Additional Ghost Roles

[Arrow768]

As some of you have noticed, we now have ghost roles available.

If you have ideas for additional ghost roles, make sure to post them below and they might get implemented.

[MattAtlas]

DERELICT
ROLES
DERELICT
ROLES

Survivors in the new away missions. Distress signal kinda shit. It'd incentivize people actually using them.

[Skull132]

It might well be interesting to implement a role or two that have you spawn on an away mission. And then give them a way to communicate with the station, thus pushing the station into action.

[Garnascus]

Any type of survivor role. Maybe with a ship they have to fix or a radio station they can construct to contact the aurora. Lots of potential but we already have a neat away mission system we can utilize. Maybe even fill it with player-controlled-enemies. 

[Scheveningen]

/tg/ has syndicate comms operators and they're fucking amazing

[DronzTheWolf]

More simple mob roles. 
Maybe player-controlled diyaabs or spiders.
Scratch that, player spiders would be terrible. Absolutely terrible.

Maybe a ghost role for the Solarian miner bots that sometimes spawn in the abandoned mine site?

[Naelynn]

As someone who ghosts very often, it's something I thought about alot.

Currently, some derelicts have the possibility to spawn construction drones. These are immensly cool, but have few inherent issues.
 - 1) The drone has nothing to do. (It's laws are to finish and improve a construction project, a lot of these ships are simply abandoned or suffered catastrophic, irrepaireable damage. Ex: Ramming into asteroids, being a bluespace amalgamation of multiple ships, blob infestation..)
 - 2) The drone has no one to interact with (Unlike normal drones, they are not lawed against interaction with people. However, if the drone attempts to leave the derelict, it gets bwoinked rather fast. {personal experience} - This is due to the fact that the drone's laws are to improve/finish their assigned construction project, not roam to other projects. )
 - 3) The drone is not customized to reflect their surrounding - they always spawn as an NT-branded construction drone, despite coming from Sol/Syndicate/Etc. ships. While this may not inherently break the lore, it is a bit derp-feeling when you're in a syndie base and you're NT branded drone and don't even have a plasma cutter. 
 - 4) Expeditions almost never happen. If you're lucky, maybe there's 1/10 rounds. Probably less.

As such, the derelict drone option ends up being a waste of the ghost's time most of the time, with exception of learning engineering skills or drone combat vs clone-pods spawned mobs. 

That said, I do believe that ghosts could have access to additional ghost spawner options - which is why I was extremely excited to see the recent ghost spawner addition. Here are my suggestions:
1) Derelict Survivors - As everyone else said above. They'd need to have a rev-like device to cause an announcement or something.
2) Bluespace Echo - The thing that happens when Wiz/Ninja gibs themselves by warping into a bluespace inhibitor. [ Random event chance to spawn, add an anouncement that says something like - Bluespace interference has been detected in your area - sometimes no one will take the echo, sometimes people will and that's fine ]
3) Carp Invasion - Ghosts should be able to take over a normal carp during carp invasion.
4) Slime - In xenobiology. Allow a person to take over a slime, and when they feed enough give them the option of mutating into a slime person. Slime people are extremely underutilizied, this would give them a reason to exist outside of wiz's polymorph stick. Only additional slimes would have this option, not the ones at round start - guaranteeing there's someone doing xenobio.
5) Station Pet - Why not have sentient Ian/Colombo/Bones/Bob/Chauncee?
6) Spiders - I don't think player spiders are a horrible idea. Do it.
7) Mining Event Drone - Sometimes there is a mining drone that spawns on the asteroid, let players possess it.

Finally: Make Construction Drones useful. Since they are clearly not wanted to come onto NSS Aurora, give them the ability to act as the derelict's self defense system. Namely: 1) Give them a ranged weapon of some sort. Plasma Cutter is ok, but powered crossbow would be best fit. 2) Allow them to pilot exosuits - many derelicts come with Exo's, and this would allow the drones to act as the threat on more benign derelicts.

Edited August 13, 2019 by Naelynn

[Chada1]

I second all of Naelynns suggestions, especially the very last.

[goolie]

get some ghost roles for the expedition to the away missions and shit! that'd be a whole bunch of fun.

Edited October 18, 2019 by goolie

[Naelynn]

One more suggestion that I just thought of:

I've been thinking about how to make derelict exploration missions more frequent, and me and @Bear have came up with an idea of 'Expeditioneer' - this is due to the fact that people at round start have duties, and on average the earliest you can get expedition going is 1 hour in... at which point the station tends to be panicking due to antags so it gets cancelled.

Expeditioneer team could be a thing that ghosts can opt to call - something like starting a vote for ghosts only. If yes, announcement would be send, and soon a ship would arrive with acceptable hazard gear [something like - Hazard rig + 1 laser rifle + engineering suite + medical suite] along with 3-ish ghosts possessing a new body. 

Or expeditioneer/adventurer could simply be a role.

This is however a more difficult thing to prepare. But I'm putting it out here.

[BoryaTheSlayer]

Yeah! I like this, Naelynn. Let's say that someone in command(most likely RD) decides that an expedition is in order--they notify Central, and they send the research shuttle(that now could come from the Odin)with an expedition team ready. That'd require a lot of changes but that'd make expeditions happen much more often. And then, of course, we could also have people on the derelict itself, much like the pod survivor--someone who got left after the mess. This would really freshen up the expedition experience and bring a lot of new fun, in my opinion, despite how much work this would require.

[Chada1]

I'm gonna chime in here, I think the primary charm of expeditions are how they get Station crew off the Aurora to visit new places. I think an expeditioneer squad would entirely eliminate that, and it'd become 'Why would we send Station Crew on an expedition when we have heavily armed people trained for it?'

[BoryaTheSlayer]

Okay. Fair point.

[Chada1]

I mean, a 'Squad coordinator' typed character sent by NT to pick out a team could work a lot better and still maintain that charm.
A full team likely would entirely eliminate it and become more akin to an ERT for expeditions.

Edited August 13, 2019 by Chada1

[Naelynn]

@Chada1 those things can be one at the same - the idea is to reduce downtime before expedition can happen, and for that the shuttle needs to have workable gear.

[Bear]

As naelynn said a coordinated away team leader would be great. Really help increase the amount of expeditions that get off the ground especially on low pop hours

[Gem]

implemented.

locking and archiving.