/tg/Station 13

Bottom post of the previous page:

I've seen many many people complaining about wizard, as it's literally just a one-man powertrip with no consideration to anyone else. However, none of them has made a thread on just removing wizard. So, in an act of fostering discussion, I'll step up and make the relevant thread.

Personally I hate wizard and wished it was fully disabled on Manuel, mainly because its too disruptive and too damn /powerful/. It's not the worst antag, though... cough cult cough

Edit: To clarify, I personally want it disabled on manuel but it also has plenty of reasons to be disabled on other servers. I dont want to overstep my bounds and enforce my will on things I don't know about, but since others want it disabled outside of manuel, I decided to have the scope of the thread be broad.

I'm happy to keep wizard alive if you want to make it scale and address the fun for 1, but the onus is on someone who wants to maintain it to the standards players (in terms of enabling/disabling config) and maintainers (in terms of getting the changes in prod in the first place) want.

If no one wants to do that we are left with "deal with it" and remove

NoxVS wrote:As long as it wasn't station wide and easy to communicate, ghosts could be fine. The problem I have with it in its current form is now suddenly every one has semi ghost metacomms. Kill a guy? He can now go to sec and point them to you. Trying to hide or use a disguise? You have a massive ring of ghosts and stick out like a sore thumb. A possible replacement or rework could be where ghosts are invisible still, but gain some ability to manipulate the world. Turning on lights, moving things, just normal haunted stuff.

Controversial opinion: Wizards are not bad antags, and it's partially because they have so many ways to let deadchat/dead people participate in the round. Even if they don't want to spend points on minionmancy items or scrying orbs, they can at least bother to spend 0 points to cast the Summon Ghosts ritual. Summon Ghosts is one of the best wizard spells we have, and making ghosts unable to crudely communicate through it kind of defeats the point of the spell/ruins what makes the spell so good.

Also, it's nice to have a place (wizards) where we can dump ideas for cool shit that would be ludicrously overpowered if actually given to a normal antag.

also also, I have like 5 wizard builds that I haven't gotten to try yet please don't remove wizard before I can try any of them ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

stewydeadmike wrote:is there anything unique (outside theming ofc) that wizard brings to the table? Is there like a fundamental experience of wizard that isn't found in other antags?

It's the only mode that is guaranteed to be one player against everyone else (unless they spring for apprentices, then its more like nukies). No other mode does that, really. This makes it rather unique, for better or worse.

ATHATH wrote:Also, it's nice to have a place (wizards) where we can dump ideas for cool shit that would be ludicrously overpowered if actually given to a normal antag.

And that would be entirely fine, if those ludicrously overpowered stuff weren't ending up in dynamic. While I don't think wizard is a good mode, I think the main issue is the fact it cannot coexist with other modes. A lone wizard is fine, summon ghosts doesn't matter when there is only a wizard running around, but when wizard ends up in dynamic it turns the mode from dynamic to wizard. Any semblance of normalcy is gone, and there is no option for the other antags to do anything but murderbone. Kill someone stealthily, you now have a ghost pointing security to you. Or someone has a scrying orb and has found out who the traitors are by using it to enter deadchat. Or your target is now surrounded by friendly xenomorphs and robots with guns that also have access to syndicate comms.

If dynamic is ever to fully replace secret, wizard has to go.

Tlaltecuhtli wrote:give chaplain sect powers to undo polymorph changes and curse of madness?
staffs can just have a limed shot amount if used by not magicians

nianjiilical wrote:i do sort of like the idea of having minor and major wizards, minor wizards being less threat but not getting the more disruptive spells

would it be better if certain wizard spells were easier to undo? just to throw out some ideas

-summon ghosts, summon events and curse of madness end when the wizard dies
-guns summoned by summon guns cant be fired if the wizard dies
-summon magic spells either cant be used if the wiz dies or can only pull non-disruptive spells
-rework staff of change so that being polymorphed doesn't drop your inventory and add some way to un-polymorph people (spray them with holy water?)
-make artefacts like staff of change, staff of healing and mjolnir weaker if used by nonwizards
-turn scrying orb into a passive spell, or make it so nonwizards can see but not hear ghosts with it
-replace soulstone belt and necromantic stone with equivalents that dont destroy the body/equipment
-balance the demons on their own if they're a problem

i mean id be fine with losing the murderbone/disruptive spells in exchange for more defensive/gimmick tools, gimmick wizard is more fun than murderbone anyway

wyci

Literally just dust all wiz gear and cancel wiz stuff when they die. It was the magic inside them that made it all possible.

I'll code it if someone can hold my hand with making a component/element to attach to wiz stuff for dusting on their demise.

we need more fun spells like duffelbag curse and less like fireball

Also, staves of change might become less disruptive once Indie-ana Bones's xenomorph changes go through.

RaveRadbury wrote:Literally just dust all wiz gear and cancel wiz stuff when they die. It was the magic inside them that made it all possible.

I'll code it if someone can hold my hand with making a component/element to attach to wiz stuff for dusting on their demise.

element. make it take the mob (wizard) as an argument.

register COMSIG_GLOB_MOB_DEATH on that mob. callback qdels the attached atom, make a visible_message or something too.

care about lich later.

NoxVS wrote:when wizard ends up in dynamic it turns the mode from dynamic to wizard. Any semblance of normalcy is gone, and there is no option for the other antags to do anything but murderbone. Kill someone stealthily, you now have a ghost pointing security to you. Or someone has a scrying orb and has found out who the traitors are by using it to enter deadchat. Or your target is now surrounded by friendly xenomorphs and robots with guns that also have access to syndicate comms.

And that's a good thing.

I think we should always have a gamemode that makes one player the star of the shift, however infrequent it is. It's a unique component of the game that allows one person to basically run an event with them at the center and do any gimmick they want.

The issue is that wizards are dangerous and so the crew will hunt them with every powergaming tool they have, thus requiring every wizard to take basic murderbone shit as a matter of defense even if they also want to do a gimmick. I think there are two solutions to this.

Make wizards more powerful inherently so they can spend more points on gimmick shit and be more creative than being forced to spend 60% of their stuff on ethereal, fireball, timestop and forcewall just to survive for more than two minutes. Yes, make them MORE powerful to make them less murderboner, it makes total sense obviously this makes sense. This could be done by giving them some default defensive abilities or making defensive abilities cheaper. Maybe you can choose your first defensive spell for free.

Or reduce the desire or capacity for the crew to maximally powergame validhunt the dangerwizard which can be frustrating for players either through code changes that nerf weapons or policy changes that reduce their ability to powergame. I think this could occur as a side effect of other game policy solutions but ultimately would be a frustrating solution to the problem.

So the problem with wizards is they should be massively buffed. That's my take I'm sticking with it.

NoxVS wrote: And that would be entirely fine, if those ludicrously overpowered stuff weren't ending up in dynamic. While I don't think wizard is a good mode, I think the main issue is the fact it cannot coexist with other modes. A lone wizard is fine, summon ghosts doesn't matter when there is only a wizard running around, but when wizard ends up in dynamic it turns the mode from dynamic to wizard. Any semblance of normalcy is gone, and there is no option for the other antags to do anything but murderbone. Kill someone stealthily, you now have a ghost pointing security to you. Or someone has a scrying orb and has found out who the traitors are by using it to enter deadchat. Or your target is now surrounded by friendly xenomorphs and robots with guns that also have access to syndicate comms.

If dynamic is ever to fully replace secret, wizard has to go.

That's a problem with dynamic, not with wizard.

Stickymayhem wrote:I think we should always have a gamemode that makes one player the star of the shift, however infrequent it is. It's a unique component of the game that allows one person to basically run an event with them at the center and do any gimmick they want.

The issue is that wizards are dangerous and so the crew will hunt them with every powergaming tool they have, thus requiring every wizard to take basic murderbone shit as a matter of defense even if they also want to do a gimmick. I think there are two solutions to this.

Make wizards more powerful inherently so they can spend more points on gimmick shit and be more creative than being forced to spend 60% of their stuff on ethereal, fireball, timestop and forcewall just to survive for more than two minutes. Yes, make them MORE powerful to make them less murderboner, it makes total sense obviously this makes sense. This could be done by giving them some default defensive abilities or making defensive abilities cheaper. Maybe you can choose your first defensive spell for free.

Or reduce the desire or capacity for the crew to maximally powergame validhunt the dangerwizard which can be frustrating for players either through code changes that nerf weapons or policy changes that reduce their ability to powergame. I think this could occur as a side effect of other game policy solutions but ultimately would be a frustrating solution to the problem.

So the problem with wizards is they should be massively buffed. That's my take I'm sticking with it.

Sticky speaks the truth

Whenever I wiz, I try to get deadchat/ghosts in on the fun as much as possible. I think some of the problem is there's not much in the way of fun gimmick stuff, and the stuff that is gimmicky is simply outshined by the stuff that's actually useful for the same price. (Fireball+Timestop, Wands+Charge, LOCKER STAFF)Maybe change spell points to a 100 point system so that spell purchases can be more granular would help? I think that cooldown reductions could also be a reduced cost, with a higher initial cost for the spell.

Wizards are kinda forced into spending some of their points on OH GOD PLEASE DON'T KILL ME if they don't go full murderbone and that's baaaaad.

Yenwodyah wrote:

NoxVS wrote: And that would be entirely fine, if those ludicrously overpowered stuff weren't ending up in dynamic. While I don't think wizard is a good mode, I think the main issue is the fact it cannot coexist with other modes. A lone wizard is fine, summon ghosts doesn't matter when there is only a wizard running around, but when wizard ends up in dynamic it turns the mode from dynamic to wizard. Any semblance of normalcy is gone, and there is no option for the other antags to do anything but murderbone. Kill someone stealthily, you now have a ghost pointing security to you. Or someone has a scrying orb and has found out who the traitors are by using it to enter deadchat. Or your target is now surrounded by friendly xenomorphs and robots with guns that also have access to syndicate comms.

If dynamic is ever to fully replace secret, wizard has to go.

That's a problem with dynamic, not with wizard.

That's dynamic working as intended.

Stickymayhem wrote:I think we should always have a gamemode that makes one player the star of the shift, however infrequent it is. It's a unique component of the game that allows one person to basically run an event with them at the center and do any gimmick they want.

you can just play ai if you want to be the center of attention

cacogen wrote: you can just play ai if you want to be the center of attention

Now why would anyone want to be cool in an online game meant for escapism at the end of the day? It just makes no sense.

Remove spells and make wizard an RP role.

cacogen wrote:

Stickymayhem wrote:I think we should always have a gamemode that makes one player the star of the shift, however infrequent it is. It's a unique component of the game that allows one person to basically run an event with them at the center and do any gimmick they want.

you can just play ai if you want to be the center of attention

ah yes, I'm sure everyone enjoys playing the complaining doorknob.

I mean I do, but it's not for everyone.

How to fix wizard:
Staves/wands of door creation should be able to card the AI.

A couple of people threw themselves in front of that for some reason

Counterpoint - What if we removed wizard's pass to murderbone. Maybe it would encourage more creativity. But then again no one is ever creative with wizard and 90% of wizard "gimmicks" suck.

vkalls wrote:Counterpoint - What if we removed wizard's pass to murderbone. Maybe it would encourage more creativity. But then again no one is ever creative with wizard and 90% of wizard "gimmicks" suck.

....removing the murderbone antag designed around murderbone's murderbone right? What a great idea

also because that entails literally saying wizard is not an antag on lrp

thehogshotgun wrote:

vkalls wrote:Counterpoint - What if we removed wizard's pass to murderbone. Maybe it would encourage more creativity. But then again no one is ever creative with wizard and 90% of wizard "gimmicks" suck.

....removing the murderbone antag designed around murderbone's murderbone right? What a great idea

your suggestion is rooted in the belief that no antag can change from it's origin, which is clearly false, if the wizard had it's murderbone pass removed, people would react, it might take a long time, but over time the antag would shift to be unrecognisable from what it was before.

Furthermore, you suggest the antag is "designed" around murderbone, this is something of a fallacy, there is no "design" in the original antags, they were added based on whim mostly and we don't have their creators around to plumb their mind about what the thing is supposed to do, therefore it's wrong to suggest in such concrete terms what something exists to do.

staffs make me furious because if the wizard dies the round just turns into a complete slog where all conflict is negated because of "le funne staff"
other then that wizard's fine

oranges wrote:

thehogshotgun wrote:

vkalls wrote:Counterpoint - What if we removed wizard's pass to murderbone. Maybe it would encourage more creativity. But then again no one is ever creative with wizard and 90% of wizard "gimmicks" suck.

....removing the murderbone antag designed around murderbone's murderbone right? What a great idea

your suggestion is rooted in the belief that no antag can change from it's origin, which is clearly false, if the wizard had it's murderbone pass removed, people would react, it might take a long time, but over time the antag would shift to be unrecognisable from what it was before.

Furthermore, you suggest the antag is "designed" around murderbone, this is something of a fallacy, there is no "design" in the original antags, they were added based on whim mostly and we don't have their creators around to plumb their mind about what the thing is supposed to do, therefore it's wrong to suggest in such concrete terms what something exists to do.

I mean everything points to the intention being murderbone, his tools are for boning, there's only one of him and a whole lot of normies, I mean it seems like the most likely purpose. Plus like you're orange man so your opinion is invalid

saprasam wrote:staffs make me furious because if the wizard dies the round just turns into a complete slog where all conflict is negated because of "le funne staff"
other then that wizard's fine

Rounds no longer end when the wizard dies? Is that a Dynamic thing? Anyway you could just destroy certain artefacts of the wizard if they're deemed too overpowered for a regular shift when they died.

cacogen wrote:

saprasam wrote:staffs make me furious because if the wizard dies the round just turns into a complete slog where all conflict is negated because of "le funne staff"
other then that wizard's fine

Rounds no longer end when the wizard dies? Is that a Dynamic thing? Anyway you could just destroy certain artefacts of the wizard if they're deemed too overpowered for a regular shift when they died.

It does end when wizard dies, but if its dynamic which I believe is now 24/7 for all servers, it continues. You can try destroying the stuff left behind by a wizard, but you can't undo the effects of polymorphing, summon ghosts, the trauma spell, etc

You could have those things undo themselves when the wizard died but it'd take some coding to do and I don't think there's interest

you'd just be discouraging the """"fun"""" spells and encouraging them to take murder tools instead, which will not be reverted when the wizard dies

it's not scalable

Jaredfogle wrote:you'd just be discouraging the """"fun"""" spells and encouraging them to take murder tools instead, which will not be reverted when the wizard dies

it's not scalable

If the best argument for not removing a bad part of wizard is "the rest of a wizard's kit is worse" then its time to pull the plug already

NoxVS wrote:

Jaredfogle wrote:you'd just be discouraging the """"fun"""" spells and encouraging them to take murder tools instead, which will not be reverted when the wizard dies

it's not scalable

If the best argument for not removing a bad part of wizard is "the rest of a wizard's kit is worse" then its time to pull the plug already

too tired to know if you meant this in any other way but pulling the plug on wizard is what im arguing for in this thread

Jaredfogle wrote:too tired to know if you meant this in any other way but pulling the plug on wizard is what im arguing for in this thread

Oh yeah, I fully meant it in the "tell it to turn around and think of the rabbits" sort of way

of mice and wizards

I like wizard. Playing wizard is probably one of the most fun roles to get because they're a super expensive (threat wise) antag that's a single individual with a great deal of power and other antags don't really provide that.

I also enjoying wizard rounds when I'm not the wizard. Taking down or surviving a powerful threat like a wizard is fun due to the special preparation and challenge it takes to succeed.

I don't really think it's a problem that the wizard has abilities that can bring you out of the round or cause significant problems without very much you can do because of their rarity.

Stickymayhem wrote:I think we should always have a gamemode that makes one player the star of the shift, however infrequent it is. It's a unique component of the game that allows one person to basically run an event with them at the center and do any gimmick they want.

The issue is that wizards are dangerous and so the crew will hunt them with every powergaming tool they have, thus requiring every wizard to take basic murderbone shit as a matter of defense even if they also want to do a gimmick. I think there are two solutions to this.

Make wizards more powerful inherently so they can spend more points on gimmick shit and be more creative than being forced to spend 60% of their stuff on ethereal, fireball, timestop and forcewall just to survive for more than two minutes. Yes, make them MORE powerful to make them less murderboner, it makes total sense obviously this makes sense. This could be done by giving them some default defensive abilities or making defensive abilities cheaper. Maybe you can choose your first defensive spell for free.

Or reduce the desire or capacity for the crew to maximally powergame validhunt the dangerwizard which can be frustrating for players either through code changes that nerf weapons or policy changes that reduce their ability to powergame. I think this could occur as a side effect of other game policy solutions but ultimately would be a frustrating solution to the problem.

So the problem with wizards is they should be massively buffed. That's my take I'm sticking with it.

It's like a buttonroll/jordie rodspam (there is even a spell which turns you into a rod!) event though and players arent actually encouraged to treat it as a soft event manager but rather a time trial on culling the station. At the very least it requires severe code changes according to your grievances, i cant really see how that train of thought ends with make the crew more shit to deal with wizard while also encouraging the wizard needs ADDITIONAL FREE SPELLS!

Cobby wrote:

Stickymayhem wrote:I think we should always have a gamemode that makes one player the star of the shift, however infrequent it is. It's a unique component of the game that allows one person to basically run an event with them at the center and do any gimmick they want.

The issue is that wizards are dangerous and so the crew will hunt them with every powergaming tool they have, thus requiring every wizard to take basic murderbone shit as a matter of defense even if they also want to do a gimmick. I think there are two solutions to this.

Make wizards more powerful inherently so they can spend more points on gimmick shit and be more creative than being forced to spend 60% of their stuff on ethereal, fireball, timestop and forcewall just to survive for more than two minutes. Yes, make them MORE powerful to make them less murderboner, it makes total sense obviously this makes sense. This could be done by giving them some default defensive abilities or making defensive abilities cheaper. Maybe you can choose your first defensive spell for free.

Or reduce the desire or capacity for the crew to maximally powergame validhunt the dangerwizard which can be frustrating for players either through code changes that nerf weapons or policy changes that reduce their ability to powergame. I think this could occur as a side effect of other game policy solutions but ultimately would be a frustrating solution to the problem.

So the problem with wizards is they should be massively buffed. That's my take I'm sticking with it.

It's like a buttonroll/jordie rodspam (there is even a spell which turns you into a rod!) event though and players arent actually encouraged to treat it as a soft event manager but rather a time trial on culling the station. At the very least it requires severe code changes according to your grievances, i cant really see how that train of thought ends with make the crew more shit to deal with wizard while also encouraging the wizard needs ADDITIONAL FREE SPELLS!

yknow if you wanna try making wizard more event-inspired you could just rebalance offensive spells to be costlier while decreasing the cost of gimmick/funny haha spells to 1 or even a .5 if that's possible

barnyard, locker staff, shit like that is funnyTM while being just as costly as a fireball or rod - if we want to deincentivize "kill everyone" murderbone wizards, why the hell are these the same cost?

Making offensive/lethal spells costlier just means you're going to get wizards with lethal spells. I think a good deal of the issues may be solved with simply giving wizards More magical gear and spells not aimed at such lethality. There's a ton in tg code to give him a bag of wacky tricks.
Simply put there is not enough gimmicky, varied spells or equipment for him to toy with.
No bag of seeds that will let him plant almost Anything Anywhere. I mean, you could give him basically an ability/item/spell that lets him drop down a ladder in the middle of a hallway that goes to the wizard academy and let people go to away mission shit using him if you really wanted.

Maybe discern between offensive and lethal, too, because I would bet many 'offensive' spells are taken because they are lethal/damaging more as a way of deterrent rather than as a means of attack. How many sec/assistants you think have been ei nath'd purely because they were tracking to get up in the wizards face?

This thread has been going on for much longer than it deserves and a lot of the changes people propose rest on code changes and not policy. Can a headadmin like just look at this and close or disable wizard so this thread can finally die?

Omega_DarkPotato wrote:

Cobby wrote:

Stickymayhem wrote:I think we should always have a gamemode that makes one player the star of the shift, however infrequent it is. It's a unique component of the game that allows one person to basically run an event with them at the center and do any gimmick they want.

The issue is that wizards are dangerous and so the crew will hunt them with every powergaming tool they have, thus requiring every wizard to take basic murderbone shit as a matter of defense even if they also want to do a gimmick. I think there are two solutions to this.

Make wizards more powerful inherently so they can spend more points on gimmick shit and be more creative than being forced to spend 60% of their stuff on ethereal, fireball, timestop and forcewall just to survive for more than two minutes. Yes, make them MORE powerful to make them less murderboner, it makes total sense obviously this makes sense. This could be done by giving them some default defensive abilities or making defensive abilities cheaper. Maybe you can choose your first defensive spell for free.

Or reduce the desire or capacity for the crew to maximally powergame validhunt the dangerwizard which can be frustrating for players either through code changes that nerf weapons or policy changes that reduce their ability to powergame. I think this could occur as a side effect of other game policy solutions but ultimately would be a frustrating solution to the problem.

So the problem with wizards is they should be massively buffed. That's my take I'm sticking with it.

It's like a buttonroll/jordie rodspam (there is even a spell which turns you into a rod!) event though and players arent actually encouraged to treat it as a soft event manager but rather a time trial on culling the station. At the very least it requires severe code changes according to your grievances, i cant really see how that train of thought ends with make the crew more shit to deal with wizard while also encouraging the wizard needs ADDITIONAL FREE SPELLS!

yknow if you wanna try making wizard more event-inspired you could just rebalance offensive spells to be costlier while decreasing the cost of gimmick/funny haha spells to 1 or even a .5 if that's possible

barnyard, locker staff, shit like that is funnyTM while being just as costly as a fireball or rod - if we want to deincentivize "kill everyone" murderbone wizards, why the hell are these the same cost?

1 TC purrbation spell when

We are not interested in removing wizard presently, as we don't believe there is enough wrong with it currently to warrant a config disable.

Headmin Votes:
Coconutwarrior97: Yes.
Jimmius: Yes.
Naloac: Yes.