Kaed

In the Spacial Manual, there exists a spell called Polymorph. It turns you into a parrot. This is actually the worst spell in existence. It's so bad, I'm convinced it was put in there as a joke spell, and no one really glanced twice at it when they merged it in from bay. But for those of you unfamiliar with this spell, I will give you a brief summary. -Upon casting this spell, your wizard 'turns into' a parrot mob named Parrot (Wizardname) for approximately 10 seconds. -During this time of being a parrot, you: --Cannot open Doors --Cannot use Spells --Cannot attack in any way --Cannot run or pick up objects --Have the same health as a basic parrot mob, allowing you to be killed with almost no effort by anything that feels like doing so. --Will also die within about 5 seconds of being exposed to vacuum/space, far faster than you would as a wizard. --Don't turn back into a wizard if something kills your parrot. --Have a really awkward, jarring period of about roughly a half to a full second at the end of the spell where your whole screen turns black as (presumably) you are shoved back into your original mob, rendering you moderately helpless during this short time. -The spell has a cooldown of 60 seconds. This can be reduced to 30 seconds by wasting investing another spell slot on it, and no further. This is a preposterously long time for such a feeble effect. As such, I have found that the only potential use for the polymorph spell is to fly up and down elevator shafts. because you can, in fact, move up and down levels while in parrot form. Even with that ability, the spell lasts such a short time that you are likely to turn back into a wizard and fall down the shaft, breaking all your bones, unless you time it exactly right and the elevator doors aren't closed. I propose the following, therefore: -Rename the spell Shapeshift -Move it to the Druid Spellbook -Allow the spell to be used to turn into a variety of simple mobs, potentially even some strong ones if you expend more than one slot on it. Maybe some of the mobs will have special abilities along the lines of the parrot's 'can fly' passive, like mice being able to ventcrawl, lizards being able squeeze through maint hatches(or maybe something more interesting?) -Remove the duration on it entirely. Make the transformation last until the wizard chooses to dismiss it. -Let the wizard name themselves whenever they transform, allowing them to do something moderately interesting like impersonate Ian or one of the other station pets, or be an entirely new thing, rather than 'mobname (WizardName)' -Allow them to use their spells while shapeshifted. I'm looking at the druid spellbook right now. I don't see anything that could really be used to horribly abused. In fact, you could actually create really interesting scenarios where like, you're a magical cat/dog/mouse/whatever with a bunch of magical animal friends who also are played by people who enabled their ability to inhabit wizard pets (It's an opt-in option in your roles, guys. Go look) -It might be important to let the wizard retain the ability to talk while shapeshifted, since I don't think most simple mobs have the ability to do language by default. -More health would be good too, or perhaps the ability to turn back into a wizard if your shapeshifted form dies, taking a chunk of damage as a result of being hurt out of it.

For the most part, the vampire's kit works pretty well and is worth using. But up there at the top as the single most expensive ability available to them, at 200 blood, Diseased Touch. After doing some testing with it today, I'm not really convinced it's living up to what you have to pay for it. Here's what I found. -It infects you with a disease that causes headaches, coughing, organ failure, and genetic damage. Now, that probably SOUNDS good, but from my experience here, there's some really big asterisks you have to add onto this. -The disease has a latency of approximately 10 minutes before you actually get to the part where they start dying. During that period, they suffer from obvious headaches, followed by coughing. Every description of the diseased touch SAYS it starts off in the fourth stage, but it clearly does not, as it progresses slowly one by one through the 4 tiers of symptoms. -During this 'incubation period', they have ample time to saunder over to medbay and surround themselves with doctors. My knowledge of virology is admittedly limited, but from what I understand, it's pretty hard for a single person to die in medbay due to a disease, because spaceacillin halts symptoms entirely(?) for a period. And I don't know how long it takes a virologist to cure someone, but I feel like it's not so long that they run any real risk of being in danger. -The disease is designed not to spread. It's SUPPOSED to kill a single person 'fairly quickly', presumably in a fashion that does not directly implicate you, the vampire. It fails utterly to do this. -At one point during testing, I managed to infect someone using Diseased Touch with a disease that had no other effects other than sneezing, mucus, and shakey screen. This is incredibly underwhelming for a 200 blood ability, and I suspect it might be some form of oversight rather than an intentionally random symptom list. Even for what this ability is evidently supposed to do, I feel like 200 blood is way too expensive. However, it's possible that this ability just needs to be fixed somehow to actually be formidable to the point where it lives up to its exorbitantly high cost.

To be perfectly honest, I think the aim intent should be reworked a little - you still get the aim assist and reflex fire on the first (couple?) shots, if they make you reflex fire, but after that, you have to manually shoot at them. You don't just get to stand there and auto-fire your gun at them until they die with precognitive accuracy. The targeting overlay should remain on them, to let them know you're still aiming the gun at them, but it shouldn't just keep going off until you are dead or stunned and unable to move. Guns are already dangerous enough without making killing someone require no input by the player at all beyond the initial aim.

I disagree. It should be defaulted to the strongest degree of force. When you have a gun pointed at you, your first thought should not be 'I wonder what permissions I have while I have this gun pointed at me, am I allowed to radio?' it should be 'A gun is pointed at me, I better fucking listen to the person holding it and not pull any shit'. It gives you obvious messages when you are permitted to do something by it being turned off. There is also a two second delay period before they fire at you for doing forbidden things, making 'accidentally' violating them really hard. If you are typing something into the radio when gun is pointed at you, maybe you should stop typing, and pay attention to your surroundings, i.e. the potentially hostile gunman currently in your personal space, rather than 'accidentally' letting slip over the radio that someone is pointing a gun at you right now, or whining that you were just roleplaying when you decided to make your radio message cut off suddenly and it registered as using the radio so they shot you.

See, this is a viewpoint I don't really get. Sure, it's nice to say that we shouldn't 'ruin the game for other people' by changing how miner pizza generation works, i.e. actually limiting it, but.. what, exactly, are we ruining for people by changing it? Is there something that being able to generate over a dozen crates of pizza per round accomplishes? Why do we need to leave things as they are and just rely on the staff to moderate everything? There is no actual purpose I can see for this limitless pizza mechanic as is other than trolling the round and chucklefucking. I am fairly sure it was an oversight on the part of whoever coded the miner reward machines, not some sort of intended feature we're taking away from innocent players. Dialing it back is better than making the admins run over and berate people for abusing a game mechanic that doesn't need to be there in the first place. They should be there to facilitate actual rule violations, not babysit the crew.

There was a dumb joke the admins put together for April 1st this year where they created a fake new species called 'snakepeople' that had a stupidly long body made of tail segments, but it was really hacky and unstable. In the one round I was in for about five minutes before deciding to leave until they got the 'joke' out of their system, it didn't look like their bodies even displayed right, they were just floating clothes with a poorly drawn tail extending off behind them for about a 10-12 squares. Apparently it also caused a lot of crashes, if this thread can be any clue. You can probably tell from my tone that I didn't find it amusing in the least, but clearly a lot of people want a repeat the the joke that aren't me, so take my words with a grain of salt.

Uuh. I can't think of a single reason why you would need 20 pizzas in a round for any reason other than trolling, much less more than that. I don't actually see any reason why we should leave it and put people on the 'honor system' to not be shitters with it. Just go to the kitchen if you're hungry, instead of abusing a game mechanic to make it more completely pointless than it already is.

I was under the impression that this was already done on this server. It's almost standard policy on people who are trying to encourage roleplay to time lock security positions. I'm not sure why it was taken off if it was ever there. Most people who come on a station to dick around and troll are day 0 people. I'm not sure why you would enable them to have a full salvo of weapons in arms reach. Whoops, looks like skull said they just forgot to get around to it. Problem solved.

This is an issue for every HRP server. If you have a silver bullet for this, please do let us know. Otherwise, hnrg. This was actually a thing for about 6 months. There was no real feedback about it and the lore dweebs couldn't be arsed to keep it up to date. There's no silver bullet beyond something extreme like making them read it then quizzing them on it, which even I will acknowledge would be stupid and annoying. However, there are several smaller things you could do to help. -Make a scheduled (bi? semi?) weekly event organized by the lore team happen, involving some recent events. It would probably usually be human/tajara/unathi related, because those are the most played raced on the station, and it doesn't even necessarily need to be the focus of the whole round (which will probably be extended anyway). Loose examples: -A modified skipjack with wounded tajaran soldiers limps over to the station requesting help. None of them speak solcom very well, if they do at all. -A group of people arrive who are transparently being shills for Nanotrasen political interests to try and make the crew agree with them. -An unathi group arrives on the station to formally exile a member of the crew, or whoever Jackboot decides that happens, because guwanning is usually off-screen or in character backstory. -Not'zar arrives on the station to pardon a long-lost Izweski clan member hiding under a false name belonging to a clan that doesn't exist anymore. I dunno what to tell you there, man. Maybe try again some time and throw polls at people over it. If the lore team is disinterested in maintaining it, though, maybe there's no point.

I read your post, Scheveningen, don't worry. If you really want me to summarize how I feel about it and facilitate a conversation, I will. Here are a few bullet points of my contention with your expressed viewpoints -They are the exact same arguments I ran into last time, even when they aren't entirely relevant to my suggestion, such as: --We don't moderate people's antag roleplay (One of the original purpose of this thread was not to suggest you tell antags how to roleplay, but to give them some lore to work with. Additionally, 'we just don't do that', is not really an argument for why you shouldn't do that in the future, but rather a resistance towards considering it.) Along with several fresh, exciting ones, such as: -The lore isn't real, all of it is made up, basically this is all a game, stop trying to make everyone take it seriously. (All I suggested is we give people nudges to care more, rather than leaving the entire thing up to their initiative, and to try and do somethings that make the setting feel more present. 'It's not real' is also never actually an argument you should be making to defend something about a fictional setting. Of course it's not real, but that's completely irrelevant to what we're talking about. We're also meaningless specks in the overall cosmos, but here we are, arguing on a forum. A concept or goal has as much meaning as you give it, and you can always give it more, even if it doesn't matter to other people.) -Missing the point of my antagonist argument entirely to try and inform me how not to draw aggro from the crew. (The point of this paragraph was not to illustrate how hard it is not to get aggro by security, but to point out that since antagonist have no lore to work from, they make up their entire purpose on the spot. It is a meaningless story they are forced to make up that has no backing in anything. I wanted to give them a possibility to change that.) -Blaming bad roleplayers entirely for bad roleplay, claiming that people can't be taught to improve. (This is actually kind of a poor opinion to have of people. They are thrown into a white room and expected to paint a mural, and you seem to think that it would be outrageous to even give them some stencils to start with until they can work without them. Art isn't a magical talent that you either have or don't have, and neither is writing or interpersonal understanding. It's also a little frustrating how often you resort to using dismissive hyperbolic statements like 'just because we don't have nine million factions coded into the game' as basis for your counterpoints.) -New players wouldn't want it, we'd scare them away. (Even if this were actually more than a hasty generalization - since I don't think anyone has actually tried to do it?? -, that encouraging them to try harder, do we really need to be so all encompassing that anyone can feel like they fit in? You say people are easily offended on the internet, but so what? You'll lose some people, sure, but you'll draw others who want what we have now. There's over 200 people playing SS13 right now, and it's past midnight in most of the US. You're not hungry for a player pool.) -We're not going to force people do do anything. (At no point in any part of my suggestion was I saying we should force people do do anything. The entire multiparaph suggestion can be summed as 'Hey, guys, let's try and make lore and characterization a thing that we encourage people to look into?', so maybe you will understand why I'm irritated that your responses seem to be entirely reflexive rote involving how the server just doesn't do that.) Do you understand that different communities have different ways of doing things? we have a particular idea in mind of what role play means. Myself, abosh and the rest of our staff team get to decide the terms. Our definition is not necessarily better or worse than another communities definition but i do think its reasonable to say we are doing a lot of things correctly based on our player count. I do not want to enforce character records or things of that nature because i think we have spent a long time creating a place thats easy to understand but also with a very deep rabbit hole you can venture down should you so desire. The lore is a prime example of this. Almost everyone knows the basics "ok Nanotrasen, spooky megacorp headed by miranda trasen....tau ceti...biesal, cats and lizards got it!" if you care enough to read articles and various wiki pages to create a more real character thats something YOU can decide and not something we want to force on you. "woah miranda is a changeling? president dorn likes to dab and the sol alliance tried to take over tau ceti!?" I am of course open minded but if you are going to present us with a "better" way to do things you will have to overturn what i see as quite a lot of success. Unless you think aurora is a gigantic failure on life support. in which case the point it probably moot! I understand that there's differing ways of doing things, but like, I'm not asking you to upend your entire structure?? To rehash what arrow said, my suggestion can be summed up as -Devs: Automatic Mechanic to remind people to fill out their char records and "style" once they have played x rounds -Lore: Provide some background for antags, especially wizards and ninjas, to work with? (But not as guide-rails, not a mandatory standard) -Create some way to encourage/involve people to read lore stuff. -Maybe create actual real new articles to show up in-server on the server that relate to stuff the lore team has posted? Even if it's just tl;dr summary or a hyperlink for the articles on 'current events' I actually don't understand why this is such a stressful set of goals to apply that it would destroy the standards of your server as they are right now. I obviously want more than that, but I'm trying to work within what seem to be your goals, and you're screaming and acting like I'm twisting your arms! Hell, you could even throw the auto-reminder to update records out the window. What about the rest? What's actually the problem, other than we just don't do that. Could someone actually explain it to me, because I honestly don't understand. It sounds to me like just a suggestion to put more fluff and let people know it's there!

[scrubbing this due to being unnecessarily rude]

We're trying to run a roleplay server here, last time I checked, not create new memes. I care if they buy 1000 pizzas, because they're turning the cargo bay into a visual prop comedy on an ooc level. Is there any logical reason why you think piling hundreds of questionably obtained pizzas all over the workplace would contribute to the immersion of the round? People would be tripping all over them, stepping in greasy pizza, it would be a safety hazard in any situation where they're not just inert objects you can walk over simply because game mechanics say so. If they're bored and finished mining, they can go mingle with the crew, like normal people do, rather than spamming object spawns. They buy the pizzas as a reward to EAT. People generally share five-packs of pizzas, not tile floors with them.

There's apparently a thing that pays miners to upgrade their equipment. It also dispenses pizzas. It does not dispense any kind of logical limitation on the number of pizzas you can generate. I assume there are probably other things that need to have a hard cap placed, so miners don't just buy 1000 pizzas and scream that it's their money they can buy more pizzas than they will ever need so they can tile cargo with them.

And that's just general lore stuff. Hardly anyone seems to know about contemporary events happening in the setting, i.e. the news posts.

I sorta thought that was the idea! It's no different, really, than implanting yourself with an explosive implant, only poison themed. And possibly less shitty?

I thought the thread was about just a poison tooth that takes out everyone involved now, though...?

Uuuh, sure. I guess it could be summarized like that, but I'd also add -Create some way to encourage/involve people to read lore stuff. -Maybe create actual real new articles to show up in-server on the server that relate to stuff the lore team has posted? Even if it's just tl;dr summary or a hyperlink for the articles on 'current events'.

I don't really think say, chopping off all their arms and legs and throwing them in a hole is a thing that should ever be considered a viable solution for dealing with problems on a roleplaying server. You might as well advocate for straitjacketing and muzzling every lich. There's no fun or even roleplay to be had in lying helpless on the floor in a dark room with no way to ever escape. Even being dead provides more player interest in the round goings on than that. I'm also not sure what statistical pool you're drawing from when you make this (at least to me) absurd hasty generalization that 'people seem to prefer to just allow the antag to powergame them to death rather than fighting back in a smart capacity'. I certainly don't think that, and while I can't prove otherwise, I refuse to believe that every person on this server aside from me feels the way you claim they do. A lot of people more likely don't know what mechanics are being used by the antagonist, because they don't, IC or OOC, understand how to beat them. This is turning into a bickering thread more than anything, though, so I will acknowledge you have a good idea in the bit about rooting the phylactery. I think it should be something the lich has to set up to use. The heart should have to be rooted to a spot, making it float in the air and glow ominiously within a field of dark energy or something, for you to use it for a dark resurrection. Maybe even emote to nearby people about feeling chills down their spine and dark whispers. If it's not been set up, and is just a random object, you can't use it to revive at. The 'set up' format should be like a destructible structure that turns back into the regular heart item if hit or shot enough. It should also not be something you can hide in a locker, it's a visible structure that can't fit in containers. It should show up on some kind of scanner when active, maybe the anomaly scanner. The heart itself should probably remain difficult to destroy, requiring the chaplain to null rod it or something. That way the lich can theoretically retrieve his phylactery if it's taken.

That's kinda cool, actually. Pale, creepy ghostmens.

There was a time a long while back that probably no one except Jackboot remembers, when I was invited to join the lore team. My first 'challenge' was at that time to tackle the lore for antagonists, so I started with wizard. I brainstormed a bunch of ideas to try and explain the at the time assorted in-game mechanics, like factions all the different outfits belonged to (this was before the branching spellbooks were patched in, so there wasn't a whole lot to work with other than clothing). I ran into a roadblock, however, in that the administrative staff at the time flat out told me that no antagonist is whitelisted, therefore they do not regulate their roleplay, and further that they absolutely refused to start doing so. There were some arguments between 'giving the roleplay structure' and 'stifling player creativity', and I ended up leaving the lore team in frustration, but discussing my old drama is not really why I'm writing this. (It's more of a context point to start from) A couple weeks back, Skull posted a poll regarding people's opinions on how the server was managed. I ruminated over some of my desired answers there for a bit, and ended up never really posting my poll entry because I had more to say there than could feasibly be expressed in a small anonymous information gathering poll. So here I am now. This thread starts at antagonists, but it really branches out from there, because the problem I want to bring up is endemic of how the server is run - enforcement of the actual setting, character design, and tying your characters into anything, is so slim as to be nearly nonexistent. Sure, it's easy enough to pretend to be a doctor on a space station, or a engineer who builds an engine, because for the most part you can just glide by defining your character by their profession, rather than any personality or connection they have to the larger galactic setting around them. How many of you people reading this thread right now know who Joseph Dorn is? Do you know what the capital of the Republic your character is working within is, or even what the name of that republic is? And for people playing unathi, do you know who Yizra Unzi is, and what their current relevance is within Moghes politics? How about Not'zar Izweski? Probably most of you do not know the answers to all those questions, unless you ran to the wiki or have been reading Jackboots newsfeeds, which by the way he works damn hard on and you should give him props for. Or maybe most of you do know, because maybe the only people who use the forums are ones who care. Either way, they're not even obscure names or places I asked about there. It would be like being a US citizen today and not knowing who Donald Trump is, or that you live in North America. But that's part of the problem too. You don't have to. You don't have to know jack shit about the setting you're in beyond the most rudimentary concepts about culture and species, and even then it's only mildly enforced if you are trying to play a xeno race. Human characters have basically zero oversight in any way. I'm fairly sure this is the way it is both because it makes the server more accessible to new people, and because it's a hassle to enforce things that strenuously. But your server advertises itself as 'Heavy Roleplay' right in BYOND's interface. Is that what 'heavy roleplay' means here in Space Station? The bare minimum you can put in place to make a cohesive setting round to round? No killing each other randomly, no griefing, make sure you only do stuff related to your job guys! Other than that, go nuts, lol! Maybe you feel like if you start enforcing things like people having records filled out, you'll lose your player base. I disagree with this. I think stressing that people invest time and thought into their character beyond their physical appearance and name will give them more investiture in the character. People who give a flying fuck about who they are playing tend to roleplay better and more cohesively. They try, rather than get by. Now, I'm not saying you should start demanding people fill out their records and make a backstory or get banned. But you should start gradually stressing to players new and old who have done nothing to flesh out their character to start doing so. Give people who have been playing for two weeks regularly and still haven't even filled out their appearance tags a nudge, urging them to read the lore and create a place in the setting beyond 'Medical Doctor 281A'. You can even have it be an automated message the server boops them with when they log in, to save admins the trouble of tracking it. And this brings me to the subject of antagonist roleplay. Right now, as far as I am aware, the staff refuses to enforce any kind of standards for what a wizard or ninja is, why cultists exist, and so on. You can decide you are a highly advanced cyborg sent by Nanotrasen to destroy the station, or a wizard from the Biesel Mages Guild, if you wanted. Granted, few if any of the crew would believe either of those backstories are real. But it doesn't matter, because no one will fault you for creating your transposed OC unbound by any semblance of setting. You may as well be lying as telling the truth, because the backstory you create is so abstract and unimportant as to be irrelevant. You're an intruder to the canon on the station, and since the station pretends to be bound by lore, you're inevitably not welcome bringing your nonlore nonsense in. It probably makes it harder that each round with antagonists has retroactive continuity, and you're not supposed to remember there are such things as wizards or ninjas. Again, I don't think you should tell antagonists how they are supposed to be playing. But the total void of anything resembling a lore to work from leads to people having to make up shit as they go, and often, this results in subpar roleplay. It's difficult for most people to make up more than a 'gimmick' on the spot, and a gimmick only barely keeps the flow of a roleplay going up until someone decides they don't care about your gimmick and would prefer to arrest you for being where you shouldn't be. Something needs to be written to give some of the more exotic antagonist a grounding to work from. An origin for wizards or ninjas, loose or complex as it may be. Maybe they can choose to ignore it if they have a better idea, but SOMETHING is better than the null information we have now beyond mechanics information.

Are they still going to be generic bald humans, though? Can it use your character data to make you, say, an unathi or something.

I'm able to express my opinions like anyone else, aggressive as they may be. I'm not even really being directly rude or insulting to anyone. So let me just summarize my feelings instead of making this a back and forth. -We have two dog pets already on the station, Ian already covers the 'small, cute dog' category, while St. Colombo covers the 'big dog' slot. -Adding a third would start to oversaturate the station with dog pets. -There is already a science 'pet', but if you want to replace it, please replace it with something a little more thematically distinct, even if it's not a slime. -I really don't like pugs

A lot of things appear in cargo. Many of them are really dumb and shouldn't be in there, like space bats and medibots that inject you with infinite amounts of poison. Not super seeing what the big deal is with domesticated slimes. Sounds like you have a hate boner for them.

It's true. I hate pugs. If we added one, I would probably try to make sure it was dead in any round possible. Including non-antagonist ones. Just start playing RD for the purpose of throwing the awful thing into space as part of my job. Slimes would definitely be less awful. I don't know what you're on about with 'no precedents for slime pets'. It's part of the dang game already, unlike pugs.

Do we really need another useless pet to stand around? I mean, aside from the HoS's cute gshep and maybe the CMO's cat, all of them are completely passive and don't even serve any purpose, aside from Ian, who is usually Slithiss's emergency snack if he can't be bothered to leave his office. But if you must... pugs are ugly, deformed and stunted monstrosities, so while I can see why you would want one in science to show what it's done, perhaps something more thematically appropriate, like a rainbow slime, which I've seen on other servers.