Frances

Delta leaving has been a meme for a while now. Let's stop trying to pick fights with each other, people. Come on. Happy new year.

Can halo be un-IP-banned? He says he can't laugh at stupid threads anymore without asking me to take screenshots for him and it makes him sad.

Is the inability of forum-banned members to read the forums intentional, or an oversight? I've talked to a few people who have been forumbanned (Chaz, Techno, Halo), and they all seemed to be unable to access the forums at all.

What did you change in the records?

Could be nice. Would be a bit awkward for doctors coming directly from Baycode, buuuut they'll adapt. It's not like giving water to a Tajaran would make them explode or anything like that. What I like about this isn't that it nerfs species or discriminates against them, actually, but that it actually makes species feel different from a medical standpoint. That's something it would be good to have. Not essential by any means, but fun. As for the suggestion specific to Skrells, that could be fun too. Make Skrell medicine require plasma, so that it isn't produced every round "just in case" (there's not enough Skrells to really incentivize chemists to anyway), but so it can still be made in a pinch (when it would really be needed) without having to go through a million hoops.

This is just my take, but the problem isn't that she's extraordinary. It's that she's extraordinary in six or seven different ways at once. It's no fun to play characters that are bland and average in every possible way. We don't come here to sit down and continue an extension of our lives on a computer. We come here to do (and see) cool stuff. But there's a good way to do cool stuff, and a bad way to do cool stuff. There are two (good) ways you can do this. It's not an all-or-nothing situation, where you have to turn your character in the blandest everywoman possible to earn your unban. But the collection of traits you (and I) have presented are all... extreme. It's not fair to say that your character had a rough upbringing, because it's more than that - she's using her experience to let herself get in trouble and kick ass on a regular basis. It's also not fair to say that your character has an interest in science despite her unusual background, because it's more than that again - she's literally top-of-her-class out of nowhere, and has the super-smarts despite possessing the attitude of someone who couldn't keep their attention focused on a book for more than a few minutes. It's again not fair to say that your character was slightly genetically modified when she was born as an illegal genetic experiment, has the appearance of a fanfiction mutant, and comes with a backstory and personality that would be better suited for the heroine of a teen novel than for one of many side characters trying to collectively create a narrative together on the Aurora. So, for the two things you can do: One, you can focus on a trait, bring it to the extreme, and get rid of the other extreme traits so you actually have a chance to focus on developing something in a complex and organic way. Want Seon to be confrontational? Make her suffer for it. Make her feel conflicted, make her face consequences for the fights she picks, make her face regrets rather than always doing the "right" thing in the most cavalier way possible. Want Seon to be a super smart and fight to overcome the odds of her rough upbringing? Represent the struggles incurred by her personality. Make her actually feel complexed and ashamed by her appearance, not "if you look at me I'll break your face". If she's smart, don't make her earn it for free. Make her actually studious, diligent, captivated with her work. Don't make her the kid that gets perfect grades despite never being in class because they have to go fight against the bad guys. Want her to not give a shit about anybody's feelings and act super weird? Don't get into fights with people and break the rules so much. Weirdos avoid people or ignore them, they don't get upset with them and try to fight with them out of the blue unless they're a movie villain. Or two, you can keep her personality as it is, but tone down every aspect by a fair bit. She can be a lab assistant that's sorta weird, sorta confrontational, sorta dickish. She should still face consequences for her actions, and keep in mind that she would be fired the moment she got into trouble, because NanoTrasen has better things to do than care about one of the many, many lab interns they could get. If you go down this path, I'd advise getting rid of the gene modding, because it's probably the easiest thing to alter about Seon without significantly altering the rest of her personality, seeing as it doesn't really seem to have any impact on how she thinks or behaves. As a whole, something I think your character is in a need of is real flaws. If you examine the flaws she currently has, none of them are really bad. Her terrible personality doesn't prevent her from getting a job on a high-class research station or actually doing the things she wants. Her past as a deeply-troubled urchin doesn't seem to prevent her from being one of the smartest people alive, and only seems to have consequences for the people she gets into fights with, not for herself. Her extensive gene modding still makes her pretty (how can you be complexed with your body image and flaunt your sexuality so much at the same time?), and only really serves as an additional excuse for her to get angry at people. These flaws aren't good, because they don't feel grounded. They don't feel real. They make people think, "How could this character really be so lucky about everything", and not "Man, I really feel as if somebody could experience those things." I'm just trying to offer advice as a fellow roleplayer to another. I don't have a clue what the whole dealo with "authority" and "responsibility" is, but the best resolution for this sort of issue is pretty much for the community to partake and help in the best way they can. It's silly to say someone shouldn't be listened to just because they're not a min, cause we're all doing the same thing here - roleplaying.

We need to calm down a bit. You people need to evaluate actions for their worth and intent (intent mostly to decide how to deal with problems and talk to people). I get that the accusations of an anti-TheFurry metaclique are annoying, but so is being told you've done something bad simply because people got upset and made complaints. This is HRP. People will get upset. Concrete examples (like Hive posted) are good. Simply pointing out that people are upset is less helpful, because on Aurora that's about as observant as making a remark on the color of the sky. This isn't an issue of genetic powers, though. One of the argument presented here is that Furry gets powers every round, when literally the sole purpose of geneticists is to deal with powers. (You can't pretend that cloning and organ printing are full-time occupations.) If there's something to look at, it's behavior. Skull's posts are good start for outlining the issue, and tbh there isn't much we can do as a crowd except wait for him to come back with a full account of what he's observed. And let's stop fucking cursing at each other for fucking Christ's sake.

Except you said Furry's fault was to trap an engineer in maint for laughs, while he claims said engineer wasn't trapped at any point, and responded to Furry's actions receptively. One of the two is using powers at the expense of others for the sole purpose of being annoying. The other is using powers to create an amusing situation for another player. Shouldn't the two be dealt with differently? And even if the latter represents an IC fault, shouldn't it be met with an incident report, rather than admin action?

I've failed to fully explain my idea. Precedent is good, but when you fail to enforce precedent its utility erodes away. People are bringing up the excuse that "other geneticists have done the same thing lately and haven't been punished", which puts us in the trap of "if we fail to enforce it then it shouldn't be a rule". You can decide how much that should be true, but the issue you have with Furry's conduct is one of principle, not one of "other people get punished for it", right?

Furry's actions are his. If he does something bad, then it's on him and should be judged taking into account context and precedents. If there's a hate club against a user, it should be dismantled, but that's a different problem altogether and shouldn't absolve the user of their own wrongdoings (though I think a real hate club is unlikely to exist, considering the people who made complaints against Furry are pretty diverse, mostly unrelated, and tend to have some reasonable ground or justification when they do). Also, two wrongs don't make a right. Skull's point isn't about other geneticists breaking the rules or not, it's about Furry actually receiving special treatment because of the "hate squad"/all the complaints against him. Just treat this as if it were a random player you didn't know. That's how complaints should be addressed, not with "well, this person gets picked on a lot, I'll probably assume that they're blameless without really considering or addressing the actual issues brought up". In this case, however. If what Furry really did was try to spook a maint engineer who was obviously roleplaying along with the whole thing, then I think it's a bit unfair to punish him for that alone. The rule on genetics was placed to stop rampaging hulks, but it doesn't mean geneticists are a special role on station which is exempt from fun altogether.

Gonna give MetaphysicalPersona a chance to answer, but one thing I wanna add concerning what's been brought up with skills is that characters are expected to have a reasonable skillset. Seon is a lab assistant, but she's both super young and knows how to fight, and coincidentally has one of the most confrontational personalities on the station. It's already pushing it to have a farmhand develop a pronounced interest in theoretical research and suddenly excel in all of their academical endeavors, but having the same character act like a complete dick and constantly get in trouble like a highschool drama villain probably crosses a line somewhere. Like, really, the only acceptable instance of a young lab assistant who's super smart and knows what to do in a fight would be one where the character doesn't metagame, doesn't validhunt, and doesn't break the law or do their best to get into fights whenever possible. With great power comes great responsibility. If you're really intent on creating a character who's a genius, make it about providing an interesting storyline for all involved, not about picking fights with everyone/being literally flawless/some impossible combination of both.

You should reply to the criticism that was given. I tried to write a post detailing issues with Seon, as did Dea. Can we talk about some of these and engage in dialogue? This is probably going to take a bit of time to figure out.

I'll try to come up with a list of Seon's combined traits which essentially make her a Mary Sue character: She's extremely young yet has non-negligible experience in various fields She's got extensive combat skills (martial arts and firearms) despite being barely more than a teenager, and her primary occupation being centered nowhere around combat She's aggressive, confrontational, and tends to behave like a street thug, despite working on a high-grade research station She makes a fair share of lewd comments and openly engages in creepy or disturbing behavior (again in what should be a research lab) She earned her qualifications by being super smart/top of her class despite being deeply troubled Her backstory is really outlandish and dramatic (illegal test tube baby, somehow beat the shit out of a police officer as a teen and got released to work on the Aurora a year later) She's been gene-modded far more than any regular human you'd expect to encounter in our lore None of these traits seem to be presented in a "bad" light. She's still pretty, her outbursts are against people who are presented as having "deserved" it, her supposedly undesirable personality traits makes her more "cool and edgy" than a honest social reject, and she manages to avoid most punishment despite engaging in outlandish actions. Now, the thing is most of these traits can be played well, with careful thought. But you can't do all of them at once! That's just a bad, bad recipe for trouble. A character that does all of these things at once is way too bloated with "special factor", and it doesn't give you any chance to expand on any of the traits in a believable manner. Furthermore, your character ends up being very shallow, because there are little to no character in both real life and fiction that have all these special traits at once, and it makes it hard both to relate to the character, and actually roleplay them in a way they would be realistically expected to act. If you're interested in proceeding further with this, and finding out exactly what Seon's flaws are and what the best ways to fix them would be, then I'd start by asking you a question: What do you think you enjoy most about roleplaying on SS13?

The lore can be used to justify a lot of things, sometimes in silly (but not too silly) ways. For example, for a research station to have a bar, it could be assumed that drinking culture is far more important in 2457 than it is in the western world today. So adding a second surgery room isn't unrealistic. However, I'd like to see what people think of it as far as gameplay is concerned.

Revisiting this thread I have to stand with the people against the addition of a 2nd operating theatre. Does the addition of a second OR make medical's job easier? Yes. Do we want to make medical's job easier? It reduces conflict, reduces challenge, reduces the opportunity for chaos (and having to manage this chaos), and overall makes the game a bit more safe and boring. The lack of a second operating room does not make medical literally unplayable. It creates situations where crafty surgeons should have to prioritize, engage in triage, attempt to stabilize patients, or mount temporary ORs (using readily available tools from genetics or robotics). It's also not an exceedingly common situation, as it could be on say, Colonial Marines (which does have multiple ORs).

So everyone who works on the Aurora lives in Tau Ceti?

Related question, what does the commute of a person coming to work on the Aurora from Earth look like? From the colonies?

I'm curious. You've got a list of planets, industries, an established political makeup, and so on. Probably more paragraphs on this faction's political assembly than I've ever written on the lore. But I feel like it's missing something that makes all this... special? It's a very cold and clinical description. It's not missing tangibility as a believable faction, mind you, but it's missing tangibility as as a captivating element of a story. Would you be interested in writing (or having others write) about the culture of the faction? Their way of life, their mentalities, what their political views actually are? You could also expand on the planets. Who's in them, why, what's their relationship to Tau Ceti and what kind of people from the faction could we expect to see on the Aurora? What do the planets look like?

The Skrell rework isn't done. I applied a few minor patches to get rid of unwanted elements and quickly introduce new concepts, but there's still time to expand on these concepts more. I'm not that interested in the concept of "races". Every other species already has a bunch of very distinct cultural groups. Differences in cultures are mostly attributed to closed social systems, with globalization resulting in a gradual "merging" of cultures. As Skrells live in a very unified society, I don't think there would be major cultural differences between most of them (this isn't to say there wouldn't be some, but it wouldn't be significant enough to have different Skrell races). Now, for the planets. Mrimatool's lore mentioned two important planet: Jargon IV, the Skrell homeworld, and Aliose, an ice world. As far as I'm concerned, these two planets still exist. There are no more "cavemen" Skrells, Skrells benefit from roughly the same level of technology all across the federation. Cities on both Aliose and Jargon IV would be high-tech. As Jargon IV is a cross between a swamp world and a water world, you would have a mix of above-ground and underwater cities, which would look roughly like this: As for Aliose, the planet is mostly comprised of extensive underground complexes with a few above-ground installations. Finally, keep in mind that the Skrell have a rich colonial empire, which is comparable to the one of humans. So your Skrells could also originate from whatever wacky colonies you want to make up - and if you're looking for inspiration to create new colonies, consider that Skrells are pretty much bent on colonizing anything that holds scientific or economical value, regardless of how difficult the actual colonization process would be. So expect them to settle in some pretty weird and creative places and try to find ways to adapt to their environment. This information will be added to the wiki once we have time to get all of our ducks in a row and create a series of Skrell fluff pages (while streamlining the core article).

Looks like I missed that part. My mistake.

Conceptually speaking, she's got a really rough shell. This is what I think is her main flaw, tbh. I spent a while observing her interacting with Safiya in genetics yesterday, and honestly... she's not a bad character. Yeah. Surprisingly. We've had our share of disturbed, mentally questionable young adults on Aurora, and not all of them have been terrible, so yolo. And I don't think there's anything inherently flawed with the kind of character you're trying to have (it certainly delves into fantasies, but hey, that's why we roleplay, to create a fun narrative that appeals to us.) The problem is with the presentation. As people pointed out, there's actually a ton of unstable or weird characters (in a good or at least interesting way) on station, but the difference is most of them play the trope in a realistic and much more subtle way. There's no two ways to go about it, the issues with Seon-rin lie with the attributes she displays outwardly. A history of mental illness or questionable behavior in her records. Lewd comments to strangers or coworkers. Her constantly defiant attitude towards the law, which seems to be landing her into the brig quite regularly. This isn't a problem because of her nature - it's because of the way she displays this nature. She should make a greater effort to blend in. Reduce the clashes with authority figures, reduce the outwards creepiness. You don't have to get rid of it. But it's something a character like her would probably camouflage. You can have a very fucked up nature but it's something you would hide if you expect to survive in society. That way, it's much less likely to get onto people's nerves all the time, and when you do reveal it, it's all the more striking and impressive (because it's actually fresh, rather than the same old routine we're already accustomed to.)

If you can steal a medical jumpsuit you can probably steal a syringe (they're literally everywhere. Science. Medbay. Brig infirmary. Cargo where they get thrown down disposals. Just come up with an excuse to ask for one.) I'm not against having this mechanic for the sake of not having it. I think it's counter-intuitive for a stealth item, which is expected to give no immediate warning to your victim, to have a chance to produce a visible red text log when certain (maybe non-obvious) conditions are met. For a highly specific payoff in a highly unusual situation which is unlikely to happen, and for which other solutions are already present.

Would there be a benefit, though? If you have any job where your hardsuited target wouldn't have a reason to freak out were you to inject them with a syringe (science, medical), you would already have access to perfectly good syringes, making the parapen's only asset, once again, stealth. Additionally, this would be for the tradeoff of no longer making the parapen "dummy-proof", because you'd expect it to be stealthy, except it would come with an unexpected "non-stealth" function (instead of giving you a harmless "you can't figure out a way to apply the parapen to your target's skin" message) when applying it to any hardsuited individuals.

If you want to do that, scrap recovery, replace it by a second operating room, then turn the psych office into free space for the operating rooms (could rework the whole current OR+storage+recovery+psych block into something fancy) and move the psych office into the break room. I would argue that the break room is somewhat used (mostly for characters who want to idle for short periods of time), but it could be removed, if absolutely necessary. Recovery in its current state is essentially useless.