[2 Binned] Doing Something About Cult

[TrickingTrapster]

Maybe, nanako, but this might invite a system of asking LOOC "Can I have a turn?". Might want to think about a countermeasure for that. But I mean it when I say cult could use buckets more of RP-oriented things, rather than only super-duper-ultra-useful spells. Have a bit of flavor, let people get creative with it.

[DatBerry]

Oh hey this thread is still going.

I thought you guys might like to know i've added a new cult feature for next patch:

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/1870

It gives them the ability to sacrifice small animals in order to upgrade pylons into weak defensive turrets.

In general, i see cult as the most defensive of our antags, and this is a step towards encouraging that kind of gameplay. I may take more in future.

What i'd like is for cults to do less roaming the halls stabbing people, and a lot more taking over a section of the station, and turning it into a temple to nar'sie.

Where possible, they should be capturing people - alive - and bringing them back for conversion or ritual sacrifice with lots of pomp and ceremony

I'm open to ideas on how to reduce their ability to hunt down civilians for sport, and to shift towards a more defensive focus

I definitely agree that random murderhobo'ing is not good antagging, and isn't fun for anyone.

 

remove the stun talisman and keep it as a hidden rune where when you walk over it as an infidel, it activates, maybe add cuffs that warp around your hands that are as good as real handcuffs.

[TrickingTrapster]

I'd rather have conversions and capturing come from good RP rather than being robust at mechanics. Which is something the cult mechanics are almost opposed to, at least from my perspective.

[Kaed]

Here's a small thought that comes to mind.

What if, once a construct is made, if its player ghosts, any other ghost can take over its body freely to inhabit the construct. This would mean you could ghost without feeling bad about sabotaging the round

Perhaps this'd be some small consolation, as it'd allow you to eventually respawn, or to play as a mouse/drone/posibrain/nymph/pai/whatever. Your character would still be gone but at least you wouldn't be forced to play something you dont want to.

I think a lot of observing ghosts would like to play as a construct, they're pretty powerful and fun.

 

That's good for making people not be an unwilling construct, but it still doesn't address the issue of having their character removed from the round irrevocably and more importantly, without a conscious choice on the part of the antagonist. Even changelings, who honestly have the most reason to create an unclonable body, do not utterly destroy the viability of bodies just for the sake of performing one of their basic mechanics. There are several ways you can manually render someone effectively unclonable if you really want, from decapitation to spacing their body, but all of them require conscious effort on the part of the aggressor rather than being packaged into an antag mechanic that even the cultist in question has no control over.

What if they WANT to leave a headless body as a warning, or are simply inattentive enough that they leave the sacrificed corpse in maintenance to be found and cloned? These are both more viscerally real experiences than simply creating a pile of bones and ash or a mass of gibs that belongs to no discernible person beyond the pile of belongings that dropped off their body.

And let me tell you, the ability to become a mouse or diona is not really much of a consolation for getting the ability to not be a construct if you don't want, Nanako. As long as their body still technically exists there is a chance they will be able to play their character again, and I'm not sure just complete round removal because an antag caught you is entirely fair for either you or the antagonist, who might want other things.

[TrickingTrapster]

Agreed with Kaed on most points. I don't think a character should be removed from the round because cult(or a wizard) decided on LOL SOULSTONE. I personally have more enjoyment out of a round where constructs and juggernauts are not rampaging around and destroying everything. They don't really RP, they just break shit. I don't see the fun there. They don't create conflict, they create combat. Any semblance of the character used to create them is gone, you're not even allowed to RP a lingering sense of them, which just outright sucks. Hell, staff of change does this better. Yes, it affects your character unwillingly but at least it's still your character as opposed to a mindless slave. The inability to have my character even remotely recovered just because an antag decided to use a certain mechanic certainly sucks any enjoyment out of the round that I might have had. "Oh but just respawn as another character" No. I logged on to play as the character I joined as, not another character. Might as well give cult a supermatter while you're at it, they'll achieve the same thing. Just push people into it, boom, no more character. Same thing as with a soulstone, at least when used on me, because I'm not staying in that soulstone. We're high roleplay, dammit, why is there a mechanic that forces players into mobs with the sole purpose of making combat and unable to RP properly. And no, I don't see combat as a form of RP, at least not when a mob's sole purpose is to combat, like with juggernauts. The fact that there's a player in there only makes it worse. Cult kind of feels like someone made a draft for an RTS game and accidentally forced it into a roleplay.

[JKJudgeX]

Agreed with Kaed on most points. I don't think a character should be removed from the round because cult(or a wizard) decided on LOL SOULSTONE. I personally have more enjoyment out of a round where constructs and juggernauts are not rampaging around and destroying everything. They don't really RP, they just break shit. I don't see the fun there. They don't create conflict, they create combat. Any semblance of the character used to create them is gone, you're not even allowed to RP a lingering sense of them, which just outright sucks. Hell, staff of change does this better. Yes, it affects your character unwillingly but at least it's still your character as opposed to a mindless slave. The inability to have my character even remotely recovered just because an antag decided to use a certain mechanic certainly sucks any enjoyment out of the round that I might have had. "Oh but just respawn as another character" No. I logged on to play as the character I joined as, not another character. Might as well give cult a supermatter while you're at it, they'll achieve the same thing. Just push people into it, boom, no more character. Same thing as with a soulstone, at least when used on me, because I'm not staying in that soulstone. We're high roleplay, dammit, why is there a mechanic that forces players into mobs with the sole purpose of making combat and unable to RP properly. And no, I don't see combat as a form of RP, at least not when a mob's sole purpose is to combat, like with juggernauts. The fact that there's a player in there only makes it worse. Cult kind of feels like someone made a draft for an RTS game and accidentally forced it into a roleplay.

 

SS13 is a simulation system that has game modes in which to use the simulation.

Some of those game modes include concepts like elimination and unwilling team switching. That's just the nature of the game. If you don't like it, you can always get out of it by disconnecting on death. I know that sucks, but it also sucks to get absorbed, or spaced, or gibbed, or borged, or permabrigged for something you didn't do and left with no form of communication... elimination and uncomfortable things are meant to happen within SS13.

I'd go so far as to say that if every once in a while you were not made fundamentally unhappy by a round of SS13, that the game didn't do its special thing. You are MEANT to be punished and put into uncomfortable hellscapes by the game, in my opinion. That's a huge part of its charm that many other games lack.

When I play the board game Betrayal at House on the Hill, I don't *want* to suddenly become a vampire/ghost/werewolf/murderer/plant monster that has to kill my friends/loved ones at the board game... I was hoping it was my buddy Joe, but sometimes it's me and now I have to begrudgingly play the part... but, then sometimes you learn to enjoy the mechanics and emergent gameplay that you didn't look forward to, anyway. And maybe you never like it, but the risk of that happening to you should have made your investment in the game much stronger beforehand.

Maybe try to focus on assisting the remainder of other people's roleplay when something like this happens to you, rather than focusing on how fundamentally unhappy you are about what happened to you? I dunno, just some thoughts. It's an opportunity to explore if you work to drop your cynicism and disappointment, and to me that's a big part of the charm of a game like this.

[TrickingTrapster]

Hmmm, yes, lots of roleplay when you're sneakily assassinated/absorbed in a far-off corner of the station where nobody ever goes with your sensors off. Oooo, people will find me, uhuh. And let me be clear here: I dislike combat in SS13 in general. So of course that means I'm also not gonna like gamemodes associated with it, like merc, heist and cult. And before you call me out on calling them combat-oriented, heist and merc literally spawn with armories of weapons so yes they are combat gamemodes, the community just got creative with them to not make it devolve into a slaughterfest with no RP. Not so much with cult, whenever a cult round is going on I usually feel like they are just greentexting. And fair enough, the entire gamemode coaxes you into doing so, but, why, exactly? Why do we have a greentext gamemode on our HRP server again? It's fine to have a goal but all current runes for cult are literally RP-less greentext-achieving mechanics. I want some more RP mechanics, get the crew spooked, get the crew to fear things and coax them into joining you willingly. Instead of "hurr durrr I need to use this to valid". Get the chaplain involved instead of making him -just- a target because he's the one cult counter. Vampire has presence, merc and heist get access to merchant like things, rev thrives on RP since people need to make up their goal, traitors have a lot of tools for RP, wizard just got revamped to make RP more accessible, malf AI can make up laws to RP in, and what does cult get? Conversion, soulstones, constructs, pylons... But RP mechanics? Noooo, we need to greentext apparently. And I know it can be done, I have played as cultist a little while back, I did roleplay, it was great, nobody died, we got to summon Nar'Sie. Yes, the current problem lies with the playerbase's mentality on cult. No, we can't change the playerbase's mentality on cult just like that. So the solution is to change cult to make RP easier for the a little less-creative people so we don't get greentext summon ghost army fuck up the station cults all the time. Making cult less greentext-y would do wonders for the RP stability of that mode. Get some different deities to worship, get different runes based on the deity, have all of them include some form of RP runes and mechanical runes. Bam, revamp. Just came up with that on the fly. It's not hard to think up new things. But my god, please stop greentexting cult so much.

[JKJudgeX]

It's an RP server, not a "non-combat" server.

Your character has decided to wander around a rarely traversed part of the station and you suddenly get murdered? That happens in like, every horror sci-fi movie ever made, and the game is meant to mimic that kind of thing from time to time.

Every single mode has combat weaponry and gear. That's there for a reason.

What you are talking about are the things usually referred to by the community as "gimmicks"... and they are not unique to RP servers. The raiders doing the merchant thing, the revolutionaries doing the communist thing, traitors adding flair to their objectives by saying it's for a specific company, etc.

In any case, there is plenty of time to RP in the 30 minutes to 2 hours while the antags set up their gameplay... maybe they'll get busted, maybe you'll never see them, maybe they'll RP with you... and maybe, in this particular round, your fate was to be the hapless victim that gets shot in the face for seemingly no reason. It happens, and trying to make it not happen takes away from the realism and some of the suspense of the game.

I had a great round as captain a while back where I kind of discovered who the antags might be, but didn't know where they were. I went to talk to them to see if it was them, and I opened the door to science to find one of the suspects standing there with a gun in his hand. I say "What the-" and then he blows my brains out. It was a great round because of the fun interactions that happened leading up to this. I didn't enjoy having my fun round instantly concluded, but, it made sense, right? The captain has just found you with a gun? Bad times for him. Had he gone into a big RP spiel, he would have had to trust me to play into his gimmick, which I may or may not have done (Nathan Corvo is usually non-violent, this guy didn't know that or didn't care).

Long story short, half of the excitement of this game is not knowing what's in store. If everyone becomes a scripted text-slinging RP-Robot for fear of getting adminhelped, and every game mode turns into something as terribly boring and done-to-death as merchant mercenaries (please kill me out of this round when this gimmick happens)... the game loses flavor and people get bored.

Cult is great... be they suicide bombing extremists, a super stealth-cult that summons nar-sie, or a station-converting super-defensive bunch of almost-wizards, the gamemode as it is is one of my favorites.

[TrickingTrapster]

There is a difference between non-combat and just straight up ruining someone's round because mechanics coax you into doing so.

And, the situation that you described as captain? You had prior RP. You knew there were hostiles, you had an idea of where to find them, and you found them. A situation like you described there is fine, and also less applicable to cult because cult is literally the odd one out for all the gamemodes, if only for the conversion system. It's also a lot less about WHAT the antags do and more about HOW they go about doing it. I do not enjoy cult, because the way the gamemode is laid out it just >almost< forces people to greentext the mode. I'm not saying that we necessarily need to remove anything cult has now, just add a few more ways that cult could go about roleplaying things rather than people seeing one rune and the entire station starts meta-ing the cult, or the cult goes loud and the round is basically over after 30 minutes. Stealth cults usually have the problem that they don't really RP much cult-wise until it's time to summon nar'sie which then comes the hell out of nowhere for 80% of the crew. If the things they do lead up into summoning nar'sie, perfect. They succeeded. Buuut how much enjoyment did the crew get out of it? Remember that a gamemode is supposed to be fun for the >entire< crew, not just the people that get converted. Just add a bit more flavor for the cult to interact with the crew that's not HOLY CRAP BLACK MAGIC EXORCISM VALIDHUNT. Not knowing what's in store is fine, but as soon as a single crewman discovers a rune and calls it out on the radio, the entire station is aware and there is going to be a degree of metagaming, whether they do it conciously or not. Yeah I totally don't know what's in store if someone discovers a rune 10 minutes in. Cult feels way too play-to-win as it is now in my opinion.

[LordFowl]

This thread has gone on for a long time, and has not really produced a whole lot. Beyond the possible suggestions to changing conversions, and removing stun talismans (which is a duplicate of another thread), I don't really see a lot of this happening unless it is formatted in a more coherent and sanitary manner.

As it stands, cult, along with all other gamemodes, is a tool - it is the responsibility of the players to use that tool to create situations. We cannot mechanically force RP, no matter how hard we try. If players are powergaming with cult, that is more the avenue of the administration, if the problem exists at all.

Re; polls. Suggestions are not a popularity contest, and you really only make the post much harder to digest by encouraging polling.

Re; "lore issues". Until these issues are confirmed as a problem that needs to be fixed by Jackboot, I feel it is safe to discount this claim.

Voting for dismissal as it stands, based solely on the OP. Other solutions that were presented in this thread may one day be pursued if someone feels like they care enough to revive them in their own suggestion thread.

[Arrow768]

Seconded. OPs suggestion is something for the mins to decide.