Policy regarding poor bsa placement

[TheRex9001]

A controversial ruling from last term https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=34354 https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopi ... nk#p692368was in regards to a player getting noted over poor bsa placement, what is your opinion on matters like this? Should non-antagonists be making things that benifit antagonists? If bad bsa placement isnt allowed should bomb shops be?

[iwishforducks]

i mean, first and foremost, it was just a note placed by one admin- Vekter, which he ended up repealing anyhow.

kieth’s response in the policy thread is as good as it gets. one of my most favorite memories was when a bsa was placed right smack in the middle of medical, and you know what happened? a centcomm inspector was sent! …and then was promptly kidnapped. and so a response team was sent… and I was sent back to central in crutches after getting slammed in the head by a toolbox through my response team armor.

places where BSAs shouldn’t be are ripe for roleplay experiences. as long as you don’t fire it with little care or egg people on, there really is no issue with making the BSA wherever you please. which is all what kieth said. im honestly just repeating kieth.

i keep seeing comparisons of BSAs to bombs, but bombs aren’t that comparable to BSAs because bombs are more of a one-and-done thing. what are you gonna do, send a Bomb Explosion Crater Inspector to inspect the aftermath? (some admin PLEASE do this) to answer the direct question of “bomb shops”- I mean, the lines start to blur and you gotta ask if selling bombs is egging people on to use them. the answer to that is “yes, imo”, in which the next question is “is it funny? are people enjoying the bomb shop?”- and that can only be answered on a round by round basis.

[Sightld2]

Its soul. Its comedy. This game is about things going wrong. Poor decisions being made. And if the same poor decisions are being made over and over to the detriment of the fun of the server? We have rule 0 for that.

[iain0]

I never really had an issue with the player getting noted, but I guess I also don't really have an issue with it being removed.

Firstly, this is a 'rare' event, people dont typically build the BSA in unfirable places all the time, as long as it doesn't become some new regular meta to see what place it can be set up that's inevitably going to cause consequences then ... whatever really, intermittent oddities are fine and don't typically need much enforcement. As such, the note or absence of it doesn't likely make a big difference. It's probably better removed for optics just to send the message that rare constructions in weird places /are/ ok and aren't an automatic noting by precedent at this point.

But I always felt there was an under represented point, the BSA is a giant gun. Okay thats not groundbreaking, but, it's a weapon, it's meant to be fired, it's fully functional and both dumb and OP all at the same time, it's also pretty cool watching it fire and usually there'll be an assistant or two who deliberately gib themselves in its beam of pew. It's a neat construction, the once a month it happens, and people will typically want it fired, you can kinda predict that. So surely there should be some awareness when setting it up to make sure this is "reasonable" (and from what i remember of this case, if nothing else, switching it to fire left to right rather than right to left would make a huge difference).

That said, the firer is ultimately entirely culpable for the consequences of firing it regardless of where it is. This is directly and obviously dangerous to fire and if you really care about it there are better routes than blind firing it through the station and killing people. Bans for misuse of BSA happen periodically.

All in all, as a one off there's not a lot really invested in this case, if it ever does become a frustrating meta of people setting it up in silly places then it can be looked into and policied if necessary, however this is probably a near-zero chance simply because the stars aligning for anyone to be bothered to make the BSA in the first place is so uncommon that any 'odd installation' events are likely to be a couple a year sorta frequency, in which case just slapping whoever pressed the fire button probably sufficed. If the crew do get frustrated over its unfirability thats typically an IC thing until it establishes a meta-pattern (which there's zero reason to expect would happen)

[Cheshify]

If you want to place the gun in a dumb place? Sure, go ahead, however, if you don't take the tiniest of precautions about warning people what's going to happen then the consequences are on you. Just say "hey people I'm firing a BSA across the station stay out of the path". Doing stupid things and having things exploding is ss13's core, being obliterated without warning by a non-antag is the issue.

[Pepper]

Humor should be an immutable defense for any rule bending (secret rule should be invoked more often, imo). Gimmicks become unfunny when they are readily available and repeatedly seen. It's like hearing the same joke over and over again. In practice the BSA is neither of these so building it in a comical place tends to end horribly in the best kind of way.