2 dismissals Take away combat oriented antags from secret.

[TrickingTrapster]

I want to preface this with that it's probably very biased, but here we go anyway: Combat in SS13 sucks. It's dumb, chaotic, and really does not add to any roleplay whatsoever if you were not in the buildup to the combat. Which usually means everyone except security and maybe command. (Exaggerating for effect.) This means that when certain gamemodes are chosen for secret, the round -will- devolve into a combat scenario between security and whatever is the shooty mcbangbang antagonist of the shift, unless there's a very gifted antag that manages to keep the situation from going that way, but those seem to be few and far between. In particular, this scenario tends to play out with most team-based antagonists (heist, merc, cult). Not exclusively, but those gamemodes this tends to happen on the most. I have also been reading recent threads about how antag roleplay is a problem usually because of security and/or their guidelines, but I also think the tools given to some antags really doesn't help the situation.

Now, I'm not saying delete these gamemodes (however much I'd like cult to be removed from the server forever) but I do think that gamemodes that usually end in a big battle or slaughterfest should not be in secret rotation. Cult is the biggest offender of this, I think, mostly because of its endgoal provided of (in essence) 'bahahaha destroy everything by summoning evil god', but heist and merc are also repeat offenders. In contrast, all other antags feel like they get a lot more freedom in their endgoals and the tools they get to work with, such as wizard or vampire. Plus, it doesn't help that security generally has the mentality of 'WALL OFF CREW FROM ALL REMOTELY POSSIBLE THREATS', which makes sense ICly but why even have antags at that point. I think that by removing these from the secret rotation, we can start shifting the server mentality in the longterm from combat-ready to more roleplay-ready.

Another point I want to bring up, is that no matter the buildup, roleplay involved toward the combat or how much sense it makes ICly, it is simply not fun when you get caught up in whatever combat is going on and die because of something your character was not even involved in (usually because of security's wall-off mentality). And at the end of the day, people log in to have fun and have a good time on the server but oops security and antags were given too many guns today so now everyone has to die. And it's different from say, a traitor pulling a gun in the bar and having an isolated incident there, but when an extended firefight or slugfest takes place along a bigger part of the station, having bystanders be killed that way just sucks (especially without cloning). And don't give me that 'oh but them's just the breaks' or 'just play another character' crap, those are lame excuses to allow this. When you log on, you select a character you want to play and you may not be in the mood for anything else. Plus, assuming you're there from roundstart, generally trying to play is about a 2-hour investment of time to try and get some enjoyment here. Getting your fun ruined because 'that's just how it goes' is a terrible mentality. And at least if these modes are required to be voted people won't have to waste 45 minutes to one and a half hour figuring out what the gamemode is before going 'no thanks' and leaving (looking at you again, cult).

Bottom line, remove combat oriented antags like cult, merc and heist from secret rotation so big bad shootouts don't have to ruin a 2 hour investment for all non-security on station. Thank you.

[ImmortalRedshirt]

I really can't see this as anything but an excessive watering down, sorry. In fact, the outlook on "two-hour investments" and "those are lame excuses to allow this" paints a picture of RP as nothing more than being exactly what plans one has at roundstart. There can be no deviations from the plan, everything must go according to the routine, otherwise it's too gamey and a waste of two hours. I've never seen RP this way, as it as much about everyone else's stories as it is someone's own, perhaps even more, and seeing how these collide in unexpected ways and push characters and their relationships to the edge, even if ultimately reset at the end, is exactly why it's so interesting to play here, instead of one of the other HRP servers, which more often than not have allowed themselves to fall into an eternal polite routine.

Cult can go though, that gamemode is massively fucked up. No one else has a hardcoded endgoal except this one.

[MattAtlas]

Voting for dismissal.

This is absolutely not the direction we want to go towards. I am also sure this isn't the first or second thread you've made about this exact same argument. It's just not going to happen.

Edited November 15, 2021 by MattAtlas

[NG+7 Gael]

Yeah, no thanks. If you decide to play secret, you're accepting the fact that you may be involved in combat, get injured, die, or otherwise end up interacting with "combat antags." RP is a joint effort, things will not go exactly as planned. This is true even for tabletop games with a small group of friends, let alone a ss13 server full of people. If you don't like what's happening in the round, you can cryo. People's idea of 'fun' is different, and I highly doubt many people here would want to remove combat antags.

Also, cult can be really fun. It doesn't have to be a "kill everyone destroy everything summon evil god" gamemode just because the option exists. That seems to be something that's missing from this- the end goal of most of these rounds, even when they do turn into combat, is not the combat itself. The combat is generally just a consequence of whatever actions the antags were taking. Just because the antags have the option of combat, or end up in combat, does not mean that the entire point of the round was the combat. I would say team-based antags also have the most flexibility for interesting gimmicks, especially mercenary.

[Arrow768]

Seconding the vote for dismissal for the above stated reason.

After the NBT has arrived we will evaluate the role of security and possible look into alternatives to their force monopoly if the situation does not improve.

[TrickingTrapster]

Dismissals are up but gonna reply anyway. I know the combat isn't the end goal, but at least 9 out of 10 times it does happen in those gamemodes. Whether that is due to security, the antags' gimmick, the antags' available tools or just plain stupidity, kind of wasn't the point. The point was that combat sucks and kind of kills all RP going on because either security walls you off or the firefight reaches you and kills you with no real involvement from yourself. Combat is boring. Click other people more than they click you, unga bunga. No character interaction is taking place, bonds aren't being deepened and problems aren't being explored, it's just laser fire, hack and slash weapons and skulls being bashed in, it's all chaos. My idea was with taking these modes away from secret rotation to get people to be less combat-happy and not default to it, which seems to be the case from a lot of posts that I'm reading around the forums. (And it doesn't help that, what, 80-90% of the gear antags receive are meant to hurt and kill people, and only the remaining percents are actual roleplay tools.) Perhaps it's the antags' flavor text, perhaps it's their tools, perhaps it's security being trigger happy, who knows. I just know that I have never, ever, ever seen a single cult round that, if the cultists didn't end up doing nothing because of time constraints, didn't end up in some sort of combat fest. Not once. Not back when I started, not back when I was admin, not recently either. I've never seen a merc or heist team enter the station without some weapons on their person. I want to interact with antagonists, I want to have a fun round. But combat simply isn't fun, which is why I made the suggestion.

[OffRoad99]

On 15/11/2021 at 10:15, TrickingTrapster said:

Another point I want to bring up, is that no matter the buildup, roleplay involved toward the combat or how much sense it makes ICly, it is simply not fun when you get caught up in whatever combat is going on and die because of something your character was not even involved in (usually because of security's wall-off mentality). And at the end of the day, people log in to have fun and have a good time on the server but oops security and antags were given too many guns today so now everyone has to die. And it's different from say, a traitor pulling a gun in the bar and having an isolated incident there, but when an extended firefight or slugfest takes place along a bigger part of the station, having bystanders be killed that way just sucks (especially without cloning). And don't give me that 'oh but them's just the breaks' or 'just play another character' crap, those are lame excuses to allow this. When you log on, you select a character you want to play and you may not be in the mood for anything else. Plus, assuming you're there from roundstart, generally trying to play is about a 2-hour investment of time to try and get some enjoyment here. Getting your fun ruined because 'that's just how it goes' is a terrible mentality. And at least if these modes are required to be voted people won't have to waste 45 minutes to one and a half hour figuring out what the gamemode is before going 'no thanks' and leaving (looking at you again, cult).

Bottom line, remove combat oriented antags like cult, merc and heist from secret rotation so big bad shootouts don't have to ruin a 2 hour investment for all non-security on station. Thank you.

So...without combat-oriented antags like cult, merc and heist...then more than half of Secret rounds will be either Technomancer or Changeling, or Extended.
Secret Extended can be fun from time to time, but the people who wants to play an Extended round usually vote for it. When you vote for Secret, you're aware that you may end up against one or more antags: some may be carrying guns and may be hostile, others may show more self-restraint.

The Secret gamemode is very popular across SS13 because it's completely unpredictable: it may be an Extended round, it may be a Merc round, or a Merc+Ninja round. Anything can happen, whether it's a guns-blazing Merc team shooting its way through Science, a Technomancer who's looking for an apprentice on the Aurora, a secret Cult who wants to spread the violent nature of their God through peaceful or semi-peaceful means. There's a lot of possibilities there, even more so when antags have the freedom to make their own gimmicks.

I've seen two-three RP communities on Space Station 13 whose default mode were Extended, with little to no antagonists in a month, and I've never seen any of them with more than five players at peak hours.

That being said, the Aurora-universe is definitely not a peaceful setting: megacorporations have more power than governments, they ruin peoples lives on a whim, pillage worlds of their resources. A large chunk of our setting includes a strong focus on violence, and the Aurora's been periodically boarded by armed teams in the past. The NSS Aurora suddenly becoming a more peaceful and safe little station amidst a sea of chaos becomes suddenly unrealistic and straight-up boring.
It's a -1 from me.

[TrickingTrapster]

I didn't say anything about wanting it to be peaceful all the time, I just want the actual mechanical combat to be toned down a lot. If I wanted to play a 'click-you-win' game I'd play Call of Duty or Cookie Clicker. Also, as a side note, yes I do vote extended every round because I like RP involving characters that I like to be canon and not interrupted every other shift by a red alert. I think I've said this before, but the core of my point is combat =/= conflict. Conflict is good, it creates RP. Combat is only good in very specific situations that has everyone involved build up to it, like security organizing sparring boxing matches in the holodeck or a hostage situation contained to a dock. But combat in and of itself doesn't create conflict, it creates annoyance OOCly and 'omg run away' in IC, and during running away or dying how much RP are you doing? Exactly, none. Then, afterward, you have to RP being afraid of the big bad firefight which is not even canon and you have to act like nothing happened next round. Oh yay, so much fun this non-lasting RP is in a setting where people try to develop their character over multiple rounds. Woohoo. Conflict, on the other hand, is created from much better set up scenarios, from something ad mundane as characters simply not liking eachother to a misunderstanding after someone throws an item to someone doing their job wrong by accident. Conflict happens naturally, while the combat feels so incredibly forced and inserted into the round for no other reason than 'lawl RP' like 95% of the time when it involves antagonists. And trust me, I don't dislike antagonists. I like vampire, wizard/technomancer, the occasional ninja and since the rework to Changelings that no longer requires them to murder crewmembers I think their RP has improved significantly. I just think that a few select gamemodes are so set on forcibly inserting combat in the round without making the buildup feel natural enough that it just ruins those gamemodes outright. Yes, they can make it work with a good gimmick. Keyword is can, but with so many variables that can make it go wrong you'll need three four leaf clovers, the planets to align and a rabbit's foot for each antagonist to even have a chance of having it work.

For cult specifically, I think a lot of their stuff is fine, the blood runes create a nice bit of conflict for the crew if they are discovered, even if some of the powers are dumb, they have the possibility of creating an actual cult within the crew without having to forcibly kidnap everyone and they have a lot of opportunities for conflict with the chaplain especially. But they apparently need that arming rune that gives them choppy stab stab weapons and OP armor, but instead of using the garb to roleplay with and the blades like sacred relics or something, as soon as someone uses them the entire cult grabs a set and the slaughterfest begins, at which point people may as well cryo because RP is about to end.

Mercs is already a big improvement over cult, visitors are a nice change of pace for the station, I think. I have seen merc rounds do it well, it's entirely possible. It's just that of all the tools they get, they get like... What. 2, 3 rooms full of nothing but military grade weapons and equipment? Yes, they have the freedom to make any gimmick they like, but when their options for tools are so limited, and overwhelming in the 'beeg gunz', it's not a very big surprise that even over half of the good gimmicks have to include them in some way. And unless the gimmick is super fantastic and coordinated with admins, security is going to get suspicious, the mercs are not willing to give the weapons up since it's pretty much all the tools they have and while that would create conflict, sec being sec and antags having weapons in hand this at least 99% of the time results in a firefight. Woohoo.

I think heist is the best of the three, but with the same problem as merc, although to a lesser degree. Their arsenal is still an overwhelming amount of guns and other apparatus to hurt and kill, and kind of not enough 'stealthy steals' or 'integrated item liberation'. With how many guns they have you might as well just call the gamemode 'robbery' instead of heist so people will at least expect guns pointed at them.