Kaed

You can't design a game intented for 20+ people around 'what if lowpop' All sorts of bad things happen in lowpop rounds you can't do anything about such as: There is no engineering so the station has no power There is no security so the changeling/vamp succs everyone There is no medical so people that get injuries just die There is no science and the malf AI borgs everyone For the sake of argument though, let's actually look at the radstorm event. What actually happens? A notice comes up that radiation storm is on the way Everyone who cares wanders to the nearest maint shaft and heads inside Everyone stands around for 2-3 minutes staring into space or talking to each other, waiting for it to end so they can get back to their round. That isn't very interesting. I think it would be a much more exciting event if there was some iota of danger, a smidgen of threat for the unprepared, rather than just turning into Maint Station 13 for couple minutes.

Not really. Does everyone need to carry a weapon just in case of spiders? Get someone to help you. Gather general tools to put on a table in your department, in case someone needs them. Power failures happen, it's already common knowledge you need a crowbar around in case of emergency, what's a screwdriver too? They are already very common. I could see adding them to heads that don't already have it, but we don't need to be placing them on every table.

Presumably, the same thing that happens to a new player who walks onto an openspace tile or gets attacked by a spider or bear, if they're still a thing. They call for help and someone helps them or they end up in pain crit until they leave. Threats to character safety should be intuitive to avoid, but they don't need to be baby safe. Tools are publicly available to every crew member, it's not hard to find them with a little experience, and it is not unintuitive to unscrew a maintenance panel to get into the tunnel.

It's time for another round of Kaed Pitches a Big Project He May Or May Not Commit To! Something I've been bouncing around for a while in my head is a reform of how hydroponics and cooking work. Right now they mostly work, aside from Nanako's additional cooking code for procedural food, by combining certain foods together in a special machine (be it microwave, oven, or fryer) and pressing a button to wait before your food comes out. Nanacode food is the same, except what pops out is based on what you put in and your choice of food container for it. Food, however, is mostly a chem that exists in either the animal protein (for meats) and nutriment (for everything else) and your character's mob processes both of these two chemicals to give you nutritional value. The type of food you ate is irrelevant, their contents are largely going to be either of those two things, and the flavors you taste are given to you by the food container you consume from, not by what's inside it. That's not a bad system, it works. This is what I will call 'Black Box' cooking. What I'd mostly like to do is inject a bit more interactivity and complexity into the process of cooking. I will give you an example of what I mean. This is how you make a burger now: Break an egg into a bag of flour Pick the dough that just appeared and fell on the floor up and put it in an oven tray, which you put in the oven Quickly pull the resultant bun out 10 seconds later because otherwise the nuclear reactor core you call the oven will burn it Shove the bun and a slab of meat into the microwave and press on Retrieve burger. Shove an entire wedge of cheese into the burger if you want to. Give the burger to a passing crewmember who will begin shrieking at you if you try to pull out the EFPoS. Here is how making a burger will ideally work in my plan Put flour and egg into a mixing bowl item or beaker, because you can no longer break eggs directly into the flour bag like a neanderthal Pick up the resulting dough and interact with it to shape it into your desired shape (i.e. hamburger bun, hot dog bun, bread) Put it in an oven tray and then into the oven, which no longer has to preheat and is just on or off. It also cooks said bun at a reasonable fucking rate instead of burning it in less than 20 seconds. Go begin preparing the meat in the meantime. Pick up a piece of beef, which is now a distinct object from non-cow meats. It contains 10 units of Raw Beef, which unless you are unathi, you should not be eating. Put the beef(s) in the grinder. Retrieve the container of raw beef, add some salt or pepper (after putting it in a mixing bowl, you savage!) Put the resulting burger patties on the grill (a new object) and while they cook, retrieve your hot, fresh burger buns from the oven. Once the meat is done cooking, pick up the Hot Patty with a spatula (don't use your hands unless you are wearing gloves or are unathi, or you will burn yourself and drop the meat on the floor violating health and safety regulations which will result in you being brigged) and insert it into the bun. Now you have a Basic Burger! You may also add cheese slices, produced by further slicing a cheese wedge, or vegetables, such as Sliced Tomato or Diced Onions, both of which are produced by using a knife on the relevant vegetable, to make more complex and tasty burgers to order. All of these items contain reagents that are named and flavored after what they came from, which will be child reagents of nutriment and animal protein. Due to how tasting works, you should be able to taste what is in your burger as a result. Cooking will function similarly across the board. I will be adding things like onions and lettuce, too, and probably using better sprites for things. Food that is typically not eaten raw like potatoes rice flour and meat will have a uncooked reagent inside their vegetable or meat container. Eating uncooked foods like this will cause you to receive less nutrition and also some gross taste messages. We'd call this system "modular cooking', because it involves adding ingredients into a food item like a burger or hot dog manually to upgrade it. Other ideas: -Portable grill. Works like the kitchen grill, but can be dragged with you. It can't cook as many burgers or hot dogs at once as the kitchen grill, but it can hold some buns and fixings inside its cooler, allowing you to have a BBQ anywhere! -Mouseburgers/sausages. For when you want to show your appreciation for the local rodent population -Mystery meat patties/sausages made from more than one meat, which may or may not contain rodent filler. For when you want to be a dodgy chef.

I'm saying I think both should be added in to try and help vampires judge how to best achieve their goals. Just because you might want to resist and die rather than being a thrall doesn't mean that I as a vampire want to leave a corpse around for security to find if I can help it. Giving some kind of prior indication ICly how the interaction will go beyond LOOC would be nice, if you're going to take away irresistible thralls. This is a compromise that doesn't screw over anyone particularly more than the other, by not being an overt nerf and also providing a way to deter vampires from bugging you if you don't like it. Though I should point out that I still think people should suck it up or be punished rather than be allowed to just die because being thralled rustles their jimmies.

We can't have opt-outs decide for the player, because most people forget to ever check their antag settings unless reminded, so it's not necessarily representative of fact. It should only serve as a guideline, not an alternative to choosing to die in character. What if you change your mind, too, because you're enjoying your roleplay with the vampire? OOC settings should not determine your IC decisions automatically.

I'm not against trying this, though honestly I feel like if we're remaking security to only facilitate cells and 3-5 employees, it needs to be a lot smaller. I'd honestly recommend changing it to 1 departmental security for each department and 2 regular sec officers, a warden, an HOS, and a couple of losers pretending to do forensics stuff. The whole buddy system for patrols is pretty iconic and it's weird to only have 1 general sec officer. If they're decentralized you can afford to have a few more officers, particularly if you're taking away sec channel for the non-general officers. That being said, I see some merits in people's suggestions that this will be a train wreck, but I also think giving it a try is worth it. We should shake things up once and a while to see how it works.

I wholeheartedly agree with any solution that ends in more dead robots. And also with this sudden agenda Dronz has to push as many anti-antagonist suggestions as possible.

That's not really viable, it's very hard to judge when someone is in crit from being drained, I've tried doing that before to get free blood, and it's really tricky, sometimes they die before you finish embracing them. I don't think becoming embraced is something you need to be able to resist, you are a free willed entity after and can do what you want. The thirst can be dealt with in a non murdery way if you want to, and you can snitch on them and go back to diddling around in science if you want.

There's no need for you to be able to resist The Embrace. You are under no obligation to follow the vampires orders at that point, and it costs them no blood to embrace you. You can just fuck off and do whatever if you want. If they did not take the time to check if you are going to be a viable vampire ally, it's their fault.

I would consider dying a punishment for refusing to play along, but it's also got to refund the blood in the process. Admins should not have to be called every time this happens, and people should not be cryoing because they got thralled. It would be nice if you could tie the 'thrall' opt in option to this, and maybe allow vampires to see somehow in game viable targets. This would cut down a lot on accidental resist murders and salt. Like, a way to scan someone you can see and 'check if their mind is open to subversion'

No. Extended is not 'an option' it's in the secret rotation so that you can have rounds where there are not antagonists, to throw people off and prevent overt metagame. People should not be joining secret on the vague hope that the 1 in , what, 16(?) chance occurs that it's extended. That's like joining extended in the hope that the 'random antag' event occurs. It's probably not going to. If you join secret, you should be prepared for antagonists, They might not happen, but you should not be allowed to join under the expectation that you can throw tantrums and quit when it's not secret extended, forcing the antag to get an admin to refund their blood or find a ghost to put in the construct or soul gem. If you can't hack being thralled or cult converted, then just don't join. There's a low chance it's going to happen given the other game modes exist, and if it does, just deal with it like a mature adult.

Alternative idea: punish people who join secret rounds then throw tantrums at antagonist interaction. It's always baffled me that people are allowed to join around where antagonist can appear but then expect that the antagonist aren't going to interact with him are using their antagonist abilities on them.

I don't think a regularly occurring basic round type that changes the entire context of the setting is going to happen. At best you get an event out of this.

That is an opinion that I do not share. I think both have merits for interesting roleplay depending on what you're looking for. This isn't the thread about complaining how thralling ruins the game, either. For my part, I think that the Embrace is mostly not used because it's so difficult to get the ability. It should absolutely not be an automatic thing that happens just for sucking someone's blood, but rather something that you can do by choice much earlier on. Uncontrollable antagonist creation is a recipe for a very toxic environment, especially if they are under no obligation to cooperate.

This is hilarious, changelings are by far the weakest antagonist in the game and the most terrible at doing anything interesting. There is zero actual reason why a fake changeling should not be able to hear everything around them even better than an actual corpse. Lings need all kinds of Buffs, actually they need a rework entirely but that's another story, stop trying to make special exceptions for them to make them stay shittier than everything else. I like this idea in general and don't think that should be special exceptions.

By getting it from the new aliens. You're just disassociating the poison from fish, not removing content that you can make from it previously.

They can be edited to take regular fish meat, which can be procured via cargo or perhaps some starting fish filet available in the freezer. Which do not contain poison. And perhaps the poison can be renamed to something less fish, like xenotoxin or something.

I personally don't give a flying dung heap about the legacy of the server. It's about time we move past dwelling on old jokes and memes into a more modernized server with a few more shreds of originality, rather than keeping cartoony old sprites and space fish on eternal life support. Though I will agree that the two sprites could do with a little bit of clear differentiation.

It's actually fairly common in cult rounds, but point taken.

This is a good guide, but it skims over advice on how to deal with a fundamental issue with cult rounds by never mentioning it or potential solutions for it - people who hate cultists and cult rounds and rage-ghost or suicide rather than being converted/soul-stoned. EIther way, you are left with a corpse or useless soulstone. You should address ways to avoid or fix this very common issue. Also: You can put runes in the chapel, I have literally taken it over and walled it off with runes in a cult round. The only thing holy ground does is block badghosts. Also also: It should bear some mentioning that hidden runes can currently be revealed by pulling up a floor tile, due to an oversight in invisibility code.

It would be better to do something new and interesting with energy weapons than to take away what ballistics has now. As a design philosophy adding features is generally preferable to removing existing ones, because the latter tends to make people more upset than getting something fresh to play with. Ballistic weapons are in a place of realism with how dangerous they are, whereas lasers remain a joke largely because of stubborn mindsets like this that insist they should stay stagnant where they are rather than trying anything else. What if instead of energy cartridges you swap out like ammo magazines, there is a sort of optional bulky side battery box that can be put on belts or back slots or something, and then plugged into a gun you are using to provide it with constant charge. The battery box can carry any of the standard batteries you'd have in APCs, but only charges the gun about as fast as putting it in the charger, if not slower. This would provide a sort of middle ground between 'having to run off and charge your gun' and 'having a way to reload while in combat'. And since it runs off a battery rather than the functionally unlimited energy of a powered station, eventually you do have to retreat to get your resources back. It should be difficult and time consuming to take the battery out of the pack and put it back in, to prevent people from carrying a backpack of batteries and just swapping it out of the pack for more laser ammo in mid combat - there should eventually be a point where you have to retreat to recharge your stuff, but this way, you are able to somewhat compete with ballistics in battle, especially if science and mining have been working well to make the good batteries.

The only benefit lasers have over ballistics is they can fire through transparent glass. They currently cannot be reloaded in combat, which is somewhat of a problem because they are already fundamentally weaker in combat than ballistics, which: -Often have a higher rate of fire, since most of them are automatic or semi automatic -Deal way more damage -Leave shrapnel and break bones/organs, both of which require surgery to fix as opposed to simply slapping on some salve or swallowing a dermaline pill. (and shrapnel can occur from a SINGLE BULLET on a FULLY ARMORED PERSON) -Are capable of limb gibbing much easier than lasers. -More armors provide laser than blunt resistance So I don't really get this insistence that lasers will become too strong if you let people change out battery packs. They're already so weak that people will always use ballistics if they can get their hands on them. Security only uses lasers in combat because that's generally all they're equipped with, while the almost entire antagonist battery of weapons is ballistic.

Organic damage. Anyway I don't understand why people keep saying that the server is not ready for transhumanism. You just present the scenario (people can resleeve) and people play in it. We already have robotic unathi as a species despite the fact that that was the last species I would have possibly pick to be transhuman Jesus Christ I'm still annoyed about that moving on. It's legitimately not that difficult, unless the real concern is that you don't know how to do lore for it and you're just sort of hiding behind the excuse that the players can't handle the change.

Cool. I'm sure you had interesting roleplay there, in that situation where you were allowed to essentially become a minor antagonist in the round because someone cloned you illegally and you could scream about your rights being infringed and maybe weep about how you aren't a real person anymore and have no soul depending on your character's motivation for opting to not be cloned. I'm sure you would have been well in your rights to behave like an aggressive lunatic or depressive shell, depending on your flavor of choice. However, I don't think cloning should exist as bait for self-victimization roleplay (because it is impossible for you to be cloned without your OOC consent) and a potential to become a self-designated (minor) round antagonist. The purpose of cloning should be to allow people to participate in the round again as the person they joined to play, in the role they were supposed to be in.