped, tiny room is a form of animal cruelty. I cannot suspend my disbelief that a one-hundred and fifty pound semi-aquatic rodent would make for a good pet aboard on a cramped refinery/exploration vessel with no bodies of water or even any open grassy areas for it to frolic in. I say this as a staunch lover of all large South American mammals, such as the tapir and capybara. People should be asking why every department needs a pet when the vast majority of them, outside of Ian, who has seniority and makes sense, almost never see any use.

Sleeve patches already exist, I think, but you make a much better point. No need for these to be two separate items. I have shoulder-sleeve sprites for every flag pictured in the OP. May be missing some that are in the flagpatch selection, so I'll get to work on that.

i was aware, i just don't like where flagpatches are. these go on the sleeve.

side-note but the strongest argument against the sol alliance is that the tiny little flag they put in the upper left corner of everything looks like shit

i wasn't sure if the martian flag on the wiki (whose emblem in the middle appears to have been squashed, lol) was current. what do you think about the rest, Zelmana?

imagine pulling into an intergalactic gas station and they've got embroidered patches for sale right next to the cyber-vapes or something, idk Following a brief "discussion" on Discord, I went out of my way to sprite shoulder-sleeve patches for (most) in-game countries, plus a few Earth-nations whose flags are highly pleasing. Quality might not be the best, but it is what it is. Two of them are novelty patches related to space exploration history. They have equipped sprites, which are very small but (hopefully) distinctive enough to be told apart if you squint. They're meant to be attached to a jumpsuit. They're embroidered patches. The kind you buy at a gift shop. An interstellar gift shop in the year 2465 where everyone's speaking some kind of mish-mash of Chinese, German, and Spanish and there are aliens making weird noises at you. If people are interested in these, I'll make more and go through the trouble of actually getting everything into a .dmi. pre-emptive answer to a question "why would someone wear a USA flag patch in 2465?" why would a japanese guy who doesn't speak english wear a t-shirt that has "FUCK ME THE GUY" on it? because it looks cool

I was thinking that it'd just set you on fire and give you a lot of burn damage, yeah, not gib you.

I really enjoyed it. This was the first event I've attended in a while. (I believe the last one I saw was a KOTW event years ago.) I think it was good to get the point across that the Horizon is moving through a dangerous, sparsely inhabited sector of space and that working on the Horizon can be and canonically is a reasonably hazardous workplace, that space is not entirely safe, so on and so forth. The mention of hazard pay was a good touch. Felt it was kinda hard to gauge how canon-hazardous it is to work on the Horizon, because antags aren't canon. "This is the first time we've seen X," etc. (Of course, several other events with extremely high death tolls have probably gotten this point across already.) I think a good mix of less violent/intense events and ones like this one would be something like 75%-25%. Worth pointing out that an intense event wouldn't necessarily equate to things exploding and ship-to-ship combat, although I personally find it really interesting to see just how messed up the ship got after a solid hour of getting shot at. (It surprisingly wasn't that bad and I only almost died twice.) Side-note: I don't know what service roles are supposed to do during events. Engineering was doing damage control and occasionally manning weapons, operations was manning weapons, R&D was throwing out gear, most of security went out to board the abandoned Hephaestus vessel, and command was commanding. There doesn't seem to be much of a place for service during events like this, which is unfortunate. I can personally think of a few plausible events that'd be very intense for service players.

Standing behind the thrusters when the SCCV Horizon moves should literally just kill you. Instantly. It should be bad. I'm talking instant death, maximum burn damage to every single part of your body. And it should do that if you stand behind the Intrepid when it's taking off, too. It should actually fucking kill you. Non-joking summary: this idea stemmed from a brief discussion on Discord. Standing behind thrusters when the ship moves/a shuttle is taking off does not, to my surprise, kill you. It should. It should instantly kill you. There should be hazard signs. This idea's pretty straightforward (i.e, the thrusters should kill you if you're standing behind them), so I don't feel too bad about this thread being brief. Thanks for reading.

Thanks for the replies! I'm not one-hundred percent sure on what you mean here, but I think (I think! based on what I think you're saying) you have a pretty good point... all that being said, I don't think it would be too difficult to get a little more detailed while also being respectful. And for what it's worth, I haven't seen these vast generalizations. (But maybe I haven't been looking too hard.) Mentions of religion on the wiki are rare. Hinduism, the third-largest religion in the world, is mentioned exclusively on three pages relating to Xanu Prime. I guess Gadpathurians are all atheists. (Atheism, for what it's worth, is only mentioned on five pages: one relating to a region in Moghes, three relating to the DPRA and Tajaran culture, and one relating to... Xanu Prime.) I don't think you came off as rude at all! Thank you for your kind words. I agree that it's a pretty fraught topic and that, understandably, staff are a little hesitant because, you know... the playerbase is pretty varied. Kids of all ages, for better or worse, play Space Station Thirteen... and a lot of these kids aren't super nuanced writers. I will say that ethnicity/ethnoreligions are a whole 'nother can of worms. I'd also hope that Aurora goes for the Star Trek thing where no one gives a shit about race in the future but I have never seen a concrete answer on that on any server.

Big post below. tl;dr is: I agree with both of you, basically, but I am mentally unwell and am passionate about speculative fiction that deals with religion. Read at your own risk. I figured the date on the thread I linked made it all a little questionable, yeah. I (personally) don't see anything wrong with having the basics of something as large as the religions we're familiar with down, just in a sort of 'this is where X system of belief is at in the 25th century' sort of way. (If you can't tell, I'm a big fan of SF that bothers dealing with religion/religious questions: Dune, The Sparrow, A Canticle for Leibowitz, et cetera.) Before I write what is undoubtedly going to be a long, impassioned spiel about where religion slots into SF, I want to note that I have a degree in Religious Studies. I'm very passionate about this sort of thing, so if I come off in a certain way, just know that I have good intentions. I find the whole "religion is headcanon based" thing to be a little bit... odd? Headcanons tend to run into each other without about as much grace and panache as two passenger trains headed towards each other. I find it especially odd given that the vast majority of religions we have around today, in the 21st century, have been around for at least hundreds if not thousands of years. What, we figure out interstellar travel and suddenly every planet's got a different pope? Maybe when you get really far from Sol, and over a long period of time, that'd make sense... but we're not really dealing with that! There are magical (I can think of no other term to use, since Aurora isn't a hard SF setting) warp engines; we're not dealing with a thousand years between then and now, either, just four hundred and change. I'll definitely try and expand on it, which might be a little slow coming. (Just got hired to teach at a school two weeks ago, school for-real starts tomorrow, so that's eating up a lot of my free time.) Two ideas I had kicking around was a past incident where missionaries went, illegally, to an alien planet (either Moghes or Adhomai) and ended up getting killed, which would obviously be some kind of situation. Another would be further hammering in that Mormons are basically born-and-bred bureaucrats and intelligence agents (the stuff about Mormons being targeted for recruitment in the State Department and CIA is true.) These are people who have a cultural aversion to a lot of human foibles... i.e, drinking, smoking, premarital/adulterous sex... they're diligent. They're patriotic. I can imagine Biesel/Coalition/frontier people emphatically not trusting or liking mainstream Mormons and viewing them as Solarian imperialists. I think I mostly covered what you said above --- you make some good points, but I find the dearth of lore on actual religions a little odd and find the 'headcanon' thing to be a little off-putting. I'm not one-hundred percent sure on what you mean by 'not directly available in-game,' either, since the LDS movement is covered under 'Christianity.' (Yes, Mormons are Christian, specifically Christian in a way that makes perfect sense if you take into account the religious climate of the United States at the time Joseph Smith was preaching.) [I push my glasses up and my face is immediately transfigured into that of the nerd emoji] Space Station 13 roleplaying servers have always had lukewarm at best religious lore and a major part of this is that, at least in the days of yore (like, 2012-2015), a lot of the people involved were atheists who had zero interest in writing about religion in an SF setting. I'm talking generally, here, this isn't about you, GeneralCamo, just something I've noticed after years and years (half of my life) on the periphery of this whole thing. Anyways, lore basically exists as a framework for players to jump off of. All lore. The way I see it, the more there is and the more detailed it is, the better! Way back in the dark ages (2013), Tajaran lore was this: they are people who look like cats. They used to be owned by an alien race called The Slavemasters who are gone now. By the grace of God, Tajaran are now an actually compelling, well-written alien species! This was accomplished by actually writing something. Anyways, I dunno what my point was, here. I like science-fiction. Aurora is (generally) a good science-fiction setting (if slightly fantastical) that's presently lacking in some things. As for the impact it'd have on characters on the Horizon --- well, I already baked in some mild conflict that's broadly reflective of the tensions between the ASSN/Coalition. It would also (hopefully) allow people, if they so choose, to play a Mormon character that isn't running entirely off of headcanon. I agree that Space Mormon is an inherently funny concept.

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