Sleeper-hold choke

[Bauser]

I will preface this by saying I don't know if it would be a good idea. Combat meta has a lot of moving parts. You decide!

According to this feature, if you are actively choking someone (I.E. you have them in a neck grab AND have activated the grab to start dealing damage), you can click on the target with disarm intent selected to apply a sleeper-hold choke, giving them a some amount of extra sleepiness after a small progress bar elapses. The goal of this move is to keep the victim asleep for a brief time after you've subdued them, giving you some time to maybe stow them away or otherwise manipulate them to suit your plot.

It is my hope that this feature would be used by antagonists to take down targets in their path without taking them out of the round (for very long, at least). Like a merciful ninja or secret agent with good intentions. If you've got someone in a full-on choke, you've already won the fight. So this option could really ONLY be used to be more merciful than the current method (choking until they pass out from oxyloss naturally and probably start taking recurring oxy damage from crit). But since it would require an active choke, there's no way to do it completely without harm - every few seconds you spend applying more sleepiness is another few seconds they have to endure the damaging choke, so you have to meter your attack and use some self-control if you want it to work without negative consequences.

My ideal end-goal for this technique is that a robust traitor would be able to carry out more complicated schemes (like most of the ones that involve incapacitating someone without killing them) without having to spend at least 1/5th of their telecrystals on the parapen or having spend 30 minutes devising a hairbrained plot to get a sleep-inducing drug AND administer it to their target... which then fails, causing the scheme to never take off.

Things we don't want:

1) For the sleeper-hold to apply extra damage. If it did, it would just be used as a tool for faster killing, and choking is already perfectly fine at killing.

2) For the duration of the applied sleep to be comparable in potency to methods like chloral hydrate or paralysis pens. The balance should be such that attempting to apply that much sleepiness on a person (I.E. that many rounds of the sleeper-hold choke action) would carry a serious risk of critical injury from the oxygen loss of the regular choke... so it would take a long time anyway AND be counter-intuitive to the purpose of putting them to sleep.

3) For it to be legal for security to apply this technique in any situation other than immediate threats on their life.

[Bauser]

Side note: we can explain the difference between this choke and the current aggressive choke by saying the standard aggressive choke is on the airway, while the sleeper-hold choke is a blood choke.

[TheSleepyCatmom]

I do actually really like this idea. But maybe we should make it a sleep-choke instead of a disarm-while-choking. Like if you use help/disarm or something (anything besides harm) to tighten the grab to the throat, you'll do a sleep-choke instead of actually choking. That'd be interesting, I think. It'd take longer, but wouldn't do much (if any) oxygen damage.

[Bauser]

Well, a problem that might arise then is that it wouldn't take any more steps to do than a regular choke, even though it subdues the opponent more immediately (since putting them to sleep prohibits them from resisting, while getting choked normally does not).

A fix for that would be to make it still require the completion of an interruptible progress bar (while the standard choke stays as it is). This way, it wouldn't just be the new meta for nearly-immediately putting someone unconscious (unable to fight back). Which also makes sense in-universe, since crudely throttling someone's neck doesn't take the precision needed to use the specific choke-hold that blocks the carotid artery and jugular vein.

And I still think it should specifically require the disarm intent, both so it remains sort of a higher-level "skill" to use (requiring the conscious knowledge of it) and so you can't use it just by spamming grab. It should require at least a little finesse and it shouldn't be possible to do on accident.

[TheSleepyCatmom]

That's fair, yeah. The progress bar would be cool, in the end. Make it interesting, and gives nonlethal CQC stuff for non-sec (Even if it does require a lot of other steps). It'd be good for people with Antag Force Gloves too.

[Hendricks]

Cool idea, many a times if I see an antag behind me, I act like I don't notice, giving some solid snake opportunities. I mean, if any Antag ever approached behind me with no one else around. Which is like, never. But its there as an idea. Also, just in general I like it.

[SampleTex]

I love the idea, and I can easily see how it could make knocking people out much easier. Maybe the victim can't speak as well while being sleeper hold choked, they can still make noise and mutter out some words but I can imagine airflow would still be restricted at least a little bit. Maybe they'd talk like a person does with a broken lung (messages getting cut short and ending with ... as the person runs out of breath to speak). It'd be them basically gurgling some incoherent message over the radio while half unconscious (which could also just be equated to someone accidentally leaving their radio on, or give the victim a chance to rp something out). People would get the chance to know something could be up, or it could simply be someone left their radio on accidentally as they ate some food.

Plus, people would be able to knock someone else unconscious, steal what they need (maybe a tator stealing the captains ID for their agent ID to scan) and if done right (tator wearing the mask and everything that was messed with was replaced or put back), tators could get into their own ninja like shenanigans if they wanted to, or just steal everyone's clothing for the purpose of spacing it.

[Coalf]

Maybe instead of applying disarm. How about instead we use the "Pull Punches" verb to specifically give the chokehold a non-lethal method.

[Bauser]

But should it really be a 'pull-punches' attack, considering that it still does oxygen damage? It might fool some inexperienced wrestlers into thinking it's safe if we do that... And that's a recipe for some seriously unnecessary corpses. And we can't make it not do oxygen damage, right, that would be silly. Another serious problem with making it a pull-punches attack is that it means if you're trying to subdue someone non-lethally with this method, but still with ill intent (E.G. a traitor trying to Solid Snake someone), any punches you throw during your attack... will be pulled punches! And if you're a bad dude trying to knock someone out, even if you only want to put them to sleep, you're probably still wanting to throw real punches and do whatever it takes to put the person down first. But I suppose that point is open for debate.

It also occurs to me now that a progress bar would probably be unnecessary. I had forgotten that sleepiness in our mechanics already takes time to like metabolize (not the right word, but it does describe how the status needs to set in first before taking effect) and actually make someone unconscious. Since even the strength-30 sleep from chloral hydrate takes about 40 seconds to put someone out, according to the wiki 'Guide to chemistry', there's basically no way that the sleep from the choke would happen too fast. The initial effect chloral gives is weakness, this is what incapacitates them initially - and since the sleeper-hold would not impart weakness, we don't need to slow it down any more.

[TheSleepyCatmom]

You'll fall asleep in about ten-fifteen seconds from Chloral at the latest. It's about double that for Sopo as far as I'm aware, without the near-insta incapacitation.

[Bauser]

To me, that seems like a fine time-frame for putting someone to sleep this way. So we might be aiming for a comparable potency, there.

[Trazz666]

Done in a safe, controlled environment, it's possible to cut off the blood flow (mostly) safely in short bursts. However, in a combat scenario where the other person is likely going to be fighting for their life, you don't have the luxury of being gentle. The oxy damage is a good idea, because of the above reason, as well as the fact that knocking out via cutting off blood flow is literally starving the brain of oxygen.

Plus, if you're going through the effort to knock someone out non-lethally, it means you likely don't want them dead. The threat of rising damage will encourage the attacker to work quickly and prioritize what's important to take from the victim rather than just completely screwing them.

[IAmCrystalClear]

+1

Yes, we need this. Along these lines maybe we could rework the "dry rag" meta, where you can use a chem-rag on disarm intent aimed for the head/mouth as you would for a throat-slit with a knife on harm.

For reference, currently, aiming for the mouth with a dry rag will instantly inject 5u of whatever chem you have in the rag as long as they don't have a mask on, it's hilariously broken when you consider you can literally instantly inject chloral into anyone without any build-up.