EvilBrage

I would propose that the stale feeling comes from the fact that the premise never changes, regardless of the antagonist - you're always working for NanoTrasen in one role or another aboard the Aurora. Breathing new life into the game would require a shift of that formula, even if only for select game modes. For example: introduce a "prison" setting in which there are fewer types of roles (prisoner, guard, maybe a warden, you get the idea) or a "city" setting that more closely mirrors civilian life. We can still have antagonists (and probably the same antagonists, with a few exceptions).

Not sure about the rest of you, but lately I've been getting this message every time I log in. Normally, this isn't an issue - I click through it and go on about my day, but playing a wizard round (the corrupt form, to be specific) brought to my attention that this message pops up every time you transform. The script is overzealous, and it's a reminder of a rule that should be fairly common sense to begin with - could we just do away with it altogether? Or at least find a way to prevent it from popping up while you're in the middle of a round and transforming?

Back in 2014 or 2015 I rolled wizard and got it in my head that... rather than pop onto the station and begin murdering crew with fireballs and magic missiles, I would simply hand them a knife and kindly ask them to kill themselves. Some of them obliged, so I turned them into artificers and had them set up a base for me. Stunned ISD when they tried to come along and detain me, tied them to chairs, offered them the same choice - it was about 25/75 in favor of just getting stabbed in the gut to facilitate the rise of Dark Kingdom of Cargonia. This was before I discovered it was much more fun to create my own ID and pretend to be the captain.

Murdered an entire manifest of 27 people. They died either by: Killing themselves. Knife to the gut.

Right, but then the act of abstaining from choosing a trait becomes a choice in and of itself - adding a new "meta" layer to one's decisions. There's already no downside to opting out of the trait system as presented - you won't receive a boon, but you won't suffer a bane either. You'll still outrun bruisers, outpunch those with small frames, and still be more technologically savvy than the handy folks. I'm fairly indifferent to the number of traits we have, and whether the choices we have to make regarding them are static or a gradual slider - so long as a choice is there and any choice will carry with it upsides and downsides. I'm also fairly indifferent to the idea that a department will favor particular traits over others; it makes sense that security would staff people with more muscle than the medical department, after all. If individuals select traits that are entirely incongruous to their character design (your flavor text says you're a skinny 4'11'' girl but you take the bruiser trait) that's something we can address within the present ruleset already. No advantage presented can change the core fact of SS13 that being able to click with alacrity - being robust, in other words - will put you in a league of your own. I am not suggesting massive bonuses by any stretch of the imagination; I can't imagine the bruiser trait giving you more than 5 extra points of damage per melee attack, or small frame giving you more than a 10% speed bump over others. These won't shift the formula of the game in any radical direction, but they will be noticeable. When traits are regarded as "nice to have" rather than "must have" or "useless," that's when we'll know we succeeded. It will come with growing pains, yes, but I anticipate you will come to appreciate how we can encourage players to act in a realistic manner through the application of mechanics such as these.

That was the best inspiration I could find that would work with what we have; something with an upside and a downside. Why does a 4'6'', geriatric, spindly medical doctor do the same unarmed damage as a 6'3'' former spec-ops bruiser who stays in top physical shape? That's a question you can't answer with the current system; so long as we're on the topic of competitiveness, let's not pretend that a minor mechanical trade-off could ever compare to that provided by the actual antagonist of the round. If you're worried about the limited capacity of a trait and its impact on your personal style of play, you could always simply not select a trait - but don't expect to do more damage than someone willing to put their money where their mouth is by selecting a trait that provides increased melee damage at the expense of XYZ. The trait system is not a replacement for roleplay, but a byproduct thereof - individuals should not select the "quick" trait while RPing themselves as the aforementioned 6'3'' spec ops bruiser. Don't get caught up on the single example; you make a convincing case against the inclusion of personality traits in the list, but there will invariably be someone who asks why they all have to be oriented towards combat or movement speed - my point in providing the example was to expand the discussion beyond mere combat applications. Ironically, I disagree with differences based on job. A character does not become any less mechanically inclined when he joins as a visitor than when he joins as an engineer - it's still the same individual, after all.

The reason I tend to shy away from skill systems is the difficulty of implementation, whereas a trait will really only involve a narrowly tailored focus; "RP it out" is a fine concept, but it can serve as an excuse to refrain from any mechanical change. Sure, you could just roleplay the effects of bullets, but it's nice to have the mechanical encouragement to do so properly, right? I view traits in a similar light - sure, we roleplay that one character is taller than another, stronger than another, etc. but it would certainly be nice to have the mechanics to back that up. Again, the goal here is just to get some mechanical distinctions between characters beyond their species. For the relatively low amount of effort, I think it's a promising avenue to consider.

Give characters a little mechanical variation - advantages in one area at the expense of another. We can either pre-define these limits, or allow players to adjust their level of impact to a degree. Let's say we have a trait called "beefy" that increases damage done by melee weapons and unarmed attacks at the expense of speed - either we can define the exact limits of the trait initially, or allow players to decide how much speed to give up for how much damage with a special formula. Maybe you can only select one - maybe you can select multiple, as long as we can ensure you don't game the system. Some example traits: Bruiser: It's harder to move around, but you hit like a truck and take more damage than usual. Increased melee damage and pain threshold, decreased speed. Small Frame: You're thinner and more frail than most of your species, but quicker as a result. Increased speed, decreased pain threshold and melee damage. Handy: You wish you were born in a simpler time; you're good with your hands, but modern technology can be troublesome. Decrease materials required for manual construction, add arbitrary timewasting computer things(?) Charismatic: It's a little easier to get people to see things your way. Permit a green message similar to vampire's presence, balance with a similarly minor downside. You get where I'm going with this. Alternatively, allow all characters to select one trait that imparts a small advantage - the goal here is mechanical variation in some way while keeping a level playing field.

I'm the someone else this happened to; can confirm I'm getting the same message and cannot connect to the server.

Would you care to elaborate on that with more specificity? I'm afraid I don't understand how you arrived to that conclusion. Two hours had expired before I even claimed a single victim. That victim was directly involved in the discovery that the AI (played by myself) had, in fact, propagated the entire conflict with the crew by printing pictures of the SAT to begin with - not the individual I had attempted to frame. I had been interacting with the research director for nearly the entire round by destroying the research servers, driving them to suspect other crew members, and facilitating the fiasco with the SAT. Again - I was directly accused of printing the pictures that had started the entire scenario to begin with by the individual I wound up killing, which is what prompted the next stage of hostilities toward the crew at large. If the gimmick was acceptable and the crew was sufficiently engaged, yet that is not proper escalation, then which stages are you suggesting have been missed? The server has established administrative precedent that if (for example) security witnesses an antagonist character commit a serious illicit act, it is permissible to kill them without so much as speaking to them. How do my actions differ in any significant way, especially considering the initial target had evidence of my misdeeds and was the only individual capable of dismantling me - the research director?

The problem tends to be that most makeshift weapons, in addition to requiring some unorthodox materials to make, are utter crap compared to simpler weapons - and that's if they're not outright more dangerous to you than anyone at the other end. I wouldn't bother with improvised guns; if the jam chance isn't absurdly high, you have a 1 in 3 chance of it blowing up in your hand. Throwing metal rods manually will rack up damage quicker than a crossbow (and probably quicker than the improvised guns, but depending on RNGesus, your mileage may vary.) I love improvised weapons as a concept, but mobs are too resilient for a lot of them to be practical.

Depends. Some weapons, however, take loose bullets rather than magazines (the derringer comes to mind.) In order to reload a derringer, you essentially have two options: Keep individual loose bullets in your inventory and reload them individually; they'd have to be in your backpack or a carrier that does not have a set number of slots, else you'll find your entire webbing consumed by five individual bullets. This is obviously less than ideal. Keep the .357 in a speed loader. The issue there is that you must dig the speed loader out of your pocket, remove a round from the speed loader, then place it in your derringer - also a very slow process. Stacking bullets together is just a little "quality of life" thing; magazines will obviously always be the speedier way to load a weapon, but managing many tiny items of the same kind should not be as arduous as it is right now.

Pretty much what the title says. It's a pain in the ass that I can't keep more than one bullet in my pocket at a time, so let the bullets stack to an arbitrary number and just subtract one every time you load them into a revolver or whatever.

The damage from neck slicing should be sped up significantly (cut it down to 1/4 of the time it currently takes) and should not take more than one attempt with a knife-sized, bladed weapon to make an individual pass out from blood loss. Point-blank shots from firearms just need to be fixed period. It may also be worth considering revising weapon damage upwards and lining them up with one another to a particular degree. There's no reason a kitchen knife should do half the damage as a tactical knife simply because the latter has the word "tactical" in it - they're essentially nigh on identical weapons. There's no reason for .38 ammunition to do 20 damage while .357 ammunition does more than double and ignores a portion of your armor. If there's a question about which value to modify, take the lower one and revise it upwards.

One has to wonder how it became a stereotype in the first place, if the concept has zero merit. In a vacuum, the above proposals certainly would cut down on the bad sort of behavior we see routinely from the department, but they break down when considered in concert with the actual circumstances of the server in any given round. My experience is that other officers will not interfere with their fellow security members, barring maybe a head of security. Any dispute certainly becomes a game of "he said, she said" and in that event, the other members of security will side with the officer far more often than not. There is no evidentiary standard required by regulations. Good luck, if that chain of command doesn't include a head of security. I routinely witness entire security teams ignore captains and acting captains. If I filed an IR for every instance of security malfeasance I saw, I would spend more time on the forums than playing the game. None of these methods accomplish their intended goals. Far better than ramping up an attempt at policing the police, however, would be to restructure the security department to better facilitate the sorts of interaction we are looking for - behavior would improve naturally, but this is neither here nor there with regards to the suggestion at hand. We'll just have to agree to disagree with regards to why we believe this suggestion is ultimately beneficial.