Make Death More Meaningful

[Nanako]

I think cloning cheapens death. The whole concept of cloning fits the sci fi setting very well, and its a good idea to have, but right now its overused. After Yinzr breaches the brig and slaughters the entire security force, or some similar incident, medbay recieves a huge procession of bodies that are just churned through the cloning machines and spat back into duty like an industrial production line. There's no meaning or respect to the whole thing, and nobody's really that worried about death because getting cloned is so quick and easy if there's a half-competent medical team.

Meanwhile, the chaplain, whose job is supposedly to give funerals and handle the remains of the dead, is often neglected and deprived of these vital duties. I believe he deserves a bigger role, and that doing so would encourage more people to play that role

I believe death should be a more meaningful thing, and that the cloning machines shouldn't just serve as a revolving door to whatever afterlife you believe in. We have security armed with a whole host of non-lethal methods of subduing suspects, we have strict rules about escalating to lethal force, and we have the biesel law against executing. I'd argue that our lore tends to lean towards valuing life, and the ease of cloning runs counterproductive to that.

to that end:

1. A Mechanical benefit for funerals.

When a person's remains have been properly laid to rest, either by cremation, or burial at space, the player's respawn time should be reduced. Say by 15 minutes. In many cases (given the time necessary to resolve situations and recover bodies) this would result in that player being able to respawn immediately. As a different character, of course. The usual rules apply, and respawning as a character who just died would be very wierd.

Mechanically, this would be easy to implement for the cremation bed. Slightly more difficult for burial at space but the implementation i'd use is that it'd register whenever a coffin containing a body passes out of the edge of the map. instead of being sent to a new Z level, it'd be deleted from the world (so that coffins don't end up on the asteroid or something). Using the mass driver would not be strictly necessary

Deaths by antag action (or just whenever the player doesn't want them to be) would still not be canon and hence not carried over betwen rounds. But deaths would be canon until the end of that round, and a funeral would give people a proper place to attend, grieve, give their condolences, speak eulogies about the dead, etc. It would create more interesting RP than cloning them, as well as providing a mechanical alternative means for players to get back into the game after death

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2. Restrict Cloning

Already used here and there by a few people, introduce and canonise the concept of Cloning Insurance. Your character pays a bit out of their paycheck each month, for the knowledge that should they die (of causes not related to old age or genetic diseases) then their insurance company will pay the costs for them to be cloned.

The idea being, cloning is an expensive process. Involving high tech equipment, a significant cost in energy, materials, and medical care after the fact, and requiring specialised knowledge to perform.

It shouldn't be used for everyone, or be the go-to action whenever someone dies

People who have cloning insurance paid up should mention it in their medical records. Id'deally there'd be a special field for this, to select yes/no, but that would be a little bit of coding. Just manually entering it in text is fine, and already done by a few people.

Right now this would simply be a thing we roleplay, but later on it could be factored in as a lifestyle option in Senpai Jackboot's economy plan, allowing players to select a Risk Level for that character which would adjust the insurance premiums, and they could also increase their risk level if they actually use it, since dying once indicates you're lkely to die more often

If a person doesn't have cloning insurance before they die, then you don't clone them. Cloning an uninsured person would result in minor criminal charges, as well as the culprit being liable for the full cost of the cloning.

In exceptional cases, if a person who is vitally needed dies without insurance, their department head (or the HoP or Captain in all cases) could authorise department funds to pay for the costs and allow them to be cloned anyway. This should involve paperwork to authorise and justify it, and come with the IC expectation of a hearing later to justify this decision. Abuse of this authority would be a matter for IAA's to investigate.

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3. Assume no family by default.

Even in cases where people have died and not been cloned, i've often seen chaplains' requests for funerals rejected with the all encompassing justification that the dead will be taken home and returned to their families for a funeral of their choosing. This does make a lot of sense, but it's also denying the chaplain his role.

To alleviate this, i propose that we take a de-facto assumption that a person is a friendless family-less nobody, unless specified otherwise. If their medical records don't name a next of kin, or specific instructions to take their body home (or if another crewmember doesn't claim the body), then they should be assumed to have no ties, and the body should be released to the chaplain for a funeral.

There would of course be exemptions for people killed in mysterious circumstances, and for the bodies of vamps/wizards/changelings, who should be taken home for investigation and a more thorough autopsy, or for their remains to be used as evidence in a trial. But in most circumstances, like people being gunned down by traitors, dying in breaches, eaten by monsters, etc, their remains should be laid to rest by the chaplain board the station.

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Overall, i feel these changes would:

-Give death more meaning

-Create more interesting RP around the dead (watching how people react to your death as a ghost is pretty fun)

-Fit with the lore better than the current system

-Not be programmatically difficult to implement

Thoughts?

Edit: Since many posts seem to not be taking it into account, and the feature is not well advertised, i feel i should explain this here.

Aurora's code DOES already contain a respawn feature. After 30 minutes have passed since your last death, you can type respawn in the chatbar to be taken back to the main menu, and rejoin the game as a new character. The first idea here is to allow funerals to reduce this timeer on this existing feature, not to add a completely new respawn feature

You can technically rejoin as the same character, although this is frowned upon and discouraged except in cases of technical issues.

Edited April 25, 2016 by Guest

[Guest]

I'd say no, we had this discussion a long time ago and it was decided it wouldn't happen. Here's my reasons for why I said no at the time:

--Meta shifts to people (+antags) never taking risks and constantly avoiding combat. Conflict rarely happens nowadays from antagonists because they're afraid to die. Station personnel get the luxury of being the good guy that gets cloned. Antags don't. It'd be reasonable to assume that if we started creating restrictions, that neither party would be willing to do much. Actually, with the flip, the antagonists would be given more reason to be aggressive. Nuke ops would still murderbone the station, but they'd do it with much more gank efficiency and most assuredly putting people out of the round. Heisters are misinterpreted as nuke ops and thus do the same. Changelings and vampires aren't crewmembers.

--30 minutes is a fourth of the round in most cases. If you get chloralnapped by a changeling at the beginning of the round, you get no chance for cloning if you're a poor bugger with no insurance. Not only are you unable to play one of your favorite characters, you get to sit and do nothing but watch everyone else who doesn't know you're dead.

--No defibs are mapped in. The most useful life-saving medical devices were removed by Baystation devs. (Unrelated note, Baycode traitor uplink has a singularity beacon.)

--The crematory is for burning husks of cloned people, and also for incinerating horrorific entities. People don't realize this, likely because it's never been said.

--Assuming people don't have family after they are dead is the silliest company policy I've seen on workplace accidents that turned lethal. The bodies are almost always turned over to next of kin. If none exists after an investigation, they often donate the body to science for medical research and organ donation. Allowing for a corpse to be incinerated without family proceedings is the silliest thing I've ever seen.

[LordFowl]

--No defibs are mapped in. The most useful life-saving medical devices were removed by Baystation devs. (Unrelated note, Baycode traitor uplink has a singularity beacon.)

It would be more accurate to say that defibrillators as a whole don't exist in Baycode whatsoever, because they don't.

Also, as Delta pointed out this issue has been raised before, and it was decided against inhibiting cloning. Trying to brute-force the meta like this would only have unforeseen (but very foreseeable) and shitty consequences.

[Alberyk]

This is a really old discussion. Death is cheap and easy in this game, so, returning back to life is the same as well, even if we have the stupid biomass mechanic which add nothing but; chemistry has to make meat or the kitchen must be raided.

As people did point before; bodies in workplaces are returned to their next of the kin after the shift, which is probably what should happen by default if the players does not says otherwise in their records. And if people want to play perma death or something in the round, just don't return to your body or put do not clone in your records.

[Nanako]

I'd say no, we had this discussion a long time ago and it was decided it wouldn't happen. Here's my reasons for why I said no at the time:

--Meta shifts to people (+antags) never taking risks and constantly avoiding combat. Conflict rarely happens nowadays from antagonists because they're afraid to die. Station personnel get the luxury of being the good guy that gets cloned. Antags don't. It'd be reasonable to assume that if we started creating restrictions, that neither party would be willing to do much. Actually, with the flip, the antagonists would be given more reason to be aggressive. Nuke ops would still murderbone the station, but they'd do it with much more gank efficiency and most assuredly putting people out of the round. Heisters are misinterpreted as nuke ops and thus do the same. Changelings and vampires aren't crewmembers.

 

You're contradicting yourself here, first you say antags will get less aggressive, and then more aggressive. Which is it.? As you already pointed out, antags don't get cloned anyway, so i suspect the latter

I don't see why there's a reason to think that people wouldn't do much. It's security's job to take risks to protect others, the people who pick security are willing to do that. People who play security are also generally likely to put cloning insurance in their records so it might not affect them much

As for the rest of the station, they shouldn't. We already have powergaming rules against scientists arming up and going antag-hunting. Giving them a little reason to fear death would be just more encouragement to not powergame.

 

--30 minutes is a fourth of the round in most cases. If you get chloralnapped by a changeling at the beginning of the round, you get no chance for cloning if you're a poor bugger with no insurance. Not only are you unable to play one of your favorite characters, you get to sit and do nothing but watch everyone else who doesn't know you're dead.

Which is why there's the first and foremost idea, a funeral reducing your respawn time. 15 minutes is a lot less, that amount can be adjusted too. You're likely to be waiting at least that long if you're found and cloned anyway

 

--No defibs are mapped in. The most useful life-saving medical devices were removed by Baystation devs. (Unrelated note, Baycode traitor uplink has a singularity beacon.)

Not sure how this is relevant, i agree we should have them back, but i think that's a seperate idea

--Assuming people don't have family after they are dead is the silliest company policy I've seen on workplace accidents that turned lethal. The bodies are almost always turned over to next of kin. If none exists after an investigation, they often donate the body to science for medical research and organ donation. Allowing for a corpse to be incinerated without family proceedings is the silliest thing I've ever seen.

 

People with empty records are also silly. If you haven't filled in your next of kin, then who are they supposed to contact?

There's also the fact that taking people back to the shuttle is rarely actually done. Usually the dead just rot in the morgue forever, while the chaplain sits in his office doing nothing. The returning bodies to family policy deprives the chaplain of usefulness, and detracts from the round in the name of rarely used metaRP which affects nothing.

[Nanako]

This is a really old discussion. Death is cheap and easy in this game, so, returning back to life is the same as well,

 

I don't agree, death isn't that easy. People can live for quite a while while heavily wounded, and people go unconscious at about half health which negates the need to kill them to remove the threat. It takes quite a bit of beating to kill a downed person, which only reinforces the concept

With a combination of meds, stasis bags and blood transfusions, almost any patient can be saved no matter how dire. If they're not dead, they can be healed back to normal by any half decent doctor

Death is not cheap or easy. Breaching is the only thing that kills people easily and inevitably, and that's being heavily nerfed in the new map by setting it on an asteroid where most walls don't open to space.

As people did point before; bodies in workplaces are returned to their next of the kin after the shift, which is probably what should happen by default if the players does not says otherwise in their records.

If people don't note any next of kin in their records, then who are the remains going to be returned to?

People don't just get hired instantly, there's an interview process, psych evals, lots of questions, forms to fill in, etc.

People would definitely be asked about their family and contacts during this

If people don't put any next of kin in their records, then it's because their character was asked, and answered 'none'

[Mofo1995]

I will lay out here a treatise on why the removal of cloning is a bad idea.

1. Not everyone has records. In fact, majority of people don't have records. It has never been a requirement to play on this server to have records, even a lot of heads of staff have blank records. Just like access to the forums is not required to be an active player on our server, neither is spending the time to write out one's employment records.

2. People already smash the F1 key upon being killed by an antagonist, but this is often reconciled with the fact that upon death, you're not out of the round forever. A lot of antags kill people, but it's usually all right because they can be cloned later. In a respawn-less environment, being killed with a welderbomb at the 30 minute mark means you're out. Being capped by a merc or nukeop, and your out. Fireballed by a wizard, out. Even if properly RP'd so as not to be gank, death against your will be an antagonist is still a common occurence, especially for security. Cloning is a major ball in the court of non-antags, and more than once, security has sprung back after annihilation thanks to the cloning pods. Without them, crew have to choose between being permanently dead, and being a robotic slave to a mega corporation for life.

3. Canonical deaths. Believe it or not, there's a lot of death in extended. The occasional bald will go down disposals, a viral outbreak will occur ravaging the crew to death, the still insanely aggressive slimes in xenobiology will get loose and kill, and toxins tests can go wrong and cause leakage. Anomalists and Xenoarchs can sometimes get instantly killed on the job, just for doing seemingly benign experiments on seemingly innocuous objects. Death happens surprisingly often, and some extended rounds can rack up serious death tolls. Imagine if all those deaths were irrevocable, it would be terrible. Most people on the station aren't rich, and so, they would just remain dead. Forever. There was a funeral once for someone who had DNC and DNB in their records, and all though it was heart-wrenching fantastic RP, it would become nigh on impossible to have stable recurring characters who aren't rich if cloning was made into a rare and expensive process. Most people don't want to lose their characters permanently, and they don't want other's characters they like to be lost permanently.

All in all, I think this would cause a lot of grief and woe in a bad way rather than a good one. People would be far more willing to fling character complaints and salt if their deaths took them out of a round for good. The coffin and respawn as a new character idea is interesting, but aside from myself and a small handful of others, chaplains who actually do chaplain things are insanely rare. More often than not, their bald and new and doing random things around the station or being generally super weird, and there's only one slot for the job. No one has respect for chaplains, and most can't be trusted to carry out this funeral task.

[Guest]

You're contradicting yourself here, first you say antags will get less aggressive, and then more aggressive. Which is it.? As you already pointed out, antags don't get cloned anyway, so i suspect the latter

 

Perhaps you should start reading a bit more in depth relating to tense and context.

As of now, the only people that need to be afraid of death are antagonists, as they're never cloned due to them being antagonizing and generally the bad guy. So what if a security officers gets absorbed by a changeling? If his body is found, he can be promptly cloned.

Assuming we put so much work into "making death meaningful" when in fact it is only meaningful for characters in important game progression roles, the gameplay meta will shift towards antagonists not giving a shit about roleplay expectations, walking into situations recklessly and with the intention to do as much damage as possible rather than creating a story or a narrative for the crew to follow. I'd say around eight out of ten regulars in this community would rather be given an LMG to shoot up their workplace with as a traitor rather than go through the effort of trying to engineer interesting situations that don't amount to ordering tac armor, bulldogs and telling the station to surrender or some other unoriginal crap.

Non-crew antagonists almost never get cloned anyway, so they're effectively empowered further to murderbone people on the offchance that the folks they kill don't have cloning insurance. Moreover, if they kill enough, someone can complain with the pathetic excuse that cloning is getting expensive and not everyone can be cloned, and only the super important captain, HOP and HOS can be cloned while the station remains understaffed in an engineering department.

Death is not meaningful because the community chooses not to make it meaningful. You cannot change people, only the game mechanics. And this is an issue that game mechanics will not fix without effectively making the game and roleplay atmosphere worse.

[Nanako]

I will lay out here a treatise on why the removal of cloning is a bad idea.

1. Not everyone has records. In fact, majority of people don't have records. It has never been a requirement to play on this server to have records, even a lot of heads of staff have blank records. Just like access to the forums is not required to be an active player on our server, neither is spending the time to write out one's employment records.

First, i said restricting, not removing cloning.

Not everyone has hair, either. yet we often look on baldies with no small amount of concern. Taking time to fill in stuff about your character is a pretty important part of RP. As a security cadet i get refused most equipment due to a lack of training noted in my employment records, i got the same in medical when asking for chemistry access.

Taking time to fill in your records, is an active step in differentiating yourself from the greytide. I see nothing wrong with encouraging it, it gives you reason to think about your characters.

But ultimately it would only require writing 'Cloning insurance fully paid up' in your medical records. Even people who are intent on remaining mysterious could manage to copy and paste that, but it'd still catch out the greytide mob who don't know or care about such things.

 

. People already smash the F1 key upon being killed by an antagonist, but this is often reconciled with the fact that upon death, you're not out of the round forever.

 

Assuming your body gets found, and cloned, and then you're supposed to go through some medical RP of being surprised about your status as a clone, and talking to a psych about it. This is rarely actually done.

On the other hand, the thing you're forgetting (or perhaps unaware, let me teach you) is that you can respawn as a new character 30 minutes after your death, by typing respawn in the chatbar. This feature already exists, and does not depend on your body ever being found. Of course it comes with some RP expectations, like not having any IC knowledge of what has happened in the round.

My first idea was to allow a proper burial to reduce the timer on this respawning, if the body is found and given a proper funeral, which seems like a win/win to me.

 

3. Canonical deaths.

 

Not seeing the issue, i specified that deaths would still not be global canon, only for the rest of the round. Dying twice in a round is fairly uncommon. Not everything in an extended round is canon, there's no server rule that states as such, its a commonly held thing but nowhere near mandatory.

The occasional bald will go down disposals,

Baldies ragequit on death and can't be cloned, irrelevant

a viral outbreak will occur ravaging the crew to death,

As a longtime medical player, lethal viruses are rare. I've seen a player die to a virus exactly once in over two months. It's a rare and interesting event, it SHOULD kill people and they should be mourned.

the still insanely aggressive slimes in xenobiology will get loose and kill, and toxins tests can go wrong and cause leakage.

People working in such dangerous environments should have cloning insurance. If you can't take one minute to put that in your records, why are you working in such a dangerous job in the first place? Toxins and xenobio are not for the inexperienced.

Also xenobiologitst tend to not get cloned. They tend to get left to rot on the floor of xenobiology surrounded by slimes, because those things are too damned OP to be worth the risk for a corpse recovery. If they do get recovered, it tends to be such a long time later that the player has already respawned or logged out, so they still don't get cloned.

 

Imagine if all those deaths were irrevocable, it would be terrible.

Irrevocable only in the sense of having to play a different character for the rest of that one round

 

they would just remain dead. Forever.

Most people don't want to lose their characters permanently,

Most of this post seems to be labouring under the impression that everything is canon in extended. That's not true.

If necessary, you can handwave it away as, your family/friends/etc pooled their money to afford cloning you.

 

if their deaths took them out of a round for good.

Only the character is taken out of the round for good, not the player. Respawning already exists.

I think this whole post is full of misconceptions about what i'm saying, and what features are already in place.

[Nanako]

As of now, the only people that need to be afraid of death are antagonists, as they're never cloned due to them being antagonizing and generally the bad guy. So what if a security officers gets absorbed by a changeling? If his body is found, he can be promptly cloned.

 

You don't think this is a problem? We're supposed to be a heavy RP server. Written in the rules specifically is Avoid Pain. How does allowing or encouraging people to not fear death, fit with that?

 

Assuming we put so much work into "making death meaningful" when in fact it is only meaningful for characters in important game progression roles,

I disagree. As a janitor the other day, a pair of vampires accidentally went overboard in feeding and killed me. My death was investigated as suspicious and it resulted in escalating the situation from stealthvamps into a stationwide firefight with an ERT being called. Even the lowliest of people dying in unexplained circumstances can kick off major events.

the gameplay meta will shift towards antagonists not giving a shit about roleplay expectations, walking into situations recklessly and with the intention to do as much damage as possible rather than creating a story or a narrative for the crew to follow.

I disagree. As we've already established, this would not affect antags. But making normal people fear death more, would make them less likely to go rambo, and more likely to comply with an antag's demands, more likely to be well-behaved hostages, and more likely to try to RP instead of trying to be the hero

 

I'd say around eight out of ten regulars in this community would rather be given an LMG to shoot up their workplace with as a traitor rather than go through the effort of trying to engineer interesting situations that don't amount to ordering tac armor, bulldogs and telling the station to surrender or some other unoriginal crap.

Because the protagonists don't fear death, and hence aren't scared of threats.

Non-crew antagonists almost never get cloned anyway, so they're effectively empowered further to murderbone people on the offchance that the folks they kill don't have cloning insurance.

Random murderboning is already frowned upon and admins can intervene if they feel necessary. There's almost always at least one moderator online.

In either case, respawning already exists, and with my first idea to reduce the delay on it and allow faster repsawning, randomly murdering people wouldn't affect the overall crew count that much.

 

Moreover, if they kill enough, someone can complain with the pathetic excuse that cloning is getting expensive and not everyone can be cloned,

Anyone can write cloning insurance in their records, it's an RP thing until future features change it otherwise.

 

Death is not meaningful because the community chooses not to make it meaningful.

I disagree. It's not meaningful because the mechanics of the game make it not meaningful. Specifically the ease of cloning. The community mostly plays the game they're given, very few of them have either the development knowledge or the influence to change the rules of aurora.

 

this is an issue that game mechanics will not fix without effectively making the game and roleplay atmosphere worse.

As mentioned above, i disagree. I think that making protagonists fear death more, would encourage better RP from them. Less people trying to play hero, and more normal people trying to keep their head down and stay out of conflict, as every non-security crewman is already encouraged to do.

[Guest]

You don't think this is a problem? We're supposed to be a heavy RP server. Written in the rules specifically is Avoid Pain. How does allowing or encouraging people to not fear death, fit with that?

 

What do you expect anyone to do about it besides complain? Telling it how it is, and not how "ideally it should be in a perfect roleplay utopia" or whatever.

 

I disagree. As a janitor the other day, a pair of vampires accidentally went overboard in feeding and killed me. My death was investigated as suspicious and it resulted in escalating the situation from stealthvamps into a stationwide firefight with an ERT being called. Even the lowliest of people dying in unexplained circumstances can kick off major events.

 

Blatant murder tends to get a lot of attention. The only thing that changed in the round was that security identified antagonist activity and is now in a heightened state of alert. If the victim were a captain, the circumstances would've been radically different.

 

I disagree. As we've already established, this would not affect antags. But making normal people fear death more, would make them less likely to go rambo, and more likely to comply with an antag's demands, more likely to be well-behaved hostages, and more likely to try to RP instead of trying to be the hero

 

Yeah, it does. It gives them more valid OOC reason to take people out of the round. If it wasn't permadeath before, it certainly will be. Assuming we're giving this suggestion any credence.

 

Because the protagonists don't fear death, and hence aren't scared of threats.

 

'Protagonist' is not a term we have ever used and I am not about to validate the use of it.

 

Random murderboning is already frowned upon and admins can intervene if they feel necessary. There's almost always at least one moderator online.

In either case, respawning already exists, and with my first idea to reduce the delay on it and allow faster repsawning, randomly murdering people wouldn't affect the overall crew count that much.

 

Rules don't stop people from breaking them or toeing the line with those rules. We wouldn't have complaints, ban requests or adminhelp if they did.

Nah. The fact we have a respawn system in place is a privilege itself, it requires a lot of trust to be put in the playerbase to not immediately respawn after waiting X minutes and then immediately intercepting the person that killed them and taking revenge. There is no need for timers to be reduced off of 30 minutes, which is more than enough time to allow an antagonist to move on and get some other business done. You also clearly have not seen a nuclear emergency round, or a very messy heist.

 

Anyone can write cloning insurance in their records, it's an RP thing until future features change it otherwise.

 

Arbitrary and pointless. Adds nothing but unnecessary fluff. It's not even the good kind of fluff.

 

I disagree. It's not meaningful because the mechanics of the game make it not meaningful. Specifically the ease of cloning. The community mostly plays the game they're given, very few of them have either the development knowledge or the influence to change the rules of aurora.

 

I can safely say that it's a community attitude. They could treat the issue differently, but they do not. They are not limited in roleplaying post-cloning RP. They just choose to skip that and return to the round. I've been around for a fair deal of time and the attitude in regards to death and cloning has never changed. Sure, people have questioned it such as you do, but nothing happens because the quiet majority choose not to make anything different of it.

A thing that has changed, though, is that people treat the roleplay server we're given as if it were a competitive atmosphere. It is not, at its core, but the mechanics presented to the community are so alluring in terms of combat that it seems to overwhelm the desire to roleplay rather than fighting or shooting folks. Funny enough, this is where the mechanics made the game more meaningful, but in a radically different way than what the server is supposedly focused towards. You can thank the baydevs for having gone off on an action-focused tangent in terms of mechanical development. They put stuff in because "muh combat immershun" rather than really hammering the nail on the head with what was originally considered fairly important.

 

As mentioned above, i disagree. I think that making protagonists fear death more, would encourage better RP from them. Less people trying to play hero, and more normal people trying to keep their head down and stay out of conflict, as every non-security crewman is already encouraged to do.

 

I should probably repeat myself again, "protagonist" is an awful term for roleplaying. It is acceptable within D&D stuff where campaigns focus on developing storylines of individuals rather than situations (as is the spirit of SS13, there are no heroes or villains, only survivors), but not in an atmosphere where non-antag roles all have their own place in the universe accompanied with their own attitudes, opinions, moral/political leanings, skillsets, and so on. "Protagonist" effectively defines what you're so focused on creating this suggestion against, as a countermeasure for your so-called heroes and villains.

Spacemen are mortal enough with our current port of Baycode. There is no need to reinforce mortality any further than needed.

[Garnascus]

I have been wanting to completely axe cloning forever, jesus fuck i hate cloning. Its so aggravating to kill someone only for them to come back from the dead completely fine. Death has zero impact in this game, at best its a minor inconvenience and its insulting we claim to be heavy RP and have cloning in such a state.

No i dont think we need to add mechanics to funerals for quicker respawns. You died, deal with it. You can man up and wait thirty minutes. It would be almost as bad id new crew keep showing up. Its already a problem for antags crippling security only to have to keep fighting an endless wave of urist mcofficer looking to collect a valid.

Sure i ranted hardcore, bottom line is this. Death has no meaning currently and cloning in its current state is to blame. Axe it or gut the ever living fuck out of it.

[UnknownMurder]

I need to agree slightly with Nanako but greatly with Garncanus...

The issue I see as an observer: People doesn't fear death or react to someone dying or already dead because they can be cloned.

I'm not sure what to say, it's little infuriating to me that the victim you've killed is cloned and you would have to work with it without tipping off the victim. Because of the DNC or DNB, Chaplains are usually unable to perform a funeral because "medical records" card excuse.

Not sure what to say other than picking my side. So.. Yeah.

[DatBerry]

While i myself dont mind dying and waiting 30 minutes, im sure there are people who will end up with highblood pressure from the increased sodium levels.

more people complaining about gank, murderboning and anything that could kill them and it's not like we need to scare our antags anymore.

Id imagine people would stop talking to and avoiding people they dont trust.

[UnknownMurder]

While i myself dont mind dying and waiting 30 minutes, im sure there are people who will end up with highblood pressure from the increased sodium levels.

more people complaining about gank, murderboning and anything that could kill them and it's not like we need to scare our antags anymore.

Id imagine people would stop talking to and avoiding people they dont trust.

 

Oh. We wanted to make antags scared? Yeah, that's NULL.

I'd prefer we make crew members scared.

[Nanako]

What do you expect anyone to do about it besides complain? Telling it how it is, and not how "ideally it should be in a perfect roleplay utopia" or whatever.

 

Learn.

When baldy mc scientist dies after attempting to lasercannon the wizard to death, and complains in deadchat, everyone will tell him he deserved it, and that it wasn't his place to be trying to hunt down the antag.

And also take a break. Instead of being expected to be cloned and jump back into what they were doing, the dead will be more encouraged to respawn under a different department, at least resulting in the antags facing a vairied security force instead of killing the same people several times

 

Blatant murder tends to get a lot of attention. The only thing that changed in the round was that security identified antagonist activity and is now in a heightened state of alert. If the victim were a captain, the circumstances would've been radically different.

Security went to arrest the antag, and things went south from there. I don't see much that would have been different if it were a dying captain, maybe a fax to central, but they'd still be going for suspects

Yeah, it does. It gives them more valid OOC reason to take people out of the round.

Characters, not people. Again, respawning already exists

 

'Protagonist' is not a term we have ever used and I am not about to validate the use of it.

Someone else used it first, don't get too hung up on terminology. My point was, making normal crewmen more afraid of death is a good thing

 

Nah. The fact we have a respawn system in place is a privilege itself, it requires a lot of trust to be put in the playerbase to not immediately respawn after waiting X minutes and then immediately intercepting the person that killed them and taking revenge. There is no need for timers to be reduced off of 30 minutes, which is more than enough time to allow an antagonist to move on and get some other business done. You also clearly have not seen a nuclear emergency round, or a very messy heist.

Metagrudging is still against the rules and punishable. A newly respawned character has no memory of the round's events. And critically, is probably in a different department from the security officer they just died as

 

Arbitrary and pointless. Adds nothing but unnecessary fluff. It's not even the good kind of fluff.

I think most fluff is good records aren't filled out enough, this would give one concrete reason to encourage people to pay more attention to theirs

 

I can safely say that it's a community attitude. They could treat the issue differently, but they do not. They are not limited in roleplaying post-cloning RP. They just choose to skip that and return to the round.

Probably because its always the same. There's only so many times you can do the 'Oh no, what happened to me, where have my prosthetics gone' before it becomes old.

I'd argue funeral RP is at least more interesting, a eulogy would act like a place to tell how much they liked or hated your character before sending them off into the great void

 

You can thank the baydevs for having gone off on an action-focused tangent in terms of mechanical development. They put stuff in because "muh combat immershun" rather than really hammering the nail on the head with what was originally considered fairly important.

]

I'm not quite clear what you mean here, can you give examples of what's important that isnt here?

 

Spacemen are mortal enough with our current port of Baycode. There is no need to reinforce mortality any further than needed.

Spacemen are literally immortal while cloning exists so easily, its immersion breaking and silly to have the same people come back repeatedly

[Guest]

And also take a break. Instead of being expected to be cloned and jump back into what they were doing, the dead will be more encouraged to respawn under a different department, at least resulting in the antags facing a vairied security force instead of killing the same people several times

 

Don't tell me how to play, don't tell anyone else how to play. Rarely are people going to change their playstyle until they personally identify that something is wrong with their way of playing the game.

Antagonists don't amount to just killing people, btw.

 

Security went to arrest the antag, and things went south from there. I don't see much that would have been different if it were a dying captain, maybe a fax to central, but they'd still be going for suspects

 

The chain of command becomes fractured when a head of staff dies. A department can and most likely will lose its direction when its head of staff dies. Security becomes a new department when they lose their HoS. Likewise for the other departments, when the captain dies, command will start to struggle to maintain control without any real direction. And because someone refused to clone them or find them, nobody else can join into that slot without an admin opening another slot.

A janitor dying does not cause this much effect on a round.

 

Metagrudging is still against the rules and punishable. A newly respawned character has no memory of the round's events. And critically, is probably in a different department from the security officer they just died as

 

Rules do not stop people from breaking them. Frustration can cause people to make stupid decisions.

 

Probably because its always the same. There's only so many times you can do the 'Oh no, what happened to me, where have my prosthetics gone' before it becomes old.

I'd argue funeral RP is at least more interesting, a eulogy would act like a place to tell how much they liked or hated your character before sending them off into the great void

 

How long before people get tired of the system you're proposing, then? I can only predict the amount of complaining and dissatisfaction people will have with it, assuming we're taking a chance with it.

 

I'm not quite clear what you mean here, can you give examples of what's important that isnt here?

 

Meaningful RP. wew

 

Spacemen are literally immortal while cloning exists so easily, its immersion breaking and silly to have the same people come back repeatedly

 

Well gee golly gee, if you wanted to kill someone so bad and keep them out of the round, you could just space them or take their head. So that's definitely not correct.

I would of course report that because it's just as "shitty" as you view cloning as.

[Skull132]

Here's a catch-22.

The antagonists very rarely treat killing someone to have gravity attached to it. The very same thing applies to crew. No one cares. The round based structure of SS13 lends it to this. The mechanics of SS13 lend themselves to this approach. Almost everything about SS13 lends itself to death being an inconvenience at best.

Even from an OOC perspective looking at roleplay: how often can you be bothered to roleplay out your character grieving over a lost comrade, with the present structure of SS13? It takes actual effort to do so, and granted, it takes effort to roleplay, but to go through a practiced grieving process for the character every single day is. Draining, I want to say, for the player?

Also, there are ways to deal with cloning as an antagonist: anything from hiding the body, to completely destroying it, to destroying cloning itself. If your goal is assassination, without the possibility of cloning, then that can be done.

So, either keep death cheap as it is. Or start messing around with the very core essence and structure of SS13 and its gameplay.

[Guest]

So, either keep death cheap as it is. Or start messing around with the very core essence and structure of SS13 and its gameplay.

 

We would be taking a very uncertain risk if we decided to change anything about it. It's hard to make death valuable when achieving it is so simple and easy.

I'd probably be willing to bet that pre-code transfer Aurora made surviving easier, so there was room to not only take risks but to also take additional time off from job-related tasks to mourn, grieve or partake in roleplay events.

What's changed? The speed and pacing of rounds. The first mundane event happens within 10 minutes after the round starts, and then 5-15 minute intervals after that with more events. The engine needs to be set-up in 15-20 minutes, tops, before power starts failing across the station due to a poorly mapped powernet. There's little time to set job-related tasks a bit backward in order to type up a couple emotes, kick back and take your time in doing, but there's always something (awfully bad) going on and never enough time to take a small break, kick back and relax. Either things get done in a rush or they never get done at all and have arbitrarily harsh consequences attached to them.

[Nanako]

The antagonists very rarely treat killing someone to have gravity attached to it. The very same thing applies to crew.

As a counterpoint, hostage situations. they happen a couple of times a day on average, we have a very cool hostage taking mechanic for facilitating it, and it's very often done by raiders

The mechanics of SS13 lend themselves to this approach.

Again i disagree, with the exception of cloning, i'd argue the mechanics lean heavily towards life being valuable. Namely the amount of force required to finish off a downed person, and the amount of time a wounded unconscious person will survive, the ability to save any patient from death if you reach them alive, the abundance of nonlethal weapons and the existence of the brig, and the fact that people fall unconscious pretty easily, negating the need to kill them in order to remove threats.

If life really didn't matter, security would walk around with lethals all the time and execute people on the spot at their discretion

 

Even from an OOC perspective looking at roleplay: how often can you be bothered to roleplay out your character grieving over a lost comrade, with the present structure of SS13?

Well, once for each friend i can think of would be pretty good overall. A few people i know who tend to die a lot, would be likely to have cloning insurance anyway. But people i know who aren't security officers, die pretty rarely. Their deaths are an uncommon and interesting ocurrence

It takes actual effort to do so, and granted, it takes effort to roleplay, but to go through a practiced grieving process for the character every single day is. Draining, I want to say, for the player?

 

There's a whole lot of ways to RP grief. You could go to the funeral and cry your eyes out, you could get drunk in the bar and try to forget, you could throw yourself into your work as a means of distracting, or you could lash out, do something stupid and end up in the brig.

A variety of funeral instructions in the medical records could keep things interesiting, too. some might want a party, some might want to be quietly cremated without informing anyone, some might want their ashes scattered around their favourite parts of the station, some might want to be sent off in a specific outfit. You might give a euology, or a public statement swearing revenge, or pleading with the murderer to not kill anyone else.

I think even if the same person did die and have funerals over and over, i could have quite a lot of fun varying the approach to it

 

Also, there are ways to deal with cloning as an antagonist: anything from hiding the body, to completely destroying it, to destroying cloning itself. If your goal is assassination, without the possibility of cloning, then that can be done.

 

As far as i understood, this is powergaming, and frowned upon. I seem to recall pootismaniac getting disciplined for decapitating corpses just to delay cloning

 

So, either keep death cheap as it is. Or start messing around with the very core essence and structure of SS13 and its gameplay.

 

I don't really feel that my proposed changes would have that far reaching of an effect, to be honest. I'd consider them more a small step in the right direction, with the cloning insurance thing being an easy opt out.

[Guest Complete Garbage]

There could just be a new option in the character setup menu, like: Cloning Insurance; Y/N. And the cloning machine can run a check to see if it's ticked, and if it's not, maybe a popup like, "This person is not insured. Clone anyway? Y/N"

I don't know how complicated it would be, but I'd like it if this were an opt-out rather than an opt-in thing.

[Dreviore]

Let me explain this.

Its very rare for antagonists to be cloned anyways. Anything that makes crew less likely to try being Leroy when heisters strike is a good idea in my eyes.

Its annoying to board and suddenly a janitor with a mop runs at a crowd of 5 guys with guns. Only to be gunned down wordlessly because he attempted to wordlessly attack us.

Ive had a janitor with no care for his life decide instead of getting down on the ground and being let resume work without his earpiece he would shout into comms, then bitch about having his head blown off in looc. This was on a round where we had 4 crew members captive, and this janitor had the nerve to claim we were murderboning. Fun fact: he was our first kill at that point.

[Butterrobber202]

Yeah, going to have to go with Garn here

As a antag, Mods have yelled at me for cutting off heads and spacing them, why?

/Because I have IC knowledge of cloning, if I'm a antag those fuckers aren't coming back

[Garnascus]

I used to be guilty of that myself some time ago butters. In hindsight its kinda enabling salty sams. If you kill someone feel free to go as far as possible to make sure they /stay fucking dead/.

[Guest]

I used to be guilty of that myself some time ago butters. In hindsight its kinda enabling salty sams. If you kill someone feel free to go as far as possible to make sure they /stay fucking dead/.

 

Watch as people take this the wrong way completely.