Change ling succ

[Sebbe]

Know what's scarier than death? Pain.

Know what's scarier than pain? Loss.

People complain that Ling is just a ganking and necrophilia ERP gamemode, why not change it so Lings need people to stay alive because of "nerve impulses" or something, then sending an overload of impulses straight into their brain, liquifying a small but significant portion of it, virtually lobotimizing the victim (Actually lobotimizing them ingame) and then sending them on their way.

Things this fix and change.

1. Ling can no longer kill someone and succ them, it will give them an error message with text along the lines of "Victim needs to be alive for the process of feeding" Victim can die after however, who cares.

2. Makes the gamemode somewhat scarier, death is as far as we know something cureable ingame or in-universe to a certain extent, but lobotimization is permanent and scarier. Imagine being walked into a room filled a bunch of simmilar looking people, some of them happy to see you as you walk into the room and the person guiding you saying quietly to you that they are your family, but you can't recognise anyone of them, and you can't remember having a family... or ever having anything at all.

Or for that matter, imagine the person you love the most lying in a hospital bed, a person you have spent the last ten years married happily to, the person who you have children with and shared wonderful memories with, not even glance twice at you as you walk in the door, not knowing who you are or what you meant to them before the events that led up to their loss.

3. Makes a good excuse to add a second ling and refactoring the gamemode a bit to reflect changes, also automatically involves at a minimum 3 departments (Medical, security, command are forced to respond to the situation, if a civi or researcher is affected that department is affected as well.)

4. Gives lore people something to do, making the ling's main gimmick somewhat fleshed out on the wiki would be fun, instead of "Sticking bone needle in brain and succing brain juice."

More addons to this is welcome.

-Sebbe

[Bauser]

How would a player act after they've been lobotomized? Would they retain any control at all, or would it be tantamount to death for the player?

[Sebbe]

How would a player act after they've been lobotomized? Would they retain any control at all, or would it be tantamount to death for the player?

 

They get lobotomized, forgetting their whole lives, and anything but their base language, so Unathi only speak sintha (or whatever Lizznerds default is) Skrell -> Squidspeak, Tajara -> Siik and so on. Humans default to galactic common since flavor text languages would need a second feature involved.

The person would not retain any knowledge on work, where they are, who they are, who they were. Anything except language will be forgotten to the player which will be announced through a giant Bwoink message after the Succ succeedes.

Edit since I didn't answer the question really: They will still be able to play the game like normal, except that they have basically been stripped of anything to do except inhabit medical the rest of the shift, or get given basic tasks or attempted rehabilitated. They can still move and do shit but they are basicly worthless as they no longer retain their knowledge on engineering, security, bartending, etc.

[Kaed]

To be honest, thematically that sounds kinda interesting, but from a gameplay sense I do not think it is a good idea. Having to play a lobotomized amnesiac who is confined to medical is not fun. Fun should be more important in changing game mechanics than added grimdarkness.

[Sebbe]

Thing is this opens a lot of doors, if you get locked in medical the crew are kinda sitters and the Ling didn't take advantage of the situation. The Ling can lie and tell you anything and we'll, you don't have a reason to doubt them as you don't know any better, whatever they tell you will be the stone hard truth.

On the other hand you can be given small tasks to help out, or sent to chill somewhere the rest of the shift.

No matter the endgame this solves the ganging problem people complain about and if you can't find RP when people are forced to interact with you, you need to take a break from rp games and check yourself. Not directed at you btw Kaed, just to the general public overall.

[Trazz666]

For lack of a better term, this idea is cruel. And not in the acceptable, cruel to the character sort of way. This is cruel to the player. Taking away their player agency by ripping away their memories and forcing them to live as useless husks? Good lord, if this were to be implemented it would have to be grounds to circumvent the no suicide rule.

I've been taken out of the game and not killed by minimal antag involvement before, and let me tell you it's agonizing. I know Aurora as a whole has been drifting to the death-is-bad side for awhile, and I know changeling is a mode still rooted in classic ss13 style, but this is *not* the way to go about fixing it.

[Sebbe]

For lack of a better term, this idea is cruel. And not in the acceptable, cruel to the character sort of way. This is cruel to the player. Taking away their player agency by ripping away their memories and forcing them to live as useless husks? Good lord, if this were to be implemented it would have to be grounds to circumvent the no suicide rule.

I've been taken out of the game and not killed by minimal antag involvement before, and let me tell you it's agonizing. I know Aurora as a whole has been drifting to the death-is-bad side for awhile, and I know changeling is a mode still rooted in classic ss13 style, but this is *not* the way to go about fixing it.

 

Oh this isn't about "fixing" ling, not to the extent you are thinking at least. This is something to change the gamemode away from the cheap rust-code gank gamemode it is now to something more scary, more demanding of the crew to deal with. I see a pattern with the current antags which makes sense considering their 2 hour timeframe before salty dead people, or excluded hidy-hole people vote transfer.

With this change you can cause paranoia, you create litteral blank slaves of real people you can convince with no backlash to do things unless you give conflicting info. You can tell them anything from you being covert agents here to do mischief to being super soldiers here to clean out the station and the victims have no reason to distrust you because they don't know any better.

You could bring actual paranoia into the paranoia gamemode by making it so anyone you "work with" have a mission and a goal. the big difference maker with this is that you need to actually spend some time with your victims, if you want, or you can still kill them after the succ or let them die from their injuries. the change is honestly minimal, it depends mainly on the players as you said, both the antag and the victim.