Antagonists and Aurora: A discussion thread

[GeneralCamo]

Lately, antagonists have been a major discussion point around the community. There have been threads calling for removal of certain types, removal of borging, and several discussions on both the main discord and relay discord. I have noticed a disconnect however in what the maintainers want, and what the general community wants. And a disconnect between what those who play antagonist see, and those who don't play antagonist see. These are symptoms of a larger issue that have been stretching for years however, this isn't a new issue. But I feel we need to have a central thread discussing what place and purpose antagonists should have on the Aurora.

There have been multiple ideas brought forward on antagonism, including:

• Removing changeling from secret: https://forums.aurorastation.org/topic/18892-feedback-removes-changeling-from-secret-rotation
• Removing cyborging as a punishment: https://forums.aurorastation.org/topic/19365-remove-borging-as-a-punishment-and-change-execution-guidelines
• Revamping off-ship antagonists into overmap antagonists: https://forums.aurorastation.org/topic/17124-overmap-mercenaries-and-raiders-discussion-thread
• Dynamic gamemode as the primary gamemode: https://forums.aurorastation.org/topic/15426-the-dynamic-gamemode
• Drafting people who vote for a mode as that mode's antagonists: https://forums.aurorastation.org/topic/14089-regarding-forced-antag-drafting
• Moving all antagonists into off-ships (mentioned in discords)

None of these have stuck. Yet, there is clearly a problem as antagonists are very uncommon; it has been mentioned the whole reason we have "antagonist mains" is that very few people actually enable them. And I am tempted to agree; you are pretty much guaranteed to get a slot if you enable them, assuming game modes aren't skipped outright due to a lack of players playing them.

This thread resolves not to correct it, but to open discussion on this. What do we want from antagonists? What is the goal of them, and our server in general? The hope of this is that we can possibly work on a solution to the "antagonist drought" that we have had, and the general complaints that the playerbase has had.

[Captain Gecko]

Honestly I'm okay so far with our antagonists, generally. If I had to mention a point of contention, as far as I go with a science main, is how you very quickly end up out of ideas of what to do with captured vamps and lings you put in your cells, but nothing that can't be fixed with good gimmicks and ingenious roleplay. I don't know what we'd have to change or remove if we'd somehow need to do that.

Perhaps one of the main issue, if we really want to look for one, is that Aurora has been elvolving since it was first created, into the mostly RP experience it is today. Most of the antags we have were not made for HRP, but just balanced around the server's rules and player needs. That's not a big issue, but what could be even better would be antags with roleplay in mind from the get go, revolving around RP, and so on. I think the recent addition of psionics is a good instance of it, though still just a tool in a classic Antag's armory, some of these powers are just things purely revolving around mental influence. Of course that's a bit shaky, purely relying on other players' willingness to actually be fair and play along (most people do thankfully!) But worst case scenario we can learn as we go.

Offship antags might be interesting too.

[Ublicto]

The easiest solution to this is to change server culture. Require people to "let the antag cook" among other things. Let it be known that during a round with antags, the course of the round and how fun it is generally depends on the antag. If antag was less of an OCC difficulty (including after the round where people shit on you) to play more people would probably do it.

[Susan]

Antagonists are an antiquated, half-baked concept that is fundamental to LRP and MRP servers and are a holdover from the fact SS13 shares its roots from the same singular source repo; Goonstation, /tg/station, Baystation, and Aurorastation have all taken that code and morphed it into their own things, but remain shackled by ancient ideas - and that is what an 'antagonist' is. The reason why they are unpopular, and why there are consistent problems with the depth and breadth of roleplay, is that antagonists by design and implementation are one-trick ponies with no significant thought behind them.

I have played this game for eleven years, and I can count on one hand the amount of times an 'antagonist' made an engaging round. There are scarce few encounters I can positively remember. Now, when you pin that against the backdrop of repetitious gimmicks, murderboning, powergaming, poorly thought out plans and consistent antagonist mains who progressively decline in quality with every passing round, it is clear (to me, personally) and it is my opinion that antagonists are a net negative to this game and they only persist on Aurora because we as a server are too afraid to redefine ourselves.

Remove antagonists. It is far past time for the system to be destroyed.

Every memorable, character-defining and earth-shattering moment I've had on Aurora Station has not been as a result of, or had any connection with, Revolver Man #5674, or Changeling Adrenaline Sac Rodeo #496874, or any of the innumerable and forgettable cookie-cutter antagonists I've had to slog through to get roleplay throughout the years. They have come from events like Bad Moon, or Bayonet Hand, or the Cold Dawn arc: storylines with tangible consequences that irrevocably change characters and lead to growth, new relationships, the destruction of old relationships, et al. Hell, not even events. The arc where two Dominians got deported to be executed was so much more interesting and fun than any antagonist round I've had in the last three months simply because it was canon and real and it ginned up the crew where they started arguing with each other and grappled with their actions that led to this outcome.

Antagonists are a hollow attempt to emulate this kind of heavy roleplay - they do not succeed, and frequently miss the mark more-so than they hit it. They are a relic, an artifact of ancient SS13 from Exodav's era that are long past the point they should have been euthanized. Aurora is too afraid to take unilateral action against antagonists and do the better thing to remove them in favor of more canon events - minor to major, story-driven, off-ship overmap roles, etc; we are scared of 'losing players' and changing up the gameplay loop that has been the same since, what, 2008, with just a fresh coat of paint and some abilities added and removed, here or there.

I think it is high time we tried a new system. Curated experiences and plot lines people can involve themselves in - which don't always need to be people getting blown up and dying!!! - are beautiful things that antagonists simply cannot hope to emulate. They are shallow attempts to generate intrigue and roleplay, which may have worked in 2008, but I've seen Changeling so many times now it does nothing but annoy me when I want to do roleplay that isn't 'oh man he's alive again'.

[rrrrrr]

I've talked about this already in another thread, but I definitely think that a lot of the issues that current antag roles have stems from two things.

1. People are forced to improvise an entertaining gimmick that includes a fair number of people on the spot. This is difficult.
2. They have far less to work with than admins running events.
3. There are zero stakes. No one actually dies. Nothing is canon. People like stakes. This is why events are almost always well-attended.

I'm going to try and be a little more positive than the above post. I've been playing Space Station 13 for thirteen years (haha) and I genuinely do like the action and conflict that antagonists provide, even if what they can provide is, by nature, limited. If it weren't for antagonists, what would engineering have to do, for example --- repair broken windows on the off chance whoever's piloting drives the ship through a carp shoal? Setting up the SM reactor, thrusters, RCON, et cetera takes all of fifteen minutes. Twenty if you're doing it alone. If it weren't for antagonists, I simply would not have a lot to do when I play this game.

Of course, we just got out of two canon events where engineering had a whole heck of a lot to do, so that's sort of a null point if you aren't taking into the account that running events takes time and effort and they can't, by any means, be more than a semi-regular thing. That's the main issue with removing antagonists, I think. Without 'em, outside of events, you're playing extended. I don't think anything's wrong with extended, but I don't speak for everyone. For every extended round with great, organic, canonical conflict, there's five where not a whole lot happens. People stand around in a hallway and shoot the shit about intergalactic politics. You need to keep in mind that I'm unwell and can entertain myself by infodumping on people about the ship's water recycling systems, but again, I don't speak for everyone. I genuinely think a sizeable portion of the playerbase would leave if antagonists got removed. And you can say maybe that they're not players worth having, but I'd just call that jaded.

I think the issue is that a lot of people have seen every conceivable permutation on traitor, mercenary, changeling, et cetera. These basic gamemodes are tired. I can admit that even though I'm easily entertained. They need to be reworked and I think there need to be more things for, say, traitors to do in the absence of a coherent, on-the-spot gimmick. Give them more stuff to steal, or something.

Edited October 7, 2023 by rrrrrr

[Susan]

I completely disagree with any suggestion events cannot be a 'semi-regular thing' because if they were intended to eclipse antagonists, the systems that make them up should be overhauled and made easier and more accessible. There should be a staff role specifically as a pseudo-DM so admins do not need to be involved beyond greenlighting the narrative with lore staff. And it doesn't even need to be explosive. Corporate parties, inspections, hell, the Kobayashi Maru style event was fun and interesting. 

If we are going to replace antagonists it would necessitate a code pass-over to enable the kind of framework for what is basically a 'DM-lite' system, rather than just commenting them out and relying on what we have now. That's my take on it, and I would be glad to map or run events if that ever came to pass. But the culture shift and code requirements are too daunting, and we're too afraid of losing a few players, so we are stuck with the same stale set-ups, and that is a travesty.

[rrrrrr]

I didn't say they couldn't be a semi-regular thing, just that they probably couldn't be more than semi-regular. The ideal (the perfect ideal) would be that every round is canon and events happen once or twice a week. I'm mostly in agreement with what you said, otherwise.

[Ublicto]

2 hours ago, Susan said:

I completely disagree with any suggestion events cannot be a 'semi-regular thing' because if they were intended to eclipse antagonists, the systems that make them up should be overhauled and made easier and more accessible. There should be a staff role specifically as a pseudo-DM so admins do not need to be involved beyond greenlighting the narrative with lore staff. And it doesn't even need to be explosive. Corporate parties, inspections, hell, the Kobayashi Maru style event was fun and interesting. 

If we are going to replace antagonists it would necessitate a code pass-over to enable the kind of framework for what is basically a 'DM-lite' system, rather than just commenting them out and relying on what we have now. That's my take on it, and I would be glad to map or run events if that ever came to pass. But the culture shift and code requirements are too daunting, and we're too afraid of losing a few players, so we are stuck with the same stale set-ups, and that is a travesty.

Scheduling events will necessarily make non-event times less populated if all other rounds are extended. It will make it harder to gain new people and integrate them into the community which is a recipe for stagnation and a bleed of players. If you want more event-like antag rounds why not make a new WL category that gives some people certain powers (like spawning ships) when they roll antag to make the round more event-like? That seems like the best of both worlds, although I don't know how feasible it would be.

[Fluffy]

Our antagonists suffer, in my opinion, from a list of issues that needs multi-faceted approaches to tackle, which I will try to condense (this could take literally pages upon pages of expansions and subtopics) only two of the points as follows:

 

1) They are under an insane, undue and unfair scrutiny

Since they have the spotlight and they do unordinary things, they are bound to be the big victims of any John Doe that decides to ahelp or player complain them over trivialities

This is not helped, at all, by the fact that you have to reconstruct the significance and interpretations of the rules based on what happens to others, instead of reading it and have a pretty solid understanding of what you can and cannot do

That there are unstated expectations people can be punished for should not be a thing in general, but this disadvantages and unfairly punish antagonists in particular, due to their position

The aforementioned is compounded by the fact that a punitive approach is employed instead of a corrective one, making any mistake someone could make a permanent mark in their record that can be used literally years down the line to justify punishing more harshly the next mistake; it seems to me there is a cultural problem where people are very unwilling to forgive mistakes, this is particularly visible in the famous phrase often employed in appeals/complains of "intentions doesn't matter", a reductionist view that only seems to account for effects (which are of questionable relevancy in the big scheme of things themselves)

 

A sizable number of people wants them to deliver an amazing, interesting, engaging story, while at the same time not doing nearly everything that would make it possible: Does not want to be converted, assassinated, thralled, held as hostage, killed, sent in medical for a long time, inconvenienced by an atmospheric sabotage, or an SM sabotage, made into a cultist, attacked when they're not 100% ready to beat them, and so on

Some also expects extremely sophisticated, non-repeated stories on the regular, that are essentially impossible to archieve (there's only so many things you can narrate about), and even less so the more things you bar them from playing into

 

Even when someone manages to create a unique and engaging story there's a tendency for people in dchat / looc / OOC / discord to go into full peanut gallery mode and pick apart every detail they didn't like or issue they had with it, it isn't even sufficient to mark everything and more, you can and will find people that can do it better, faultlessy, HRPerly, you name it, someone will be there to tell about how they would have done it better in one way or another on the regular; if in some miracle sense you manage to avoid that, you will find a John Doe eager to tell you how he didn't enjoy the gimmick because you interrupted the stream of sips x500 at the Bar while the chat was being used to write a novel that would have made Dostoevskij weep seeing its length, or whatever other reason. Even if the vast majority of people enjoyed it, you will still have to be subjected to the salt of those who didn't (either as a whole or in part), and you will always find someone that didn't like something about it, eager to tell you

 

2) They are toothless

We do not give them enough tools and liberty to engage in meaningful stories, which cheapens out the interaction with the ship, and thus the fun of it

There is no engagement in a story where you know who will win already, and it's practically written on the walls that The Horizon Always Wins™ (or at least, doesn't lose in any meaningful way); while this is a sad but excusable condition for canon things, it should not be towards/with antagonists

This comes from their toolkit, that is underpower to face an entire ship worth of people with entire backup departments, and from the player culture that shoehorn them in playing to lose (or risk more complains / administrative actions coming their way)

This also means that we rob half of the ship of fun: If Security is nearly always equipped enough to easily deal with them, people in other departments don't get to have the fun conflict with the antagonists; If we have an easily on tap Crew Armory fully equipped, Operations doesn't get to bring in shit and Science doesn't get to make things to fight back the antagonists with

If you have to instill fear of being bwonked to people because otherwise they would do something that a normal, sane person would do in said situation (see: Machinist making mechs if the Lii'dra were to reappear and is trying to take over your ship, or SRF marines are spotted), you are doing something terribly wrong with the balance

If there are essentially no stakes of dying/losing, it's boring for both sides, and if the antagonists are basically expected to lose from the get go in nearly every situation, it would suck even more for them

The aforementioned expectation also morphs the perception of the threat on an IC level, which usually railroad the gimmicks to go in the famous loop we're used to seeing

 

 

In regards to them, it is infeasible and a shot to our foot to remove them, the only server-specific data available (thanks to a pool that @La Villa Strangiato made and posted around) has currently the following statistics:

Spoiler

Antagonists seems to be liked (at least as a concept, and over the alternative), there is a clear wish for them to remain (54.69% of the respondents to the pool have indicated that they would either play less or not play if they were not present, with a whooping 20.31% of them for the second case), it is also visible ingame when extended gets voted (or secret extended rolls) repeatedly that the popcount crashes; in the servers browser, there is a correlation between higher pop and the presence of antagonist (excluding NSFW servers, but I suppose people play in those for fundamentally different reasons)

Yes, I am aware that they are not HRP servers, there are other confounding factors and so on, if you have better data I am all ears for it

 

I would also like to point out that there are memorable and engaging antagonist experiences: the time the Horizon got sold to Dominia, the Solarian Clone Corps, when the Biesel emperor came visit in an alternate timeline scenario are three that comes right to my mind, all done by antagonists (without admin support as far as I am aware), and they all happened in the past few months

Lastly, I want to note that expecting antagonists to be memorable on the daily seems like an issue of unfair expectations, we should not expect antagonists to be consistently memorable just like we should not expect every character or character interaction to be, and we engage with way more characters than antagonists in general too, so they are far more likely to be in the selection of memorability (small trivia: this is formally known as base rate fallacy/bias)

[Ublicto]

49 minutes ago, Fluffy said:

Our antagonists suffer, in my opinion, from a list of issues that needs multi-faceted approaches to tackle, which I will try to condense (this could take literally pages upon pages of expansions and subtopics) only two of the points as follows:

 

1) They are under an insane, undue and unfair scrutiny

Since they have the spotlight and they do unordinary things, they are bound to be the big victims of any John Doe that decides to ahelp or player complain them over trivialities

This is not helped, at all, by the fact that you have to reconstruct the significance and interpretations of the rules based on what happens to others, instead of reading it and have a pretty solid understanding of what you can and cannot do

That there are unstated expectations people can be punished for should not be a thing in general, but this disadvantages and unfairly punish antagonists in particular, due to their position

The aforementioned is compounded by the fact that a punitive approach is employed instead of a corrective one, making any mistake someone could make a permanent mark in their record that can be used literally years down the line to justify punishing more harshly the next mistake; it seems to me there is a cultural problem where people are very unwilling to forgive mistakes, this is particularly visible in the famous phrase often employed in appeals/complains of "intentions doesn't matter", a reductionist view that only seems to account for effects (which are of questionable relevancy in the big scheme of things themselves)

 

A sizable number of people wants them to deliver an amazing, interesting, engaging story, while at the same time not doing nearly everything that would make it possible: Does not want to be converted, assassinated, thralled, held as hostage, killed, sent in medical for a long time, inconvenienced by an atmospheric sabotage, or an SM sabotage, made into a cultist, attacked when they're not 100% ready to beat them, and so on

Some also expects extremely sophisticated, non-repeated stories on the regular, that are essentially impossible to archieve (there's only so many things you can narrate about), and even less so the more things you bar them from playing into

 

Even when someone manages to create a unique and engaging story there's a tendency for people in dchat / looc / OOC / discord to go into full peanut gallery mode and pick apart every detail they didn't like or issue they had with it, it isn't even sufficient to mark everything and more, you can and will find people that can do it better, faultlessy, HRPerly, you name it, someone will be there to tell about how they would have done it better in one way or another on the regular; if in some miracle sense you manage to avoid that, you will find a John Doe eager to tell you how he didn't enjoy the gimmick because you interrupted the stream of sips x500 at the Bar while the chat was being used to write a novel that would have made Dostoevskij weep seeing its length, or whatever other reason. Even if the vast majority of people enjoyed it, you will still have to be subjected to the salt of those who didn't (either as a whole or in part), and you will always find someone that didn't like something about it, eager to tell you

 

2) They are toothless

We do not give them enough tools and liberty to engage in meaningful stories, which cheapens out the interaction with the ship, and thus the fun of it

There is no engagement in a story where you know who will win already, and it's practically written on the walls that The Horizon Always Wins™ (or at least, doesn't lose in any meaningful way); while this is a sad but excusable condition for canon things, it should not be towards/with antagonists

This comes from their toolkit, that is underpower to face an entire ship worth of people with entire backup departments, and from the player culture that shoehorn them in playing to lose (or risk more complains / administrative actions coming their way)

This also means that we rob half of the ship of fun: If Security is nearly always equipped enough to easily deal with them, people in other departments don't get to have the fun conflict with the antagonists; If we have an easily on tap Crew Armory fully equipped, Operations doesn't get to bring in shit and Science doesn't get to make things to fight back the antagonists with

If you have to instill fear of being bwonked to people because otherwise they would do something that a normal, sane person would do in said situation (see: Machinist making mechs if the Lii'dra were to reappear and is trying to take over your ship, or SRF marines are spotted), you are doing something terribly wrong with the balance

If there are essentially no stakes of dying/losing, it's boring for both sides, and if the antagonists are basically expected to lose from the get go in nearly every situation, it would suck even more for them

The aforementioned expectation also morphs the perception of the threat on an IC level, which usually railroad the gimmicks to go in the famous loop we're used to seeing

 

 

In regards to them, it is infeasible and a shot to our foot to remove them, the only server-specific data available (thanks to a pool that @La Villa Strangiato made and posted around) has currently the following statistics:

  Reveal hidden contents

Antagonists seems to be liked (at least as a concept, and over the alternative), there is a clear wish for them to remain (54.69% of the respondents to the pool have indicated that they would either play less or not play if they were not present, with a whooping 20.31% of them for the second case), it is also visible ingame when extended gets voted (or secret extended rolls) repeatedly that the popcount crashes; in the servers browser, there is a correlation between higher pop and the presence of antagonist (excluding NSFW servers, but I suppose people play in those for fundamentally different reasons)

Yes, I am aware that they are not HRP servers, there are other confounding factors and so on, if you have better data I am all ears for it

 

I would also like to point out that there are memorable and engaging antagonist experiences: the time the Horizon got sold to Dominia, the Solarian Clone Corps, when the Biesel emperor came visit in an alternate timeline scenario are three that comes right to my mind, all done by antagonists (without admin support as far as I am aware), and they all happened in the past few months

Lastly, I want to note that expecting antagonists to be memorable on the daily seems like an issue of unfair expectations, we should not expect antagonists to be consistently memorable just like we should not expect every character or character interaction to be, and we engage with way more characters than antagonists in general too, so they are far more likely to be in the selection of memorability (small trivia: this is formally known as base rate fallacy/bias)

A large contributor to this is that even if the antag can use their limited tools to their full effect, they are told not to and to prioritize telling a story (which usually means dont kill people and get brigged in practice). The crew meanwhile always plays to win, without exception.

[Carver]

I'll keep my point succinct; it would simply be better if we dropped the expectation for them to tell some grand story involving a plethora of people. Let people do quiet, simple, low-stress and/or stealthy gimmicks like vault theft and the like where they may very well be unnoticed for the round (and no, this isn't suggesting a return to old-style 'silently murder a guy').

I don't have high expectations for antagonists, and I don't really want to. My barest expectation is for them not to gank and not to do anything gross. If Tim Traitor wants to make it his goal to steal the Captain's voidsuit and nothing else, go ahead, maybe he'll find it good practice to then later aspire to something higher - or maybe he enjoys simple, basic goals that give the average Investigator some actual thinking to do.

In short; take them off the stage, and stop expecting them to be server-wide entertainers.

[Aphelion]

Shrink sec, imo. A ten person department is just too big. The crew armory is only ever useful right now on lowpop, and it never gets accessed on lowpop because lowpop heads are sparse.

It won't solve the wider issue of fear at taking things too far that I face, and lots of antags face, but it would at least make it more meaningful to kill a sec officer or two. Right now if you kill or disable 2, the department is down by 20% on highpop. The only situation where a crew armory is useful is if the antags get murderboney hard and get banned halfway through the round. At least that's what it feels like. 

Like the game is clunky enough, and sec gets an inherit advantage already, but ontop that winning is just not a thing that will ever happen. I get we're an RP server, antags shouldn't play to win but to make the round interesting, but for real sec is a curbstomping machine for any RP that isn't a goosechase around the ship. Right now to even begin to involve other departments in a violent plot, you either need to initiate it in their department, run through it, or achieve a 10-0 KD against people who play this game exclusively for combat and will ahelp you if you kill one of them.

Less violent gimicks are fine, but really whenever you do them you're playing against the clock for that phat ass department of ten paramilitary soldiers to steamroll you into the brig.

[Captain Gecko]

Thinking about it, I believe removing antagonists COULD be an interesting thing. However we'd have to replace them with something. The reason why quite a few people leave the moment extended passes the vote is that it just may get boring. Some players aren't THAT into doing their needed job the first 10 minutes of the round, and then sitting in the bar for the following 2 hours. We'd need something to do. So here's the idea:

 

We replace antags by random events. Yes we already have random events, but these are rarely a danger, and do not involve everyone. The goal of these new random events, which we're gonna call Action Events, as a placeholder name, have THREE main goals:

- Replace antags when it comes to intensity. This itensity could be adjusted to player count and/or to a vote before the round starts, asking players to vote for the round intensity between 0 to 5, or 0 to 10. The higher the intensity, the more often Action Events happen, and the more brutal they are.

- Have the potential to involve all departments, with their intensity being adjusted to fit their playstyles (IE: security would get something more intense and action-focused, less-so for Engineering.) Which is something that most antags do not. A ling, for instance, will get sec involved, probably medical, and maybe science if it's caught alive; but everyone else could wait it out in the bar, and unless the ling actively went for them, nothing would happen. Because of that, it would be wise to also implement a system that checks which departments are crewed before throwing an event that the crew may be unable to respond to (IE: avoid throwing an engineering-focused events when there are no engineers playing.)

- Add something to the roleplay/to roleplay about. These would be canon, or at least, work within the framework of extended (IE: you can still keep player deaths and some other things non-canon and so on), and thus provide some roleplaying stakes and opportunities, which are minimal with current antags and how they work.

 

I can already give you a list of events I just came up with right now, but we can -and should- make the list bigger, more varied, to avoid people getting bored of doing the same events over and over. To me, what would be perfect is at least 10 different types of Action Events for each department (including cross-department ones; and ones that naturally include other departments, for instance intense action-oriented ones will obviously have medical do some work afterward) but having even more doesn't hurt. We keep current random events too also, such as blobs, rogue drones, space hazards and so on.

Here they are:

Spoiler

• Security

- Rogue Robots [High Intensity] - Quite simple really, a harder version of the rogue drones events we already have, with rogue shipbounds spawning and going hostile, making for tougher, stronger foes. These may not be stuck to maintenance tunnels, and may be spawned instead in unoccupied rooms where they may be seen (and see you) easier. The initial alert for it may indicate where it currently is or not, that would be for the people actually into balancing to figure out. A robotician could probably get some cool materials out of this too!

- Boarding Action [High Intensity] - A site/ship spawns when the event begins, basically a hostile craft, hostile pirates and the likes, target the Horizon. A (hidden?) countdown begins before they actually open fire. We can come up with some reason why the Horizon cannot fire upon it, perhaps stealth systems, jammers, whatever; and basically have the Security forces board an hostile ship, either with one of the Horizon's shuttles, or by teleportation. This ship would be manned either by hostile, static NPCs (turrets in disguises, mechanically speaking), or automated defenses (which means the ship in this case would just be a ship sized-drone), and the officers sent there would need to reach either the bridge or the weapon's room and destroy a console or something like this. THE NPC SHIP SHOULD LEAVE AFTER A SET AMOUNT OF SHOTS FIRED, to avoid them firing eternally until the Horizon turned to dust if the crew fails (though not while there's people ON IT, of course.)

• Engineering

- Stray Shot [Mid to High intensity, depends of where the shell hits] - A stray shot from a battle that probably ensued at unfathomable distances, probably long ago, strikes the Horizon and damages an (hopefully) unoccupied room.

- Rogue Asteroid [Low to Mid intensity, depends of where the rock crashes] - Much like the stray shot, but much less destructive. A simple asteroid that was not detected due to being far from any kind of asteroid fields. It's still big and fast enough to do some damages to the ship, though if the shields are on, damages should be lowered.

• Science

- Anomalous Materials Crash [Low to High intensity] - A rock crashes on the ship and delivers anomalous materials. It would deal minimal damages, nothing aside from a broken table and so on (sort of like the drop pods) and leave an anomaly, which is the actual hazard. How dangerous the anomaly is would be tied to how intense this one event is meant to be, and it would probably require some kind of rework of how anomalies work, or at least make something that ensures that there's no instant-death anomalies suddenly murdering half the crew (IE: teleporter ones sending everyone outside), without giving them a chance to actually escape and work on it.

• Medical

- Shipbound Epidemic [Low to High intensity] - A random crew catches a disease, and will start spreading it to other crew they touch/interact with, and so on. Medical would need to get a scan of it the diseased to get an idea of how to cure it, then produce and distribute the cure, which would be a simple, random, and not too hard to produce chemical mix, perhaps even one from a list of chemicals MADE for this event. The event's intensity could vary with the disease's effect, with a low intensity epidemic causing crew to sneeze, or make their vision a bit shaky, flavor text about feeling itchy and so on; mid intensity causing vomitting, confusion and more; And the higher intensity diseases causing things like crew randomly collapsing, randomly dropping whatever they're holding in their hand, or lowering brain activity to a set level.

• Operations

- Space Battle [High Intensity] - A static NPC ship spawns and targets the horizon. Much like with the boarding action event, a countdown begins before it actually fires upon the Horizon. The Horizon this time, simply needs to fire back and destroy it. The target ship would not be boardable, and would have a set amount of "Health points", which is basically how many shots it would take to destroy it. I also imagine that, everytime the ship gets hit, the countdown to when it fires is increased a little to give the Horizon a chance to totally avoid damages if the crew is fast enough. I've put it in Operations because, while it is the bridge's work to fire the gun, it's Operations that will do the hard work of printing, assembling, and loading the guns. Destroying the NPC ship could have it be replaced with an explorable site of what is basically a derelict, then. THE NPC SHIP SHOULD LEAVE AFTER A SET AMOUNT OF SHOTS FIRED, to avoid them firing eternally until the Horizon turned to dust if the crew fails.

• Service

- Big Mess [Low Intensity] - A pipe leak or a particularly powerful scrubber ejection makes a huge mess, like a monstrous puddle of oil. Janitors are going to have plenty to do.

- Stray Animal [Low Intensity] - An animal from the garden(?) is astray. It's something harmless, like a chicken, or a cow, but it needs to be brought back.

• General events

- Aurora Inanis [No Intensity] - A harmless electromagnetic phenomenon causes aurora-like lights to reflect off the ship. It looks pretty cool. Yes it's inspired by that one even on TG (I think?) servers and all. It would probably last 5 to 10 minutes to give characters time to reach a window and settle down to watch it.

Edited October 9, 2023 by Captain Gecko

[Boggle08]

On 07/10/2023 at 18:59, Carver said:

In short; take them off the stage, and stop expecting them to be server-wide entertainers.

My position on this is pretty much this. Rather than continuing to expect antagonists to carry a 50 person server using something like four mercenaries, we instead introduce more roundstart spawns that have neutral or friendly involvement with the horizon that round, and slowly experiment with and tinker the third party spawns.

Antagonist rounds have a habitual problem of turning the session into an active shooter simulation. Everyone just sort of stows themselves out of the way, and small talk becomes situationally inappropriate. Right now, our antagonists usually have just one A-plot. Even if you have something like Traitor, with multiple people out with different agendas, it's still one A-plot because security and command  are supposed to fuck with them while the rest take radio callouts or keep out of the way.

Imagine if we had B or even C plots stacked concurrently on top of the A-plot. The kind of plots which command a level of urgency for people to risk stepping out of lockdown to address them. Ship combat is a really good example of this. Like in the last event, we had boarders on top of ships to shoot at, Two vectors for intrigue running concurrently, involving multiple departments, and requiring people to step out of lockdown and contribute.

[Evandorf]

I think I can safely say that removing antags and having perpetual extended is not something that most people would enjoy. The recent round and population trends may turn out to be cyclical but the extended enjoyers haven’t turned out in the numbers needed to keep a decent pop during multiple consecutive extended rounds.

If I were to try and distill the goal of antags into a single statement it would be: To cause disruption to the normal flow of a round/shift in such a way that is enjoyable and engaging while maintaining HRP standards. The rules say that the goal is to drive a story but you are limited in what stories you can tell by your toolkit so I think what would be useful is to expand the antag toolset.

Currently if you need something done which is outside the scope of your antagonist abilities you ahelp to ask for it to be done. This is only available if the proper staff are online and they are willing to take the time to interact you at length. What if instead there were an “observer antag”, a DM, a storyteller present in every round. They would have access to an acceptable number of admin tools such as the ability to make global ambient messages, create terrain and creatures, view the exploitables and have access to aooc. The breadth and scope of what they would be given to work with can be debated and altered but we need to give antags influence beyond what their characters can do.

Such a position would need to be whitelisted and I know a lot of people will be against giving an antag what is essentially meta powers but I believe it will appeal to those players who don’t enjoy being a normal antag not to mention all those ghost mains floating around out there, many of whom I know will be responsible with such a role. 

[Flpfs]

I feel like we should turn away from the antagonist model for a while. Contributors have added stuff like ship combat and it goes unused.

 

I agree with Gecko's idea and I think that we should stray towards a more PvE environment with smarter enemies, rounds with ship combat and boarding, more engaging exoplanets with better generation and mobs, and finally challenging random events.

I know that this sounds like a lot but I would be willing to code a part of it as long as other contributors stepped up

[Fluffy]

I do not personally see myself wanting to wordlessy battle NPC mobs (no matter how smart they are) like we're invading Gremorian Prime every other round, most of the time the hivebots/gremorians/space carps/whathaveyou are an annoyance to deal with more than something people want to engage with, as seen by the urge to immediately emitter and gigashatter them and the limited wish to visit planets or away sites for a large part of the players, and I do not believe them being smarter would solve it

Though, I do agree we should play more into the ship combat and boarding part, and challenging events when there's not much going on, but it's more of an addition between antag rounds (either on ship or off ship), not a substitute to it

[N8-Toe]

The thing with off maps is it would require a culture/policy change. As of right now the off maps essentially need the consent of the Horizon to interact with them. and do so on their terms. To have off maps be a more significant source of conflict I believe would require them to be allowed to antagonize or engage the horizon of their own initiative, as well a removal of the leviathan. It would be hard for me as a person on the Tarwa ship to try and extort the Horizon for passage through my turf, or be a trader who got in a dispute with the crew if the crew has a "Screw you I win" button.

If the interactions still have to be on the Horizons terms, it neuters it. And we get the issue of people would just, arguably as some do now, treat the offmap people as NPC's.

The antagonist model works, because you have to engage with them. You can't turn away from the guy saying "I'm from Mictalin here to make the SCC pay" if the guy has a gun in your face. Command can't tell the man with a bomb "We don't want to play with you". It happens like it or not. If we want to have offmaps be a conflict driver, we suddenly have to be ok with eating an HE shell to the face because we told the angry pirates no, or them nabbing our miners.

I think alot of the issue we have is the incongruity with what people want an antag to be, with what an antag is. People seem to want the round to be disrupted... but not their round. They want an antagnosit to shoot, or to heal the victims of. but I feel alot of people are not ok being the one getting killed by the antagonist, or who's workplace gets blown up. I think we need to again as a community take a step back and acknowledge if we have antagonists, on or off ship. They will disrupt the round, and that includes our round. And when we readied up to play the game, we agreed that could happen to us. Heck, I say lower the re spawn timer if your character dies to five minutes. That way your not out of the game, and can keep playing with everyone if you do die

[Aphelion]

These ideas on fundamentally changing antags because people want a mini event are bad. New players won't want to antag at all then, and the reason to try it would be fucked up. 

Antag rounds are boring because antags can never actually win. People are painfully aware OOCly and ICly at how stacked things are against the antagonist and fail to fear RP because of this I swear. When is the last antag round when a full sec team lost? Or a full sec team stood by for a gimick that wasn't neceserily demanding murder?

Making the round interesting =/= letting Horizon win every time.

WTF is the threat? An enemy ship? Well Horizon has Shields, and three guns, one of which can obliterate things hard. Literally every ship we have in rotation cannot counter it.

A traitor? Ok. Good luck with 10 v 1. Also because it's autotraitor, you're sharing, and they're all already sick of you.

Ling, Vamp, interesting concepts. All the gimicks are played out for people who main departments that have anything to do with these roles though. Also still got things stacked against you so you pose no actual threat (until you do)

Cult, and Rev all fit into things that would be interesting and function for 'mini events', if the round types weren't already played out hard by the people who play this game all the time. They also always usually lose, though sometimes if we're lucky an ERT is at least called.

 

For antags to be at all appealing, I really think we need to give them a win or something. 'making the round interesting' is way too vague, and it will never be actually interesting if people don't actually feel threatened.

 

This server is crap for action, I think in an effort to encourage more RP based gimicks. But Action is all it actually has, any RP gimick built around lore will make half the server totally gormless to what is going on. Hell most of sec don't even know what factions make up the PMCG, and you want them to know lore?

 

I get the design philosophy of building towards a server that leads players into following the rules, and I think that is what has lead to this situation, but that's also just fucking weird given the server has 24/7 moderation. Like we're doing both and it leads to traitors who softball sec (for fear of admin intervention), and get fucked in reply, because sec is built for the situation where an antag is griefing and not running for plot, for some reason.

I really think that if we really want to have fun, we need to be prepared to actually have a risk and maybe get griefed here and there. It happens, deal with it.

 

For what it's worth, I'm biased. I am so, so sick if playing antag, and trying very hard not to not just fucking kill people and to RP, just for command or sec or whatever department to conclude that I need to be removed from the round. But surely it can't be fun for sec either? Round after round of "oh the antag is here, time for code blue, let's get lethals and armor, and just steamroll this". Tho that's not what I see, it's usually 'deals with it quick, maybe one officer goes to med, then they all give eachother high-fives' 

[Evandorf]

16 hours ago, Aphelion said:

These ideas on fundamentally changing antags because people want a mini event are bad. New players won't want to antag at all then, and the reason to try it would be fucked up. 

Antag rounds are boring because antags can never actually win. People are painfully aware OOCly and ICly at how stacked things are against the antagonist and fail to fear RP because of this I swear. When is the last antag round when a full sec team lost? Or a full sec team stood by for a gimick that wasn't neceserily demanding murder?

Making the round interesting =/= letting Horizon win every time.

WTF is the threat? An enemy ship? Well Horizon has Shields, and three guns, one of which can obliterate things hard. Literally every ship we have in rotation cannot counter it.

A traitor? Ok. Good luck with 10 v 1. Also because it's autotraitor, you're sharing, and they're all already sick of you.

Ling, Vamp, interesting concepts. All the gimicks are played out for people who main departments that have anything to do with these roles though. Also still got things stacked against you so you pose no actual threat (until you do)

Cult, and Rev all fit into things that would be interesting and function for 'mini events', if the round types weren't already played out hard by the people who play this game all the time. They also always usually lose, though sometimes if we're lucky an ERT is at least called.

 

For antags to be at all appealing, I really think we need to give them a win or something. 'making the round interesting' is way too vague, and it will never be actually interesting if people don't actually feel threatened.

 

This server is crap for action, I think in an effort to encourage more RP based gimicks. But Action is all it actually has, any RP gimick built around lore will make half the server totally gormless to what is going on. Hell most of sec don't even know what factions make up the PMCG, and you want them to know lore?

 

I get the design philosophy of building towards a server that leads players into following the rules, and I think that is what has lead to this situation, but that's also just fucking weird given the server has 24/7 moderation. Like we're doing both and it leads to traitors who softball sec (for fear of admin intervention), and get fucked in reply, because sec is built for the situation where an antag is griefing and not running for plot, for some reason.

I really think that if we really want to have fun, we need to be prepared to actually have a risk and maybe get griefed here and there. It happens, deal with it.

 

For what it's worth, I'm biased. I am so, so sick if playing antag, and trying very hard not to not just fucking kill people and to RP, just for command or sec or whatever department to conclude that I need to be removed from the round. But surely it can't be fun for sec either? Round after round of "oh the antag is here, time for code blue, let's get lethals and armor, and just steamroll this". Tho that's not what I see, it's usually 'deals with it quick, maybe one officer goes to med, then they all give eachother high-fives' 

First rule of antagging is that you will eventually lose. Exceptions being game modes like rev where the majority of the crew can be made antags or very lowpop rounds. You just don’t have the action economy to keep up with a ship full of people. At best, you escape on a shuttle or fly your antag ship back to the starting area. This isn’t something that needs to be fixed though. Giving antags some way to definitively “win” is just ego and rarely adds anything to the round. Losing Narsie and the Merc nuke didn’t really change the flow of the round. You might fuck up the ship enough to force a scuttle but that decision should stay with command and the moderation team.

[Fluffy]

38 minutes ago, Evandorf said:

First rule of antagging is that you will eventually lose. Exceptions being game modes like rev where the majority of the crew can be made antags or very lowpop rounds. You just don’t have the action economy to keep up with a ship full of people. At best, you escape on a shuttle or fly your antag ship back to the starting area. This isn’t something that needs to be fixed though.

Sure, but the point isn't to give them some way to definitively "win", that doesn't add anything to the round

The point is to give them roughly equal chances to win (except some loner antags that would not make sense to win alone, like a single antagonist, or the vampire etc. you get the gist)

 

41 minutes ago, Evandorf said:

Giving antags some way to definitively “win” is just ego and rarely adds anything to the round. Losing Narsie and the Merc nuke didn’t really change the flow of the round.

We have exactly this problem, right now, only that it's not the antags but the ship to have the way to definitively "win"

The point isn't to flip it the other way around: You would have the same issue in reverse, the point is to balance the chances, as if they are too much swayed on either side, it rarely adds anything to the round

[Evandorf]

1 hour ago, Fluffy said:

Sure, but the point isn't to give them some way to definitively "win", that doesn't add anything to the round

The point is to give them roughly equal chances to win (except some loner antags that would not make sense to win alone, like a single antagonist, or the vampire etc. you get the gist)

The thing is, you can't balance chances for victory between the crew and antags in the way I assume you mean. Their goals are too different. The crew's objective with a hostile antagonist is to simply stop them either by making them flee, killing them, or permanently detaining them. Antags can't achieve the same, both because the crew is too numerous and because our HRP focus and rules forbid killing crew without good reason. What I recommend as antag is to have a goal for your gimmick and a victory condition for your round. I see too many Stephen King gimmicks; good setup and interesting premise but the ending lacks focus. Give yourself a clear target, telegraph that to the crew via announcments, radio, RP, ect. and then work to achieve it. Even when the crew inevitably takes you down you can succeed in your mission and if the crew is involved and informed they will enjoy it more. It will make it more difficult sure, but mechanical knowledge and prepwork can go a long way.

[N8-Toe]

They need to be allowed to pick objectives that they can win. I don't know how well people would take me as an antag doing a sabotage or assassination objective. Sure I could do an announcement giving a heads up "oooh evil mictalin saboteurs"  may be aboard. but thats also asking me to softball to security and the crew. if I announce someone may be here to wack the cap... well code blue, sec's armed, captain has armor, and is in the bunker. Can my achievable goal be to kill the captain, sabotage medical or the brig, perhaps rob cargo, mug some crewman, or hold up the bar. As well if it is 1 v 10 situation, and sec is fighting them with lethals they should fully be allowed to go to the boards. hostages, bombs, sabotage, and lethal force the works.

I bring up these. because these are things within the ability of an traitor who can be defined as a "A man with a gun and a plan". These do generate RP, and tell a story even if there is not monologues and announcements ahead of time. This creates disruption, it has a goal, I'd have some kind of justification for it.. Maybe I'm sick of the SCC so I wanna knock off the captain, maybe I got gambling debts and need the money so a hostile group is paying me or I'm going to rob the ship. These are "Winnable" objectives.  I can measure victory.

But now lets be actually honest. My gimmick involves me saying anti corporate things to my co workers, sniding about management on the radio, than when I see the captain in the hall way alone I say "Up yours corpo scum" and blap em with a gun, and run away. Ditch the piece and try and lay low.. Maybe try and get the XO next. Is that.. a good gimmick? or did I take a player out of the round without RP and im going to be talking to an admin. I created RP, the captains dead, there is an investigation, maybe it'll lead to me and I'll make a run for it or a last stand. maybe it wont.

 I rob cargo with a mask on and change of clothes, I grab the money, I grab the bread, and I run. ditch the disguise, and hide till transfer since sec is searching. Is.. that a good gimmick or did I fail to create RP.

The reason I bring this up is again. I think we're lying to ourselves. People where saying "well we need antags who are not trying to carry the round fully". I just gave you some examples, if you where the captain who got blapped by me with your RP buildup being maybe I snark at you once on radio, and me shouting something before killing you. Are you ahelping? IF your the cargo tech who I pistol whip to take your ID, than leg it and lay low for the rest of the round. Are you ahelping me, or at the end of round when your sec and realize I layed low. If we want the offmap to be the antags. are you going to ahelp when you die without warning when the bar is hit by an HE round because command insulted a pirate.

The core we need to see here is to fix our culture, we need to be lighter on antags. We need to lower their thresh hold for violence, and we need to punish players who refuse to play along, yes and roleplay, or go out of their way to just shut them down. I fully believe people should eat command bans for dismissing gimmicks or trying to fax them, and regular people should be eating week bans for taunting armed angry men with guns. We also need to remove the fear people have that they're just going to get bwoinked if they antag, or get salted at. I dont play traitor because I've seen people antag banned for what I think was wildly unfair, and I dont want to loose my command whitelist. We can't have our cake and eat it too.

If we want antags who carry the round, they need to have gear that lets them enforce that gimmick as well the OOC rules and culture that they should be allowed to

If we want antags who act as sorta B and C plots, well we need to accept events that disrupt our rounds may not be as "grand"

if we want off map antags. They either have to be able to be a true threat, and initiate hostilities, or they're just NPC's

 

 

[Evandorf]

4 minutes ago, N8-Toe said:

They need to be allowed to pick objectives that they can win. I don't know how well people would take me as an antag doing a sabotage or assassination objective. Sure I could do an announcement giving a heads up "oooh evil mictalin saboteurs"  may be aboard. but thats also asking me to softball to security and the crew. if I announce someone may be here to wack the cap... well code blue, sec's armed, captain has armor, and is in the bunker. Can my achievable goal be to kill the captain, sabotage medical or the brig, perhaps rob cargo, mug some crewman, or hold up the bar. As well if it is 1 v 10 situation, and sec is fighting them with lethals they should fully be allowed to go to the boards. hostages, bombs, sabotage, and lethal force the works.

I bring up these. because these are things within the ability of an traitor who can be defined as a "A man with a gun and a plan". These do generate RP, and tell a story even if there is not monologues and announcements ahead of time. This creates disruption, it has a goal, I'd have some kind of justification for it.. Maybe I'm sick of the SCC so I wanna knock off the captain, maybe I got gambling debts and need the money so a hostile group is paying me or I'm going to rob the ship. These are "Winnable" objectives.  I can measure victory.

But now lets be actually honest. My gimmick involves me saying anti corporate things to my co workers, sniding about management on the radio, than when I see the captain in the hall way alone I say "Up yours corpo scum" and blap em with a gun, and run away. Ditch the piece and try and lay low.. Maybe try and get the XO next. Is that.. a good gimmick? or did I take a player out of the round without RP and im going to be talking to an admin. I created RP, the captains dead, there is an investigation, maybe it'll lead to me and I'll make a run for it or a last stand. maybe it wont.

 I rob cargo with a mask on and change of clothes, I grab the money, I grab the bread, and I run. ditch the disguise, and hide till transfer since sec is searching. Is.. that a good gimmick or did I fail to create RP.

The reason I bring this up is again. I think we're lying to ourselves. People where saying "well we need antags who are not trying to carry the round fully". I just gave you some examples, if you where the captain who got blapped by me with your RP buildup being maybe I snark at you once on radio, and me shouting something before killing you. Are you ahelping? IF your the cargo tech who I pistol whip to take your ID, than leg it and lay low for the rest of the round. Are you ahelping me, or at the end of round when your sec and realize I layed low. If we want the offmap to be the antags. are you going to ahelp when you die without warning when the bar is hit by an HE round because command insulted a pirate.

The core we need to see here is to fix our culture, we need to be lighter on antags. We need to lower their thresh hold for violence, and we need to punish players who refuse to play along, yes and roleplay, or go out of their way to just shut them down. I fully believe people should eat command bans for dismissing gimmicks or trying to fax them, and regular people should be eating week bans for taunting armed angry men with guns. We also need to remove the fear people have that they're just going to get bwoinked if they antag, or get salted at. I dont play traitor because I've seen people antag banned for what I think was wildly unfair, and I dont want to loose my command whitelist. We can't have our cake and eat it too.

If we want antags who carry the round, they need to have gear that lets them enforce that gimmick as well the OOC rules and culture that they should be allowed to

If we want antags who act as sorta B and C plots, well we need to accept events that disrupt our rounds may not be as "grand"

if we want off map antags. They either have to be able to be a true threat, and initiate hostilities, or they're just NPC's

 

 

We have nothing in the rules that requires antag gimmicks to be grand and I personally agree that they shouldn't have to be. This is more of a attitude shared by some and is completely ahelpable if people are excessively salting on your gimmick.

In your anti-corporate example, I would say that you didn't provide sufficient RP beforehand but there are many ways to provide it other than the radio.

For example, the other day I had a traitor round where I wanted to use the Xanu Rep's exploitable info as cause for an assassination attempt. I did a few things leading up to the actual killing.

• I purchased an encrypted headset key to keep tabs on what was happening.
• I made announcement that Xanu intelligence warned of an attempt on the life of a Xanu citizen aboard the Horizon.
• I purchased a burner laptop and and agent ID card to use for texting so I could send the rep threats beforehand. They were quickly relayed to Command and Security but could not be traced to me.
• I installed a closet teleporter between a locker on the Intrepid and a locker near the Rep's office.
• After I let the crew simmer on the threats and sec work to try and figure out who the attacker was I purchased some frags and made a lame attempt by tossing one at the Rep and the bodyguard assigned to them from Sec.
• I fled to the Intrepid and launched towards nearby rangers, bolted the airlock between where the teleport comes in and the cockpit, and waited for the inevitable boarding attempt. In the end they decided rather than teleport into danger they would take the spark and do a boarding operation.
• Once that was in full swing, I took the closet back to nearby the Rep's office, purchased a rifle and did what I set out to do.

I'm not listing all this to brag, only to show that there are many ways to interact with the crew and also ways to avoid confrontations with security while also achieving your goals.

I agree with you that too much pressure is put on antags to carry rounds but also antags need to think beyond simply clashing with security.

[Fluffy]

1 hour ago, Evandorf said:

Antags can't achieve the same, both because the crew is too numerous and because our HRP focus and rules forbid killing crew without good reason.

I do not think this is a good addressing of the point, and the reason is that the point of this discussion, I believe, is to make antagonists more enjoyable to play both as and against

That can include changes in philosophy, change in code and change in rules

Indicating the philosophy and the rules as a reason for why a suggestion would not be possible does not progress the discussion, the point of a suggestion is to change something, that can also include them in the list of options

Assume there is a rule that forbid janitors for cleaning, someone makes a thread about how it sucks to play janitor because there's nothing to do, and suggest that maybe they should clean, and a lot of people agree to that; saying "the rules doesn't allow janitors to clean" wouldn't really be helpful, because the retort would simply be one of the many variations of "ok, let's change that, if that is part of the problem, that's the point of the suggestion/discussion"

 

 

There is also a distinction between what the code allows you to do, and what you should do: The code can, right now, allow a mercenary team to wordlessly enter the first turf of the horizon, set down a nuke and blow it up in 5 minutes since roundstart, that doesn't mean you can or should do it, but the code is completely indifferent to that part, it's up to the humans that inhabit and make this 20+ years old game run, to make it run and make it fun

Same way would go with balancing, we can make it so the antagonists can gigastomp the whole security team 1v5, that doesn't mean you have to enter Hopper mode as soon as you walk into the ship and mow down everything you see; you narrate a story, but when the ship turns out to be hostile to you and tries to stop you, now you can show your prowess and gigastomp the unprepared foes that are coming to shoot you;

That means you can proceed to try and archive your objectives, that means some more challenging, thoughtful and fun things to do for both sides beside "alright guys antag #46541651 of the week here is a rifle click until horizontal", that means crew can have a conflict with them when/if sec gets wiped, that means science's nice toys have a sense to be built and used, weapons ordered, mechs built, crew militia, medbay having their flow of patients, engineers trying to keep the ship together, atmos techs refilling the breached areas, command having to coordinate and evaluate the approaches to the demands knowing that "no you won't" will mean they can very well lose the ship, especially if unprepared, it means more believable reactions can be allowed, and so on and so forth

You still drive a story, a narrative, and you also have fun when the inevitable conflict will come out of it, for both sides