Sniblet

I think you’re coming across clear enough. I completely tuned out the Biesel election. I think Torvald is president? All I know about him is from vaurca-general memes. He’s like racist or something, maybe. We’re in Tau Ceti, though - a mobile Biesel territory. The current president can affect us via his influence over our laws. Changes that the corporations won’t sit down for aren’t exactly likely to come about without a major conflict (which can affect us in its own way. if whoever-the-president-is goes dramatically off the rails), but they’re capable of small concessions that appreciably affect us. Getting away with what used to be sedition, or especially eating a fine for what used to be narrowly acceptable behavior, remind us that we put a new guy in the big seat, and also that yes, we are in Biesel.

For whatever it's worth to you, if you want to extend the recent events section and possibly add a new dimension to the character, while reading this I noticed that having been bounced around a lot of Heph postings recently could have given Toil a near-miss with (almost?) being posted at Burzsia during the insurrection, forcing them to reflect on their own mortality/the political contention behind their work/how exactly they view IPCs/etc.

I haven’t seen it, but it sounds like a harsh tone break from the rest of the lobby. If you want to show off WWI cats, 80% of existing tajaran art is here for you. In this other corner, we have a robot with sunglasses and a smoke, and over there is a bug doing some welding. Oh and here’s gore. Not an 18+ server by the way. Strictly family-friendly by the way. Always be considerate to the many children in our community by the way. But let’s also maybe show all new joiners a cartoon of a furry being headshotted before they’ve gotten to finish character creation. I guess S.P.L.U.R.T. is no better, in fairness? I don’t know if I’d agree with comparing this to ingame proceedings, either. Shoot a tajaran in the head ingame and he’ll duck behind cover, gauze himself, say “O-ow.” and trudge to medbay for a regeneration serum injection that sounds like “pssh” and looks like the doctor’s giving him a kiss, with complementary instant scar revision. Shoot him three times and his face gains a flat abstract red blob decal that doesn’t quite fit his skull shape, and then he still goes “O-o-ow.” on the ground about eight times before getting automuted and PM’d the mature and dark-themed words, “laugh at this user.” We can get dark, but I would not call it consistent or defining enough for a title splash.

I'm never a fan of "we won't let you do what you want because you wouldn't want to" arguments, especially in roleplay, but anyway... True. I invoked handguns, famously always bought but never used by any antagonist that ever faces ballistic armor, so that I could show the audience what a difference correctly specialized armor makes, and also tell a fun anecdote that involved the greatest anime of all time, Sword Art Online.

It’s been a bit, but last I looked the armor spec game is entirely one-sided. Uplinks only sell “heavy armor,” which is above average against everything, and uplink EVA gear has been deliberately altered so that it’s all identical in protection. Horizon can do the whole armor counterplay game, while antagonists can only choose their weapons and looks (but oh boy, can they ever). The justifications for this were pretty flimsy (‘Horizon has an armory, the mercs do not’ - except that they do?) and broke down to “so that Horizon can always win.” It’s kind of an ugly thing to have to say, but it’s fair I think. Armor spec makes an immense difference. You cannot kill someone in ballistic armor with a handgun. I mean that you cannot. When I say that you cannot, I mean that you can’t and it is impossible. They passively outheal the gun in the way of Kirito from Sword Art Online or The Thing from John Carpenter’s The Thing. Longarms are different, but it’s still impossible (by which I mean not possible) to blow off limbs through ballistic armor.

The ominous device. Upon creation, it allows the antagonist to choose a skin from one of many hair-raising geometries: * Pillar * Dome (smooth) * Dome (hexagonal panels) * Pyramid * Cube In any of the deeply disturbing colors available to the machinist’s paint gun. It can be deviously renamed and redescribed, including a bespoke OOC description line, at any time via an OOC interaction. The device can similarly be made to pulse frightfully with spine-tingling light of a chosen color and intensity. Antagonists can use it to deviantly create custom SCC announcements on a short cooldown. If it is destroyed, they are informed of its destruction through a chilling OOC warning. An antagonist can horrifically produce a remote controller from the ominous device, allowing themselves to use the renaming, redescription, and lights functions remotely. The renaming, redescription, and lights functions, available only to antagonists by default, can be unlocked by an antagonist so that others can use them. In like a scary way. There is an admin variant, where all antag checks are replaced with server permissions checks. The ominous device otherwise doesn’t do anything. It does nothing.

I’m happy to be of help as your virtual reminder buddy. If there was any other silliness you were meaning to retcon, remember to do that too. Beep boop. It’s kind of a shame, but I get it. Warp alone can still be a big looming threat if we want it to be.

Lore Impact: basically zero if you retcon this, worldshaking if you push it forward normally Species: whoever bothers. Humans, probably? Short description: https://wiki.aurorastation.org/index.php?title=Einstein_Engines#Taipei_Engineering_Industrial Remove the lie that no one has volunteered to follow up on the hyperdrive in all this time. How will this be reflected on-station?: Depends on how you use it. It can have comparable implications to the invention of FTL, or change nothing. Is this addition redundant?: No Do you understand that lore teams can change it?: that’s the point yeah Long description: It has been FIVE, sorry, FIFTEEN YEARS and NO ONE has volunteered nor been volunteered to explore an entire new dimensional anomaly that, if mastered, would shatter the Chainlink - and could have shattered NanoTrasen before the Chainlink was formed with years to spare. Countless investor meetings have been had and Einstein Engines’ leadership has never reached a majority opinion that this technology should be pushed forward despite existing obstacles. They are not sending in IPCs or viax. They are not sending in dregs. When the first Space Race went down, states had more volunteers than they could find uses for. The Hyperspace Race is not happening due to a complete lack of volunteers, in this, a time with many times the number of living beings at hand to select from; in this, a time when any and every improvement on the warp drive could end NanoTrasen. If I’m this annoyed and I’m not even in the Auroraverse, how does Noelle feel right now? TEI quit at the first turn, and NanoTrasen Incorporated and Hephaestus Industries and the Nralakk Federation and the Serene Republic of Elyra and the Technocracy of Galatea and the C’thur Hive and Lii’dra and the Golden Deep are united in not wanting to be so rude as to steal their yellowed notes, instead being content to wait and let some patents dry up, apparently. “Conceptually instantaneous (whatever that means) galactic transit without the use of phoron fuel is not of interest to us at this time.” -Taipei Engineering Industrial Office of Corporate Communications I don’t know how you can safely advance this without making upsetting waves in the setting, but I think it’d be cool if some faction somewhere had this ace in something that believably resembles active development, as opposed to being forever delayed by the most unbelievable excuse yet contrived by man. Maybe push it forward - maybe tell me that there’s a reasonable obstacle holding TEI back (like okay maybe they do want to go forward but you know maybe it’s hard) - maybe say hyperspace was discovered only this year instead of fifteen years ago. Failing any of that, fine, retcon the dimension. As it exists now, this is wholly unbelievable and I treat it as if it’s not there.

Sorry, I'm a little late. We're still talking, right? Right. So after 30 minutes' focused work, the chef (when one comes up) can now make nearly anything on the menu as many times as anyone asks (0-1 times), and you can make infinite leather whips and glitched reishi joints to disturb and concern security with (when they ask you to stop, you will). Hydroponics is not fun. Growing bandages is useless, unless you can grow something better than an ATK. Hydroponicists need something to live for, and in order to count, it has to be something that people might go out of their way to ask you to do. You're the only source of coca on the ship, but cocaine is, um. And, oh, cool, you've made 400 quadrilliomn jars of honey, mmm I drinky it and it says you taste honey that's so fucking cool you're really cool man, anyway, I'm gonna go aggressively flirt with the HoS, because he'll say something a bit less predictable than you taste honey (it literally just says honey i am enraged by these kinds of taste descriptions). You know what I'd do? Make cooking more interesting. Add scent and make taste more evocative than you taste fucking honey and when I ask you, now, to let cooks be even more creative than a simple upgrade to the existing taste system would allow, what I mean is let them write taste descriptions themselves like those funny visual descriptions you sometimes see in make you go hmm, if they're willing to do a little work and get a sufficient variety of spices from botany. We have spices. We have condiments. They all just sit there on the counter because they all print you taste SPICE (oh sorry "SPICES") and MAYONNAISE (!!!). That's so fucking cool man. I'm gonna go very strongly imply to the HoS that I am a danger to myself and others and need to be heavily restrained and monitored in person by him and no one else. The bar's good, because I can make almost lyrical taste descriptions with a bit of study. People will drink them and go "oh, wow, how did you make this?" not because it was difficult or tedious, but because it was interesting to read and realize that such creativity is possible and no one else had thought to do that before. The kitchen gets honey. Wait, no. It gets meat and salt and something indescribable. Because there's no hydroponicist.

No affiliation with the lore team, just dropping an observation as a regular bug guy. It’s not impossible, but uncommon for a vaurca to be forced into a role that they resent, like Ra Riva. The Queens know what their castes are capable of and comfortable with, and unhappy workers are less than ideal - a bulwark made for chemical weapons would often, at the least, be grown with an exception to their nonviolent nature imprinted in their neurochemistry. Look at Vedhra’s page; are all of those workers secretly miserable? Unbound vaurcae, free-willed though they are, are purpose-built the same as viax; they’re grown specifically to fill the first position they’re put into. They often diverge later in small ways, but are born for what they’re expected to do. There would likely be a reason for this mismatch, as opposed to it just happening. Maybe it was a test; maybe the cell’s needs changed unexpectedly and a temporary concession fell on Riva’s big silly shoulders.

“If it makes you feel any better, what you came here to discuss doesn’t matter to you or anyone, you’re arguing for something that you’ve been explicitly interested in avoiding, and you never had any hope of pushing this through.” I’m salting a fair amount and I’ll stop from here, but please listen to yourself.

If they decide to wear the uniform. A machinist in black is indistinguishable from an engineer in black until you look at the ID. A pharmacist in a red qipao doesn’t look like anything. If you see a vaurca in vaurca clothes, you have to guess by the color they’ve chosen for their clothes (see: painted chassis - you don’t need to add new sprites, this functionality already exists, what are you talking about), their gear belt if applicable, and their satchel or tunnel cloak - or better yet, examine them. See also: any racial clothing and most loadout clothing. Golden Deep outfits. I recall the team being interested enough in them. Brother, you just examine them and then remember their face. We all do it. If you’re on Aurora’s forums, you already know what the woman in the red qipao does at a glance, or the cheery woman in the brown and red outfit, or the sniffing tajaran in unaltered laborer’s clothes, or the Athvur bulwark in plaid, or any and all captains, XOs, or RDs whom you’ve seen more than once. You know what Ren Hartfort really does, even though he dresses as a physician. Usually, you still have to check whether or not they’re on-duty. This is not creating a new problem, only adding new, interesting, wholly reasonable dimensions to an existing one. A minor one, necessary for an existing positive tradeoff at that - have you ever seen these mixups be anything but a slight, temporary embarrassment? not interested. Man, I just try to think through these things as if being right matters.

The roleplay anarchist is here. Everyone, please stand for another passionate argument for the dissolution of the rules. “Uniform standards are already permissive” Yes. Yes with the chad face. Unrelatedly, OP is saying they ought be more permissive. ”It would be a bad look for corporate” No. No with the chad face. What does this mean? Honestly, what are you talking about? Most fictional and real steel-exterior robots don’t wear clothes except as a joke. Do we feel bad about this? Does this fact reflect badly on Boston Dynamics or the Confederacy of Independent Systems? Would it if the robot had a job? If we in the real world started putting robots to work, would they have to follow the same workplace dress code as the people, or wouldn't you just like, apply paint and decals as necessary? If they start acting more like humans, does that really change anything? ”I’m not interested in rewriting the policy right now” OK. If you don’t feel like typing, let someone else do it. I volunteer. I’m sure you could find others, too.

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.