Buff Grabs Moderately

[Colfer]

This suggestion is to address a serious issue with grabs at this moment, they seem to be straight up broken and non functional, grabbing a person will still allow them to simply walk away from the aggressor for another 2 entire seconds after being grabbed EVEN IN AGGRESSIVE GRIP, while the aggressor is fully incapable of movement for this entire period, allowing the victim to run almost 6 tiles away before the aggressor can even act. This is unacceptable.

The change I propose is to simply make passive grabs stop a character from moving for 0.5 seconds (or until the grab is released), and aggressive grabs immediately stop a character from moving indefinitely (or until the grab is released), no other changes to functionality. At this moment, it is honestly easier to kill your target or significantly wound them than it is to get them into a kill grab and restrain them, considering this is a high roleplay server I think this should be changed.

Examples of this being extremely useful:
Security grabbing a suspect in order to stop them from trying to escape by forcing them to stop for 1 second in order to subdue them.
Antags actually being able to use grabs in any capacity without having the person run an entire marathon and then call for help 7 screens away, giving the antags away if they were previously hidden.

Edited August 26, 2021 by Colfer

[Butterrobber202]

This is big true. If you want to grab someone, a grab is actually the worst way to do it because you can walk out of them without even hitting the resist key. You want to grab someone properly you need to hit them over the head with a baseball bat or pepperspray them first.

[Carver]

I prefer grabs being bad to grabs being good. The times when they were good, combat was thoroughly miserable and relied entirely on both the reaction time of players and the pure RNG of resists.

In fact, I'm going to go in a step-by-step of why grabs being good would be the single worst change to combat imaginable, a very simple step-by-step that would take all of 1 round for someone to replicate if it were changed.

1. Grab intent, click someone quickly enough.
2. Advance to aggressive grab, since they can't move you can trivially force a pin as they HAVE TO win a resist dice roll, and if they win you can just repeat step 1.
3. If pin succeeds, congratulations, you can effortlessly kill the person. There is nothing they can do at this point besides hoping they win an even lower odds dice roll before you slit their throat with the million odd sharp objects that exist on the station.

Edited August 27, 2021 by Carver

[Colfer]

11 minutes ago, Carver said:

In fact, I'm going to go in a step-by-step of why grabs being good would be the single worst change to combat imaginable, a very simple step-by-step that would take all of 1 round for someone to replicate if it were changed.

Simple fixes could be put into place to combat some of this, such as making a person have to spend time upgrading the grab to aggressive (which would lock somebody in place) which takes 2 seconds if the victim is in help intent and 4 seconds in harm intent (and start the 4 second timer if they begin resisting), meaning somebody can still act while being grabbed such that they could resist by spamming the movement keys while pulling out a weapon to deal with the aggressor or attempt to shove the aggressor off with disarms if no weapon is available. This could make grabbing more of a struggle move thats primarily favored towards the victim in terms of damage as the victim would be able to act during the grab while the aggressor would be focused on upgrading the grab.
 

24 minutes ago, Carver said:

If pin succeeds, congratulations, you can effortlessly kill the person. There is nothing they can do at this point besides hoping they win an even lower odds dice roll before you slit their throat with the million odd sharp objects that exist on the station.

On this topic I completely disagree, most people are trying to grab a person in order to take them hostage or restrain them in some way for later antaging goals, saying "This feature is bad because you could kill somebody easily with it" is a horrible mindset, because I could play a scientist, emag into the CMO's office at roundstart and steal the hypospray, load it with toxins from experimental chemistry and go on a murder spree, that doesnt mean that the hypospray, emags, or associated chemicals need to be nerfed, I just want to give antags more of an option than "You use sedatives or you nearly kill the person getting them to paincrit so they stop resisting"

[Carver]

4 minutes ago, Colfer said:

Simple fixes could be put into place to combat some of this, such as making a person have to spend time upgrading the grab to aggressive (which would lock somebody in place) which takes 2 seconds if the victim is in help intent and 4 seconds in harm intent (and start the 4 second timer if they begin resisting), meaning somebody can still act while being grabbed such that they could resist by spamming the movement keys while pulling out a weapon to deal with the aggressor or attempt to shove the aggressor off with disarms if no weapon is available. This could make grabbing more of a struggle move thats primarily favored towards the victim in terms of damage as the victim would be able to act during the grab while the aggressor would be focused on upgrading the grab.

Having any sort of timer based on intent would be awful, as there are many valid reasons to fight with """help""" intent. Timer or not, ye olde 'meta' stun and grab. This is still effective, just marginally less so because aggressive grab is no longer a game over state.

6 minutes ago, Colfer said:

On this topic I completely disagree, most people are trying to grab a person in order to take them hostage or restrain them in some way for later antaging goals, saying "This feature is bad because you could kill somebody easily with it" is a horrible mindset, because I could play a scientist, emag into the CMO's office at roundstart and steal the hypospray, load it with toxins from experimental chemistry and go on a murder spree, that doesnt mean that the hypospray, emags, or associated chemicals need to be nerfed, I just want to give antags more of an option than "You use sedatives or you nearly kill the person getting them to paincrit so they stop resisting"

You see, I actually would say that the hypospray deserves a nerf. Simple point is that you, realistically, are not going to be getting a good grab on anyone who's not half-asleep. Balance-wise, you shouldn't either, and expecting a mechanic to not be abused is frankly silly given the server's history of nerfing abused mechanics (black k'ois, teleporting into the armoury/vault, ion rifles, and most pertinently for this thread, GRABS).

[DronzTheWolf]

I agree that grabs should be buffed. As of now they're a particularly dry cough in your enemies' direction, only useful for carrying people to stop the drag bleeding.

[Carver]

It also escaped my mind until now that this would make (antag) Force Gloves absolutely absurd if they still have the instant-aggressive grab.