What is the difference between hard crit and death?

[Itseasytosee2me]

Imagine five states of being that a spaceman might find themselves in.

Healthy:
The default state of being, where you have complete self-autonomy. You can attack others, run around, heal yourself, interact with all manner of objects and machinery.

Light Crit:
After being beaten to a pulp, the things you can do are immensely reduced. You can crawl, and you can speak, but not over your headset, and typically have no way of recovering from this state on your own (the addition of some sort of grenade contraption with a voice analyzer may give you some more power.) You also tend towards hard crit in this state. The impact that you have over the game is very little, but you still have the power of communicating with other spacemen, and can try to crawl your way to get some help. Other people have the power to do whatever they want with you as you have no ability to resist. If you popped an epi-pen before going down, you'll manage to recover to a state of autonomy after not too long, it doesn't take too much effort to get someone out of soft crit.

Hard Crit:
You can't do anything. You can't see anything, you can't hear anything, you have no self autonomy and can not communicate with anyone around you.
Yet by the mechanics and rules of the game you are for all intents and purposes "alive." Harming a human in hardcrit still counts as human harm. Chemicals that only work on living players still work on players in hardcrit. Unless you had some special preparations that can activate with 100% autonomy there is no way to pull yourself out of hardcrit. Without help, you will soon die.

Dead:
You are dead. You can't do anything, and you can't communicate with anyone. It is harder to bring someone out of this state than hard crit, and do to organ rot it gets harder over time, however it is still possible. As long as the brain remains intact (no matter how damaged it is), its possible to revive someone with round start technology. Albeit, if it is necessary to do a total brain transplant, the person will be forever changed to have a new body and name, mechanically no worse for wear.

Unrecoverable dead:
A state of death in which there is no coming back. You have no autonomy, and you will never come back from this state without being reborn into a new character.

Now that we have these terms defined, it seems to me that there is a discrepancy in how we perceive these states and how they actually are presented to us mechanically. In the current state of the game, murdering someone is not all that heinous a crime, provided you take them to medbay afterwards. A person can go from dead to fully healthy in a matter of minutes. The state of being dead is ultimately unimpactful, not any more so than being knocked into crit and then revived. People generally do not fear the prospect of death, and killing is not typically punished more than knocking someone into crit is, or hell, even handcuffing and muzzling someone brings about an effect that's similar to what we call death in this game.
This attitude by the playerbase is entirely justified by the mechanics that we have laid out. If death had some consequence past a slightly longer wait time then people would revere it more. But as it stands, death is pretty meaningless.

[ekaterina]

The difference is that being in hard crit is actually WORSE than being dead. While dead, at least you can spectate and chat with your fellow ghosts. In hard crit, you're not playing the game, you're just connected to the server watching a white screen. It's like watching paint dry. The only reason not to succumb is if you're about to be revived.
Is this a motion for coders to remove hard crit?
As to whether killing someone yields the same sentence as putting someone in crit... do you mean administratively? Because there's definitely a difference with security. Murder gets your head chopped off, except for those rare cases where circumstances lead the charge to be reduced to manslaughter. Putting someone in crit... it can be attempted murder, but it is usually just assault.

[sinfulbliss]

I agree completely with OP. The rules now force you to bring people to med after your conflict, so dying is essentially a nonissue unless it’s 1) by an antag and 2) in a hidden section of the station. Neither are very likely to be true, especially since most antags don’t need to murder anymore (which was a goal of progtot).

In the past death usually came with the risk of not being recovered, and that baked in all its meaning. Soft crit and hard crit were states you definitely didn’t want to be in because they meant you would die if there wasn’t intervention, and dying meant you could just be out the round if you were somewhere inconvenient.

[NecromancerAnne]

I have no idea what the fuck ekatrina is on about with regards to hardcrit, because you literally said nothing to the effect of what they're saying. But I would probably be careful calling for a more consequence being directly tied to dying. Death in this game is primarily only as consequential as there are the means and knowledge available to the people tasked with bringing you out of it can employ. Assuming they can, of course, find your body and bring you back into the round as 'you'. Technically, ghost roles enable literally anyone to re-enter the round, just not as their round start character.

There is a kind of a correlation of the more experienced a player is when trying to fix your state of death to the actual weight of that death in terms of mechanical impact. I could, as a player with an unreasonable amount of time in the game and having acquired a ridiculous amount of game knowledge, provide literally anyone the ability to come back from practically anything short of total body annihilation (and no extracted blood) with enough time and effort because I know all the tricks of the trade and how to accomplish it. For me, I can make death inconsequential, for myself or anyone who I wish to provide those answers too. You and I know these tricks, and for us, we can make death meaningless, as we're both older players with this perspective.

For the new player or those who actively choose not to employ anything beyond the bare minimum, your mileage may vary. Bodies rot without formaldehyde, you may have lost a limb, you could be addicted or overdosing on something that is killing you and your organs slowly. You need brain surgery, or you need blood. Death is circumstantially consequential. In ideal circumstances, it is not very consequential, and in harrowing circumstances, you're still paddling up shit creek trying to not be dead.

By taking circumstance out of this equation, and death is inherently consequential for entering it at all, you lose a part of that uncertainty with regards to how you'll fair once you are able to be brought back. It stops being skill expressive, I suppose, and now just a burden you get lugged with. It also adds a degree of severity to even funny death, and I feel makes the game grittier rather than what it should be, which is light-hearted and comical.

And, I feel most importantly, it makes mistakes while trying to resolve someone who has died or is on the verge of dying much more antagonistic. I would really prefer new players not getting escalated against because they accidentally stabbed a patient in harm intent with a scalpel, killing them. In our current system, that's a fine mistake to make, since they still have a chance to fix the consequences. In the proposition 'death is inherently consequential', many players will interpret this as grief because of the ease by which incompetency now saddles the burden of death with the victim, and not the person treating them. Either the actually inexperienced player is stuck taking the blame, or you've provided a means by which actual malicious actors can indeed obfuscate their bad faith behavior. Being deliberately incompetent is a lot more obvious now than it is in a state of the game where death just kind of happens in all manner of ways on accident, but even accidental death comes with a significant punishment for the dying person.

I think the cheapness of death is part of the charm. Focusing too heavily on a hardcore experience as inherent to the game rather than a self-imposed challenge is ultimately to the detriment of the game's theme and actually probably presents a degree of problems that might make it significantly less approachable for newer players to only the benefit of a minority in the community.

If this isn't an argument for 'death should be inherently consequential' then nothing need change because death is circumstantially consequential. What you likely are suffering is the burden of knowledge and understanding how to overcome and resolve death as a problem.

[oranges]

you are currently fucking around, you do not want to find out

[Itseasytosee2me]

snip

Your perspective serves as the opponent to my main argument here, and I think it simply represents a fundamental difference in how we see the game. I would personally prefer a grittier atmosphere, one with permanent consequences, not necessarily gutting someone's character from the round, but something to give more impact and weight to death. Death, I think we agree, improves the atmosphere of the game when it is cheap, I just think life should be more expensive.

I like the idea of something pristine being lost when a character dies. A permanent stain on their soul if not their body. Other codebases like lifeweb and eris have limitations on revival that add mechanical depth to the game and improve the emphasis of death. Even old TG had the idea of clone damage as a result of an imperfect cloning process, back when cloning was the only means of revival that could be done past a certain time window.

[Fikou]

make it so if you survived the round on the emergency shuttle in your original roundstart body without dying once you get a 1.25 antag rate for the next round, this will make lives much more valued for the players.

[Timonk]

make it so if you survived the round on the emergency shuttle in your original roundstart body without dying once you get a 1.25 antag rate for the next round, this will make lives much more valued for the players.

Does it stack?

[conrad]

make it so if you survived the round on the emergency shuttle in your original roundstart body without dying once you get a 1.25 antag rate for the next round, this will make lives much more valued for the players.

Does it stack?

Yes, additively, so the second time is +50% rather than +31.25%.

4 rounds alive means guaranteed antag.

[Lacran]

snip

Your perspective serves as the opponent to my main argument here, and I think it simply represents a fundamental difference in how we see the game. I would personally prefer a grittier atmosphere, one with permanent consequences, not necessarily gutting someone's character from the round, but something to give more impact and weight to death. Death, I think we agree, improves the atmosphere of the game when it is cheap, I just think life should be more expensive.

I like the idea of something pristine being lost when a character dies. A permanent stain on their soul if not their body. Other codebases like lifeweb and eris have limitations on revival that add mechanical depth to the game and improve the emphasis of death. Even old TG had the idea of clone damage as a result of an imperfect cloning process, back when cloning was the only means of revival that could be done past a certain time window.

Death being circumstantial fits better with a round being so dynamic. The severity of the death matches with the severity of the situation you have found yourself in.

Creating a "gritty" environment through punishing death mechanics isn't going to happen I don't think.

If you make death more punishing you don't actually give value to death, you just devalue the player's life after death. A player revived from dying to a minor mistake is not going to value their life if you've made living more tedious.

Death has little meaning to any player over 10 hours in. Primarily because players are scared of things they don't understand. Maybe not necessarily adding a punishment to death, but an element of unpredictability would be the angle?

Like if revival didn't always bring a player back as "them." Maybe revival had chances of giving players a new identity and memories. Maybe there's a small chance of you coming back as a non-contagious hostile zombie.

Stuff that isn't just "ok you are back but with a phobia of corgis" but things that actually fundamentally impact your approach and goals within the round.

[RedBaronFlyer]

As Lacran said, the weight of death depends on the round.

If it’s a low-threat round/a round where security is keeping things stable, then death is of very little consequence, outside of fringe cases like a miner dying when they’re up to their neck in hostile mobs. Most medbay visits will be stupid stuff like playing Russian roulette with all six chambers loaded, drinking till your liver dies, or licking shocked grates in maint tunnels.

On the opposite side, in rounds with high threat or a dangerous situation (typically mass casualty events), then the price of death can be high, because there’s no guarantee that revival is certain. I think I’ve been revived a resounding single time during a nukie round, for instance. Typically the more fucked the station is, the less likely you are to be revived.

You can observe this with players' behavior, players are less likely to go into maintenance tunnels just to explore, people don’t drink themselves to death, play Russian roulette, or willingly step into the clown’s 100% certain death trap hallway contraption when they fear that they might not be revived.

Obviously, you’ll have those players who have reached SS13 enlightenment and are fine with dying without being revived, but I would consider those players to be in a minorty.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

I dont really get this policy thread. What policy is it advocating for?

[Itseasytosee2me]

I dont really get this policy thread. What policy is it advocating for?

This is the players club, and its a discussion of a discrepancy I find interesting.

[Bawhoppennn]

I'd genuinely love removing revivals. It would stop people bitching about round removals and add some real weight to dying. Sadly since cloning was removed death has far less of an impact (which is I think the opposite of the goal cloning removal actually had). Way too easy and fast to revive someone these days. Atleast it is involved though unlike cloning though, that's good.

[Itseasytosee2me]

I'd genuinely love removing revivals. It would stop people bitching about round removals and add some real weight to dying. Sadly since cloning was removed death has far less of an impact (which is I think the opposite of the goal cloning removal actually had). Way too easy and fast to revive someone these days. Atleast it is involved though unlike cloning though, that's good.

I agree alot with this. I really supported the removal of cloning back when it happened but now its easier than ever to resurrect someone. You can't even rely on sabotaging the clone bay if you want someone to stay dead, you are going to have to bomb all of medbay to stop the constant flow of revival.

[ekaterina]

I disagree wholeheartedly. We shouldn't be looking for ways to make players enjoy the game less.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

I dont really get this policy thread. What policy is it advocating for?

This is the players club, and its a discussion of a discrepancy I find interesting.

Yah but like, what do you think about the problem?

[Itseasytosee2me]

I dont really get this policy thread. What policy is it advocating for?

This is the players club, and its a discussion of a discrepancy I find interesting.

Yah but like, what do you think about the problem?

I think there should be more of a difference between crit and death, either by increasing the amount of agency a player has in crit, or punishing players harder for entering a state of death.

[Bawhoppennn]

Play a Flappy Bird QTE to revive back to softcrit

[TheLoLSwat]

how would you even make deaths suck more without something crazy? Its better for reviving to be too convenient than too inconvenient, especially when its already tough to get revived if there is an active threat or your body is in a bad spot

[Archie700]

I'd genuinely love removing revivals. It would stop people bitching about round removals and add some real weight to dying. Sadly since cloning was removed death has far less of an impact (which is I think the opposite of the goal cloning removal actually had). Way too easy and fast to revive someone these days. Atleast it is involved though unlike cloning though, that's good.

So instead of bitching about round removals, people are now bitching about death since revivals were the very reason why round removals are a thing in the first place.

[ekaterina]

I think there should be more of a difference between crit and death, either by increasing the amount of agency a player has in crit, or punishing players harder for entering a state of death.

Yes

either by increasing the amount of agency a player has in crit,

Yes!

or punishing players harder for entering a state of death.

What we should really do is just remove hard crit, or at least remove the player having to sit there watching paint dry, while leaving it as a state where it's easier for medics to get this body back to health. Make it so going below 150 sends you to dead chat like going below 200 does, and going back into soft crit allows you to enter your body like being defibrillated does.
What's the point of not being a ghost when all you can do is look at one motionless tile and *gasp?

[Archie700]

Now that we have these terms defined, it seems to me that there is a discrepancy in how we perceive these states and how they actually are presented to us mechanically. In the current state of the game, murdering someone is not all that heinous a crime, provided you take them to medbay afterwards. A person can go from dead to fully healthy in a matter of minutes. The state of being dead is ultimately unimpactful, not any more so than being knocked into crit and then revived. People generally do not fear the prospect of death, and killing is not typically punished more than knocking someone into crit is, or hell, even handcuffing and muzzling someone brings about an effect that's similar to what we call death in this game.
This attitude by the playerbase is entirely justified by the mechanics that we have laid out. If death had some consequence past a slightly longer wait time then people would revere it more. But as it stands, death is pretty meaningless.

The reason for "murdering someone is not all that heinous a crime, provided you take them to medbay afterwards" is because of the new escalation policy per viewtopic.php?f=85&t=30194&p=619335&hil ... on#p619335
It was not the perception of death itself that changed, it was escalation policy that made players have to actually carry bodies to medbay.
And the difference between hardcrit and death is ss13 is dynamic. In low-threat, it's mostly just a speedbump unless you can't be found or found with your head missing. In high-threat, you're considered lucky if you're found in hardcrit and brought to medbay because then you won't have to join the corpse pile of rotting organs while the stasis beds are filled, as treating a person in hardcrit is considerably less tedious for the most part.

I'd genuinely love removing revivals. It would stop people bitching about round removals and add some real weight to dying. Sadly since cloning was removed death has far less of an impact (which is I think the opposite of the goal cloning removal actually had). Way too easy and fast to revive someone these days. Atleast it is involved though unlike cloning though, that's good.

I agree alot with this. I really supported the removal of cloning back when it happened but now its easier than ever to resurrect someone. You can't even rely on sabotaging the clone bay if you want someone to stay dead, you are going to have to bomb all of medbay to stop the constant flow of revival.

If you really want someone to stay dead, that should be on you to dispose of the body, whether by hiding it or spacing it or any other of the methods. Removing revivals codewise is one of the most extreme solutions, as it results in a paradigm shift in how players and admins now treat death.

[Bawhoppennn]

I'd genuinely love removing revivals. It would stop people bitching about round removals and add some real weight to dying. Sadly since cloning was removed death has far less of an impact (which is I think the opposite of the goal cloning removal actually had). Way too easy and fast to revive someone these days. Atleast it is involved though unlike cloning though, that's good.

So instead of bitching about round removals, people are now bitching about death since revivals were the very reason why round removals are a thing in the first place.

Yes and they can get over it.

[Qbmax32]

if you just don’t die then this never becomes a problem

[sinfulbliss]

yeah archie is correct the new escalation rules forcing revival after death kind of fucked things up and made it feel cheap

that said i wouldn’t want to see the crit system changed at all. it makes sense to be unconscious and unable to interact in hardcrit, it’s different from death because you can be easily healed back up without needing medbay and a defib

[kinnebian]

I think there should be more of a difference between crit and death, either by increasing the amount of agency a player has in crit, or punishing players harder for entering a state of death.

Yes

either by increasing the amount of agency a player has in crit,

Yes!

or punishing players harder for entering a state of death.

What we should really do is just remove hard crit, or at least remove the player having to sit there watching paint dry, while leaving it as a state where it's easier for medics to get this body back to health. Make it so going below 150 sends you to dead chat like going below 200 does, and going back into soft crit allows you to enter your body like being defibrillated does.
What's the point of not being a ghost when all you can do is look at one motionless tile and *gasp?

it would be cool if the closer you got to death you would start hearing and seeing ghosts, but also i agree with ekaterina on this

[massa]

I agree completely with OP. The rules now force you to bring people to med after your conflict

I assure you if someone starts a random fight with me over nonsense I am not dragging them to medbay and I don't know what weird burger king manager thinks that's how human interaction goes, and I definitely don't expect to be dragged there if I start something.

They're not my friend and I'm not enough of a fucking shithead to crit someone over something minor enough for me to drag them to med at the end of it. You really shouldn't have non antags critting eachother so often over trash and nonsense that you need daycare rules.

This shit getting pussified for real. Make your bed, sleep in it, SS13 runs off the law of the jungle.

[massa]

To that end, SS13 is an exercise in Free Will.

Let people suffer the consequences of their actions in a human driven environment.

[Itseasytosee2me]

I assure you if someone starts a random fight with me over nonsense I am not dragging them to medbay and I don't know what weird burger king manager thinks that's how human interaction goes, and I definitely don't expect to be dragged there if I start something.

They're not my friend and I'm not enough of a fucking shithead to crit someone over something minor enough for me to drag them to med at the end of it. You really shouldn't have non antags critting eachother so often over trash and nonsense that you need daycare rules.

This shit getting pussified for real. Make your bed, sleep in it, SS13 runs off the law of the jungle.

It may not be right, but it is offical policy to drag your opponents back to medbay and then forget about the incident.

If a conflict leads to violence and either participant is incapacitated, the standing participant is expected to make an effort to treat the other, unless they have reason to believe the other was an antagonist. Once treated the conflict is over; any new conflict with either individual must escalate once again. If you get into a conflict again with that individual, they may be removed permanently from the round.

[massa]

I assure you if someone starts a random fight with me over nonsense I am not dragging them to medbay and I don't know what weird burger king manager thinks that's how human interaction goes, and I definitely don't expect to be dragged there if I start something.

They're not my friend and I'm not enough of a fucking shithead to crit someone over something minor enough for me to drag them to med at the end of it. You really shouldn't have non antags critting eachother so often over trash and nonsense that you need daycare rules.

This shit getting pussified for real. Make your bed, sleep in it, SS13 runs off the law of the jungle.

It may not be right, but it is offical policy to drag your opponents back to medbay and then forget about the incident.

If a conflict leads to violence and either participant is incapacitated, the standing participant is expected to make an effort to treat the other, unless they have reason to believe the other was an antagonist. Once treated the conflict is over; any new conflict with either individual must escalate once again. If you get into a conflict again with that individual, they may be removed permanently from the round.

a lizard critting himself over the toolbelt on my waist getting left in maints is

most assuredly

not my problem

[Kendrickorium]

for once i'm looking forward to seeing oranges come in here just to say "no"

[sinfulbliss]

a lizard critting himself over the toolbelt on my waist getting left in maints is

most assuredly

not my problem

keep in mind

if they’re acting like an antag you don’t have to bring em to medbay after killing them cause they fall under valid policy

[zxaber]

We should replace hardcrit with D&D deathsaves. Every ten seconds, you randomly gain an invisible success or failure token, 50/50 chance*. Every failure brings you closer to death, and three will make you dead. Successes don't individually change anything, but if you roll 3, you're brought to lightcrit and stabilized there. You'll neither recover from light crit nor seep back into hard without outside effects, but you can still crawl around. Dying or recovering to light crit wipe the current token counter.

Since damage in hardcrit still takes your health down, being attacked would fundamentally be a failed roll, even though it doesn't actually give you a fail token.

*D&D counts 10 as a success but eleven twentieths is an awkward ratio.