Kaed

Just like captains, HoSes, and to some extent, Borg and AI. They can still be punished for ganking or emping you through a wall. And the IPC can still kill/detain them first. Nothing is wrong with a conflict having no magical resolution. Sometimes you just have to fight. And we still have soul stones.

Now he gets it. You don't deserve anything just from playing a game. If your character can't function in an antag (or any) role, you don't deserve to have game code rewritten to facilitate you. You roll with what you have. Role-playing is like that. Should we let diona be sec officers and make them get a speed boost for that role, too? You know, they're players too, and security is a major part of rounds. This is the kind of argument you're making. Now, I someone wants to rehash a new role for IPCs in cult, fine. But adding hasty patches to make them almost work isn't something anyone is obligated to do for IPCs, and I think more effort needs to be put in than this. v- Also, what Ash says. -v

Sorry, I was being the token voice that complains loudly every time someone suggests we remove a reference from the game. I figured I would try it out for once. Unfortunately, I don't have the strength of conviction to argue about it in long, multi-paragraph posts about how a reference is harmless and how you can't take a joke, and that it and makes the game fun, or run to reddit to rustle a posse of off-server SS13 players to flame you. To be honest, I don't really give a shit about the mining picks. This sounds like it would make things less annoying and old timey, more fitting for an advanced space station in the future. My primary concern about this is that if every miner has a KA, we might have problems down the line of people weaponizing their mining equipment. Can KA break through walls and windows? When it's fully upgraded, it sounds like it's going to be dealing 30+ damage per hit, with multiple shots per pump and splash damage. This could be basically like giving cargo a free infinite use rocket launcher that just take a while to build? I admit I haven't used a KA very much, maybe it has some kind of limiting factor I don't know about. What is to stop antagonists from doing this?

But Burger, the pickaxe is our reference to Dwarf Fortress and or Minecraft. You can't take them out, it's more important that we keep references in the game than than make it realistic! Those pickaxes are vitally important to the culture of this server. owo

Stopgap solutions are supposed to be short term to keep the game from breaking down, and mean that someone plans to actually do something larger eventually. Right now, we have a perfectly good one that won't cause gameplay issues, in that IPCs just can't be cultists. Unless there is a plan to make the stopgap progress to something else, with clear goals and plans, I can't get behind this. Cult code is a giant steaming mess, and people don't generally even want to touch it. Who's going to do it? And why can't we just leave things as they are now while someone works on the project to rework IPC and cult interactions? Not being valid cultist is much more stable than this PR, because it doesn't create potential situations where an admin has to intervene because, for instance, there are only IPC cultists, and they can't make conversion runes. Because I don't see being a half cultist with crippled functionality as much of an improvement and could cause issues down the line depending on how long we leave it like that. People recently called for the removal of changeling until something better can be done. We can do a similar thing here with IPC cultists.

Prosthetic limbs can be repaired by the owner of the limb, unlike IPCs, who cannot self heal or repair without outside help, and them being damaged by an EMP also does not result in the death of the cultist who has them, as it does for IPCs. You can die from having a prosthetic heart in an EMP, but if that happens, oh well. Shit happens sometimes, and you can't cover every base. And optional character trait is a much smaller problem than universally shared xeno race traits. The way things were was the easier route because it involves not caring about design consistency or logic. A number of people in this thread clearly do, even if you do not, but our opinion remains just as valid. "It's rarely a problem' does not mean 'it's never a problem'. The fact that this thread is so contentious is evidence to the fact that your ideas are not the only ones people have. But, again. I'll reiterate for the third time now. Playing conceptual tug of war is not accomplishing anything. We need to find a middle ground that makes everyone happy, or at least not angry, and stop telling the other side they're wrong because we don't like their ideas.

He makes a good point, if the round spawns 3 cultist who are all IPCs, how are they ever going to progress? A cultist needs to be able to perform all functions of being a cultist, otherwise you just getting a participation award and stalling the round progression. Admins should not need to intercede just to make the round function.

Prove that Nar'sie has any interest in non-organic life or is capable of changing it. This isn't really an argument anymore than 'prove that god doesn't exist' is an argument for there being god. This topic is getting really tangential... maybe we should be discussing a way to make everyone happy instead of force our opinions on each other. I present, again, the Ravtar vs Nar'sie idea.

I have an idea, after some thought for an alternative to shoehorning IPCs into the blood cult What if we ported in Ravtar to some extent (probably not the whole thing, because they I think there's some mechanics they have that don't quite work here, like the Ark spawning), and IPC can both start as a member of the cult and be converted to it. And we'll have a sort of Narnar vs Ravtar thing

I like how you posit your opinions about design as if they are hard facts. Aside from certain interactions in various round types, many of which are purely mechanical/code based in nature, there is no evidence that ANYONE has a soul, ICly. That's what the purpose of faith is. The rest of this is just more justification behind your support of this idea under the guise of delivering an irrefutable arguement. Now, there is one part of your post I can get behind, though. Porting over the machine cult to this server. That feels a lot more like it would fit with IPCs being included than this shoehorned excuse for player inclusion. But this is sort of off topic, because this thread is not about adding Ravtar.

Fine, then just accept that I don't agree with you and take the hint that I don't want to argue this any more, please. I don't like it, you're not convincing me here.

-scrubbed for being irrelevantly snippy-

Eeeh. You still can't convert an unlawed borg or AI, so. Alternate interpretation: it's something fundamental about their nature as technological beings. And the loyalty implants, I'm glad you brought those up - they're a technological defense. Much like borg and AI, the cult cannot influence something that is technological, because as he is the Geometer of Blood. "I'm a magical dark god I don't gotta explain shit lol" is unsatisfying and lazy as an explanation for this inconsistancy, as far as I am concerned. IPC being unlinked to things only means as much as you choose to make it mean, and code can easily be changed, like it already was here before you made your PR. The point is, we can argue with each other until we're blue in the face, but I don't support this PR. Synthetics should stay out of the cult, just like they stay out of vampires and changelings. Organics only, fool. -1

Nar'sie corrupts the entire station when he arrives on our plane itself. By then your status as living or synthetic is completely irrelevant because reality is being warped. But you can't convert borgs or AIs, for heck's sake, I don't honestly see a compelling reason why IPCs should be convertible too unless you're going from a purely mechanical standpoint, which says you can 'because they have hands and count as a human mob'. Are they somehow super special snowflakes that are completely different from other synthetics? How is that, exactly? There isn't really a reason being given other than 'nar'sie can do anything he wants'. Which again, is a justification for inclusiveness, not a logical reason for doing this. Even you admit it's not tenable for them to be a regular cultist because of how their self-damage mechanics work. Why do you think being a crippled half cultist is somehow more reasonable than just... not being able to be a cultist, for the sake of narrative consistency? I'm also PRETTY sure (but not completely certain) that you take damage from using rune papers, because it's still using a rune. The only benefit is you can carry the rune in your pocket. So this doesn't even solve the problem?

Don't state that they are 'unwilling to stand', make sure it's completely neutral by not giving any prompt, otherwise people would instantly know that someone is force laying because the prompt shows up. Otherwise, I've seen this asked for before, and agree with it.

I'm pretty sure the fact that IPCs have souls or not is something that's hotly contested ideologically among many different races. There hasn't been any 'confirmation' that IPCs have souls beyond 'hey the game mechanics create a ghost from a corpse because that's how the game works and it hasn't been changed to reflect differing situations' (much like until now there was no coding regarding IPCs not being converted, and for a while, way back, changelings could sting and impersonate IPCS). It would probably not be hard to make it so IPC 'ghosts' are at a higher invisibility value than other ghosts, making it so cultists and such can't see them with their revealing abilities, and also add code preventing them from being soul stoned. Bam, now IPCs don't have souls as far as IC interaction goes. All antagonist rounds where you can actually 'see' ghosts due to supernatural stuff are 100% noncanon, too, so you can't use them as a precedent for canon. This is a slippery slope argument and most of it is irrelevant and off topic speculation. It is very rare for there to be more than 4-5 IPCs in a given round, even on high population. This is not 'limiting the options of cult', it's creating a new dynamic where they have individuals they have to oppose (all synths, instead of certain synths, 4noraisin) instead of rushing to convert them because they are basically immune to everything and are a very easy powergaming race after being converted, assuming you still want to make them immune to EMP. If cultists are scared and timid all the time (hint: they aren't, this is a hasty generalization. I see many rounds with aggressive and active cults), that's a larger issue, and not getting to claim the less than half dozen IPCs that show up in a standard round is not going to largely change it. Every 'xeno' race comes with certain restrictions and privileges, roleplay and mechanically. You aren't owed the right to play a cultist because you want to play an IPC, any more than I, as an unathi main, should be allowed to play a captain just because I like playing unathi. There are many other antagonist roles an options available to an IPC, without needing to keep this one open to them simply to not hurt the players feelings when they feel excluded, when narratively speaking there isn't a good reason for them to have it. If you want to be a cultist after this, just... don't be an IPC. It's not hard to make a different character.

Like Schev is saying, the majority of arguments for IPCs can be summed up as handwaving reasons why they should be included (it's magic lol), rather than applying any kind of logic or balance to the situation. There's no actual reason WHY IPCs should be included in this. They lack many essential vital properties that living creatures with blood and souls have. What you are providing is JUSTIFICATION for why they can be cultists. Why would Nar'sie expend the effort to convert all the oil of a synthetic being into blood when, by the logic of this revision, they can't even function as a full cultist and are fundamentally crippled in utility? It would be like Nanotrasen hiring a blind and paraplegic person but giving them an expensive mechanical hoverchair and proximity alert system to help them not run into walls. The cult of the geometer is not an affirmative action organization recruiting incompatible workers out of pity. They're here to get shit done. The real reason is this: No one has coded it out until now, and there was a very valid reason for it being coded out, narratively speaking. It's much more appealing to have some things on the station that are just outside supernatural events than invent reasons to shoehorn them in.

Then put the armored one in the locker, problem solved.

Alternatively, create a more modern gear set for defaults and put the awful noir meme into the locker as an optional thing, since removing old memes from this game is like pulling teeth sometimes. (though I totally support removing them) Then again, if they're in the loadout already... what's the problem with removing them?

Can we just leave IPCs out of the cult entirely? Make them enemies of the cult, they don't have blood, or souls to steal. They're just robots. Why do cult mechanics have to apply to everyone? Changelings can't suck them. Neither can vampires. They're immune to most of their powers. Let them be different and outside the influence of the mystical (and biological)

That was literally what I was proposing to do, to expand on phoron and as a side job, port the secret recipes over to it to give them canon plausibility. Renaming them is definitely part of this, and on topic. It's not phoron researchers primary mechanic to handle secret recipes, no, but they are the ones who will be pioneering research into uses of phoron and the ones who should be making the weird shit, not chemists who spend their shift making medicines and poisons. And it makes a big difference to the number of people here in this thread who think the 'mystical hoodoo' needs to be cut out. The whole concept of developer dismissal, to my knowledge, is largely based around the idea that is no one wants to take up a project suggested, and if you get enough dismissals, the project is deemed unworkable because no one wants to do it, or because it unbalances something. There's even general divisiveness in thread about the subject. Well, I've gotten what I wanted from this thread feedback, and am going to begin poking around at doing this. It is probably going to take a while, and I'm not even entirely sure I know enough about code to do it, but for the time being, consider it an active project of mine. As for the bit about it 'not really changing anything', I don't see what relevance that has. There are dozens of other projects about adding game content currently (many of them by burger), and they just add some sort of new feature or change a feature to something new and more expanded. Change happens because someone wants a change.

Randomly spawned silliness is not the same as standards of character design and setting causality. You can also find bats that randomly spawn in crates in cargo, but that doesn't mean NT stores bats in their cargo bay. It's just a goofy mechanic, not part of the lore.

I have spoken with the allmighty jackboots, and this is what he hath decreed: Ye verily, doth it be true that a blue scaled unathi is weird and worthy of shame or bullying, but hark: A male heir to a household is too important to hide away in the basement. Had they been a female, the shame and concealment might have been justified, but a manlizard must be displayed and deal with the ridicule that doth come with thy tainted scales. Basically the 'princess in a tower' storyline doesn't really work for a 'prince' in a heavily patriarchal society structure. You can't hide one of your male heirs away from the world, it's important that people know you have 4 heirs, not three, even if one of them looks like a blueberry. Either revise the story to be different, or make it a female unathi, which has it's own changes, like her probably not being homeschooled and pampered as much as this guy was. The stuff previously mentioned about names is also important.

I, uh, just wanna point out real quick. Liquid fire is the least arbitrary thing, by your standards. The idea of liquid fire is very realistic and there's things like napalm. Sure, it's more of a gel, but it's basically the idea of "liquid" fire. Napalm already exists in the code. Liquid fire is a substance that is supposed to be actual, liquid fire, not something that sets on fire on contact with air, also known as an impossible concept.

As long as their ingredients somehow involve something you can only acquire from supernatural sources, I would be okay with that.