A Topic on Player Choice and Antagonist Gimmicks

[BurgerBB]

This isn't meant to target any individual person, antagonist, or gamemode, but rather an ongoing thing that occurs usually once every ten or so rounds that I feel deserves a thread.

 

Antagonists are powerful. They're powerful for a reason, and that's to make it so that they last 2 hours on a crew that may or may not robust them. If you made antags out of paper, rounds would last 20 minutes and nothing would happen because of crew valid hunting or sec doing their job. Their strength allows more flexibility when it comes to conflict and gimmicks and allows them to take control of the situation that sometimes crew or security would otherwise ruin. Being an antagonist is similar to being a mini dungeon master in terms of what you can control and the responsibility of such.  As an antagonist, your goal OOCly is to provide an entertaining experience to the crew and to have fun along the way. Like a dungeon master, you provide a story as well as the choices your players can make, and both have a serious impact on player enjoyment.

A dungeon master with a really good story but little to no choices in player action can come off as unfun to players; I'm sure everyone knows the term "railroaded" when comes to interactive media, where the experience feels like you're just on a straight path to a destination you already know. Unfortunately, antagonists tend to accidentally create railroads, whether unintentional or intentional, by their actions in the round. Most antagonist types have the power to shut down or seriously hinder the productivity of certain departments to give you more "breathing room" as an antagonist for your gimmick or story. For example, a rogue borg may shut off power to the director's office, a ninja may decide to raid the armory to steal all the weapons so security can't kill them, or a malfunction AI may blow up EVA Storage so it would be harder to breach the core. If an antagonist does a whole bunch of actions that limit roleplay or make the goal near impossible to complete, then the players won't really be too happy.

For example, if a merc bombs medical to the point where no one can treat anyone, bombs the armory to the point where security can't access it and the guns, and then bombs cargo's surface where they can't retrieve guns, then that would be severely limiting choice depending on what your gimmick is. If your gimmick was to takeover the station and enforce some orwellian rule for 2 hours, then that would be fine because there is plenty of time and options that the crew can make to overthrow you and you'd have a good story and interaction if you use your power appropriately. If your gimmick was to raid the vault, kidnap crew randomly, and spread a lethal virus to cripple everyone as quickly as possible, then that wouldn't be fine because you severely limited the time and amount of resources players are allowed to use and made it near impossible to protect the crew.

In 99% of rounds where a good majority of the players didn't like the antags, the antags didn't give the players much of a choice. Changeling is considered one of the worst gamemodes on Aurorastation because it's very core mechanics make it so that players don't have a choice, or have the opportunity to make a choice. Most people don't like rev because one side or another is forcing the other side to picking one choice and one choice only with the threat of being kicked out of the game. Most people don't like cult because they're forced to make the "right" choice (submission) even if they don't want to.

So the point of all this is this: Give players more choices in how to deal with situations. You don't have to give them ALL the choices but don't limit the choices to something like "SERVE ME OR DIE." where you can literally either serve them or absolutely die because you had 0 chance of fighting them because they destroyed nearly everything you could possibly use against them. The less choices you give to the players, the more generally players won't like your gimmick because you're giving yourself too much power and doing a lot of things that most players consider powergaming or metagaming.

 

 

Edited October 21, 2019 by BurgerBB

[Zundy]

Powerful.

[Carver]

A very apt point, I often fight against antag buffs exactly because I expect the standard antag player is solely 'railroading' a round for their own fun, and I often see supporters of said buffs being people who I know to do precisely that again and again given the opportunity.

So very often people do these crippling set-ups and proceed to do little else other than Genocide Crusading any random crew who speaks out against it, whilst using their position of power in no meaningful or interesting manner. There's never a 'take-over', there's never a 'change of command', it's always just them pointing a gun at people and demanding something random and inane such as a million credits, the vault's contents and the Captain's left testicle.

[Scheveningen]

Feels like the spoon theory Nantei was talking about a couple days ago. Have to agree with this assessment, I've been pretty much thinking it for the past few years. The eternal question is always, "Is the round the antagonist's to railroad their own way, or is the round the antagonist's to play semi-cooperatively with?" There seem to be benefits and sacrifices one makes with any playstyle as an antagonist. I still don't have the answer, and I try to play antagonist infrequently so that people don't get tired of repetition.

[sonicgotnuked]

Wow a topic I actually agree with.

 

Memes aside, yeah, this really does put a good standpoint. I myself am guilty of not giving enough 'choices' Perhaps the most recent example was a raider team I was apart of. We bamboozled security, welded them in an elevator, and stole the armory. Later on, I found out my other raider buddies locked down the cargo account and all of security died due to another raider RCDing a turf away. To be fair, my enjoyment of the round was going down as well. It's not fun to not have opposition.

 

I really do like this point of view. At the end of the day, the 'choices' are limited by mechanics. My frustration with cult (my most hated gamemode) is that there is literally zero other options. It practically mechanically forces you to spread by converting. While Ling, I feel have some good options, is a bit guilty with this as well. This is why I enjoy malfunction so much to be honest because CC announcements are a rather powerful tool and you get endless supplies of them. 

[zyymurgy]

He's right and he should say it.

Antagonists are on the station for one purpose: to make the episode of the show entertaining.

SS13 is a dramatic, collaborative creative writing game facilitated by an engine that allows you to have an avatar that takes damage and can attack. It's not the other way around for me; it's not a game where you're trying to win by clicking on the other player to damage them, where you can emote occasionally for fun if you feel like it. SS13, in an HRP server, is about experiencing the story that other people are trying to tell, and adding your own input to help tell that story. It's not something competitive; for me, you should be working TOGETHER with the antag at all times OOCly, even if you are ICly enemies.

Episodes of sci-fi TV shows that are full of suspense and tension are pretty much universally agreed to be cool. A lot of the antag modes on station are set up perfectly for this type of thing. You have your monster of the day. You have your pool of unwilling victims. You put the two together and you hope that magic happens.

Unfortunately so often the magic just isn't there because your antagonist player wants to win, not to play their role as this episode's villain.

Imagine if Michael Myers just like, bombed that chick's house instead of chasing her around for two hours and then dying.

It's easy to complain about this but it's hard to say what should be done about it, though. I jokingly suggested something like a karma system and was hit with a hard "no" when this came up in discord. So how is it supposed to be moderated? I legitimately would like to see a rating or ranking system for antags, where if you get enough -1 you get locked out of that role for a couple days, and if you get enough +1 you might unlock some more OP gear to use in your storytelling.

Antags that tell a good story should be rewarded, and antags that fail to prioritize the entire server's enjoyment of the round should be guided toward a more constructive style of play. I think it might help with some of the anger and frustration that gets seen in OOC and DSAY as well to have a system where you can actually provide feedback on the antag's performance and have it matter.

I don't want to get anybody in trouble, so when there's a bad antagonist, I try to just get over it; I'm not typically going to ahelp because I'm buttmad. However I also don't want to be salty in DSAY or OOC after the round because that also doesn't help anybody! But when you don't know who the antag is, you feel like they fucked you over, and you don't want to ahelp or make a player complaint -- what are you supposed to do in order to give feedback on the round?! How can you tell someone who you feel didn't do a good job, something like that calmly and anonymously without it turning into a shitfest? There is no system for giving feedback or even incentivizing "good" play. I really wish there was though.

[Scheveningen]

4 minutes ago, zyymurgy said:

It's easy to complain about this but it's hard to say what should be done about it, though. I jokingly suggested something like a karma system and was hit with a hard "no" when this came up in discord. So how is it supposed to be moderated? I legitimately would like to see a rating or ranking system for antags, where if you get enough -1 you get locked out of that role for a couple days, and if you get enough +1 you might unlock some more OP gear to use in your storytelling.

Too abuse-able by groups of players, especially if the system doesn't have a proper way of determining which group of players is repeatedly screwing over a singular one. More hassle than it's worth to fine-tune.

Likewise, it's super easy to come to the conclusion that someone as an antag was a "shitter no rp awful person bad roleplayer!!!" just because their character killed yours in a video game. As-is, I do think people should use the complaints section to request job-bans or antag-bans on offending players who do a spectacularly awful job at everything. After all, it's the job of staff to have to make decisions like that, so help them help the community.

Edited October 21, 2019 by Scheveningen

[zyymurgy]

15 minutes ago, Scheveningen said:

Too abuse-able by groups of players, especially if the system doesn't have a proper way of determining which group of players is repeatedly screwing over a singular one. More hassle than it's worth to fine-tune.

Likewise, it's super easy to come to the conclusion that someone as an antag was a "shitter no rp awful person bad roleplayer!!!" just because their character killed yours in a video game. As-is, I do think people should use the complaints section to request job-bans or antag-bans on offending players who do a spectacularly awful job at everything. After all, it's the job of staff to have to make decisions like that, so help them help the community.

So then what is supposed to be done about it? I don't want to get people banned. I want to be able to provide feedback to good players and incentivize good play, as a player, instead of screaming in DSAY to literally 0 effect when I'm unhappy.

There's currently a system for providing feedback, good or bad, that consists of "scream in OOC at the player when the round ends" or "find them on discord and corner them in PMs". That's a bad system.

Edited October 21, 2019 by zyymurgy

[Scheveningen]

Ahelp often, make complaints about players or characters who you think are particularly problematic. Treat the matter of what RP quality of what an antagonist offers more seriously and keep an OOC eye out for it.

The staff team prefer this process to proactively and tyrannically exercising their power to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of antagonists. As, eventually, a staff member will run into problems if they happen to be wrong in a situation. Speaking from experience there.

Even a single report on someone who has no prior record of bad antagging builds their record by a single incident, even if they are not punished.

This isn't the perfect solution, but it's the best solution at the moment.

Edited October 21, 2019 by Scheveningen

[zyymurgy]

5 minutes ago, Scheveningen said:

Ahelp often, make complaints about players or characters who you think are particularly problematic. Treat the matter of what RP quality of what an antagonist offers more seriously and keep an OOC eye out for it.

This is exactly what I said I don't want. I'm not going to ahelp just because I'm mad. I'm not going to make a player complaint just because I feel like the antag fucked up. I want a system where I can casually +1 or -1 someone's performance on station without making it a big personal thing. I don't want to immediately jump to the "tell the teacher" option when I feel someone didn't do well; I just want to be able to give anonymous feedback and have it taken into account, both positive and negative. And the current system, which is "ahelp" or "scream in OOC" or "find them on Discord", is not a satisfactory one to me personally.

Edited October 21, 2019 by zyymurgy

[BurgerBB]

The problem with this situation is that it is incredibly difficult to give criticism without coming off as an asshole and without trying to drain your message. Like, I don't mean to target anyone in particular but when I was see I kept seeing the same regular antagonist players doing the same bullshit over and over again despite players complaining about their behavior to the players directly or to staff or the forums. Repeat complainers, not just me, would come off as assholes or whiners and would be berated for it. I think the reason why people are too scared to ahelp, make a complaint, or anything for that matter are scared that they'll be labeled as either of those things or don't want to come off as rude. Like one of the things I don't think some of the staff here understand is that their banter about players not ahelping issues or complaining in deadchat really has a negative impact on what gets reported here.

[Resilynn]

I’m going to science the shit out of this.

So, first-  yeah, a lot of antag rounds ARE lacking. Some game modes tend to be worse than others-ling and cult come to mind especially (granted, I’ve seen great ling and cult rounds before.)

But, from a teaching standpoint, my biggest suggestion is modeling. People do not react to negative feedback. Even if they want to!  Study after study shows that negative feedback often just removes the incentive to try new things, especially for voluntary activities like playing antag. By providing negative feedback- whether it’s complaining in ooc at the end of a round, implementing a -1 (and +1) system, or removing the ability to play certain antags, we convince new-but-not-too-new players that they’re not good at the role. They don’t end up playing antag. This means most of our antags are played either by very seasoned players or, more often, new players who we can’t expect to know mechanics well enough or be familiar enough with server culture to drive an interesting round with solid pacing and story telling. 

Being a good antag takes practice, and we remove the will to practice (which naturally takes failure) by providing negative reinforcement. Failure is a natural part of learning, if we punish failure, we will not get better antags. That’s not anecdotal evidence or my bias as someone who very occasionally antags, that is how learning and feedback works. You can even google it.  

The best thing to do is to praise good rounds when we see them. Even to praise the good parts of bad rounds- “that crusher kill was awesome,” “I liked that you tried to go loud with ling, sorry about how it turned out,” “cool, raiders going after science got me way more involved than if they went after the vault.”  

Moreover, play occasional antag rounds. And be the antag you wish to see in the world. That’s what modeling is- you do the thing well and your onlookers get an idea of how to do the thing well. And sure enough, studies show this is a great teaching method. 

Not every round is going to be awesome. And by all means, if people are breaking the rules, ahelp. But failure shouldn’t be punished.  When we punish people for trying and failing, we are punishing them for trying.  And if people aren’t trying, we are going to get shitty antag rounds. 

So in short- don’t complain about gimmicks, praise good gimmicks. Go out there and antag to show people how it’s done. That’s not me being soft and squishy and lovey, that’s the scientifically proven best way to improve performance. 

Edited October 21, 2019 by Resilynn

[Natiform]

1 hour ago, Resilynn said:

good shit

i've also gotta agree with everything stated here. positive reinforcement is where it's at, and the very few times i've attempted antag i was lucky enough to be with extremely seasoned players that could help me along the way and gave me the constructive criticism i needed to be better.

but otherwise? i'm kinda nervous to try antag stuff because i know i don't know enough to drive a story, and i'm worried that if i fuck up i'll get a player complaint when i'm just trying to learn. i'm not saying we be a hug server, but just, like, more willing to believe that not everyone that does something bad has malicious intent. i see some antags do amazingly and they'll get some praise and that's it. if an antag does a bad job, then the yelling in OOC and dsay will get almost out of hand. how does that cultivate a good experience for anyone? how does that make people more willing to try dumb, fun stuff?
i just don't have the answers. i almost feel like a good idea would be a thread to talk about what went well in a round, what people enjoyed and what drove the story. i learn best by example, anyway.
i'm also not saying that people aren't allowed to be frustrated. i just think we need to balance some of the anger with some positivity.

Edited October 21, 2019 by Natiform

[Sytic]

Also, I've been complaining about this shit for years.

If you want to be the kind of person to give repeated amounts of shit to literally every Sec main you come across for being bad, or literally every antag you come across for being bad, or generally curbstomp everything into the ground for your macho shenanigans and then have the gall to complain about players being bad, that's just disappointing.

Be nicer to people. Say hi in LOOC. Help them out. Apologize when they get punked or give them some positive reinforcement OOCly. If you're going to bitch about your immersions when someone says hi to an antag in LOOC, while taking every OOC and IC opportunity to call them shit, y'all need to McFigure Your McShit Out.

Just be nicer to people.

[BRAINOS]

1 hour ago, Resilynn said:

gospel

solid agree on all points here.

one thing to add: when you punish people for bad antag gimmicks, you are left with seasoned players who may be very good at what they do, like @Resilynn and @Ornias for example, and you are left with new players who don't know a lot about what they're doing/what the server finds cool, but you're also left with those who quit trying to drive conflict and end up being too afraid to hurt anyone or their feelings - then we have round after round of peace raiders and peace wizards that don't give the crew anything to work together against or even with.

i'm not saying peace antags are bad entirely, but it's often rare that they provide meaningful conflict, against their character or otherwise. @Simon_the_miner did a fantastic peacewiz round a while ago on deadhour where he told people they had x number of days to live, and tried to help them find peace in their coming days- not as a threat, but as a mere message. i wish i saw more peace-antags like that, rather than, ''hey check out my cool powers,'' or ''hey we're just here to trade :)''

our number one issue is the sheer amount of salt that comes from fair kills, poor gimmick execution or even lack of involvement. that doesn't entirely fall on the antags; it's something we, as a community, need to understand:
1. as a crew fighting against the antag, we're likely to die. if you have a hyper-advanced cyborg assassin silently tracking your every move waiting to strike, you're likely to die, especially if they've told you you're a target and you put yourself in a vulnerable position. further escalation than that breaks realism for the sake of moustache-twirling. if you have a corrupt and malevolent AI that is capable of blowing up APC's, and you've seen shit blow up before, you really, really shouldn't be surprised when the one you're standing at blows up. generally, what i'm getting at is this: i hate seeing great rounds that everyone is praising in ooc only to wake up to a complaint thread posted about that antag the next day because their specific character died. sometimes we need to die to help drive the story. not everything is murderbone and our antags should be feared. 9/10 times if you're properly fear RPing, you wouldn't be painting the target on your forehead that got you killed in the first place.
2. we may not always be involved. antagging is tough work and we don't give the antags benefit of the doubt nearly enough, especially when we die. antags already spread themselves thin trying to involve a certain department, but asking for them to involve the entire crew is often a tall order. sometimes we need to accept that as a visitor or assistant, we're simply not important or involved enough to warrant an antag risking their round to rope us in.
3. as an antag, we're likely to die. that's the nature of how things go. if you're going up against one of the most advanced research stations in known space, you should expect the crew to be very capable of dealing with one guy in a gimp suit or one guy in fancy robes. you should fear security and command, you should not expect them to play along in every single case just because you have spooky sharp teeth and succed some guy dead in maintenance one time. if you approach a guy who's armed, they're probably going to shoot at you when you get closer to them, no matter how many times you emote.
4. if we want better antags, we need to put our salt aside when we have bad ones. you can't have good antags without having bad ones first. bad antags can get better, no antags will never get better.

i often feel as a server we abhor conflict, which leads to the bad rounds like the OP described; they're not sure how to provide proper escalation and don't want to try anything new lest they get a player complaint. we get so angry over things that should make sense. captains getting bwoinked for wearing riot gear when they're under a consistent, clear and immediate threat, cargo ordering guns when Sec hasn't done jack to protect them the entire round from a terrifying blood cult, people being warned by assassins, ''you're next on my kill list,'' and then being 'ganked' when they say over comms, ''hey i'm going into surgery.''

there was one round in particular where a malf ai was saying some spooky shit - and it would've been easily stopped if it weren't for sec working with it. bear in mind here sec was mostly synthetic, aside from one human trying to appear compliant enough to live. it turned a 20 minute ''hey let's pull the plug on this ai'' round into two hours of serious, bloody and terrifying conflict. the one human in sec still got a complaint when they killed someone actively trying to harm them and their goal. even though this guy in sec helped the entire round, the anger came from ''they killed me and i didn't want to die.''

we have to be more willing to take one for the team. sytic said some great shit about being nicer to people: and with that, i also agree. if we're not a friendly community, nobody's going to try interacting with us.

[Sytic]

Some elaboration, because this ties into Sec Nerfs, Antag Nerfs, and everything in between.

Say, Mr. McSecMan is a Detective today. He goes on a sleuth quest into Maint, having a fun ol time of it. He's interested in roleplaying today. He goes into Maint and hears some wack shit going on. He opens a few doors and comes across a merc team! Wowee, he's interested in roleplaying. He begins typing before three of them have their guns pointed at him and have already gone GET DOWN ON THE GROUND! He stutters and stumbles, unexpected for this scenario, before being shot in four seconds after they didn't expect this. He's cuffed, removed his headset, and later killed as part of their fearRP to prove something to the Station.

Did Mr. McSecMan have fun? No. But is it technically okay overall? Yeah. Maybe the mercs are given a warning or slap on the wrist or something and the round moves on. But this event lays an egg in Mr. McSecMan's mind. That this kind of scenario? Ruined his fucking round. So he's not gonna let that happen.

Mr. McCultBoy is having a fantastic time of it, and is ready to go doing a cult for the first time. They get the gang together in maint and are ready to have a go of it. They manage to find a person and coerce them to come into maintenance (OOCly, the gal knows it's a cult, but wants to play an antag today.) They pop an LOOC message and the gal wants to be a construct. So Mr. McCultBoy tags and bags her and puts her in a Wraith. Wraithgal buggers off and so does Mr. McCultBoy, going off into Maintenance.

However, Wraithgal's prior now-corpse is now gone! Mr. McSecMan must be on the case. Supposedly this individual brought them into Maintenance, and they gotta find Mr. McCultBoy. So they do some philandering around areas cults usually hide out (lucky guess, of course) and find Mr. McCultBoy! Before Mr. McCultBoy can speak, Mr. McSecMan suddenly thinks that Mr. McCultBoy might instantly stun rune him, so he does some quick thinking and quickdraws his revolver, popping his "Get on the ground!" macro.

Mr. McCultBoy accidentally takes a step forward, spooking Mr. McSecMan, and instantly gets unloaded 6 rounds into the chest and he falls over. The cult round stagnates and is ruined. Mr. McCultBoy will rarely give Sec a chance in the future. But at least Mr. McSecMan had fun, unlike all those times he got got.

So tell me, is this constant process of 'I'm not going to risk losing' good? Is it good for you? Is it good for the server? Or does it just start a repetitive cycle that we neglect to solve, only trying to slam sec and antag nerfs to try to do rush patch jobs to fix problems that are far greater? This may be an exaggerated (although I've seen events much like this before) scenario, but the general message stays the same: Even if it hurts us in the short term, we should try to give more credit to the 'enemy team', as we are both responsible for a good round. This goes for antags and sec.

[zyymurgy]

I agree with pretty much everything said here, and Resi brings up some really good points about negative reinforcement vs positive.

I don't want to make another huge post about it, but I will say that the server culture of screaming at each other in dsay and OOC, and ahelping or making player complaints when you're angry, is something I do not enjoy. But right now I see that being the only form of real feedback available to players, aside from self-created "feedback" threads. And not everybody has made, or wants to make one of those. So many people find the forums irrelevant, and new players usually don't even discover them for a while.

The reason I think it's so important to have an anonymous way of giving feedback or criticism is because this server encourages cliqueing, and everybody knows it. And if you speak unfavorably to or about someone in one of these cliques, the whole clique finds out. This can cause unintended ripples. When you just want to say "hey dude, I think next time it would be better if you xyz as that antag" it can feel like approaching the entire clique at once - because you know that one person will report back.

I am at the point where I actively avoid getting involved in antagonist stuff on-station. It makes people angry like 80% of the time, and I know I don't like it when I'm randomly killed or taken hostage with little preamble, and little consequent RP. There are good antag rounds, I have played in them! But the majority of the time when shit starts going wrong I do my best to avoid it as strongly as possible, even if that means shutting myself into a locked room with 2 or 3 other people who also are trying to just not get mixed the fuck up with that shit. And this is realistic! But it also makes antag rounds kind of boring. Sheltering in place during a workplace shooting incident is only fun to RP the first few times, after that it can get kind of old.

And needless to say I do not play as an antagonist. The reasons mentioned above by others hit it right dead center. I am afraid of being screamed at. I am afraid of doing it wrong, with no guidance, and no mentor to set a good model for me to follow. And I do not feel that I could make a round interesting for the rest of the players, because I don't know the mechanics very well and I know that for most if I tried to go in RP heavy I'd be criticized as a boring peace-antag, or robusted instantly - and then screamed at.

There is so much criticism and teasing and screaming in OOC, DSAY, and the discord. It makes it really hard to enjoy playing sometimes.

[Cnaym]

On 22/10/2019 at 01:28, Sytic said:

Just be nicer to people.

This.

We forget this way to often.

When I get the ahelp from a 20 day old player having their first wizzard round I tell them the magic three things. RP, escalate, die laughing.

It's not your task or job as antag to lose, but at the same  time it  should not be the goal to win some IC goal of "killing all IPCs". Winning is the good atmosphere after round end when everyone had fun.

That being said the most important skill that always breaks the antags is communication. If I see the round start and someone goes to AooC for "who has a plan?" and the response of three mercs is to go on shopping and equipment spree until  0:40 I know we won't have a good round. If you get your idea together, let an admin know. We have seen a lot of them, we will usually give help and more often than not spawn whatever you need for your gimmik. If I see a wizzard ahelping for a gun I just cringe though. It's come to a part where on lowpop Kyres will ask for malf, people will vote malf and Kyres will do a good round for everyone. The silent cult is somehow rather a high pop phenomena.

From what I've seen new players tend to "hide" in group antag roles and will either find one or two great mentors and have a good laugh over whatever works out what doesn't or they will, in the worst case, sit in the bridge shooting each other because someone lost his shit in AooC, while security, command and the AI watch completly baffled until the admins give the A-okay message out.

I invite you all to try traitor. There is a reason it's probably the most enabled antag role. You can buy stuff, but you don't have to. You can kill people, but you don't have to. Same goes for Vamp or Ling. Sometimes figuring out the mechanics is good enough. As a lategame autotraitor you can try to figure out that tool you never used before instead of going for the loudest explosion and nobody will be mad at you for doing so.

That's also partly true for raiders and mercs. Gimmik culture is not the only solution out there. You can just get into the station and try to steal as many ID cards as you can for a fun round. Overall don't sweat it and enjoy your ride is what I'm saying. Bonus points to you if you  managed to complete the round without  salt. Big bonus if you managed to make other players get a good laugh out of it.

[Nantei]

On 21/10/2019 at 16:53, Sytic said:

Say, Mr. McSecMan is a Detective today. He goes on a sleuth quest into Maint, having a fun ol time of it. He's interested in roleplaying today. He goes into Maint and hears some wack shit going on. He opens a few doors and comes across a merc team! Wowee, he's interested in roleplaying. He begins typing before three of them have their guns pointed at him and have already gone GET DOWN ON THE GROUND! He stutters and stumbles, unexpected for this scenario, before being shot in four seconds after they didn't expect this. He's cuffed, removed his headset, and later killed as part of their fearRP to prove something to the Station.

This, this, this. Do not kill hostages unless they are asking for it. When you kill a hostage because Security rushed you, you do not spite Security, you spite the hostage, and make people far less likely to cooperate as a hostage in the future, damaging future rounds.

Today I had a pretty good example of this. Two mercs and myself as a syndicate borg. We're in the conference room, and we want to get the nuke from the Captain for our hippie BS. One of the mercenaries stands up and aims at the Captain, hoping to take him hostage. Someone throws a flash grenade, and a shoot out starts. I fire off a single frag grenade, and the HoS and Captain start to run away towards the maintenance tunnels. I see them doing this. I could throw another frag grenade, and it would almost certainly kill them, and boy it sure as hell would be valid. But does killing them make the round better? No. So I let them go, and it later lead to a cool shootout as we fought over them. Something you always have to think of when you have the opportunity to kill someone, and this goes for both sides. If I kill this person, will it make for a better round? 

Both sides, avoid pulling guns until you need them. It sends a bad message. I am far less trusting of you not shooting me if you are wielding an SMG in my face. And as an antag, if you have a weapon out and you are security, I will treat you as a threat. Especially in regards to ion weaponry. Pulling your weapons is a part of escalation a lot of people forget. Also as a general rule, when someone uses aim intent, probably consider why. They could have just shot you if they wanted to kill you. So unless you think they will end up doing so, it might be best not to immediately try to fight back. Things like this are often why I let the other party shoot first. Do I sometimes die or lose a fight because I let them make the first shot? Yes. But it's overall better most of the time. If you are a new security player and fearful of staff talking to you, this is also a very good way to cover your butt. 

Also another thing for Antags: Can you do surgery on each other validly using your extended skillset? Absolutely. I have done it before as a Raider because it was necessary to keeping the person in the round. But if you can help it, try and force Medical into it instead. Whenever you are thinking of doing something yourself that would normally require another player to help, consider if it might not be more fun for everyone if you tried to force another player to do it instead. Hacking is a great example. Lots of antags give themselves hacking. But I have had a lot of great times forcing Engineers to hack in for me at gunpoint. This isn't always viable, sometimes you have bigger plans and it's necessary for keeping yourself in the round, but consider it when you can.

 

On 21/10/2019 at 16:28, Sytic said:

Just be nicer to people.

Also this. People learn badly from negative reinforcement. It hurts the server, it hurts you, and it hurts the other person. Be excellent to each other, and we'l all have a much better time.