/tg/Station 13

It seems lings are somewhat free to murder bone. I personally think this is a very unfun way of playing. atleast for manual they should not be encouraged to murder bone as much as possible

I dont think they are uniquely required to kill a lot of people as compared to traitor/heratic. They may retalatie against the entire station of the entire station hunts them but now the ling can cause as much descrtuction as a nukie and I think thats overkill

https://tgstation13.org/wiki/Rules#Rest ... estruction

Lings became unrestricted last term as a result of viewtopic.php?f=85&t=34523

Allow me to pull up the reading from that thread:

particularly, the fact that restricted antagonists should be handled in proportion to their crimes. typically, your presence on the station is a most heinous crime because people will roleplay it out that you've killed, eaten, and replaced the crewmember that you started as. this provides them a reason to rr you based on the single fact that you got the funnytext at the start of the round, however it is you end up being revealed, be it harmful or harmless.

Basically, the crew is almost always going to be trying to cremate revealed lings, because you can't just confiscate their gamer gear like you can an uplink, and because throwing them in a cell for 5 minutes doesn't really do much. It also doesn't make IC sense to go easy changelings. So the logic is that if the crew is de facto unrestricted against lings, then lings should be unrestricted against the crew.

GPeckman wrote: ↑Wed Dec 06, 2023 1:51 pm Allow me to pull up the reading from that thread:

particularly, the fact that restricted antagonists should be handled in proportion to their crimes. typically, your presence on the station is a most heinous crime because people will roleplay it out that you've killed, eaten, and replaced the crewmember that you started as. this provides them a reason to rr you based on the single fact that you got the funnytext at the start of the round, however it is you end up being revealed, be it harmful or harmless.

Basically, the crew is almost always going to be trying to cremate revealed lings, because you can't just confiscate their gamer gear like you can an uplink, and because throwing them in a cell for 5 minutes doesn't really do much. It also doesn't make IC sense to go easy changelings. So the logic is that if the crew is de facto unrestricted against lings, then lings should be unrestricted against the crew.

im more annoyed that this has become an excuse to just play as a griefy traitor rather then as a ling sometimes. just going on a murdering spree

I dont mind if they retaliate in such a fashion but either they dont do anything at all or are the ones instigating it

They are evil shapeshifting horrors who's main goal involve killing people and taking their place. They have no reason to show any restraint. Let them slaughter.

Autisme wrote: ↑Wed Dec 06, 2023 5:13 pm im more annoyed that this has become an excuse to just play as a griefy traitor rather then as a ling sometimes. just going on a murdering spree

I dont mind if they retaliate in such a fashion but either they dont do anything at all or are the ones instigating it

Lemme try to simplify the issue.

The problem is that, short of locking a Changeling in a room full of BZ (which disables their powers), they're very difficult to contain. This is by design and changing it would involve code changes, which we don't really deal with as far as policy goes.

The decision was made that it's healthier to let Changelings do whatever they want, since the crew is pretty much always going to kill them if they catch them.

I should note that it is super based to capture a changeling if you can pull it off though

Its not hard just strip them and build a glass wall around them....not glass window tiles a glass WALL, glass on girders.

But thats just gay baby jail containment, lings are by design meant to be hard to contain in a "friendly" way, every aspect about their kit is geared towards making them self sufficient and opposed to everything else.

I think having overly complicated exceptions is not particularly conducive to good policy. If they're restricted, they should be consistent with other restricted antags. If they're unrestricted, much the same.

NecromancerAnne wrote: ↑Thu Dec 07, 2023 6:05 am I think having overly complicated exceptions is not particularly conducive to good policy. If they're restricted, they should be consistent with other restricted antags. If they're unrestricted, much the same.

I don't believe it would be too complicated, more just avoiding the situations where a ling would be justified in plasma flooding, bombing every department, sabotaging the SM and going out of there away to round remove ASAP on MRP is something that strikes me as odd. traitors(to my knowledge) are already justified in killing anyone that hunts them and security. So this should cover the cases of "crew will hunt to kill anyway"

I agree with the sentiment, even if not the idea.

I've heard stories of Lings using their Ling status as an excuse to just play Unrestricted Traitor so to speak. They're not using their ling powers, they've grabbed the hand-tele and set the beacon to a chasm to instakill/functionally RR people. Or other such similar cases.

And in such an idea, I kinda agree. The point behind it was to let Spooky Murder Alien do Spooky Murder Alien things since they'll be deleted instantly if they're caught. But if someone's just going around not even playing their role and just using the license to Depopulate the Station, that should probably be smacked.

CMDR_Gungnir wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2023 3:25 am They're not using their ling powers, they've grabbed the hand-tele and set the beacon to a chasm to instakill/functionally RR people.

I know this isn't the totality of your point, but it's worth noting that a recent PR should have make this impossible.

Vekter wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2023 6:32 am

CMDR_Gungnir wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2023 3:25 am They're not using their ling powers, they've grabbed the hand-tele and set the beacon to a chasm to instakill/functionally RR people.

I know this isn't the totality of your point, but it's worth noting that a recent PR should have make this impossible.

Good to know that much, at least. I remember when I heard about it the first time, I thought it was a clever idea, but one that would absolutely suck to be killed by.

CMDR_Gungnir wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2023 3:25 am I agree with the sentiment, even if not the idea.

I've heard stories of Lings using their Ling status as an excuse to just play Unrestricted Traitor so to speak. They're not using their ling powers, they've grabbed the hand-tele and set the beacon to a chasm to instakill/functionally RR people. Or other such similar cases.

And in such an idea, I kinda agree. The point behind it was to let Spooky Murder Alien do Spooky Murder Alien things since they'll be deleted instantly if they're caught. But if someone's just going around not even playing their role and just using the license to Depopulate the Station, that should probably be smacked.

If someone is going to do something so blatantly antagonistic as that they are probably going to get killed anyways

not only has the chasm play been patched out, rp rule 10 exists for this and we were made explicitly aware of this gimmick.

i'm not sure there's a cake to both have and eat here. on manuel we have limits for the repetition of destructive gimmicks, and also restrictions on depopulating the station on lowpop when the crew can't react. beyond that, unrestricted is supposed to mean what it says on the tin. is the idea to have a quasi-restricted? halfway between unrestricted and restricted antags? be destructive but be kinda chill about it? sounds gnarly.

Itseasytosee2me wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2023 8:25 am If someone is going to do something so blatantly antagonistic as that they are probably going to get killed anyways

I wasn't in the round, but I heard it ended up with a LOT of people in the hole.

dendydoom wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2023 10:40 am not only has the chasm play been patched out, rp rule 10 exists for this and we were made explicitly aware of this gimmick.

i'm not sure there's a cake to both have and eat here. on manuel we have limits for the repetition of destructive gimmicks, and also restrictions on depopulating the station on lowpop when the crew can't react. beyond that, unrestricted is supposed to mean what it says on the tin. is the idea to have a quasi-restricted? halfway between unrestricted and restricted antags? be destructive but be kinda chill about it? sounds gnarly.

Assuming paragraph 2 is ALSO directed at my comments rather than the OP, I have some Thoughts. I'll put it in a drop down just in case it's not.
imo it's still worth a read anyway because it elaborates on my thoughts a lot better and my opinion is the gold standard that all other opinions should be held to, obviously

yeah i was being smug it wasn't meant as an attack it was meant because i think i'm very funny and i wanted to hear more thoughts on it. i'm not really comfortable talking about a ruling made on another player so all i'm going to say about the chasm gimmick is that we know about it and they have been spoken to about it.

there's not a whole lot i can see to be done about people being boring or being so zany it breaks the game except to step in when it happens a bunch and go "okay that's enough it's making the game bad when you keep doing that". to be honest in my experience it's just part of allowing the freedom we want to allow. i would agree it's an administrative issue to tell people to stop doing things that make the game really unfun to play, but i get a weird feeling when i think about trying to tell people when where and how to use the mechanics of antags. it's up to the player to figure that out.

there's a fatigue that builds up when antags have a maze of considerations to navigate instead of just doing their thing.

this change was initially made because the average response of the crew was to feed the ling headfirst into a meatgrinder at the first sign of trouble. really, considering it seriously, this is perhaps a code issue with regards to how they're killed if we want to keep them restricted?

dendydoom wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2023 1:27 pm [snip]

This is entirely fair, then.

In all honesty, it's less about That Specific Guy, and more just that he served as a very easy way to point at and go "What do we do when a ruling is made for a specific reason, and people go against the spirit of the reasoning in order to do something that may be kinda lame".

It's also why I wanted to hear more of your thoughts on it, because I don't think re-restricting them is the answer, and neither is quasi-restricting them. Sure, the Changeling not using his Powers and just using Cheap Tricks to insta-kill as many people as possible isn't using his Powers and thus isn't really Doing Ling Stuff. But at the same time, we don't want to restrict player freedom so Changelings HAVE to be using their power, and if we make it so that there's a little asterix next to their Unrestricted that says "(as long as you're doing Spooky Murder Alien stuff about it)" we end up with that thing where people have to hesitate, instead of being able to follow the freedom of the round. But at the same time, when they were only unrestricted because "the moment someone sees an armblade, you are going into the woodchipper", do we want to see the experience that people come to Manuel for (the general expectation that they are not going to simply be a Statistic from some guy who has only got three lines of Say, which are just "mald" "cope" "seethe" on one of the Standard/Common Antags) taken away by the very scenario they were hoping to avoid?

I know you can't speak about Specific Incidents or People, but I'd be interested in seeing a peek behind the curtain in situations like this (even if it's a peek behind the curtains for your mind, and not the admin team as a whole).

The fact that that the best plan for a ling is to mostly rely on crew gear and equipment instead of going full alien monster on people is a big lrp coder issue.

I just want my alien monsters to commit evil alien murder with actual alien powers, damnit. Make lings cool again.

Either we keep them fully unrestricted, or we restrict them. A middle ground will just open the floodgates for quasi-restricted antags with bloated policy. In this instance, we're choosing to keep lings unrestricted to preserve what they can achieve with horror movie vibes.

Chesh, Fikou, & TBM - +1