Let's spice up Merc rounds a bit!

[Jamini]

I'm going to preface this real quick.

This isn't a complaint!

I repeat.

This is not a complaint!

 

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I will say this. Merc rounds of late have gotten... boring for me. Formulaic. The same shit every time. While yes, the standard "blow everything up" does keep the round exciting at times... I'm finding myself getting kind of bored with merc on Aurora.

It's the same

>Quiet 30 minutes

>Telecomms blown up/Teleporter stolen

>Some things stolen

>Operative spotted

>Hostages taken

>ERT called

>Bombs detonated

>Banter over comms

>Operatives bug out so they don't die.

It's getting kind of... boring.

At least to me.

I'd, personally, like to see a little more variation, both for the operatives, and for command.

So, I have a few suggestions for everyone, this includes myself. I am as guilty as anyone else for bad nuke rounds. This applies to everyone who plays nuke on both sides, for the sake of making what can be a very fun team-antag round even more fun and interesting.

Operatives

Part of the removal of objectives from nuke, directly from the person that did it in the first place (That would be Zuphayr) was to free them up a bit from the syndicate/need to blow up the station. To let them do oddball things, like be waffle salsemen... or traveling entertainers...or cannibal chefs...or refugees from a station that NT "amputated"...or corrupt, but legit, inspectors from Central. A breath of variety and change to what is probably the most formulaic mode in SS13 (except maybe Mutiny)

So... can we try it? I'd like too, as a community, see us make a concerted effort to think of interesting and fun things that merc teams can do and actually try and implement them. I know on Bay it's pretty common for mercs to talk in LOOC about what shtick they want to do before they start. Sometimes it fails, often there are disagreements, but just as often you get some truly epic rounds from it.

You don't need to be afraid of losing as a merc. Your role is to make fun for the whole crew, isn't it? It's worth dying or losing, if the community says at the end that they had a fun round. Or at least it should be.

Things I would like to see Operatives do

1. Talk quietly at the beginning of the round. Work out a story, from simple, to complex.

2. Work out concrete goals. Try and make your objectives tricky, and something the crew actually cares about. Nothing is worse than a round where the operatives are not seen at all. Difficult goals are better than easy ones.

3. Try and trust the station staff a little more. Hostage trades are possible. I've done them in the past as a Vox, and Merc. Yes, it's frightening, but trading people you capture back in good faith can make for very interesting, tense situations.

4. Don't bug out at the first sign of danger. You can win against an ERT with proper tactics/communication, or you could even try and bargain with them. Remember, you signed on as an operative. Be willing to risk yourself for your goals.

5. Don't take what you can't keep. If you can't keep a hostage entertained/alive, why are you bringing them back with you?

6. Don't be afraid to limit yourselves! Working around voluntary restrictions can be fun!

Command and Security and ERT

The second half of the nuke equation, command and security can be... problematic sometimes. We are very, very quick to call the ERT on Aurora as a whole, and I am just as guilty of doing this as anyone else is. People talk big and act big, sometimes bigger than they should when the situation doesn't call for it, or are just flat-out excessively oppressive.

Things to keep in mind as Command and Security

1. Remember, operative doesn't necessarily mean hostile. Armed doesn't necessarily mean dangerous. Use actions, rather than assumptions and meta, to guide how you respond.

2. Give non-standard operatives a bit of room to work with! If the ops are going out on a limb and trying something funky/nonstandard, try and roll with it! The best way to ensure a violent, bloody, boring round end is to be a dick to a merc team that is trying to do something cool. Worst case? You get punked for it. That's no different than dying to a standard operative team.

3. The ERT should be a last resort. Yes, I know Icly operatives can be really scary. But really; unless you have severe casualties, extensive damage, or station-destroying threats you should stay your hand on the ERT and try to work with what you have. Holding back a little can make the round much more fun for all involved, and that's why we play. Not to win.

4. At the end of the day, remember that everyone loses eventually. Yes, it can suck and tempers can be high at the end of a rough round. However once things end, for better or for worse, it's best to move on. Dwelling on a bad operative round, for you, isn't good for anyone.

Administration

Hoo boy, I'm opening a can of worms here! I'm sure some of you will probably completely disregard this, or scoff at it but...

Try and help the operatives a little bit!

Nonstandard merc rounds can be ridiculously fun for everyone involved. If the mercs want to try something cool, why not pitch in and help them a little bit? Giving "cannibal space chefs" a bit of equipment to help with their disguise, or making "suprise vox synicate joint commission!" teams could be very fun! kikikiki! Possibly giving teams that are having trouble thinking of a good plan some gentle guidance, as experienced players, would not be remiss either!

Some Ideas

So, that's about it! Again, this isn't really a complaint. More of a request/suggestion for everyone than anything. Next time you get op, why not try something cool and interesting? The worst case, you fail miserably and everyone complains like they do anyway, right?

Anyway, I'm going to close with some ideas that you can read over, discard, or feel free to add too.

1. Asylum Seekers

-Premise: You are traitors to the syndicate. You are low on fuel, oxygen, and food. Convince the station to give you safe passage to Odin and pardon you for your crimes, or steal enough supplies to escape.

-Self-Limitations: You can only move the ship three times after the initial landing.

-Goal: You must either be given asylum by the station staff, be smuggled into Odin by the crew, or aquire 500units of plasma, 5 full oxygen canisters, and significant quantities of food.

2. It's Payday, fellas!

-Premise: You are a team of professional thieves.Minimize damage, maximize payout.

-Self-Limitations: No bombs.

-Self-Limitations: Try and be a Payday reference, and bring your bank-robbin' masks

-Goal: You must infiltrate the station and successfully steal the contents of the vault, 11 levels of research, and a significant quantity of slime cores.

3. We come to sell... Waffles

-Premise: You are exactly as it says on the tin. Waffle salesmen of the 25th century. Who knew that they'd be packing heat and selling LSD-laced goodies!

-Self-Limitations: Minimize casualties

-Goal: Sell dat fukking waffle!

4. Inspection Team

-Premise: You are corrupt inspection/IAA officials from Odin, and intend to shut the Aurora down and seize it's plasma reserves.

-Self-Limitations: You may not use weapons unless attacked.

-Special: Administration needs to legitimize you

-Goal: Close down at least three departments, shut down the station, seize as much of the station plasma as you can.

5. Emergency Fuckup Team

-You are an Emergency Response team! Wait, why were we called? There's no alert? Are you SURE? We better make sure!

-Self-Limitations: You must act as inept as possible at anything but robusting.

-Self-Limitations: Try NOT to bomb people! Your the EFT after all!

-Goal: Get a real ERT called, then arrest them as impostors.

6. Bluespace Technical Assistance

-You are assistants to the legendary (and imaginary) Bluespace Technician! You've been called to investigate all bluespace devices on the Aurora!

-Self-Limitations: You are actually legitimate! See if the crew meta you as ops!

-Special: Be a bit dickish, ICly, to get the crew to hate you enough to resist you.

-Goal: Gain access to telecomms and science

7. Transfer of Command

-By any means, try and have the operatives take the place of the command staff of the aurora.

-Goal: Become the commanders of the NSS-Aurora.

-Feel free to add your own!

[VoltageHero]

The biggest issue I have with Security during Nuke Ops rounds, is the fact that they don't care about being targeted, from what I've seen.

A good amount of the time, an officer will get targeted, and then instantly draw their own gun, or try and run away. It looks a lot of times as if Nuke Ops get their RP attempts ruined, when an officer decides "nope, I'm not going to be a hostage" and runs off, only to return with a Carbine set to lethal.

As much as I hate siding in on the "Security trying to be heroes" during Nuke Ops, it does happen, and the officers seem to think they did the right thing.

[mrimatool]

Have to agree with Voltage, although of course it's just as often ruined by nuke ops too. But yeah some extra lee way might work

[Jamini]

A good amount of the time, an officer will get targeted, and then instantly draw their own gun, or try and run away. It looks a lot of times as if Nuke Ops get their RP attempts ruined, when an officer decides "nope, I'm not going to be a hostage" and runs off, only to return with a Carbine set to lethal.

 

Personally, I will say that using the target option is very nearly the same as shooting. Doing so means you intend to shoot if your target moves, and is a hostile action that warrants running away or retaliation.

It may be best, if you want RP as an op, to save targeting for when you truly intend to shoot? And by all means, if you get targeted treat it as if the other side has fired.

By "give more leeway" I mean such for both sides. You can have a gun out without aiming it with intent to fire. You and emote threatening someone without targeting as well. Once you target lock, you are essentially setting yourself in for a fight. While those situations can be defused, they very rarely are.

[ZipZero]

I've seen plenty of ops try something other than 'blow everything up'. The problem, usually, is that the crew metagames and ruins it. Ops posing as CC personnel? Crew is instantly distrustful of them, and contacts CC about it. Ops pretend their ship is on fire, they have dying people onboard? "No we won't help you at all go away." Once, I saw the alert level raised to blue in the first few minutes of the round, before the ops had even moved the shuttle, because one of them sent a single message to a crewmember: Hello.

This is why I dislike playing the gamemode unless it is chosen through secret, and why I don't think this suggestion would work.

[Carver]

2. It's Payday, fellas!

-Premise: You are a team of professional thieves.Minimize damage, maximize payout.

-Self-Limitations: No bombs.

-Self-Limitations: Try and be a Payday reference, and bring your bank-robbin' masks

-Goal: You must infiltrate the station and successfully steal the contents of the vault, 11 levels of research, and a significant quantity of slime cores.

If the ops win, at the end of the round do we get a choice of three different unknown rewards, two of which we already own and one of which is something we never wanted nor needed?

[Loow]

These ideas are gold! I hope we get to see some of them put into action soon.

I've seen the legendary Waffle Salesmen in action and it stands firm as one of my favorite Nuke Ops rounds to this day.

If anyone can pull off an Inspection Team or Command Transfer, I will be forced to applaud them.

If we can get an EFT with "good RP", I fear my sides may enter orbit.

Jamini, thank you for posting this thread. Can't wait to see it pay off.

[josh1133]

No one cares about the god damn hostages!

Every time we get a hostage some bullcrap happens. I seen people pose as characters that people know but aren't working on the shift, such as yesterdays nuke round. You know what happened instead of people giving a shit?

AI shouting "I DO NOT NEED TO CARE ABOUT THEM, KILL THEM. KILL THEM."

People just going "Not my problem"

FFS its a person still! I ain't saying Sec needs to rush in and be a hero and all that shit, but fuck don't keep insulting the god damn terrorist when they are killing someone who goes to work with you, someone who has family and a life and has just as much right to live as you do, and for the love of god! Stop insulting the god damn terrorist when they threaten to bomb the station because "Ur 2 edgy 5 them", unless no bombs go off for the first god damn hour, you should be scared! Fucking someone calls in a bomb threat they evacuate the building, but apparently on the Aurora when someone calls in a bomb threat every member of the crew just passes the comms around to talk shit to the caller.

I just wanted to say that.

[Tainavaa]

I think you're referring to the nuke round where I was one of the ops. My plan was to gear up and go full fucking Payday mode. We were going to come in through arrivals and blow the vault. We were going to drag the gold and nuke down the fricking hall ransacking the station and waving guns in peoples' faces to get them on the ground with a bullet in them or not. Their choice. That was MY idea. It got me so pumped and I was excited.

However the other nukes wanted to go for telecoms first, so I ended up being like whatever. Then things went down there, and I got hurt and got an infection because some IC fuckup which left me with a broken arm and foot so I couldn't do anything too useful on groundwork. So I just stayed on the shuttle. Things never go the way you want them to.

EDIT: Also yeah, people for some reason give no shits about hostages. You have a gun to peoples heads, and everyone just eggs them on. It's like, come on. At least pretend with me.

[Guest]

It's really easy to get murdered ruthlessly for some absolute bullshit reason even as a professional, trained nuclear operative. I have been killed by carp, combat drones, rouge ex-commando janitors, infections, extremely slight breaches in my hardsuit... and so on.

It is kind of the flow of the game, but nuke ops get murdered so easily by non-RP, griefy related stuff that disrupts the pace of antagonist roleplay.

[Jamini]

No one cares about the god damn hostages!

Every time we get a hostage some bullcrap happens. I seen people pose as characters that people know but aren't working on the shift, such as yesterdays nuke round. You know what happened instead of people giving a shit?

 

 

Are you talking about when Rasaine was a "hostage"?

The issue there is that her brother was, essentially, saying that the operative's story was so full of holes that it didn't hold water. Which it... kinda didn't. Generally holding someone who isn't on the station hostage is tricky, since it can be extremely hard to believe in any way. It's far better to get real hostages if you want to try that sort of thing.

Take 'em, and shoot 'em if the crew don't play along. Then send back the heads.

Also, for the love of god the ops need spaceacillin on the shuttle. It's really a requirement with infections.

[VoltageHero]

Every time we get a hostage some bullcrap happens. I seen people pose as characters that people know but aren't working on the shift, such as yesterdays nuke round. You know what happened instead of people giving a shit?

AI shouting "I DO NOT NEED TO CARE ABOUT THEM, KILL THEM. KILL THEM."

People just going "Not my problem"

 

The issue I have with this, is that Nuke Ops wanted to trade the Captain in exchange for a random miner. At one point, a Nuke Ops replied with something along the lines of "do you value their life above your own?"

That would have made zero sense for the Captain to say "oh, okay. Let me just go get traded for a random miner."

You don't give up your leadership, for some guy who can be more easily replaced, as mean as it sounds.

[Jamini]

A random miner from an independant station, who was pretty much confirmed Not to be the person the ops claimed she was by a relative.

Like... even the one person I see protest (Carson) seemed to agree that there wasn't any way we could help Not-Rasine. If given an opportunity we probably would have launched a rescue mission. (In fact, I did suggest a false trade using Clarke as Bait. Even if it didn't pan out.) but really there just wasn't any decent justification for the crew to give up their Captain for a random miner. Especially one that probably wasn't real at all.

 

ANYWAY

 

Let's get back on-topic please! Ideas to spice up Merc rounds! Gogo!

[Frances]

If you wanna do something creative, you can ask admins to help you.

Like, even fake a CC report to counteract metagaming, or spawn you a bunch of bibles and priest outfits cause you want to pose as traveling missionaries (that actually happened and was hilarious).

A long time ago someone threw around the idea that the nuke ops should be able to intercept CC faxes, and have the ability to send back a single fake one. That'd go a long way towards giving them believable IC cover.

[Mark9013100]

If you wanna do something creative, you can ask admins to help you.

Like, even fake a CC report to counteract metagaming, or spawn you a bunch of bibles and priest outfits cause you want to pose as traveling missionaries (that actually happened and was hilarious).

A long time ago someone threw around the idea that the nuke ops should be able to intercept CC faxes, and have the ability to send back a single fake one. That'd go a long way towards giving them believable IC cover.

 

Pretty sure I've heard the Ops can't get assistance from admins.

[Guest]

Pretty sure I've heard the Ops can't get assistance from admins.

 

Nuke Op's can get help from admins, but they need to make the plan and tell us what they want.

Just asking for a CC announcement saying X are coming to the station is a little tricky when we don't know what the reason they are coming to the station for.

Time's I have helped out Op's or even Vox when players have been 100% stuck, I got moaned about by other players in deadchat.

There have also been times where we have made IC announcements but the crew still meta the hell out of the op's(Heads of staff with stronger weapons or bodyguards, security members walking around with extra things on them, crew following them around).

[Chaznoodles]

Part of the removal of objectives from nuke, directly from the person that did it in the first place (That would be Zuphayr) was to free them up a bit from the syndicate/need to blow up the station. To let them do oddball things, like be waffle salsemen... or traveling entertainers

 

Once, I had the idea to disguise ourselves as a travelling rock band and perform a gig for the station, and wheedle them out of their cash and valuables. I was shut down by all the other ops for "WE MUST TAKE HOSTAGES". More fun ideas would be good.

[Conspire2Ignite]

There's also the problem that, when the ops actually manage to get past the "Let's get hostages and bomb the place" mentality and want to try something fun, it can't work. Everyone expects nuke to turn out badly. It depends on the ops. Many have a fear of doing something different because they know they'll get meta'd to death. But it's not just meta stationside that stops them. It's the "I refuse to play along" mentality. Just yesterday we thought, "Let's do a DnD thing!" Josh was even doing a wonderful narration, in my opinion. But no one wanted to really go with it and the few that did seemed to get shut down by the others. If you don't want nukey shooty nuke ops, you're going to have to resign yourself to not being SUPER serious so the nuke ops don't have to resign themselves to being SUPER serious.

It's enough that I'm likely going to apply for Head in the future just so I can allow off-the-wall ideas to get a little further than "Let's play a ga--" "NO" and BAM shutdown. But nuke ops have to also remember to include everyone in their plans. Having the crew sit around in the bar thinking, "What now" isn't going to make anyone happy. There is only so much that nuke ops have at their disposal, but if you really need something fun for a good gimmick and you tell us your plan in an ahelp, I don't see any admin turning you down though you may have to quote Shakespeare or something.

Just remember, the RP doesn't start until you say so. If you don't want to, you don't have to be affiliated with the syndicate. You can LOOC a plan to be lost space refugees, get the shuttle to the mining asteroid, and jump off. Suddenly, no more shuttle. It never existed. Poof. You've just been space drifting a while. Which is a plan I've been sitting on a while. But. You know. Glory to the Syndicate.

[VoltageHero]

There's also the problem that, when the ops actually manage to get past the "Let's get hostages and bomb the place" mentality and want to try something fun, it can't work. Everyone expects nuke to turn out badly. It depends on the ops. Many have a fear of doing something different because they know they'll get meta'd to death. But it's not just meta stationside that stops them. It's the "I refuse to play along" mentality.

 

Well, this isn't true. The Waffle Co. attempt went rather well, and the only thing that happened was Security was slightly concerned, due to a lack of actual notification, by Command.

The issue with Nuke Ops making events that isn't rooty-tooty-point-and-shooty, is that they need to also be realistic, when calling for responses.

The one where people claimed people were on their ship, and were in need of medical attention. There was no proof of the ship even being real. Security and medical went out to look for the ship, and there was no ship there. When it was reported back, the station got yelled at for not trying to save the ship anyways. Then you got the fact that the story changed a few times during the whole ordeal.

If you're going to make a different event, don't try and make it off of somebody's hero complex. Make it something that would actually be believable, because in reality, nobody is going to risk themselves for a bunch of random strangers. Nobody is going to jump into space to go arrange a meeting with a hostage that may or may not be there. As stated earlier, if you claim to have taken a hostage, actually have a frigging hostage.

You can't say 'the station doesn't play along', and have events where the crew would have to go out of realistic standards to play along.

The station isn't a military vessel. It isn't full of ERT.

While I agree that players should try and follow along with a Nuke Op's event, the events need to be realistic too.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

I want to use a recorder to record a 'mixtape' with the other ops, form a band, then force the station to listen to our mix tape by any means necessary.

Either that or a Linkin Park band and just quote him and his song for the full 4 hours.

xXD3ADS0ULXx says, "CRAAWLING IN MY SKIIIIN"

xXD3ADS0ULXx hacks Snow Flake in the left arm, and the severed piece flies off in an arc!