Kaed

It could, but that would require a different format of transmutation which would involve combining a specific mass of matter to hypothetically fusion into gold, or taking a more massive element (i.e. uranium) and using the phoron catalyst to shave protons off of it to make gold. It would be slightly predictable because there are only so many actual 'elements' in the game, and most of the other chemicals are just compounds, there would be a certain logic and math to it. Also, causing fusion/fission in your beaker would probably kill you, because of the energy release?

And you can continue to call yourselves alchemists if you want, but understand that this would a personal choice for your characters to follow a certain aesthetic, not you following the lead of the game that arbitrarily contains chemicals called 'liquid fire' and 'azoth' and 'philosophers stone'. People may not take you very seriously and may think your quaint unathi pseudoscience is cute, or that someone pretty kooky must have designed ResearchMate. Conflict of belief instead of being forced to shrug our shoulders and nod at what is presented to us makes for much more interesting dynamics, anyway.

I mean, in theory, it could be, but I'd probably want a customized version that has some of my personal choices choices for poncho designs (that I sprite myself) built in. Putting this in the game publicly would sort of make all the basic ponchos obsolete, though I'm not sure if that would necessarily be a bad thing. Alternatively/additionally, I could release these extra poncho choices as regular options in the loadout.

I had an idea that I thought up during a rant in another thread, and I thought I'd expand on it more here. There's currently a lot of contention about secret recipes, so I'll make it clear my viewpoint on them is this: Secret recipes are interesting. They provide a medium to put chemicals and substances in the game that can break or bend some of the normal balance rules, because they aren't generally accessible to the public. If everyone who ran chemistry could create a bottle of instant wormhole, then they would show up every shift, and it would just become the status quo. Walls would become pointless when everyone can jump in a wormhole and get a free trip to a secure location (albeit unpredictably) But it's cool to have a wormhole in a bottle, and I don't think it should necessarily be taken out of the game, just kept as a secret recipe. What I don't really care for is the flavor and tone of the secret recipes that are being used right now. There are secret chemicals like liquid fire and light, 'azoth', 'elixir of life', and so on. Things with mystical names based on old alchemical concepts that frankly kind of clash with the status quo of the setting we're trying to run. Yes, wizards and cults might exist, and we have antagonists based on them, but people aren't supposed to understand and acknowledge the existence of the supernatural in a high tech research station just because we have some secret recipes. We have characters who are literally being geared up to be IC alchemists in search of the fabled philosophers stone and elixir of life. They do things like label their jars of chemical compounds after planets in the Sol system while dressing up in chaplains robes. Basically things that would cause them to be a laughingstock in any serious science community, but because the game supports their behavior on account of the blatantly mystical theme of the recipes they are making, what are you supposed to do about it? So why don't we just keep all the secret recipes, but move them under a more setting friendly flavor. Phoron is our own personal unobtanium, it can be used to explain all sorts of unusual effects instead of declaring them to be magical alchemy. We could expand on the Toxins lab, renaming it to Phoron Research, and make it about discovering the mysteries of phoron instead just making bombs. I'd be willing to code some of this myself including certain phoron compounds that will act as building blocks for things in Phoron Research, and might do some neat but largely not unbalanced things, along rechristening some of the more mystical compounds to something less obviously magical, and removing some of the pointless recipes that are literally alchemy, like making gold and diamonds through transmutation (which serves very little actual game purpose other than being cool when we have mining that can acquire them much, much more efficiently) (The point where the ingredients for the secret recipes are decided, is a higher end staff decision and is handled serverside, not by me). This WILL probably mean all the recipes change, but after that, they should remain static. You can still pretend to be an alchemist if you want, but you'll be the crazy guy, rather than legitimately supported by the game code itself.

I see nothing wrong with having to kill IPCs. They are beings of logic, not of faith. They can be the vanguard for the organics against the cult menace. But, still. Screw the robots, fire off EMP runes until there is nothing but smoking scrap. FOR THE GEOMETER

I already think it's bad enough that we have Alchemy as a secret recipe list, without expanding it into an entire fantasy themed alternative to actual science in a science fiction setting. I would much rather Alchemy be removed entirely then this happen, but that's probably not going to happen so just - 1. The only randomized Alchemy recipes I'd support are just making the ones we have now randomized every round, so that you don't have people spending the entire around pretending to be an alchemist and working off previous rounds work. Either you find a secret recipe in a round or you don't. Or remove all the magical chemicals like your elixir of life and Liquid light and just focus on exploring the strange properties of phoron. Rename toxins to Phoron Research and make them able to do more than make bombs. Don't fucking call it Alchemy.

Let's see it. Show me this horrible color scheme and I'll reconsider if I agree with you.

Problems: -Those aren't the right colors for an Akhandi robe. Green and gold =\= green and brown. -If he used to be a member of the Akhanzi Order, he would have to renounce his clan name and taken on that title. -This character was also practicing Alchemy on station before the plot that introduced the Akhanzi order into the lore started. It was only very recently that they left Moghes in the first place. In order for you to plug your character into the lore of a race, you have to actually follow the Lore that you are trying to plug into. Regardless of how aesthetically unpleasant you think it is. I suggest you make a new character if you want to do this, and fix the clothes to actually match the appropriate colors.

*grits teeth* Then why is it still treated as a capital crime. Approach it from the other side if you want to argue that. "Murder doesn't matter much" means that it should be considered as something more akin to advanced assault. That is not the case. People treat murder exactly as they do now, there's just a way to salvage someone from their corpse, usually. In the social medium we are running, terrorism and mutiny are on an entirely different tier below murder, the bar for punishment in-server is just capped lower than the level of the crimes. You do not receive a life sentence for mutiny or terrorism, but we still sentence people to life as a cyborg. Cyborgification is supposed to be a serious punishment for the worst crimes. By applying it heavyheandedly to a wide array of crimes, some of which are significantly less bad, you trivialize it. And in our setting, murder is still the top crime, cloning notwithstanding.

I agree with this, as long as terrorism is also considered cyborgable. Maybe mutiny too (mutiny itself is meant to be violent, usually). No... when I say 'actual murder' I mean 'murder', not 'I blew up a bomb' or 'I disagreed strongly with the command structure and tried to overthrow it', or 'I attacked someone and they ran away and command decided I was trying to murder them'.

And even if it was possible, you're still lobotomized, so you'll basically be a baby pissing itself in an unfamiliar body. That's not recovery. I will admit it would be an interesting dynamic if you have to brain scan someone before you borg them, because then it's possible for someone to illegally bring them back. But it would be kind of hard mechanically, because the player is now in the cyborg. That being said, reserving compulsory cyborgification for Actual Murder charges still keeps the grimdark without making it so prevalent that it makes me question why it's treated so casually when murder is still illegal.

Then don't use real life precedent to try and justify it being in the game if you just want to hand wave it and look the other direction.

Countries who engage in beheading treat it as execution instead of unaccountably engaging in legal sophistry to claim people are still technically alive without their heads because they can still detect some brain activity when they do a scan on the severed head 30 seconds later. The problem here is not that they are 'okay with cyborgification' it's that they arbitrarily decided that it's not execution because the brain is still functioning, even if its been lobotomized. Why is there no oversight or reaction to this legal decision? When every other civilized nation TC speaks with considers it murder, why do they still have this legal decision? Where is the international backlash, the pressure to change it? Why are the Skrell working on a station where they oversee this happening and sometimes actively participating in the process when they are super anti synth and would probably be horrified by the process? I keep hearing it is what makes Tau Ceti different and flawed, but being 'different' because you commit atrocities is not something that just happens without reaction from your neighbors, xeno allies, or your own people. You can't have your legal system exist in a vacuum when there is no such vacuum.

Actually, I've reached the point where I've calmed down now. So I apologize for being sharp with you earlier. I will respond to questions asked for the purpose of this thread, but will refrain from being further vitriolic in your direction.

I specifically noted that I was just describing how I felt at the time, and that it does not necessarily reflect whether you were being a validhunting IPC or not. It's right there in parenthesis. You don't need to feel that every time I express annoyance at your actions in round it is a personal attack on you. The purpose of this thread is to determine whether what you did was okay or not. Even if it turns out you were okay, I'll probably still be annoyed at you until I manage to calm down. It does not make you somehow an awful person because you annoyed me.

If we removed changeling, would we also remove the round types that involve them, or revise them? Aka removing Feeding, or taking them out of Paranoia?

I need to say this, because this is another incident where you should have sent an adminhelp to at least verify if it was an IC issue, worst case scenario we tell you it's valid but we cannot reveal why until after the round. Post round logs do not show the same picture that we can see during the round, as they do not provide the same interactive freedom of investigation as we can during the round itself. What made it seem like it was an IC issue during the round but suddenly worthy of a complaint after the round was over? To be perfectly honest, I didn't ahelp at the time because I was pretty angry and not really thinking about much of anything except how annoying this IPC validhunter was (whether he was or not justified isn't really relevant here, it's just what I was thinking at the time). By the time I considered ahelping anything it was well past the attack on me, and he had already suggested I make a complaint post round if I had a problem with him, so I just decided to do that.

Actually, people in real life very frequently are told to surrender before they are shot at, even if they are murderers, and diving behind cover rarely results in the officer walking around the cover to gun the suspect down without so much as a 'come out with your hands up!'. (Because that's insane, murderous behavior) Because that was what I did. I dived behind cover and stopped there, still fully visible to you but out of line of your shotgun due to a door, because you were shooting at me, and before I could actually PERFORM any kind of roleplay, followed up with more gunfire. Were you expecting me to keel over and start screaming instantly so you could walk up and wordlessly handcuff me while I'm typing? That's the worst kind of double standard. Relying on game mechanics to excuse yourself from having to roleplay is not very good form. What exactly was your IPC afraid of, here? That the unathi cowering in the corner was going to assault him with his lack of weapons? Again, at that time, you had no in character reason to assume I was a vampire, because it was your direct actions that caused me to reveal my nature.

Were you aware of it? The first time I did something overt and publicly vampire-like was AFTER you shot me, when I phased away in a panic. Did you have any particularly good evidence I wasn't just a hooligan who attacked the HoP, other than 'you knew it was a vampire round?' Did the HoP specify that I attempted to suck their blood or do something spooky? When I play a largely stealth-related antag in a round where there is another antagonist who went loud, there's sort of an expectation that you don't just assume everyone who is charged with a crime that round has exactly the same abilities JUST IN CASE and don't treat them like a potentially psychotic monster unless they actually start to display similar abilities. After I phased through a wall, yes, I was definitely a supernatural monster. But that happened AFTER you shot me twice under the apparently meta assumption I was a vampire too. I wasn't even really trying to flee until the second shot, I should point out, I moved myself behind some cover, nestle between a disposal bin and a wall, with a door between us, to facilitate some kind of roleplay. Rather than making any attempt to communicate with me, you walked right around the obstacles and continued to fire on me until I was forced to flee for real. Here, I even drew a diagram for the benefit of you and the people here. This is fairly typical 'attack on sight, then attack more when they show anything but total submission' behavior. It's completely believable behavior for someone to hide behind cover when shot at, the fact that you chose to take 'he moved' as evidence that I was resisting arrest and it was time to fill me with bullets is your problem, and the reason for this complaint. Once again, aiming a gun is not an attempt to arrest someone. It's an aggressive action intended to take someone hostage. The difference between this and walking up to someone with a wanted tag on them, taking out your baton, and prodding them, then chasing them down and batonning them to the ground when they move away from you, screaming "RESISTING ARREST" is fairly trivial.

I'm aware of the cargo tech, but I was not aware you were a vampire, because at no point during this did you make that clear, and when presented with the information what I had 'attempted' to murder you and that was it, I assumed there had been some miscommunication between you and security. There appears to have been some common misunderstanding on both our parts, because I thought when I eye flashed you your sunglasses blocked it, and you seemed to be under the impression I could actually hurt you by sucking your blood. Vampires cannot succ each other, though, and your actions were conveying themselves actions of someone trying to save their life own life and flee, not try to negotiate with a fellow vampire. As I recall, your only words to me once after pointlessly introducing yourself as the head of personnel (when we had already met ten minutes previously) were along the lines of 'now hold on, be reasonable', which conveys nothing useful on the nature of a fellow antag trying to negotiate, but more of a nonviolent person trying to avoid being attacked. For future reference, it helps to be up front about it with something like 'Hello, fellow vampire kin', or using some power like eye flashing, so that the other antag is not in full panic about you escaping to call security and shooting them with the laser pistol you just drew, and trying to escape the scene themselves before an AI locks them down or something. However, I guess all this isn't really relevant to the complaint, even if it is some useful context. There is a difference between IPCs having no personality at all and having a violent, aggressive personality geared towards harming other people and enjoying it. These are designed positronic entities, which means someone had to specifically create a personality that enjoys the concept of going around shooting people with at shotgun and being smugly superior about their performance in harming organics. IPCs are still not treated as people, they're treated as corporate property, legally speaking, and this is the line your character dived across. As for my constant questioning of my charges, you have to understand that I was completely baffled that I was being charged with 'attempted murder' of the HoP when I barely touched them. I was trying to find a way to weasel out of what was clearly some sort of miscommunication, but I was largely ignored regardless. The fact that I was cyborgified on 'attempted murder' charges on someone I had a brief squabble with was extremely frustrating to me, too. As was the fact that things went from HuT to me being cyborgified without actually telling me this up until you were about to do it, seemingly in a rush just as the shuttle was called (why you didn't just transfer me on the shuttle now that the round was ending, instead of trying to squeeze in a last minute execution, I don't really understand). But I was there for my execution, and I roleplayed through the whole thing, trying to appeal to the crew in general for some sort of sympathy or sanity. It was only after I finally got taken down and murdered that I ghosted, and you should know that I am under no obligation to let myself become a borg any more than people thrown into the communal for the rest of the round are obligated to stand there and stare at the wall 'for good sportmanship'. There is a reason there are cryo pods in the prisoner common area. It's also worth noting that from the moment you 'arrested' me to the moment I finally had my brain removed, I did not attack a single person, but instead attempted reasoning and escape. Whereas you spent much of the time aiming a gun at me or just shooting me, repeatedly, over and over, while complaining over looc that I didn't pain RP enough. There's a threshold of excessive violence that you repeatedly crossed over, and you actually ran out of shells trying to put me down and had to switch to your .45 pistol.

BYOND Key: Kaedwuff Game ID: bUh-auUK Player Byond Key: Maereo Staff involved: It was not ahelped because it was at the time a pretty IC issue. Reason for complaint: This person, playing an IPC sec officer named KASS, was the first security officer I actually interacted with in this round, and my experience was thus: I was in the middle of dominating someone in a hallway, and this officer walked up to me holding a combat shotgun in his hands, aimed a gun at me, and fired immediately. Now, according to the game logs, it was a reflexive fire, but I don't know what the bloody hell it was I did that caused him to fire reflexively on me, because I was standing completely still due to typing in the dominate textbox. But I did not notice he had aimed the gun at me (until he told me this several minutes minutes later in looc and I scrolled up and saw it), at which point I panicked and fled into a nearby corner about three squares away. Following this, he walked up to me and wordlessly fired the rifle at me again from point blank range, this time without even the pretense of aiming. Now, I want to reiterate that this was, again, the first time I ran into an officer this round that had any kind of interaction with me. Apparently, I was wanted for 'attempted murder' charges against the Head of Personel (who I eye flashed and tried to knock over a few times before they ran off, not sure why that was attempted murder), but KASS did not seem to actually know this until much later in processing when the Head of Security presented the paperwork to me. Or, if he did, he did not seem to feel the need to explain charges or perform any action other than 'nab the antag'. He was very insistent that he used beanbag shells, but I'm not sure why that made this behavior okay, when one hit put me into pain crit, and a second floored me. I legitimately thought he was trying to kill me, especially with the blood splatter effects the game displays. At no point during any of this did he tell me I was under arrest, nor say anything, unless it was while I was blacked out on the floor from being shotgunned, nor did he make even the smallest attempt to get me to surrender, except a token aim action, which does not really qualify as attempting to arrest someone, especially when you can apparently fire on someone now without them realizing you are aiming? But this was filed under 'resisting arrest', because I did not let him wordlessly shotgun me down. In any case, he spent much of the rest of the round hovering over me with the shotgun gripped in his hands, occasionally aiming it at me while I was bucklecuffed to a chair, and generally being really shitty and hyperaggressive. At several points, after I was killed by having my brain removed, I heard him bragging ICly about how many suspects he had taken down with his shotgun, and that he did not wish to give the shotgun up. I'm not really sure why NT would be hiring a bloodthirsty, shoot first and ask questions later HUMAN, much less a robot. His character was completely unrealistic for an IPC, taking obvious an intense pleasure in his validhunting behavior, constantly mocking the prisoner, and for much of the time, seemed to have only the vaguest idea of why I was being arrested, just that I needed to be because I was wanted by security. Did you attempt to adminhelp the issue at the time? If so, what was the known action taken by administration/moderation? No, because I preferred to put the entire experience in a post-round complaint, here. Approximate Date/Time: 5/9/2018

In principle, I'd agree with you, but in practice, it's used as a lever to remove antagonists from antagonizing, and from my on the field experience, very little roleplay is to be gotten. I tried to make something out of it, but people just ignore your plight and you're batonned and shot repeatedly until you can be put under and debrained. It is literally treated like an execution, because it is. Being attacked until you can't take any further action, while people nearby look on in silence while completely disregarding the situation in any interactive way, then killed is not a 'fantastic source of roleplay', it's awful and frustrating. At least if you try to murder someone in the middle of a crowd as an antagonist, people freak out and scream or otherwise REACT to the situation presented to them. Here, it's just *shrug* guess the antag got what's coming to them. Are you really getting more out of making the round more interesting for everyone by being quietly lobotomized and shoved in a robot, or by making some kind of attempt to escape or alternate plan, possibly even going down in a blaze of glory? If the player has no further things to contribute to the round as an antagonist, then sure, let them agree to be a robot. But cutting off any further antics by forcibly executing them under the pretense that it's a life sentence doesn't really create interesting roleplay, it just ends the roleplay there. Because they are dead, and possibly a robot slave now, with no personality. Some antagonists die in fights with security, yes, but usually those are exciting to the people in the fight. Almost always, the ones who get cyborged are the ones who couldn't put up enough of a fight to justify killing them in self defense, or are smart enough to have some kind of plan to escape, so they find an alternate reason to kill them anyway.

BYOND Key: Kaedwuff Character name: Ickthar Slithiss (and maybe my shaman, Arizi Ezrsozal) Item name: Chromomorphic Poncho Why is your character carrying said item to work? For religious and expression purposes. Item function(s): It's a poncho that changes colors to look like different poncho types. Item description: Item appearance: See above How will you use this to better interact with crew and/or stimulate RP? The different forms of poncho design can be used to represent different functions of duty or religious purposes. Additional comments: For a long time I liked the idea of bringing multiple ponchos onto the station via the loadout, so I could wear different ones for other religious occasions, but with recent changes to loadout selection code, this is now impossible. So made the code for an item that accomplishes the task of bringing every default poncho into play at once. https://gyazo.com/21f12235e457416ed3a4aa1d5ba3be4b As you can see here, I've cleverly cut out the non-standard fluff poncho designs that people have for their own custom items, in addition to cleaning up poncho code a little bit so that the '(classic) poncho' is relabeled as a 'tan poncho' under poncho/tan in every iteration, instead of just 'poncho/' If the item is accepted, I may also add a few special designs of my own to the chromomorphic poncho list, like an NT themed one for sucking up to the superiors, a black one for funerals, etc. I don't want to put any work into doing new art though until I'm sure this item is going to go somewhere, because that would make me depressed.

They have plenty of governmental flaws already, they don't need this one too just for the sake of showing that they're flawed. The way they treat synths, their behavior in regards to xeno races, their conflict with Sol. That argument that the brain doesn't die also made more sense when a lobotomy was not required first, which, in game, literally tells you all your memories are gone and you are a blank slate. You are dead. You're not coming back. The implied lobotomy being a thing you're just supposed to know happened before it actually became a mechanic is not the same. I've seen people in the past roleplaying as a robot version of themselves because this was not clear, [mention]LordFowl[/mention] Legally speaking, right now, you are required to sign a waiver to willingly cyborgify yourself. The process exists in a way where it is acknowledged as something you need to agree to do. The fact that all other factions consider it to be a capital punishment but Tau Ceti does not 'because gotta have flaws' is itself kind of a snowflakery in lore design, and there are better ways to do this. I strongly suspect that a major reason it's like this is to justify the current regulations that I am trying to change. In summary, lore is something that should follow gameplay aspects, not be just be used to justify it. It's a government decision that could easily be overturned. Actually, what happens is the heads all vote on it, and then the prisoner has the result happen. They have little say in the matter, despite being a very relevant party to it.

WIth the status of the game as it is right now, cyborgification is used as a punishment for certain crimes, like murder (or even attempted murder, which is apparently treated as exactly the same charge instead of assault for unexplained reasons) or terrorism. It's really kind of weird because execution is supposedly illegal, but for some arbitrary reason it still exists in the form of cyborgification. This particular clause goes back a very long way in the IC game and to an extent on the meta, and there was a time where you just cut out someone's brain and put it in an MMI. But it doesn't work that way anymore. You have to lobotomize the person's brain first, which let me emphasize - it's drilling a whole into their brain until all their memories and personality are gone and they are just a blank mass of nerve tissue. This is murder under the meta veneer of 'letting the antag stay in the round'. Most of the time, it's just used as an excuse to deal with an antagonist that security and the command staff don't want to handle, so instead of locking them in a cell and giving some chance for them to formulate a plan (or roleplay as a prisoner) they call for cyborgification just to 'deal with the problem'. Very rarely is it even treated as an escalation for a prisoner who keeps escaping or attacking people. It's just straight to drilling out their brain and putting them in a machine so you don't have to think about it anymore. It's horrifying, disgusting, and yet, people just sort of handwave it aside, either because either they don't really understand the process, or because they've been trained through long OOC association with it existing to not care. I just went through a round where I spend several minutes screaming over comms about being lobotomized and shot at for resisting, and the most serious reaction I got was someone questioning the legality of it and if I was even telling the truth. Either remove it as a sentence, or put serious limitations on it, so it can't just be used as a first option for people who happened to have blown something up or shanked a person to death, or done something scary and supernatural that you don't understand how to deal with. Perhaps even require the prisoner to sign a waiver saying that they submit to this process instead of being HuT and sentenced in an out of round court, instead of just forcing it on them as a punitive measure, so that the people who actually WANT to be a borg instead of spending the rest of the round in a cell get it, and the people who had a legitimate plan don't just get shoved on a table and lobotomized summarily while they scream and everyone ignores them (because being murdered on comms is just hunky dory and no one will bat an eye.)