/tg/Station 13

Title, I think that heretic is a role that is best played in multiples. With 1 heretic you are losing a massive aspect of balance and gameplay for heretics which is the conflict over the starting rifts that heretics have. The amount of rifts does scale with the amount of heretics, yes but how it usually ends up is each heretic getting fewer rifts making them all individually weaker. Heretics also end up in natural conflict over these rifts and this aspect forces you to make more decisions in the moment, should I siphon this rift at the risk of being discovered? Or should I wait for a better time to siphon it at the risk of someone else taking it first? These kinds of decisions are really good and healthy to make, its a level of thought and game choice that make heretic more fun, and something I think should be restored on MRP.

I've heard before that the antagonist is only designed for murder but the exact same things can be said for changeling or traitor. Heretics are great at murder but so is every antag, by design. They are there to breathe conflict into the round, there isn't a story if there isn't conflict and there isn't conflict if there aren't stakes. So I believe that raising the amount of heretics from 1 -> 2 is at least something that should be trialled on MRP, and if it doesn't work we can revert it.

More than 1 heretic is good since they are forced to compete for limited resources while not getting caught

I've heard before that the antagonist is only designed for murder but the exact same things can be said for changeling or traitor. Heretics are great at murder but so is every antag, by design.

I mean, yeah, it's due to the MRP ruleset that there's even any sort of restrictions on who can be killed exist. It's how you get goofy situations like how lings are murderbone restricted again, but said restricted ling can shoot out as many flesh spiders as they can afford that can murder the crew.

I'd be open to having one more heretic slot to see what happens.

Is there any way to make latejoin heretic more common instead? Or (code issue! in policy thread! cringe!) have someone "awaken" as a heretic midway through the shift à la sleeper agents?

I kinda agree that a single heretic usually isn't impactful enough. But I still think the multiroundstart heretics encourage too much of a "drop literally everything, can't even start to do your job, need need NEED to get influences NOW before the other heretics do", and I am quite happy that is gone and don't really want it back.

The issue with increasing the amount of heretics onboard the station is that you'll end up with situations where every single corner and square inch if the station will be covered in rifts that remove people's limbs and make them want to kill themselves. Science never does anything about them either so I feel that it makes heretic less of a mysterious story driven antag and more of a gamey "oh this is something that happens everywhere" antag. Of course, the design of heretics themselves is a code issue, but it's just easier to restrict them to 1 or 2 than go through trying to convince someone that the rifts should fade or something.

Just my 2¢.

BonChoi wrote: ↑Mon Apr 29, 2024 5:30 pm The issue with increasing the amount of heretics onboard the station is that you'll end up with situations where every single corner and square inch if the station will be covered in rifts that remove people's limbs and make them want to kill themselves.

I think with 2 that probably isn't a problem

BonChoi wrote: ↑Mon Apr 29, 2024 5:30 pm The issue with increasing the amount of heretics onboard the station is that you'll end up with situations where every single corner and square inch if the station will be covered in rifts that remove people's limbs and make them want to kill themselves. Science never does anything about them either so I feel that it makes heretic less of a mysterious story driven antag and more of a gamey "oh this is something that happens everywhere" antag. Of course, the design of heretics themselves is a code issue, but it's just easier to restrict them to 1 or 2 than go through trying to convince someone that the rifts should fade or something.

Science can do things about ugly-ass heretic influences everywhere?

BonChoi wrote: ↑Mon Apr 29, 2024 5:30 pm The issue with increasing the amount of heretics onboard the station is that you'll end up with situations where every single corner and square inch if the station will be covered in rifts that remove people's limbs and make them want to kill themselves. Science never does anything about them either so I feel that it makes heretic less of a mysterious story driven antag and more of a gamey "oh this is something that happens everywhere" antag. Of course, the design of heretics themselves is a code issue, but it's just easier to restrict them to 1 or 2 than go through trying to convince someone that the rifts should fade or something.

Just my 2¢.

Would reducing their number overall and increasing the value per rift help with the issues you identify here?

in any case second this idea, +1

Not-Dorsidarf wrote: ↑Mon Apr 29, 2024 5:54 pm

BonChoi wrote: ↑Mon Apr 29, 2024 5:30 pm snip

Science can do things about ugly-ass heretic influences everywhere?

anom neutralizer (engi or sci) kills em

BonChoi wrote: ↑Mon Apr 29, 2024 5:30 pm The issue with increasing the amount of heretics onboard the station is that you'll end up with situations where every single corner and square inch if the station will be covered in rifts that remove people's limbs and make them want to kill themselves. Science never does anything about them either so I feel that it makes heretic less of a mysterious story driven antag and more of a gamey "oh this is something that happens everywhere" antag. Of course, the design of heretics themselves is a code issue, but it's just easier to restrict them to 1 or 2 than go through trying to convince someone that the rifts should fade or something.

Just my 2¢.

I don't think this has ever been an issue if I am honest, and how would 2 vs 1 heretic majorly impact this in your opinion?

To expand on this, the rifts arent everywhere and they are certainly not mysterious, even if you thought both of the above were true adding one additional heretic would not be majorly impactful to the amount of rifts (I think its just +1 rift). Ultimately the current state of heretic on MRP isn't adding enough mystery to justify itself, instead conflict is taken away from the heretic and in between heretics. The whole "secret war" aspect of the antagonist is just fully lost and if what it takes to regain that aspect is 1 more ugly (removable) rift I think its a price well worth paying.

TheRex9001 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 29, 2024 7:20 pm
-snip-

They were an issue until the number of heretics was reduced to one per round. You'd turn the corner and BOOM rift, go around the next corner BOOM another rift. It ended up being that there would just be rifts in every public area.

As for me, I think that when there's a shitton of rifts everywhere it would normalize them, as in you would look at all 37 (not an actual number but an exaggeration) and go "oh yeah it's those cooky heretics again" as opposed to being (rightfully) perturbed by a singular rift in the open.

Perhaps adding another heretic wouldn't be so bad, but more than that and I think we'd be pushing the limits on an ability to tell a story about heretics.

BonChoi wrote: ↑Mon Apr 29, 2024 5:30 pm The issue with increasing the amount of heretics onboard the station is that you'll end up with situations where every single corner and square inch if the station will be covered in rifts that remove people's limbs and make them want to kill themselves. Science never does anything about them either so I feel that it makes heretic less of a mysterious story driven antag and more of a gamey "oh this is something that happens everywhere" antag. Of course, the design of heretics themselves is a code issue, but it's just easier to restrict them to 1 or 2 than go through trying to convince someone that the rifts should fade or something.

Just my 2¢.

This is obviously a code solution, but it wouldn't really be unreasonable IMO to make them disappear after 10-15 minutes.

Vekter wrote: ↑Mon Apr 29, 2024 9:39 pm
-snip-

Well the policy solution in the mean time would be to keep them capped at 1 or perhaps 2, that's why I brought it up.

Anywho, a couple more pennies to think on:

This is more of a general thought, but I think that "flooding" the station with individualistic antags actually hinders their ability / willingness to do fun gimmicks and creates stories. If you have more people competing towards a singular goal I feel that it serves more to gamify the relationship between antags and the crew. It's for this reason that I'm usually opposed to "flooding" the station with "singular" antagonists of the same type.

From a meta perspective I would say heretics actually have more reason to team up rather than compete, they are in a similar boat in terms of power scaling and can use eachother's runes to do their business, they have a tendency to want to build a "lair" or atleast several poorly hidden runes throughout the station to safely do their rituals and just having another heretic going around drawing hidden runes is beneficial to you

Their paths also let them provide something unique to the table for eachother, any heretic can pickup rust healing but only rust can spread it without serious investment.



That being said I think heretics should still come in pairs or trios, there are clear design choices that makes them seem like they should consistently co-exist and its up to them to determine if they want to be cooperative or competitive or just plain neutral to eachother knowing that eachother's existence has inherent upsides even with the potential drawbacks.


Limiting them to 1 per roll removes a lot of the depth and thought process of being a heretic and the antagonist loses a lot of its charm, if the reason you limit them to one in MRP is balance then that's just policy trying to subvert code/design rather than work with it.

MooCow12 wrote: ↑Tue Apr 30, 2024 1:25 am ...if the reason you limit them to one in MRP is balance then that's just policy trying to subvert code/design rather than work with it.

I think it's a better alternative than making MRP-specific changes to the code. MRP should have a different playstyle and feel than LRP, and I think that certain config changes / additional rules help to facilitate this, but I absolutely am aware that they're not 100% of the reasons for said differences.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

DO THIS PLEASE

The only reason I didn't make a policy thread asking for this was because I am so passionate about it that I would have made nobody take the thread seriously.

I have teamed up as a heretic many times with other heretics in the past it is great. I LOVED going for a target and seeing them in the process of being sacrificed and then going and sacrificing them at the same time together.
Or being greedy and stealing the sacrifice and running off with it.
Having more heretic means there is rift competition but it also means there is more rifts around so it's not that bad. There is a higher chance of one being in your department because of this. Even when I was a slow heretic I remember atleast one rift hiding around, or a ton hiding in security or xenobio that I can end up snatching up nicely.

I would rather have some competition between heretics than not be able to play heretic for 3 months at a time due to how goddamn rare they are. I am getting NUKIES more often than heretic now. That's horrific. I want to be able to do my cool heretic gimmicks. I may actually end up thinking about heretic gimmicks for when I play my side characters as there would actually be a chance of them getting the roll.

I WANT THE GLORY OF HERETICS BACK PLEAAASSSSEEEE

BonChoi wrote: ↑Tue Apr 30, 2024 1:52 am
I think it's a better alternative than making MRP-specific changes to the code. MRP should have a different playstyle and feel than LRP, and I think that certain config changes / additional rules help to facilitate this, but I absolutely am aware that they're not 100% of the reasons for said differences.

Ya but that alternative is causing this to suffer
 

Constellado wrote: ↑Tue Apr 30, 2024 2:45 am
I have teamed up as a heretic many times with other heretics in the past it is great. I LOVED going for a target and seeing them in the process of being sacrificed and then going and sacrificing them at the same time together.
Or being greedy and stealing the sacrifice and running off with it.

BonChoi wrote: ↑Mon Apr 29, 2024 11:21 pm
Anywho, a couple more pennies to think on:

This is more of a general thought, but I think that "flooding" the station with individualistic antags actually hinders their ability / willingness to do fun gimmicks and creates stories. If you have more people competing towards a singular goal I feel that it serves more to gamify the relationship between antags and the crew. It's for this reason that I'm usually opposed to "flooding" the station with "singular" antagonists of the same type.

If heretic is as rare as wizard with only a fraction of the power then aint no way anyone is doing gimmicks when they roll one.

If there's 16 heretics all trying to ascend at once tearing the station apart they DEFINITELY aren't doing any gimmicks either.

I'd go as far to say that it's more of a code issue though because I feel that the inherent design of antags like Heretics don't help roleplay as much as they harm it but that's opening a can of worms I'd very much so not like to get into right now.

why are we talking about 16 heretics when the policy request is to increase it to "2 heretics"?
this is completely unrelated to anything in this discussion, there is no plan to allow 16 heretics to run on any server

16 heretics is so far down the other extreme that i doubt we would ever see that kind of amount outside of an adminbus round, whats on the table is them appearing in small groups which should softcap around less than half of that in total if dynamic is feeling quirky at the time and really wants to spam heretics that round.

I thought it was obvious like in my first message that I was exaggerating, shame on me for not making it obvious I guess. Regardless it's the (or more) that I care about.

BonChoi wrote: ↑Tue Apr 30, 2024 11:35 am I thought it was obvious like in my first message that I was exaggerating, shame on me for not making it obvious I guess. Regardless it's the (or more) that I care about.

Exagerrating to an extreme that obviously nobody is going to implement is wasting time.
It still isn't clear how many you actually think would be too many.

Three? Five? Twelve?

Whatever the cap was before they were capped to 1 per round was far too many.

The (or more) part is there if the headmins want it, I personally think we should try out 2 heretics before moving forward with more (if 2 work well)

I have a few reasons why I like the cap of 1 heretic on Manuel, but I am open to experimenting with more. It does suck to be rushed to go after the influences though. It leaves very little room to set up some gimmick or to cover yourself by doing your job. Back when more heretics were a thing, I got to a point where I could tell who all the heretics were shift start with decent reliability by noticing people running all over the station checking every room when they have no reason to be. Like the chef or a miner really stick out here.

I like one heretic its nice and comfy for gimmicks

I think I like the idea of really high threat/pop rounds generating a second Heretic so we sometimes get the cool interactions between them, but I don't think it should be common.

i prefer one heretic. heretic is a very mechanically inclined "GO RUSH OBJECTIVES KILL PEOPLE GO HURRY" role, only one heretic allows them to pump the brakes a little and try to do something else.

also reduces the likelihood one of them decides to be 'friendly heretic'.

TheBibleMelts wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2024 11:31 pm i prefer one heretic. heretic is a very mechanically inclined "GO RUSH OBJECTIVES KILL PEOPLE GO HURRY" role, only one heretic allows them to pump the brakes a little and try to do something else.

also reduces the likelihood one of them decides to be 'friendly heretic'.

As I've said above this is applicable to pretty much every antagonist (especially changeling).

In regards to 'friendly heretic' I don't think this is even really a point to contend, if you have 2 heretics you also have a lower chance of BOTH heretics being friendly, one friendly heretic at this point snuffs out the threat from an entire group of antagonists.

TheBibleMelts wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2024 11:31 pm i prefer one heretic. heretic is a very mechanically inclined "GO RUSH OBJECTIVES KILL PEOPLE GO HURRY" role, only one heretic allows them to pump the brakes a little and try to do something else.

also reduces the likelihood one of them decides to be 'friendly heretic'.

a little off topic but we really gotta think about straight up banning friendly antags from MRP. being friendly as an antagonist sure, revealing yourself openly as a horrible space monster who by nature eats human beings and has no regard for human life but then going way off script and UwU-ing at people is cringe

PKPenguin321 wrote: ↑Thu May 09, 2024 1:23 am

TheBibleMelts wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2024 11:31 pm i prefer one heretic. heretic is a very mechanically inclined "GO RUSH OBJECTIVES KILL PEOPLE GO HURRY" role, only one heretic allows them to pump the brakes a little and try to do something else.

also reduces the likelihood one of them decides to be 'friendly heretic'.

a little off topic but we really gotta think about straight up banning friendly antags from MRP. being friendly as an antagonist sure, revealing yourself openly as a horrible space monster who by nature eats human beings and has no regard for human life but then going way off script and UwU-ing at people is cringe

Any antags that are acting explicitly friendly on MRP may be killed at will.

Roleplay Rule 6 wrote:Explicitly friendly antagonists do not have this protection and may be treated as the crew or admin team see fit.

oh sweet

Vekter wrote: ↑Thu May 09, 2024 3:44 am

PKPenguin321 wrote: ↑Thu May 09, 2024 1:23 am

TheBibleMelts wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2024 11:31 pm i prefer one heretic. heretic is a very mechanically inclined "GO RUSH OBJECTIVES KILL PEOPLE GO HURRY" role, only one heretic allows them to pump the brakes a little and try to do something else.

also reduces the likelihood one of them decides to be 'friendly heretic'.

a little off topic but we really gotta think about straight up banning friendly antags from MRP. being friendly as an antagonist sure, revealing yourself openly as a horrible space monster who by nature eats human beings and has no regard for human life but then going way off script and UwU-ing at people is cringe

Any antags that are acting explicitly friendly on MRP may be killed at will.

Roleplay Rule 6 wrote:Explicitly friendly antagonists do not have this protection and may be treated as the crew or admin team see fit.

people get lynched/arrested/beaten and looted/fluoride stared at while the antagonist kills them by the crew for exercising this if that antag had has meta friends and proved themselves 'trustworthy' during the shift. plus, nobody really wants the reputation as the asshole who swiftly validkills folks who might be going for a gimmick.

if you friendly antag i dont care if its a gimmick or not, you get the laser

TheBibleMelts wrote: ↑Fri May 10, 2024 4:26 am people get lynched/arrested/beaten and looted/fluoride stared at while the antagonist kills them by the crew for exercising this if that antag had has meta friends and proved themselves 'trustworthy' during the shift. plus, nobody really wants the reputation as the asshole who swiftly validkills folks who might be going for a gimmick.

I imagined this would be an issue when the policy was implemented but I can't think of an elegant solution to friendtags anyway. Sucks.

It's worth noting that I have, in the past, asked antags to not be explicitly friendly on MRP.

That being said, I do feel like this is veering off topic pretty heavily, so maybe we should take the friendly antag issue to our own thread.

I have raised it from 1>2. Please feedback here.

pray I do not raise it further

Edit: this is just a test, hypotheticals are good but whilst we're here we may as well let it run for a week or smth. Then, when the test period is over we (headmins) may have an informed vote on it

I have done a couple of shifts on Manuel the pasts few weeks where there was more than one heretic around in order to get some thoughts on this and Id say It went how I expected.

Over all I would say the total chaos level of the shift is not majorly impacted by two or three (even three or four) heretics running around. You very rarely see heretics speed run right to sacrificing their entire target list. So shifts arent being depopulated by them. Notably even on a shift that wound up with 4 shift start heretics (with three of them teaming up) they were all wiped out in the end by a coordinated sec raid.

Direct negatives on the experience of being heretic-
You no longer can rely on sec not knowing about heretics until you choose. Since the other heretics are gonna be getting rifts too, creating significantly more pressure on players not as versed in hiding their tracks and hampering the more gimmick inclined players. Nobody is going to get mad at botany for growing holy melons after a rift pops up and that is one of the worst feelings for a heretic.

Heretics with less experience/access are left in the dust as the ones with more knowhow and access quickly sweep up all the rifts.

Security are much less to show any form of mercy on the 2nd or 3rd heretic they have had to deal with.


Positives on the experience of playing heretic -
Heretic is tons of fun and more chances to play it are good.

You can team up with the other heretics and use each others stuff. I still remember one of my first heretic shifts I and another miner both rolled heretic and they taught me so many things. This was missing with only one heretic.

Snowballing off extra rifts that spawned due to other heretics is fun for that person.



I still think Manuel should be kept to one heretic total. I think it was a good unique experience for MRP and being the sole Heretic provides alot of RP opportunity that is lost as soon as you add in another heretic. That being said from my tests having more heretics has not thrown the server into chaos.