Kaed

Except, you're telling me how to roleplay right now. I don't like antagonists who come onto the station to try and wander around not causing conflict and just pretending to be a special snowflake. I don't think it's in any way reasonable for a sophisticated, private workstation to permit unknown visitors with unknown technology to show up and be cheeky to the people in command, then just allow them to walk off and do as they please. I don't think antagonists should all die, but I think it is entirely unreasonable for any antagonist to expect just to be treated with kid gloves and his or her 'gimmick' respected, just because they want it do. Especially when it's poorly thought out and/or doesn't make any logical sense. As the spellbook appears to be is right now, the only way to disable wizard as a threat the wizard indefinitely is to shoot off his feet or otherwise leave him unable to move, but that doesn't even work because -They can still fireball constantly while unable to stand -They can still use Corrupt form to run off Which means, as far as I can tell, that you are demanding people sit down and negotiate with the dangerous lichwizard. Even if they did that, and gave him what he wanted, he's still on the station. He can't leave during the round. And he can decide, at any time, to start (or resume) being hostile to the crew, if he wants to. And you're right back to trying in vain to kill him, if that happens. Especially if the wizard attempts to murder anyone who opposes him. It's completely unreasonable for you to expect security to just tolerate an entity on board the station who is harming people so consistently. I could maybe see a case for telling people to chill the fuck out who just rabidly attempt to murder the wizard over and over while said wizard largely just tells them to stop it and respawns with a sigh of exasperation, but they don't tend to do that. The almost universally respond with deadly force when attacked, like a normal bad guy. I'll acknowledge we seem to have different expectations from a round, but that doesn't mean either of them are wrong, so telling me to 'seek an alternative' isn't really a solution, it's just a demand to play how you want to play. ----------------- That aside, I'm glad we at least agree that the lichdom spell needs some retooling. According to a talk I had with Lohikar, there are currently only two ways to destroy a phylactery - using a null rod on it, or somehow deleting it, such as by putting it in a deconstructive analyzer. So, it doesn't seem to have 'health' at this time in the first place, that could be damaged by starlight. Also, most of the asteroid is dark and outside of starlight, so that doesn't super solve the problem. I think perhaps giving a cooldown of several minutes on respawning from the phylactery would be reasonable too. In the sense that if you die too often, you have to wait a period to use Dark Resurrection. This would allow people to actually retrieve your corpse temporarily if you wizard-rush them too often, and punish you for relying too much on your immortality rather than other skills you might have.

For those unaware of the wizard spell called 'lichdom', it essentially makes you a skeleton that is night unkillable, able to respawn an infinite number of times as long as some sort of magical heart item called a phylactery exists. The problem with this, as far as I can tell, is that is it not exactly well-equipped for a station this large. While it was incredibly frustrating dealing with a lich in the original station, that station was, at least, one in which you could reasonably expect everything to be on one, maybe two levels if you included the asteroid, possibly a third smaller one if you decided to also include the telecomms. This is not so anymore. Now, it is not only possible to hide your phylactery in places so ass-backwards obscure no one would ever find them... But within the very book that contains it, you have the tools to respawn infinitely and return to the station to immediately continue being a shitbag troll. https://gyazo.com/e9f7fb7f73b3622fb3c0b2932ae2939e Oh no, I seem to have been killed! https://gyazo.com/d956b3194e62e3fabfd5d73e24528ea0 It's cool though, I'll just return to my phylactery hidden in a place so isolated no one will ever find it... https://gyazo.com/6c2826052249b900c13aaab046956d64 Then return to fireballing the station via my recall spell! WHEEE! Yes, you could very well claim admins exist to moderate cases of extreme trolling like this, but it also works for people who are being blatantly murderous and/or just disruptive. There comes a point in most primary antagonist rounds like wizard or ninja that full on-fighting begins between the security/crew and the antagonist. What this spell does at this current time is basically force this escalation of conflict to either stagnate forever, or continue until everyone who can fight back is dead. If the antagonist is beyond any reasonable chance of being taken out - and believe me, the game at current time does absolutely nothing to convey what is going on with liches; I didn't even know there was a phylactery involved until I did some testing, I thought they just don't die no matter how much you shoot them - then there is nothing you can do except try to ignore them or let them control the flow of the entire round. I'm going to take a moment here to address something that I feel sure is going to come up in this thread. I've heard the opinion expressed that lichdom is a great spell because it forces the crew to seek other alternatives besides 'get muh valids', but why exactly should the crew tolerate a clearly evil skeleton monster running around? Why should they treat them like a random visitor, or auditor, or anything except something worthy of fear and revulsion? Telling people that they have no choice but to seek diplomacy doesn't really tend to lead anywhere. It's a rare person that can pull of a 'peace wizard' in a way that is interesting to be around. More often than not they just putter around being a special snowflake and existing in their half-baked idea of why their wizard is here. There's a reason why in this games inception as a concept these special characters were called 'antagonists'. They were equipped and expected to cause conflict and chaos on the station. We've evolved some since those days, but expecting everyone to just entirely discard conflict because they literally have no other choice except die or play 'extended, plus a wizard' is not an appealing prospect. Because, as far as I'm seeing, this spell isn't being used to advance some sort of gimmick involving being a lich, it's just being used as a free ticket to never die, ancillary to any actual goal they had for the round. All that being said, I'm not really sure that removing the spell entirely is the best decision. It's not a bad spell, so to speak, but it's tremendously abusable in really obnoxious ways. There is no quality assurance in place for antagonists. They're not whitelisted, and the administrative staff makes no secret of their intentions to never do so. Giving a tool to antagonists this powerful is just going to lead to more rounds where it is functionally impossible to get rid of the wizard and everyone just gets sick of having them around. Perhaps placing some limitations on phylactery use would be good, but I don't really know what you could do to them without nerfing them to the ground. Some method of reliably locating them, and the game conveying that they exist at all, would be good, because the light they give off isn't sufficient anymore to make them easy to locate on this map. Maybe with every revival the liches phylactery becomes more obtrusive, until it can be tracked somehow, if that's even possible between z-levels.

Maybe it's time to phase out Atmospherics Technician as a role and just make it part of basic engineering responsibilities to poke your head in there once and a while to make sure it's working. It's always been a very niche department to go to, as it can honestly sit empty an entire round and not affect the rest of the station. I can't say I super appreciate the idea of deliberately designing it to be untouchable by the AI, but it's not like AI on this server are generally allowed to commit atmos fuckery, anyway.

But how could you comb away your unathi frills and/or horns? Or your Tajara ears..

Actually, according to a test me and Lohikar did, it has nothing to do with whether or not you can see. The lack of ability to see messages is entirely based on the current light level - your ability to see with night vision or anything else is completely irrelevant. He also said the fix would be difficult and probably involve rewriting darkness code. (maybe you can fix tajaran night vision during that time too)

I dunno guys. This probably isn't going to be a popular opinion, on account that it asking for yet more work to be done by the dev team, but I feel like you could do a lot better with reactions to atmos temperature than making it deal micro-burn damage the moment you cross the initial designated danger threshold. You say it's a minor annoyance that doesn't affect anyone, but I don't like to have to be covered in 'fresh skins' every time I step into a freezer for 30 seconds to grab a steak or create a condiment bottle. I acknowledge that there are really only four basic damage types, and fireloss is the only type of damage that even really fits temperature related trauma. It is definitely relevant to someone sitting in temperatures so extreme they literally start peeling skin or flash-freezing blood, but there are certainly a lot less lazy and half-assed ways one could deal with hypothermia/frostbite and heat stroke in more moderate but still hazardous temperatures. Even in the much vaunted lore, for instance, there is a mention about unathi that: And, for equal coverage to illustrate the lie fact that I only read or care about unathi lore: In no way do the current mechanics illustrate either of these things, beyond entirely flavor text related messages about feeling sluggish or uncomfortable. Unathi do not pass out in the cold, and in fact, start getting alarming messages about 'You feel icicles forming in your lungs!" because there's only like 3 prepackaged 'temperature warming' emotes in each direction, and unathi having a lower cold maximum means they get the scary messages a lot easier. Having never played a tajaran, I assume there is a similar problem when they overheat, where they're told they are uncomfortable, but they are supposedly capable of ignoring it completely due to... This gem of immersive gameplay mechanics (which is true, after some study - you never go above 2 fireloss in the freezer, making it an utterly irrelevant mechanic) The point I'm trying to make here is that introducing something that causes a character to gradually lose consciousness and soon die of exposure if unrescued would be a lot better system than immediately starting to take tiny ticks of fireloss the moment you get cold/hot enough to pass your species preset temperature thresholds.

Golly, and here I thought the big red message about being neck grabbed, the gasping emotes, and the obvious damage you start taking were signs enough. I guess I didn't realize being strangled is so poorly telegraphed. >_>

I think if this had cyanide gas in it, it should generate a cloud of the stuff around you when you use it. It's not intended to be used as a weapon, it's intended to kill anyone adjacent to you and take them down with you. Like a less destructive version of the ninja deadman's switch.

Although it's not even clear what you're suggesting in the first place. From what I remember, drinking garble blasters caused a space drugs like effect with your screen where the rainbow shifting overlay started happening. I guess that got removed?

Sorry, but. People who decide to spend their antagonist round doing something really weird like 'pretending to be santa' or 'going around healing the crew with magic' are not somehow magically exempt from being questioned by security. You are not Santa, you are a crew member using illegal items to pretend to be a fictional character. It is frankly insanity to expect that doing this in a workplace should just be ignored until you do something hostile. This next part is, of course, opinion based, but people who waste their antag round on a 'gimmick' that involves them going around being a special friendly snowflake seem to have missed the important context of the term 'antagonist'. You're equipped with gear or abilities that normal crew lacks, which is intended to facilitate creating an interesting round. Deciding that 'an interesting round' constitutes pretending that you just got lost after teleporting on the station and want a place to stay and chat with people is a colossal waste of an opportunity other people really want that have more engaging ideas. As a general rule of thumb, if your 'gimmick' heavily relies on you expecting the entire crew to just tolerate your presence as 'one of the guys', then you are not playing an antagonist right. You are creating no conflict except that which occurs when people try to treat you like what you are - an intruder with unknown motives, or a crewmember that has items or tech they shouldn't have. There is no reason to remove this rule except to facilitate more peace antag play, which I vehemently disagree with. You don't have to go around actively murdering the crew without a word to be an antagonist, but you can certainly do more aggressive things than pretend to be santa.

In my experience, people who create characters with fragile/vulnerable traits such as stuttering, especially if they are female, tend to do it for the sole purple of being a special, precious snowflake, and will become ornery and upset if you try to derail their waifu-bait character by making them a villain. This isn't universally true, of course, but I have noticed a tendency of people playing timid-seeming female characters absolutely loathing the existence of cult. This is an endemic problem with cult, though. It doesn't really matter how you change it, there are people who just want to play their character like it's extended all day every day. These people will usually avoid even interacting with antagonists.

The law could be interpreted in restrictive ways, sure. You could decide that your laws make you barely functional and hide in a corner somewhere in an attempt to avoid any interactions. Or you could just behave in the 'accepted fashion', ie largely ignoring crew and doing drone things, rather than complaining that the law is badly written? It's really up to the silicon's player to some extent to determine how much fun they want to have within their laws. I will tenuously agree maybe the law could be reworded, but changing it to 'interfere' will essentially open up the gate for drones to do things that are not interfering with crew but definitely are outside of their intended purpose. It's not 'interfering' with a crew member to be a hat and beep at anyone passing, for instance. Personally, I would prefer it say ""Interact with no humanoid or synthetic being that is not a fellow maintenance drone, outside of performing your duties to improve or maintain." There are certain situations where you sort of NEED a crew member's assistance, or for them to step aside, or something. One big one I can think of is constructing new rooms. Without the blueprints, which only a crew member can use, an area cannot receive power properly, because it has to be designated as a 'zone'. Having a drone beep at the CE to help them zone a room does not seem to be egregiously out of line for performing station improvements. (This is ignoring certain CEs who seem to loathe drones and complain any time one of them changes something and would never cooperate with them under any circumstances cough hayden cough) You could also buzz unhappily at someone you see deconstructing a wall or breaking a window.

There's a certain mentality on the server, as far as I'm aware, that people who play 'direct from ghost' roles (mice or drones) should be excluded from anything involving crew interaction, in varying levels. In various cases, they've sort of got a point. Usually mice and drones that want to 'roleplay' end up either being trolly pests or acting like someone's pet. In the case of mice, it's a little more easy to deal with - just one attack from basically anything will kill a mouse, and the only things they can really interact with are food items and vents. Drones are a little more difficult, though. A drone has more tools at its disposal than any borg, can travel anywhere on the station almost via maint hatches and trash system. The ideal purpose of the drone is for someone to just spend a quiet round playing with construction/station improving, rather than going around beeping and buzzing at crew and trying to be a hat. To whit, they created the 'no interaction' law. It's not really as onerous as you think. Just focus on doing maintenance and construction and ignore the existence of crew as much as you need to. You don't need to jump through hoops to avoid them. Just act like they are part of the scenery.

Oh no, no no. Don't misunderstand me. Current ling is absolutely atrocious and awful. The entire design of the mechanics revolves around 'sting' mechanics, none of which are particularly interesting. That it needs to be changed is something we both agree on. I just don't agree that going the direction of full horror movie is the right way to do it. That's why I submitted this thread https://forums.aurorastation.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=8339 essentially suggesting we port Polaris ling set, which removes the most garbage sting varieties and provides a whole slew of other powers to use, along with giving you full access to your entire skill set as options. Yes, admittedly, a lot of them are very 'traitory', but I mainly meant this as an easy way to introduce some fresh new mechanics to what is an extremely stale, unpalatable game mode. I'm not opposed to it later being reworked into something slightly less derivative.

Eh. Ignoring that this entire thread uses way too many instances of the word 'meme', this is basically just a request to make changeling more like it is on Goon, i.e. based thematically on The Thing. It amuses me, though, that your primary complaint is 'ling is too much like traitor' and you turn around and suggest we 'make ling like vampire'. it seems to me that's taking one step forward and another big one back. Let me tell you the problem with that, even if we again, ignore the inherent irony. Skullcode vampires aren't just antags that have to go around sucking blood and leaving corpses or they turn into monsters. There are whole aspects of their design that involve subterfuge, control, and misdirection. More often than not, vampires are encouraged to keep their victims alive and under their delicate control, rather than murder them. What you have come up with here is essentially 'make the changelings murder people constantly or they out themselves as horrible monsters'. What other aspects does this introduce for people who are not interested in going on a murdering spree? The only path this idea seems to give is to be fucking disgusting and terrifying in an incredibly overt way, until security brings out flamethrowers and incinerates you into ash like how they deal with this in John Carpenter land. There isn't really a whole lot of middle ground here, because once you start using your abilities, everyone will want you dead. Sure it's scary, but it's also single-faceted and with 2-4 lings in a round, people will quickly become exhausted with screaming at Jin McNormal's head popping off and crawling away on spider legs or whatever. The Thing was a scary movie because every scene with the monster was fresh terror, a new stomach-turning form of body horror they hadn't seen before. When you try to standardize that into a set of abilities in a game setting, it loses it's impact simply by rote of repetition. Someone tried to make a game once out of The Thing, and I played it. It got really old fast, and only the boss battles even had any impact (and that wasn't much)

Why do we even still have ambrosia, other than as a legacy of the 'lol drugs!!!' days of SS13? Can't we just remove it from the machines and consign it into the depths of 'stupid joke mechanics' hell, alongside clowns, mimes, and honkmechs, and being able to cause brain damage/healing by hitting people with a bible? Perhaps you can replace it with something less stupid, like tobacco, which is already legal on station, or marijuana, which is barely even illegal in 2017 and probably would be entirely not a controversial issue 500 years in the future when there are more important things to worry about.

I would like to be able to wear an eyepatch and security hud at the same time. Perhaps a combination sechud with an eyepatch behind it. I have a character who always has an eyepatch because they are missing an eye, and it's annoying to end up as the warden and have people bitch at me that I need to be wearing a sechud.

This seems like an utterly pointless suggestion. Unlike the other 'alert level' moderated thing, suit sensors, there is absolutely no tactical benefit to not having your ID displayed. You're not even hiding your location or identity, because anyone passing by who notices you have no ID is going to ask to see it and not doing so is immediately suspicious. By adding this you just create a scenario where some irritating assistant or whatever obstinately refuses to put on their ID be cause 'i don't have to its code green lol'. This is supposed to be a private, secure research station, not a civilian hangout spot, and frankly, I don't think that people should be allowed to turn their suit sensors off entirely without being looked at askance either, but that's a different subject. The way things are now is fine, where people are expected to have identification on themselves at all times, and if they are walking around without it then someone will ask them to put it on.

They're special disinfecting future needles, that kill 100% of all bacteria and foreign organisms on the syringe after each use.

On the note of Overshadow, I think, much like wizards and muzzles, you could counteract it with deafness or earmuffs

http://ss13polaris.com/wiki/doku.php?id=game:guides:changeling Now, hear me out here, I'm sure there's a lot of eye rolling and groans, because there is probably a 'fix changeling' thread at least once every two months. Bay changeling is just not very well designed. It is entirely focused around murdering people, and the mechanics you have are almost all 'sting' related and to get the good ones you actually require several murders to occur. Early game changelings are barely even antagonist, with an array of powers that amount to 'moderately inconveniences someone for a half minute while you use tools you picked up elsewhere to down them'. Balance retooling has made it even harder on changelings, with things such as alberyk removing a lot of the stings undetectability by making people feel pricks when they are used, and having monkey eating removed. Late game changelings are just plain obnoxious, having abilities like instant paralysis for what feels like a trillion years (but is actually about half a minute or so), making stealth kills laughably easy once they get going. They also have significant blind spots in their skillset that other antagonists do not have, such as them being absolutely helpless against any synthetic in existence. People who don't want to go around beating crew members to death with a toolbox after silence stinging them have very few options, which mainly involve spamming hallucination/transformation sting until everyone starts ahelping in exasperation or mimicking voices. All of these issues are addressed with this method of changeling. There is no paralysis, transform, or hallucination sting (the shitty triumvirate), there is a method to effective cause EMP damage around you, along with a whole lot of exciting other options like making false clothing and IDs, travelling in space, becoming nearly invisible, and putting armor on yourself. More importantly, everything is accessible from the get go, but you can only choose so many evo points worth of abilities. If you want more, you need to hunt down your fellow lings, and if you want to change them, you need to slurp up a crew member. It definitely keeps the spirit of DNA eating shapeshifting monster while removing a lot of the frustrating aspects.

While I applaud some of the ingenuity of this idea, there's a lot about it that makes me frown and shake my head. It's clear that you're going for a theme, and it's a good theme, don't get me wrong. But, aside from a few exceptions, a lot of the cultist abilities you're coming up to amount to 'like wizard but vury spoops'. And that's not a good thing. Every antagonist we have right now is deliberately significantly different. We can't change cult and have the result be 'oh it's the mini raging mages round type god this is annoying'. A few similarities is fine, but if the ability list starts containing a large amount "like X ability from Y antag' then you have a problem. An individual cultist should also almost never have a power equivalent in scope to a primary antagonist, because they are multi-antags. As an example to make the mechanics significantly unique enough, I offer an alternative to these that I came up with in the last five minutes of typing this. Dark Dream - Your target dreams as if they were someone else, they are right ~ While a mind swap is fitting for mind, the question of tattoos and cult items being lost remains a big downside. Would the victim gain those abilities now that they are in your body, or not as they aren’t familiar with them (not converted). If that is too much of a hassel, perhaps this can be reworded to be more like Subjugate. Ghostly Form ~ basically ethereal jaunt would be fitting. Astral Projection - Leave your body, to see the world as a spirit. ~ can be like scrying orb, allowing them to talk with the dead, and scout out nearby rooms. ---- Overshadow: You whisper a word of power that mortal minds were not meant to know, and infest the mind of a nearby target. This ability only works at a very short range (probably 1-3 tiles), and causes you to gain control of the victim, but they can leave that area afterwards. Essentially, you take over their body and can make them do whatever you wish during that time (though there might be some limitation on making them commit suicide?). This ability only lasts a short time, roughly 30-60 seconds, and your body is helpless during this time as you collapse and mutter dark incantations to help you focus on controlling your subject (it is not subtle, so it shouldn't be done if you are surrounded). You mainly use this ability to for escapes or to make someone do something awful, and they receive a significant amount of corruption from this. Spirit Sight: You inscribe a tattoo on yourself that you can activate at any time, allowing you to, at the cost of nominal blood drain while active, to see the presence of anything living nearby. This essentially amounts to having thermal vision, but does not involve goggles anyone passing can see. Spirit Shift: You gain the ability to leave your body at will. The process requires some concentration and time to do (several seconds), during which you whisper dark incantations under your breath. Afterwards, you leave your body, entering the spirit realm. While you are in the spirit realm, you can see and hear many things in the material world, and walls do not affect your passage. Your body begins to slowly die (slow oxyloss rather than the old bruteloss, you aren't breathing anymore with no soul inside), but you can re-enter it at any time to recover, or you can perform a dangerous ritual that moves your body to the location of your spirit. This process also takes several seconds, and will telegraph what is going on to nearby people ("Urist McCulty's body begins to shimmer and fade away!"), and at the completion, you reinhabit your body at the location. Flesh is not supposed to move like this, however, and doing so makes you take a moderate amount of brute damage (enough to hurt you significantly, but not enough to start breaking bones unless you do it repeatedly in a short time). If possible, making this version of ghost lack the ghosty speed/acceleration would be good, so they can't just zoom across the entire station in seconds. The obvious things like Overshadow and Spirit Shift would corrupt people who are nearby to hear the dark whispers and see things that should not be, obviously.

The issue here I don't think is so much that the consoles need to be fixed so much as that shuttle calls and recalls are something that has entirely been relegated to staff moderation at this time. You can recall and call shuttles endlessly with no problem simply because no one has yet coded in a 'stopping point' or even a cooldown period. This should be addressed before we start removing access to the command or telling where someone is recalling the shuttle from.

While it is a very stupid mini event as-is, I don't see anything 'memey' about it. People don't make jokes about it. They don't laugh about it. It's just there, being a nuisance that people ignore beyond the passing effort it takes to grumble at an engineer to fix it. The only time people even mention out of it is to complain about it. "To complain about it." That should tell you something A complaint about a bad feature is not a meme, it's just a bad feature being complained about. Either way, this is a discussion on improving a feature, not deciding it is just stupid and 'memey' and should be removed entirely. That's not really even constructive, nor is this arguement about the nature of memetics, so let's stop.

I like how Nanako literally said she fixed this problem, and that the behavior you are talking about is a bug, and yet you are still suggesting ways to fix the problem like it was intended this way. I do not think that pAI's should die suddenly if they get too far away from their master or don't have one. That is really dumb, and makes them little more than someone's talking point to loiter nearby or sit on their head.