Allow antag roles to be selected by the antagonist

[kyres1]

What the title says. Pretty much, remove all roles that one can roll for in the special preferences tab with the exception of "Off-ship Start" and "Crew Start." These new roles would serve to combine the potential for every antagonist by allowing whoever rolls them to pick whatever they'd like to become. This would optimally come with an off-ship base remap and overhaul that I'd personally be willing to do in a heartbeat, provided development expressed any interest.

In an ideal world, specialized non-traitor roles could function on either start, meaning that Changelings could begin an off-ship start as well as a crew start. The same could be said for vampires, and cultists, however with minor conversion roles (renegade, revolutionary) being optionally enabled for free by any of these. The functionality of borer thralls would confuse me, though, those are probably best just untouched.

This would take the basic antagonist set we have and probably give them an explosively huge variety of approaches for creativity. Without the confines of X or Y's shuttle or ship, or being crammed into a little baby hideout because you can't be trusted with a gun.

But kyres, what if (insert overpowered antagonist here) decides they want to just take a mercenary assault rifle to powergame?

Saying this isn't a problem would be a lie. While I am an advocate against trying to minmax the game balance on a teetering scale, the idea of an antagonist abusing the multiple routes available to utterly pack their kit with the most obscenely powerful gear of what they can gather is... obviously going to be insufferable.

The first solution to this, similarly to how ninja tokens are handled, is to bar the primary equipment or abilities of various antagonists behind vendors, or loadout tokens. That way, when you spawn and decide to go X or Y route, you can't loot every ships' available gear to maximize your effectiveness in combat.

You would spawn with the ability to do the traitor panel equip verb on yourself - meaning, if you picked ninja, it'd spawn you with nothing more than the standard loadout (slipsuit, gloves, agent ID, headset, uplink and hardsuit token etc.) whereas you wouldn't have access to the vendor that dispenses mercenary gear. You could walk up to it and view it like a regular vendor, but not actually access it. Either this could be tied to the ID access or antagonist you selected, I'm not entirely sure what's best or more possible.

So wait, how do crew antags work?

you just don't get access to the antag abilities until you select whatever you are. Once you do that I'd just say it should function the same (nobody is touching ling anyway)

[Lonefly]

This is one of the best antagonist ideas that I've read in years. I have thought similar thoughts in the past, but never to this extent.

 

Allowing people to pick *exactly* what they want, alongside AOOC collaboration, would allow for much more varied rounds and gimmicks. This way, we could have a funny round where, say, a mercenary team is a group of geneticists testing out a new bioweapon (changeling/vamp/other future things) on the crew, or something similar to that.

 

Power and balancing is definitely a concern, and I'm not totally sure how we could handle it without putting some trust into the hands of players. Maybe timegate antagonism a bit?

[Gromnax]

Hard agree on this one. I'm often in the mood for antagging, but sometimes I have specific plans for a specific kind of antags and gotta wait days to roll it.

Another possibility, for the vendors, would be to set up a bunch of one-way teleporters to other offstation starts (merc shuttle, ninja ship, et caeterea) where the gear would be available. The teleporter would also give the basic gear of said antag. It already existed on the Aurora with the endround station which I forgot the name of. You'd pass through the doors of the shuttle, and it'd give you the basic gear of your job. This way, no meta grabbing things from other antag types.

[Captain Gecko]

I'm not a balancing specialist, so I can't tell if it's a good or bad idea gameplay-wise... But ROLEPLAY-wise? This is GREAT! Hell, that might be enough to draw me back in playing antag much more again!

To have that much freedom in choosing what to do also means that much freedom in setting up your gimmick, adapting to the crew, etcetera.  Definitely a +1 from me.

[Sparky_hotdog]

Basically what everyone else has said. Like Gecko I've no clue how to balance this, but I'm a massive fan of breadth in antag roles, so the idea of what is essentially the widest possible antags is definitely a +1 from me too.

Only thing which I've no clue about how it would work is antags like cult and revolutionary which rely on others being on their team. Obviously AOOC coordination is possible, but might not be reliable enough.

[Roostercat]

My main question with this is how antags in general are handled. Is this just spawning antags as normal but giving them the option of on station or off, or is this going to start spawning multiple antags all the time? Like vamp traitor or ling merc or so on. Because I'm of the opinion that the latter would result in constant clusterfucks that involve little RP before everything goes to hell. 

[Marlon P.]

Good idea from OP. I'd like that customization. By that I mean picking vampire stuff every single time.

+1

Edited August 15, 2022 by Marlon P.

[NerdyVampire]

Sounds great to me. More dynamic gameplay is almost always what I want and this should provide plenty of that, provided it can be mechanically put together to work +1

[Boggle08]

It's so simple of a suggestion, but it opens up a ton of possibilities when it comes to having control over what you want to do as an antagonist, or even how we design antagonist types to begin with. A feature like this would definitely hold hands with dynamic's intensity voting style, with certain options being made available or greyed out as you go up and down the chain.

What we might see is antag variety die. Even more than it already has. No one is going to pick raider over merc, unless there's a specific reason for it. In fact, we'll get a lot more merc. Allowing antagonists to choose the gamemode is kind of like having a different demographic to appeal to, in my mind. Whether or not a gamemode has variety, is fun to play, is powerful, or can carry a decent narrative will become significantly more important.

Edited August 15, 2022 by Boggle08

[Carver]

I like this a lot. Picking and choosing would be fun and hopefully up the quantity of people willing to play antagonists, and as for the concern over Borer Hosts I had previously suggested a solution that would make them quite viable for this pick-and-choose as well.

[Owen]

I think this could be very interested to try out. I can see it leading to more rounds with a more coherent plan/plot/narrative from the antags when they can choose what they want to be, rather than them having to throw a quick gimmick together every single time they randomly roll one of the antags. Definitely would like to see this.