/tg/Station 13

I've noticed this pattern of players who are so invested in their characters/winning that they cannot accept death, or loss.
It upsets me because it leads to behavior counter to what I believe the game to be about, like intentionally not killing/reviving after targets as antags because "they're my friends/I don't want to be mean", or getting so wrapped up in winning that you ruin the story of the round.

I believe this is a player mindset issue, caused by time and coders slowly taking the edge off things, because edges hurt, and people respond poorly to "bad" stimuli.
That or it was always like this. IDK I'm not a boomer.

Anyway I've been saying this sort of thing for a while now, but I'm going to start to make a concerted effort to make parts of the station (particularly maintenance) more randomly deadly.
I am also interested in more content that fits this sort of mold, as I would like to correct this trend I'm seeing in player attitude.

Thanks

As a quick aside on why I dislike this behavior.
I view ss13 as a roleplaying chaos simulator. In my perfect world the joy of the game comes from the paranoia of interacting with others as the station collapses, and the tasks you do before the station collapses, to keep you busy.
I don't like it when people fail to play their role in this pattern. I don't care if you do something cool or gimicky with your antag roll or anything, but the core job of an antag is to antagonize. I dislike it when people are afraid of doing that because of blowback or upsetting others, because it takes the core "roleplay" and injects a layer of BUT NOT TOO MUCH OR I MIGHT UPSET THEM which I think is silly, and makes for bad stories.

Similarly, I dislike it when people are so focused on winning that they are unable to allow a good story to play out, and thus create barren wastelands of stations where the bad men are all dead, but so is any reason to do well, anything, outside of getting that final bungo point or getting in shoving matches.

Both patterns pull players out of the fiction we're attempting to create. They suck.

Although there is indeed the certain behavior that players might get 'attached' to their characters, it could also be something similar. Something that makes sense is a "good death". Like, if you go out in a space ruin and die of a skill issue, that's the game working as planned. However, if you're a cargo techie who peeks inside maints for a second and you're immediately charged by three hivebots (Kilo) because it was made more "randomly deadly", that's not really interesting. At least there's some excitement when a player kills you and you're fighting to save your own life (as well as the lives of those on the station) on all accounts, I just don't really parse the statement "randomly deadly".

God, yes. Over the years the recycling of ghosts back into the round has increased by a lot, but people are too beholden to their characters and only accept dying "fairly". But good stories don't necessarily have "fair" deaths and you know someone's gonna have to get shafted at some point.

I'm with San here on "randomly deadly", dying to maintenance simplemobs isn't going to generate interesting stories or RP, the simplemobs have no understanding of either, the same would go for non-player made maintenance traps. I also don't think maintenance being more dangerous will solve the issues your describing, people who take no risks to protect their character will likely just avoid maintenance/enter maintenance with overwhelming power. Theres also the risk for antagonists, players dying to a random simplemob isn't going to generate an interesting story but if an antagonists dies to a random simplemob that's a potential story being lost.

I dont necessarily disagree with the sentiment but consider this: there's a reason why most movies do not end with the main character getting run over by a bus on their way to fight the big bad boss

Imagine you're having a great time, maybe you even survived an encounter with an antagonist! The station is on fire! Lots of excitement! And then.. you stop for a moment to scratch your ass and someone stuns and throws you out of a nearby airlock in under 5 seconds. Nobody will find your body, your death is not going to increase the drama of the round, you're locked out of the game for the next hour if you're lucky and it's to nobody's benefit

I think a lot of the "edges" you talk about probably fit this category, they're effortless, boring ways to kill people that really aren't exciting for anyone except the kind of person who cares about keeping a kill tally. I don't believe it has anything to do with being fair either, a death can be unfair and unpreventable but still bring excitement in the way it adds closure to your story or add extra drama for those who remain in the round to witness it, or it's aftermath

Edit: I will say though making the station more dangerous is not necessarily a bad idea as long as it's stuff that's appropriate and interesting to deal with and not a bunch of gotchas like "landmines randomly spawn in maintenance now"

My take on this as a filthy MRP main.

Death and injury have little lasting consequences outside of the frail quirk and maybe t3 burn wounds. There's no tension when a traitor whips out a Makarov and tries to make threats. Why? Because 40 brute doesn't matter. slap a bandaid on it and carry on. Even a frail character doesn't have much to fear from stray shots and can happily run away. (and usually gets away too) No point in trying to RP a hostage situation when a seccie can rush you and baton you to death before your shots can take them down.

Likewise, I don't think death is as punishing as it should be. Die as many times as you want, as long as Medbay can revive you, you will be revived. Players don't have to fear dying or care about taking steps to preserve their life. Severe organ decay is generally considered punishment enough but here's the thing. I can switch to my second monitor input and play my Switch until I hear the defib sound, then come back without being any worse for the wear. I don't have to worry about lingering effects coming from my untimely (and likely deservedly) demise.

Maintenance, I feel, is also extremely safe. It's not this spiderweb network of rooms where you can get grabbed at any moment, it's a small hallway on the side of your department. I should feel tense and paranoid when I have to go into maintenance, and important things that I need to semi-regularly interact with should be placed in maintenance. (like APCs) Maintenance areas have shrunk and shrunk with the various additions to stations, with fewer rooms for maint forts or opportunities for traps. Tram has great maints that could be scary and dangerous, but it's so locked off that the only people you'll ever see are Engineers and maybe a random Janitor because you can't even go into your own department maint without specifically having maint access.

Pain, bigger maints, and "organ traumas" could be routes to address some of these concerns. I think that bullets and other piercing attacks should be able to sometimes cause organ damage. I think that frail should be baseline and the frail quirk should be frail-er. I want to suffer a permanent penalty to the max health of each organ each time I die until borging is the only way to keep me going. What if getting thrown back by an explosion could cause a pierced/collapsed lung? I feel too safe whether I'm in Service cooking, or in Medbay healing patients, or when I'm just goofing around as a Janitor in maint.

I'm not interested in speaking about salty dchat players thinking that every kill is murderbone. Their opinions belong in the trash. I will say I don't think it's about players worrying about making their metafriends mad as it is about getting bonked for causing too much chaos. We'll see what happens if the sabotage policies change.

Space is 100% the biggest culprit of "sorry bro, you gotta die without much of a story." Brute damage from pressure, burn and slowdown from cold, and oxy from being maskless can drop a person really fast and the interesting stories this creates are always the survival stories rather than the failures. Making environment kill slower would foster more of these last second survival stories and hopefully make fewer antagonists die to natural causes as well as keep more crew alive for the antagonists to antagonize.

You're right that the same thing impacts antags, and that sometimes this sort of thing will lead to anticlimax, but I'm ok with that compared to how things seem to be now. Things should of course be handled with care, I'm not gonna merge Adds Random Gib Tiles To Maint, but I think we should do more in that direction rather then less. Edges like what I describe will naturally erode over time, they do for everything in the game just because of how our dev environment works. I would like to break out the whetstone.

Not every story, no matter how much I wish things weren't this way, is gonna be a winner, but I think it's important to set a baseline understanding of effectively rule 10, which we seem to be doing a crap job of doing right now. Leads to dumb player behavior, and crummy stories

I would argue even space isn't that big of a deal. A coat will keep even Lizards warm for a little while, and tea/coffee completely nullify that part. Temperature/Pressure Adaptation also still neuter the threat of no atmosphere/no heat to an unreasonable degree. (And Temp adapt lets you set yourself on fire at no cost other than your clothes)

The solution to anticlimactic endings as we ramp up dangerousness is for more antagonists to be around

Armhulen wrote: ↑Tue Aug 02, 2022 10:35 pm The solution to anticlimactic endings as we ramp up dangerousness is for more antagonists to be around

manuel players on their way to argue about how you're disrupting the flow of their round and how this degrades the quality of RP that can be found on manuel.

Player death is an awesome thing. Maybe I'm just touched in the head, but some of my favourite RPG memories (SS13 and tabletop) have been when I died like a redshirt in Star Trek. I love being the guy that dies so everyone else freaks out and starts running.

Of course, it can sometimes be more satisfying to be the guy who flees in a panic, but it's not like the same guy is always the one who dies first every time a threat appears.

I am once again here to promote that players should be extremely deadly and it should be easy for players to kill each other by "bullshit" methods (instant stuns, slips, highly lethal traitor weapons, etc.) but it should be hard for players to die to boring stuff (simplemobs, especially)

Wound chance from simplemobs in particular should probably be artificially low

I believe this comes back to our current stunbaton combat meta.

The best fights and tense action scenes I've had in ss13 are the drawn out laser gun fights where their was no stun. Or A healing factor bash-athon where there was no stun. (Rip Virology healing, Hierophant Weapon and Traitorlings)

If the only way to win as most antags now is to steal Securitys weapon, and stun people so you can get your tasks done. We're back to where we started of boring round endings!

need more antags like xenos

We need better antags, not more antags. Biddle traitors has done much to soften the "edge".

Bring back contractors, syndie kit users, lowpop heretics, swarmers and devils! Make life dangerous and unpredictable!

in the same post as "we don't need more antags" you listed 5 antag flavors you want to see added to the game

Tomato tomahto. I meant in terms of antag population vs. round population, but I don't want to mince words regarding flavor.

If you want to remove some edges, then the place to start would be with carelessness and workplace accidents.

In my opinion only the two jobs that do this best are Engineering and Science(toxins).

Engineering it is tempting to cut corners on engine set up and it will fail in some way.
Science(toxins) has the constant risk of messing up and flooding plasma.

Do these happen all the time? No, but they happen every now and then and are a thing that you could have prevent if you weren't in a hurry and that makes them perfect.

Other ideas of the same type.
If botany uses 60? units of the same chemical on a plant it has a chance to spawn a disease/fungus/whatever.
Meat/food gets a minimum cooking time but still needs to be brought above that (cooked a little extra) to be fully safe to eat. (This would also fix the worthlessness of current silver slimes).
Every time a stun baton is recharged it gets an increasing chance to become faulty and deal minor burn damage in addition to stun. This is fixable by using a screwdriver on it to fix the setting, and noticeable by an examine.
Ordered cargo crates have a 1% chance of being "hacked". If it's got two shipping manifests on it don't open it. SEND IT BACK FOR A 2X REFUND. Otherwise when you open it then you'll have a naughty law added to the AI, or an evil drone? spawned if there is no AI.
I don't have a good idea of how to make medbay accidently more deadly. Maybe make cryo more complicated to set up and use? Not quite full ENGINE tier complicated but like, set four things in four places, each of which has a chance to be messed up if you do it wrong. Freezer pump/air is one, insert beaker is a second, maybe need to manually add water/something to cryo and can automate it with plumbing for 3 and if you don't drain it first the floor will become slipping hazard, If you try to do SOMETHING while it's active and too cold then some other bad thing?

I think that covers each department with something new and deadly, that CAN be used by a traitor/antagonist but will also just accidently happen by crew negligence.

Medical has overdosing and tbh it's kind of meh, only really good for preventing people from putting 1000u of a bunch of healing chems into themselves to become invincible.

Pandarsenic wrote: ↑Wed Aug 03, 2022 4:41 am I am once again here to promote that players should be extremely deadly and it should be easy for players to kill each other by "bullshit" methods (instant stuns, slips, highly lethal traitor weapons, etc.) but it should be hard for players to die to boring stuff (simplemobs, especially)

Wound chance from simplemobs in particular should probably be artificially low

Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure simplemobs by default have a wound chance of 0.

BrianBackslide wrote: ↑Wed Aug 03, 2022 11:02 am We need better antags, not more antags. Biddle traitors has done much to soften the "edge".

Bring back contractors, syndie kit users, lowpop heretics, swarmers and devils! Make life dangerous and unpredictable!

You write up a design doc for swarmers that avoids the issues that got them removed and I will code it.

On this topic: What is it with all the effort to prevent the crew from getting guns? You can't print them now from departmental lathes even though firing pin were already a limiting factor before.

Also Guns not fitting in backpacks sucks major ass and makes them impractical even if you do manage to get your hands on one. Security has the convenient suit storage so this is less of a problem for them. Classic case of overnerf, people thought it shouldn't be possible to loot the entire armory so the amount of guns went you can fit in a backpack went from ~6 to 0, even though the actual reasonable amount would be 1 or 2.

Antagonists stealing guns is a good thing, don't just force people to only use uplinks instead.

My biggest issues with death have usually been getting killed suddenly by someone who has obviously telegraphed that they are an antag. Like, oh you want me to meet you in a private low-traffic area? Obviously you're intending to kill me, I showed up knowing that, could you at least do or say anything with flair before you end me?

One of the best deaths I ever experienced was trying to get insuls as clown, having the engineer that let me into the engie lobby say "You look delicious" (I thought it was a RDS hallucination, he was actually a ling) and then killing me while we're in the airlock between the lobby and the SM. He even took a second while I was in crit to reiterate what he had said and some other in-character ling stuff before dragging me into maint and husking me. It was pretty kino and I wish more antags would take a second to say literally anything.

On the other side of the coin I have had people literally ask IC to let them kill me and, wow, what a letdown. Not fun or interesting, absolutely babyproofed.

TheFinalPotato wrote: ↑Tue Aug 02, 2022 7:39 pm I believe this is a player mindset issue, caused by time and coders slowly taking the edge off things, because edges hurt, and people respond poorly to "bad" stimuli.

I think this is mainly a codebase issue, although there is likely some truth to it being a player mindset issue on MRP (and to a degree on LRP).

Getting sacrificed by a heretic, instead of spraying your organs everywhere, now revives you and then spawns you back on the station after you survive the very easy hellgrasp dungeon you're spawned in.
Prog tots have had all of their most dangerous weapons locked behind 300 rep, which means they can't add a lot of chaos and antagonism to the round until around the 20 minute mark through farming objectives, at which point most competent sec teams have sniffed them out and then put a stop to them before they can even buy their gear.

I agree with the principle that people shouldn't overvalue surviving the entire round and being safe to do their job. It's incredibly boring for everyone and creates a culture where antags feel bad for killing people and want to choose the least-impact methods of antagonizing (which prog tot now rewards).

Death is always part of the game and if antagonists were not running around killing people and causing problems people would not be having fun. Poly being killed by an antag who needs the extra rep is not exactly engaging conflict for players. A cult sacrificing people in a hidden maintenance base is. I don't think making more environmental hazards is necessarily the way to fix this issue because chaos is most fun when it's created by other players.

To me the solution seems to be to make antags have easier ways of adding chaos to the round, to give them better kits that allow them more freedom to spice things up. This will lead to more death and dying but also more engaging rounds for everyone involved.

Fully agree. Add more gibs. Up the ambush potential of antags without drastically increasing crowd control abilities. Add rng back back into combat. Lethal headshots. I want to be afraid when I have a gun pointed at my head.

Rpg mechanics are a good inspiration

we cant return to instant death meta with old slips and stuns and such without making revival just as easy. in the past we had cloning for this purpose, but as we made dying harder we also made revival harder.

Bring back medibot chems so i can put lexorin in them and watch all those who are reliant on free healz choke to death.

Nabski wrote: ↑Wed Aug 03, 2022 3:32 pm Meat/food gets a minimum cooking time but still needs to be brought above that (cooked a little extra) to be fully safe to eat.

This would be hilarious. The HoP could have a meat thermometer to use in health inspections.

RaveRadbury wrote: ↑Wed Aug 03, 2022 10:21 pm One of the best deaths I ever experienced was trying to get insuls as clown, having the engineer that let me into the engie lobby say "You look delicious" (I thought it was a RDS hallucination, he was actually a ling) and then killing me while we're in the airlock between the lobby and the SM. He even took a second while I was in crit to reiterate what he had said and some other in-character ling stuff before dragging me into maint and husking me. It was pretty kino and I wish more antags would take a second to say literally anything.

Based ling story, but how did you hear him if you were in crit?

Farquaar wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 1:06 pm Based ling story, but how did you hear him if you were in crit?

Soft crit, the guy new what he was doing.

On making maint randomly deadly, it would be funny if there was a chance loaded syringes hidden in door maintenance panels will poke you when you open them with a screwdriver without gloves.
Maybe dead rats or raw gibs could have a chance to make a character sick, doors could be randomly shocked at round start on top of being bolted.
Those are a few fun ideas i had

I think the main issue with conversations like this is that people always have a different idea of what SS13 is as a game.

A good analogy for SS13 is a D&D game, some people want roleplay heavy games but then you lose the stakes of death generally and your actions feel like they have less weight in a story, some people want combat heavy games and generally these can have good stories you can talk about later, but some people feel that they lack the nuance of heavy story based games, and also don't want to invest in a character that might die.

I personally prefer a good balance where you know the people and have connections with them formed through circumstance, conflict driven story, which generally is what SS13 tries to be I think. Some of these conflicts revolve around one singular item, I can think of a few good rounds off the top of my head that were shaped just by genetics doing some shit, wizard event items, colossus anomalous clown crystal, etc. These are pretty good examples of items and events that I could imagine being in a D&D game with some weird cursed item or sci-fi bullshit.

This kinda stopped being so much of a thing imo when people started nerfing stuff because they personally didn't like the feature. Nerfs should only be done in a game like this when you can't imagine almost any situations where it is funny. So many unique items and rewards have just been straight up scrapped because people decided that they didn't like them, so all those stories involving those items will never happen to a newer player even though the times they affected the round were pretty damn rare as it was. For me a lot of the memes I knew became lost to time when admiral hippie deleted all his videos as well, quite unfortunate.

We also lost the rng element of the d&d game somewhere I feel like. If you wanted a more serious combat game and utility then shoving was a push in the right direction, but I can't help but feel the goofiness of talking about how you got disarm knocked down 5 times in a row by an assistant was lost somewhere. I know people hated the old movement speed as well but there was something comedic as fuck seeing someone dragging a guy off past your departments window at mach speed beating the shit out of them.

Either way glad to see that you'll be doing something about this, hopefully drives other people to also make similarly goofy changes, I think people are nervous that people will shit on their pr's sometimes so they overbalance the fuck out of them and remove a bunch of fun stuff, so I think more prs making goofy changes could possibly inspire more varied and creative ideas.

I think looking at station events are another course of the "edges" that have been smoothed down, or were never more than a minor inconvenience.
For instance, level 7 viruses are pathetic jokes that barely warrant a trip to medbay. I understand that scrubber overflow was axed for being extremely laggy, but you don't get the fun from having your department filled with nitric acid.

What does that leave us with?
Radstorms are only dangerous if you get caught out. (as MRP rules would forbid you from going to town on the people you're huddled in maint with)
Lights blowing out and blackouts aren't really dangers.
Ion laws are more funny than scary. Server rules would typically prevent AIs from really capitalizing on dangerous laws.
Mice and Carp migration have never once been a concern. (And Carp should probably be made a lot more dangerous) (playable megashark carp?)
Scrubber clogs very rarely spawn anything dangerous.
Ionospheric anomalies tend to just be annoying unless the station is already going down in flames.
Of the regular anomalies, Pyro and Flux are only dangerous if left alone, and Gravity is only dangerous if you try to get close to neutralize it.
Meteors are a shuttle call, but only because nobody wants to go fix the damage.
Rods are a fun hazard.

I think what an individual players feels about death is all predicated on how much weight they seem to want to put on themselves in continuing to play. I've found some people treat dying as embarrassing and get very ashamed for it, which tends to make them upset or angry. I've seen some people genuinely believe that their lives or at least involvement in the situation will mean all the difference in the round, and that anything anyone else does is irrelevant or the fact that they are potentially replaceable to be sign of decay. I've also seen a lot of people mostly shrug and say they're quite literally just going to play something else. Sometimes for the day. Sometimes for good.

For round impact, I've observed that the deaths of certain roles to be especially detrimental to anything occurring at all, whether because they're the action orientated roles and they got bulldozed quickly (our antags), or they were actually a key element to things going well or badly and it happened almost immediately (like a 12 minute cult rush on the target). Mass death meanwhile has resulted in mass server population decline if occurring frequently enough (Jackrip's small group causing measurable mass pop migration from Bagil last year, for example), but in an individual round it can either make every round a mad rush for the 20 minute shuttle, or simply an entire server population just checking out for an entire hour before the round resets.

There is a individual and collective consequence to death, but it is deeply contextual and not measurable at all. And none of it has to do with the speed, ease or risk. It is whether or not it takes place at all, since anything short of death is laughably meaningless in the grand scope of things, and even death itself is an unreliable consequence given it can be reversed. If it can be fixed, it will be. If it can't, and it only affects one person, that mostly doesn't mean much and unless it's some death-like state (they're a vegetable), they're probably not going to hamper the round too much or actually, it makes things more interesting. If the thing to be fixed it is death, at most one person is in an hour long time-out.

The best thing I can say is that individual death doesn't mean anything at all overall, but it will be abrupt and negatively affect the individually personally, which gives the impression it is of a larger consequence than it might actually be (that is, individual bias). It might matter for some roles, but not most, just the individual themselves being potentially not allowed to play the game further. It doesn't really do anything much for the evolving situation in a round, especially since people are not limited in fulfilling emptied roles (that is, even on Manuel, you can become a militia force to fight a rampaging threat if they have entirely murderdeathkilled security, and there exist zero code restrictions to individual ability, just soft restrictions in the form of access and gear, all of which is replicable or can be circumvented).

If there is any problems to be identified, our consequences are largely nothingburgers, and death isn't a consequence, it's just an eviction from the experience. We lean so hard into it, that it might actually be what is burning people out from the experience of play, and focusing too much on death will only make the problems worse. Death is fine as is, but we need to work more on other consequences and a willingness to be viciously mean to players making some incidental mistakes without an easy out. And this isn't just pestering them with messages in chat like a permanent cough. It has to be something that actually meaningfully changes how they behave in a round (like, say, being wheelchair bound) to compensate.

Also, wounds are not that and they totally could have been. As far as I can tell for wounds, they're kind of sporadically balanced, with maybe only infections being of any true long term consequence for antagonists only, the role already at a disadvantage for being so isolated from assistance, so it affects general crew very little at all (and this is equally a problem given that crew weapons are lasers). For anyone else, wounds are just either going to kill you then and there (multiple puncture wounds, which brute damage does just fine as well, so its really just double damage) or just be nothing worth giving a shit about when it can be fixed in moments and practically speaking doesn't really hinder you much or change how you play.

They do make individual conflicts more rocket-taggy without taking away any control from either party. It simply punishes you for being hit. So they work better than stuns, but they are not at all worth a damn for making conflicts more or less consequential, just tripling down on lethality.

NecromancerAnne wrote: ↑Sat Aug 06, 2022 1:30 pm Also, wounds are not that and they totally could have been. As far as I can tell for wounds, they're kind of sporadically balanced, with maybe only infections being of any true long term consequence for antagonists only, the role already at a disadvantage for being so isolated from assistance, so it affects general crew very little at all (and this is equally a problem given that crew weapons are lasers). For anyone else, wounds are just either going to kill you then and there (multiple puncture wounds, which brute damage does just fine as well, so its really just double damage) or just be nothing worth giving a shit about when it can be fixed in moments and practically speaking doesn't really hinder you much or change how you play.

They do make individual conflicts more rocket-taggy without taking away any control from either party. It simply punishes you for being hit. So they work better than stuns, but they are not at all worth a damn for making conflicts more or less consequential, just tripling down on lethality.

I think peoples issue with wounds though is that they don't really serve any purpose other than to slow down the player. Stun based combat already tackled the issue of killing people when they get hit, so wounds are just a roundabout way of doing it in half of the circumstances, and annoying the player in the other half. In singleplayer games like Lisa debilitating systems are interesting because they scale the difficulty and also make the story interesting but in a multiplayer game they just serve to slow you down really and experiencing them frequently can be quite annoying as it feels like a waste of your time. It doesn't help that medical as a job is just really boring and has almost no depth.

In most actual roleplaying servers in games I've played wounds aren't an actual part of the game either they come about as a result of RP and they definitely don't happen to you frequently, while they are a gameplay mechanic in ss13 that is basically forced upon you. It doesn't help that when roleplaying wounds in other games it feels more like a two man show where you actually roleplay with the other person whereas in ss13 I feel like I'm just sitting awkwardly while someone tries to solve a tic tac toe board by reading the ss13 wiki.

My only issue with lethality is that in my eyes, I don't think Dynamic handles keeping the story going once the antags are neutralized. This issue is also compounded with the lack of threat that our old heavy-hitting antags used to deliver but no longer do, namely Traitor and Heretic.

From a mapping standpoint, there's plenty that we can do to dramatically increase the lethality of Maint. Kilostation is just one extreme of this. The problem is, once these threats become known, they can be easily circumvented, and in so doing, become not necessarily a threat at all. I share your points on the tgstation experience as a whole gradually loosing that chaotic experience as a whole over a long period of time. What I don't share is that maint is necessarily the way to go about it.

If I were to give metastation maint Kilostations little "surprises" tomorrow, I think what would end up happening is that crew and antagonists alike just begin to avoid them completely outside of radstorms and deadlier situations. It happens on Kilo, so I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say that it'll happen on other stations as well. This isn't to say that there's nothing to do, but I think alone, it's either going to be too much or too little. What I believe is needed is an overhaul of the station events system. While deadliness is a factor, I think we just need to inject more blatant chaos somewhere to stir the metaphorical pot. We have things like power outages, communications outages, and lighting outages, but they serve as a minor nuisance at most. If we could implement something more dynamic that has a feel akin to admin-run events (a standard which isn't realistic, but I think we can somewhat do something here), that chaos metric could influence the typical round.
To paraphrase: I can directly edit maintenance to the chagrin of the playerbase. I can even modular maint it to keep it from getting old, but only a dynamic system can freely deliver the circumstance to influence character movement and thus incite danger.

Our current random events are almost always major and station-wide, having localized but more frequent small events like a breaker tripping, a machine exploding or a hull piece breaking would go a long way in adding a layer of unpredictability and opportunities for mayhem

We have something like this in the form of space dust, a small unannounced event that can either be a nuisance or depressurize an entire area if it breaks a window

I don't think space dust can even break rwindows, which are another can o' worms entirely.

gotta encourage people to tap the sign some more

The Rules wrote: 10. Losing is part of the game.

Your character will frequently die, sometimes without even a possibility of avoiding it. Events will often be out of your control. No matter how good or prepared you are, sometimes you just lose.

There are of course levels to it, like a lot of people think that parapen C4 way back when was a too much, but the fact is that sometimes you're just gonna die and it won't be spectacular or interesting. To you it may feel like the game is imperfect, but it is in fact working as intended. You'll get your turn to be the main character some other round.

Remember when radiation was actually scary? Nowadays it's "ho hum take a multiver pill and you're good to go".

It's lame.

Scary? I just found it annoying, not scary. I could in theory ignore it mostly with some tea and food. But I would have wait for it to get out of my system for ages under a shower. It wouldn't kill me, but it sure would waste an absurd amount of my time.

it's "ENGINEERING IS A NUCLEAR WASTELAND AND THAT PLASMAMAN IS HUSKING ANYONE WHO GETS CLOSE TO HIM" vs "yeah the ce is a dumbass and glows green who cares". New rads are really underwhelming.

Having to actually be careful with how you handle radiation was fun, because if you didn't take proper precautions treating that engineer who died fixing sm you would get radiation poisoning if you're lucky and irradiate entire medbay if you're stupid. It's a nice change of pace from "yeah take this pill and fuck off".

PKPenguin321 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 12, 2022 6:59 am gotta encourage people to tap the sign some more

The Rules wrote: 10. Losing is part of the game.

Your character will frequently die, sometimes without even a possibility of avoiding it. Events will often be out of your control. No matter how good or prepared you are, sometimes you just lose.

There are of course levels to it, like a lot of people think that parapen C4 way back when was a too much, but the fact is that sometimes you're just gonna die and it won't be spectacular or interesting. To you it may feel like the game is imperfect, but it is in fact working as intended. You'll get your turn to be the main character some other round.

Absolutely true

I would like rads to be more dangerous to the irradiated person but I really am not that shaken up about how potent they were for low-effort grief to other players/departments if you had your own rad protection or just didn't care about the negative effects.

As a frequent player of CE when rads were bullshit, I don't think they'd be missed by many lmao. Depth is fun but less so when some invisible thing is murdering your character and its way too hard to get rid of.

Whoneedspacee wrote: ↑Fri Aug 19, 2022 5:58 am As a frequent player of CE when rads were bullshit, I don't think they'd be missed by many lmao. Depth is fun but less so when some invisible thing is murdering your character and its way too hard to get rid of.

What, you don't like all of medbay dying because you didn't wash your pen and ID?

I think that death and deadliness are more fun when recovering from harm is not too *time consuming*, even if it is also not *easy*. Spending 20 minutes being medically harassed by some very slow pracitcioner reading each step off the wiki one line at a time for moderate injuries like burning yourself setting up the SM is extremely anti-fun. Likewise one of the only advantages of the old cloner system was that you knew if you were going to get to come back and from then it didnt take too long. The problem with that wasn't that coming back from the dead was too quick, it was that it was so easy for med staff that they preferred it to the increasingly advanced medical systems. Finding ways for death and injuries to be dealt with in a manner that is both quick but challenging/restricted is probbably quite hard, but I think it's the right way.