Sniblet

I go up to the panel and point my multitool at it. I startle as though I am under attack and suddenly grip my multitool, white-knuckled, in both hands. Swaying in a desperate bid to regain balance, through clenched teeth, I hiss, “I’m— losing— CONTROL!!” And I fall to the ground with a cry of agony. The maintenance panel is impassive, embedded in the wall before my dying body. Its caution stripes and “do not tamper” warnings make for a grisly reminder of who really runs this vessel.

Though the lore exists to serve us and can change as we please, it’s currently written that all IPCs are humanoid in order to capitalize on the positronic brain’s adaptability (with it taken for granted that non-humanoid chassis are, somehow, necessarily not adaptable). That would need to be stricken from the wiki. I do want to see unbranded chassis options, but it sounds like it would be loads easier to just make alt sprites for the Baseline (though even they’re made of Hephaestus Integrated limbs, which is a bruh moment on a historic scale).

hemnlo We are Lii'dra. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to serve us. Resistance is futile. The Lii'dra do not appear often. This is because it kind of feels like everybody has to have a vaurca whitelist on an offship antag round for it to happen, and there's little overlap between people with whitelists and people with antag on. They're also, typically, um... Predictable Always loud Immune to being roleplayed with Unmaintained (last updated September 2021) And that's bad because I think they're cool. Here are some headcanons and ideas to help get YOU (yes, even if YOU are human) started on playing Lii'dra in a new and exciting way. Basically, nobody ever thinks about their gimmicks until they roll antag, so I’m thinking for you. Sections will start with italics to denote canon facts, followed by unformatted text which is me expanding on that. I will refer to Lii'dra as a singular individual with capitalized feminine pronouns, because every body in the Hivemind is just an appendage of High Lii'dra. They are not a hive, She is one person. This sounds idiosyncratic to you, but it's actually just correct. Non-Lii’dra may be called defectives, because they are defective. Individual “””Members of Hive Lii’dra””” will be referred to as units. They are not members, because that implies personhood. Appendages. Units. What's Lii'dra up to these days? General Behavior Biology Connected and Disconnected Assimilation and The Bioweapon Vixiat supremacy. This was seven hours of typing, including two accidental rollbacks of half-hours of editing and additions caused by accidental, apparently irreversible taps of ctrl+Z. Badass. I barely play lately, so if you use any of this (or play Lii’dra at all), tell me about it here and you might lure me back.

A general observation, that I’ve yet to see anyone make about Odyssey as it relates to these discussions, and ought to help guide the way we think: There are already certain other servers, quite old and very popular (last I looked), where the gameplay of every round centers around an away site. We should never be TGMC or Colonial Marines (god, please), but they have lessons for us. Means of transport, engaging pilot gameplay, exactly how lame it is to stay aboard and how important it is to get people off the ship.

You can really tell who in this thread has never mained service. Aurorastation 13 is a fictional setting. We can have our cake and eat it too, by emoting eating a cake, emoting it reconstituting itself in front of us for literally no reason, and then emoting having the cake. Everyone on Horizon is already living in deep space and being carried along through the Badlands and Uoeoea-Esa with the shields and thrusters and power down by default and constantly, constantly dealing with greimorians and blobs and allegedly combat drones, somewhere. There is a level of acceptable risk that random bar staff are tolerating already. Going on an Odyssey just means pushing that acceptable risk. No one thinks the bar shotgun should get the DOOM treatment, but a bartender should be authorized to hang around the landing site and hand out miserable visibly writhing cocktails if they please. By some, this is called fun. “What business do you have down here? There could be danger!” Catering, motherfucker. I’m doing the job on my contract, how about you? ”We have MREs” Shut up. ”I don’t care if it’s dirty down here so go back up and mop the pristine floors of the echoing, empty halls of the SCCV Horizon for 2 and a half hours” No. I truly, truly do not care if it seems a bit questionable to drag the cook along on an exploratory mission. Maybe it is! Maybe you’re right. Anyway, if he’s volunteering, bring him. If you find this unimmersive, I’m sure you can overcome that. I’m doing fine here. If it’s Fortnite: Battle Royale down there, yeah fine make him stay up. But as long as nobody’s ever asked to evacuate or shelter in place on Code Yellow, nor even the exceptional and relatively highly dangerous - no, I’m serious - Code Blue, then a Code Blue situation should be permissive to everybody.

A lot of our balancing efforts seem to rely on the assumption that antag combat interactions are usually all-out rule-breaking \TG\station deathmatches. I’m glad you see it differently, and I hope whoever’s in charge of implementing the pendagger is the same. And yeah, the sword completely breaks that point I made. I have no follow-up.

I think the point Fluffy was making is that the penergy dagger as seen in TG can go from 0 to a hit in basically an instant. A pocket gun needs two clicks in different corners of the screen. A pen dagger can be pulled out without alarms, then you mouse over your prey, then you set up a typebait, then you press Z and click more or less simultaneously. This would be almost unique in Aurora. A gun must be visibly holstered to do this, and a cane sword needs to be ICly justified. Martial arts need you to land a combo before they really count. If there’s some charge up period or arbitrary delay from ignition (Z) to the point you can start mauling a bitch (click) then it stops being unique in that way, and everything’s fine again.

Oh I was about to post the weapons line from the code Yeah! You can see that Horizon is armed. It's bizarre that it's so vague, I don't know why sensor reports are like that when you'd realistically want your sensors to be designed for detailed readouts on pertinent information like whether a ship will kill you. But, yeah, you can see. And if you're brave enough to try to board a ship that suspiciously has one more gun than it needs to clear meteors, is four times your size and likely four times your complement, greatly outsizes actual freighters, and has like seven dubious hangar doors, you're brave enough to board flagship Horizon and then try to go to ground (this will work, tho). The fact that Horizon is the flagship has, as far as I can tell, had no effect on the macro plot. Sometimes, we get assigned to missions that the SCC surveyor ghostroles could be doing day-to-day. The rest of the time, we're doing things that should be done by more than one ship. All I've ever felt of the flagship designation's presence is the occasional headscratcher whenever the greimorian hordes arise, hissing, deformed, from the vent systems, seeking to enact mild violence and antisocial behavior; and whenever the Guwan or Cytherean hordes do the same, all of which after corporate has had literal years of notice on which to send an exterminator. I'd have assumed that they wanted their flagship to represent the Conglomerate favorably. Target cares more about its stores.

I have no stake here. I’ve never interacted with CCIA. I don’t play Aurora for nonantag conflict. I barely play Aurora now, perhaps relatedly. I just like one of the points shared by N8-Toe and Fluffy a lot and I want to repeat it. ”…and that’s not changing.” ”…all those things and others as just unchanging features of reality.” Aurora is annoyingly resistant to change, at all levels. Before declaring that something must be as it is, ask and carefully answer why. There are no laws of nature at play here, and anything can change if we want it. Is Aurora the best it can be? What’s wrong with it? How can we address what people don’t like? Is the correct answer usually “don’t address them, they’re wrong?” Watch yourself. Wrong how? What tradeoffs are we making in Aurora’s current structure? What do they cost us? Are all of these tradeoffs necessary, even the old ones from a different time? How can we find out? I mostly gave up on Aurora in favor of FFXIV roleplaying. The rules are virtually unenforceable, are usually about seven points long (don’t be mean, don’t be bigoted, weapons policy, erp policy, take fights outside, separate OOC from IC, literally have fun), vary by location, and cease to exist if you make your own informal group and play in private. The system functions beautifully. I have never been griefed. It’s been a year. Aurora’s rules have dropdowns. People complain constantly. Is this inevitable, unchangeable, or is there maybe a cause? Aurora has mechanical PvP… does that account for literally all of the difference? I’ve written out my issues before; there they are again. Let go of some of the structure, please. The setting will be fine if people just like it enough to fit themselves into it voluntarily. Likewise the tone. These are ifs, of course; but if people turn out not to like something, is it not the best possible outcome to have it then change organically to match what is wanted? What are we protecting against? What behaviors are CCIA taking down, specifically, and do they have to do it in the way that they do? Do CCIA have to get people for fighting if fighting is fun, and someone else can handle it better when handling it is fun? Is CCIA, at all junctures - all junctures - asking how they can be complicit in the most fun? Are they, at some points, following procedures and realism and tone-law that are assumed to create fun? Are these sound for this purpose in all situations? If not, there is room for improvement, and that means change. Policy, mindset, rank structure - whatever, I’ve all but left Aurora. But I still play a bit, and I want you all to have a lot of fun. If people aren’t having a lot of fun, at least be curious about why and what can be done. It’s not as if they’re just trolling the forum.

A distress call in frantic Delvahhi from ICV Adhomai's Honor, a Tajaran merchant vessel flying no national flag. Horizon's away team boards onto a darkened ship. The chill of Tajaran air conditioning. The APCs are all red. The cargo hold contains two schlorrgos, scrounging from a decayed hydroponics bay, and some illegal merchandise. Pirates. Dead pirates. Case closed, then- ...somewhere deeper in, to the fore - a drawn-out, inhuman moan...

I’m not a great source of advice for believable characters, I don’t think, because I play strongly inhuman vaurcae and IPCs most of the time on Aurora. But here’s some stuff I do across platforms. I don’t reference documents regarding what a character ought to be. Ought follows is, not the other way around - so whatever I do while feeling like I’m that character, is that character - so I can never play a character wrong. If they do something that seems strange for them, then they’re just capable of doing things that you might not expect them to. (This stammery 4’10” research understudy has, if you can believe it, had an intense romantic relationship in the past, and that’s why her stammer fades and she speaks comfortably and bluntly with you about your woes in love.) Real people are like this, so I can turn what I could have treated as a mistake into an illusion of a deep, archetype-defiant, layered character. My backstories start as sketchy outlines (worked with the Nlomkala from 2456 to 2464. full stop) and don’t become tangible until someone asks me about it and I decide to answer (“it was easy for me, despite the astronomical expectations I was under - I found the orderliness soothing”). This is another illusion to make it look like I’ve done the work while actually doing minimal work. While I’m inhabiting the character, it’s not so hard to think of what they might have done in the past, how the past might have shaped them, and of course, how they’ll frame it in the context they were asked in. They’ll stay on topic, and not look like they’re reading from a pre-written backstory, because they’re not. I’m improvising every word, save for the locations, dates, and vibes. If I contradict myself, it was IC, actually. Real people are messy. They might subtly lie about their histories for any, or literally no reason. They might act noticeably differently in the same situation from day to day, and if called out on it, if they try to think of a reason for the difference, they could even point to the wrong thing (“I guess I’m just tired.” <—- is barely suppressing a surge of nauseous anxiety) whether intentionally or not. The one thing I never want to do is step into LOOC and say, "hey, can we pretend my character actually said this other thing instead?" It’s SO easy to play off your mistakes in roleplaying. I can’t get enough of it. All I have to do is never acknowledge that I made a mistake, and if I'm lucky, they can even make me look more competent than I am. Just don't ask me about whether I keep any notes. I don't want to have to lie and say I do.

Normally this doesn't matter, but if I serve a drink in one of the glasses that don't change into special sprites to match their contents (snifter, sherry, half-pint, pint, etc), most of my most fun custom mixes will come out as a nice earthy brown. Give bars a benign chemical (or several) that can be added in trace amounts to heavily weight the average color of the mix into something attractive, or even player-selected. If someone doesn't want to think about how to do that, I guess we could also add a function to these generic-sprite glasses that changes the color of what's inside, and have us pretend that it's food coloring.

CEV Eris moment? (RU/EN MRP server in an apocalyptic setting where you’re on an independently owned ship as disparate, competing, politically opposed corporate contractors working solely for the ship’s owner, and you’re basically in the Eye of Terror so your corporate masters cannot reach you and your sanity is always crumbling; self-antag is inevitable and not particularly discouraged) I get the same vibe of these groups who ought to want to kill each other, sharing a space and failing to go into hot war just because they’re paid better than they could hope for otherwise. An Aurora implementation would probably be less chaotic than that, but the similarities are out there. On first reading, I thought Hedgemaze could work as an alt map, another thing we vote on before the round: Horizon or Hedgemaze? But the rules would have to be different between ships, and you can’t play the same character on both ships if both ships share a canon, so a separate server would be almost as practical. Which is to say, not really practical. While I don’t imagine it being particularly corporate-endorsed, I could see the ship having a corporate presence. Security officers may have Zavodskoi’s name written somewhere in the legal maze of their contracts, if not literally wear the uniform. The Garden would find it hard to rope in professionals that don’t owe anything to the masters of the galaxy. If they want to stay independent, they should keep it unofficial, though. Hedgemaze is a very cool name.

They’re future ovens. They don’t cause fires because of the future. I would also be open to future ovens that could cause fires, but instead don’t need to be left on for 60 seconds before they’ll begin operating at the slowest possible speed, because of the future. Either option sounds unnecessarily tedious, but I certainly wouldn’t accept both at once. anyway let’s make all of the kitchen equipment gas-powered. you have to enslave an atmos tech before you can do anything, but you get to cook with phoron fires. “it’zzz zavhe to eat i promizze” says the chef, earning vacant stares from its customers who are gently fading out of lucidity due to acute carbon dioxide poisoning because the fume hood cannot keep up

Set Flavour Text verb but for medical scans. Some method to cause self-damage in an OOC way, other than *succumb. Tighten surgeons’ specialty so that they aren’t morally obligated to involve themselves in an asthma attack when physicians and paramedics are available. There have been a few times when I’ve dragged my character at full health into an idle medbay (or mechanics workshop) and had to emote health scanner results because I could not make the game reflect what was happening. I felt disruptive and unwanted by all involved, but a big part of that issue was that doctors right now simply never do RP treatments (this being because you have to emote health scanner results), and so being RP-ill made me unique in my inconvenientness. If RP med were made normal - starting with being enabled, rather than contradicted, mechanically - then physicians would suddenly have a lot more problems that only they are supposed to be solving. Vampires and changelings could get SO much mileage out of this, too, not that anyone wants them to be happy.