The Art of Robust by Moon Tzu

[Scheveningen]

Transcriber's note: This is not actually written by an ancient cousin of Sun Tzu, the title is clickbait.

Foreword

A major part of SS13 culture is the broad term "robust" which is warped to a variety of different ways in usage either for meme value or simply to prove the point of flexibility with a double entendre.

Robustness is generally defined as a player's total game knowledge and ability to put that knowledge of game mechanics into practice while playing the game. This can apply outside SS13 but became its own term because of the toolbox's infamous description.

For some people, being robust is enjoyable. Often for some people as well, being unrobust is equally as unenjoyable because losing is never fun.

"To robust" or "to outrobust" is defined in a slightly similar fashion, but applied in a specific sense that you outplayed an opposing player by either having better game knowledge or executing your mechanics better than the other player. This does not have to involve direct combat.

Dedicated medical players are robust in a certain fashion that they take away any of the effort of antagonists in trying to kill or maim someone by healing the problem away, they prevent viruses from becoming a big deal by sticking needles of spaceacillin in folks displaying symptoms thus saving a lot of unlucky crewmembers a lot of grief and sitting around waiting for a cure to their stage 3 virus. Engineers do the same by repairing breaches or dealing with maintenance issues caused by antagonists or other reasons. Robust engineers fix stuff in a timely fashion and get the power set-up before the power drain even becomes a problem. It is absolutely possible to get the engine set up within five to ten minutes roundstart using a very effective technique that could constitute it as a speed-run method to reduce the time needed to get the task done. Researchers can also be robust, particularly in avoiding death-defying circumstances in the form of xenobiology or xenobotany, or simply not exploding the lab. Containing destructive forces in your work environment makes the station extremely grateful that you're not a bad player. Robust security stops self-antags/chucklefucks right in their place and minimize damage to themselves and their surroundings while taking out the bad guys and stopping them from becoming a physical threat to the rest of the crew. Other departments and jobs have other ways of being very good at their job to the point that it makes a huge difference in the round just by themselves, this is especially notable when people are actually working as a team.

Robustness runs deeper than just that, or rather there's something missing. It is impossible to do any of this without understanding that you can't be robust while you're dead. Lemme explain.

Subject: Combat and Surviving It

Death may be part of the game, but it largely functions as a consequence for a very heated situation or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But because no death ever really happens for no reason in this game, it's important to understand that death is also a teaching mechanism. Such as it is for very difficult and punishing games like Dark Souls or Bloodborne, SS13 makes it easy to make mistakes and easy to die because of those mistakes being made. As an example, you can die in Dark Souls if you do everything right in a boss fight up until they're at the 1HP marker and you get cocky, try to go for a final swing at the wrong time, decide against timing your invulnerability frames in rolling through one of their heavy swings, causing massive damage to you and forcing a poise stagger. They are then able to take you down to 0 HP on your health bar and you're dead. "Fuck that!" you'll scream, because every human player will get frustrated at the game rather than looking inward at what they did wrong first. You only learn anything until after you calm down and review what you did wrong.

SS13 operates on the same principle. Simple mistakes can be mortally wounding, simple actions can also be fatal given the element of RNG, something Dark Souls possesses in the form of how bosses and other enemies use their movesets randomly and not always (certain movesets are used based on very specific conditions which can be easily predicted once you know those thresholds but I digress) according to the situation, making them difficult to predict. Unlike SS13, Dark Souls attack cues are telegraphed in an unsubtle manner and there are very very few instances where you can be instantly killed with an attack you couldn't possibly react to, as the game separates attacks in two ways, "Fast - Light" or "Slow - Hard". Getting hit by a fast attack is not forgiving but it is more forgiving than being hit by an obviously telegraphed attack. Because this is SS13 we're talking about, Kill Threats and Kill Ranges are less immediately obvious given this is more of a game about deception than it is about PVP/PVE dueling.

Dark Souls-isms aside, you're generally not working to full effective robustness if you can't manage to stay alive in the majority of circumstances.

You will not always have to fight someone to survive. Lethal confrontations are better fought when you need to do so, but why?

If you're a HOS on code green armed with only a telescopic baton and an energy pistol and a squad of 4 mercs fires in your general direction, the worst decision you could make is draw your weapon and shoot back. You might think you can clip one down but I can't emphasize how absolutely wrong you will be when you're the first dead person in the round because you didn't wise up and sprint the other direction towards the armory, in addition to globally announcing the merc presence. You couldn't do turn the tides if you didn't just temporarily walk away from the problem to revisit it with better equipment to face it. The "die another day" approach is usually the superior one if the odds are against you.

Moving on to a key point in how both antags and combat roles remain effective throughout the round.

Consolidation

In SS13, it always takes time and resources to do things and finish off tasks. Remember that bald assistant you just arrested and handed off to the warden? You're short one pair of cuffs because the warden kept them on the prisoner because the assistant was still causing trouble. If you were attentive to this fact, you'd simply get a new pair to stock up and be prepared. This doesn't always cross everyone's mind. Two visitors attack you next for no perceivable reason. You only have one pair of cuffs on hand and you're the only officer, the warden is still in the brig and can't come by the time you call for help. You stun one but the other guy shakes him up before you think you can cuff him. At this point you're at a 2-1 disadvantage and they're going to kick your ass with disarm RNG multiplied by two, this is something you are absolutely unlikely to stop whatsoever. If they play it poorly, yes, you can stun them both but you can only cuff one on the scene. The other guy will get up in the next 10-15 seconds and you can only transport one.

Things would've been different if you had that second pair of cuffs, wouldn't it? It wouldn't have been ideal, but the situation would've been salvaged better. Conditions like these define the outcome of conflicts that happen.

In a more lethal situation, it is generally not a good idea to go chasing after antagonists as they expect you to be coming anyway and will outrun you if they know how to play anyway. So there's no point wasting ammunition on someone who will run and get away anyway unless you have something that will have already dealt a death blow long before they're able to do anything about it.

Sometimes chasing antagonists as security works, often it does not. It only generally works on antagonists that have poor decision-making and commit to poor odds to fight you because of their own issues clouding their judgement. If you're up against someone who knows what they're doing, you will only waste ammo and time chasing after them. You will get fatigued after awhile and at that point is when they have the ability to turn around and outplay you. Terrorists. assassins and tricksters functionally work this way across fictional mediums to give the good guys a hard time and wear them down.

In SS13, your health is your most important resource. If you get hurt even in a small way it can seriously determine how badly it screws you up if you get hurt again.

Counter-gank, the best strategy!

Ah, staying two steps ahead of your opponent. Nothing makes a person angrier than having their plans already predicted and leading to an outplay that shuts them down. It is satisfying in its own way but you're not doing it for that purpose, you're doing it because it's your job and it's a relatively safe way to execute it if it works.

Of all of the playstyles I've seen security played, the best HOS that ever lived happened to play on goonstation. He never directly tailed after the notoriously good antagonists, instead he was always where the antagonists would likely turn up and he would exploit their surprise and defied expectations in order to get the jump on them and do serious damage with a lot of resources on their hands. Antagonists are able to do this too if they have access to all of the comms channels, and this is something that makes those antag types especially dangerous. Exploiting information is very round-changing.

You might generally ask how a HOS is supposed to expect where antagonists are going to be. On a roleplay server this is not a viable strategy until there are confirmed hostile antagonists on the station, so your character would not think this until the moment comes.

Antags commonly target innocents. Atrocities are how they bait the crew into chasing after them and it's how they antagonize the crew. Typically, the crew try to be brave and get fucked up for it if the antagonists are any good at ending fights quickly. Antagonists are not mind readers (aside from changelings and wizards who have the capacity to inform each other or receive global information on the fly, respectfully, something you can't deal with so don't worry about it), they will not usually expect an armed security officer protecting civilians due to the abusive, validhunt-like reputation security officers have unless they see the officer before they make the decision to attack innocent crewmembers.

Good antags can try to plan ahead but that issue is generally what causes their downfall, trying to predict what will happen when they typically cannot know what will happen due to the random nature of the game and how every round is often different. The best laid plans always go to ruin. If your character does happen to know an antagonist's plans, do something to help the crew stay one or two steps ahead of them to give them an advantage. If your character doesn't know, though, they don't know. Don't exploit OOC guesses for IC. If you're security, this is knowledge you should share subtly with the rest of security if you want to guarantee an elimination of a dangerous antagonist.

Being Robust is also being a Good Roleplayer

As a disclaimer. Don't make guesses unless the guess is reasonable. Hell, don't even guess, either. If you're doing guesswork you're taking larger risks in doing something related to round conditions you don't even know will happen. Don't be robust at the expense of metagaming. Be robust for when it makes sense. You're allowed to surrender in some situations or concede defeat if it makes sense. You're allowed to do anything as long as it makes good amounts of sense in the best interests of your character while remaining believable. The most you are permitted to do is be robust as what your character is reasonably good at. A character that is robust at more things than what they are supposed to specialize in is a very imbalanced character that disrupts gameflow more than it actually contributes. Remember to stay in your lane and that mechanical knowledge will actually pay off to an enjoyable experience. That being said...

Being Robust is Generally Being Reactive

Proactive playstyles are typically suited for antags and good players at SS13. I say the latter because good players know how to be proactive as a non-antagonist without metagaming/being a chucklefuck, and not everyone is capable of doing that, I struggle with doing this fairly often as a non-antagonist given the amount of times I doubt my judgement and my information. I can't do anything right without having good quality of both accounts. I also don't like ganking proactively either because I can't possibly anticipate how some players will react as everyone is different in how they respond to issues.

Reactive playstyles are also good for antags but are mostly meant for non-antagonists. It's easy: You wait for reasons to act. It is not metagaming if antagonists show themselves as a threat openly. It is not metagaming to assume it's a good idea to put on a space suit when breaches start happening in areas nearby to you or when you anticipate it's going to happen based on visual context clues. Reactiveness tends to be very powerful as it allows you to escalate your own methods accordingly based on how the situation progresses, especially when you're already prepared for a bad situation and can appropriately respond to it in a skillful fashion. Being reactive is different for every person, as everyone escalates differently. This makes you tough to predict because you're not the one making the initial decisions, you're just responding appropriately.

Note that perceptive individuals recognize patterns and routines very quickly, and can exploit the predictability in some people's responses to issues. Keep expectations low but be reasonably prepared for anything is the general motto.

end

This largely only covered combat, you say, this entire thing shouldn't be done right then and here, you say.

I've written what needs to be written. A lot of these philosophical concepts about combat can be carried over to make the other jobs efficient and enjoyable to play. I can't spoonfeed specifics about that, it would take away the trial-and-error learning process in actually using mechanics to succeed. The only thing I expanded on was how to make gameplay/roleplay strategies more effective. I can answer questions because I can't cover everything in a single post.

[coolbc2000]

I'll add

Get to know your tools of war.

This is a very important part to being robust and it has a deep learning curve. Know what burn/brute damage your weapon does at the time, count how many hits you do and apply simple math and you can figure out what state he's in.

But that's only without Armour on so negative Brute/Burn... And so on, this is how you really become Robust at this game.

Also when getting to know your Tools, don't be afraid to take a practice laser and move around the Firing Range while shooting at the targets, throwing in a flashbang with the laser still in hand as fast as you can, or even better. Gasmask on, tear gas and then start shooting again. Being Robust in this game is about Routine, getting to know your shit and the opponents shit and compare shits to see who just laid the largest dump.

Prepare, adapt, bash his head in with that toolbox on the floor.

P.S: Remember to dislocate joints, because when you only have the one Handcuff, that will come in handy.