Remove Acting-Captain Antagonists

[TagGamerGang2]

I think that acting-Captain antagonists should be removed due to the following reasons:
1. Acting-Captains usually roll lowpop rounds; ie not much security, if any, security to deal with them
2. All access allowing them to grab as much gear as they can
3. All access allowing them to roundstart subvert the AI
4.They at the least are afforded head of staff metaprotections and one might argue they're afforded the Captain metaprotections as well
5. Logically NT should put the people they're hiring to be in a Captain position under greater scrutiny

These 5 things usually make having an acting-Captain antagonist extremely boring and usually unfun especially if they do all 4 as there is, practically, not too many ways to go about solving it unless you're lucky enough to have a security team on lowpop.

[Jacquerel]

This isn't a change that can be made via policy, configs only allow disabling heads in general from becoming antagonists.
On lowpop rounds, removing all heads from the antag pool may leave it so shallow that you can essentially just predict who the valid antagonist choices are.

In terms of solving it in code, it is a thorny problem. Antagonist status is decided before jobs are assigned rather than after.
At this point the system cannot know who if anyone will be the Acting Captain.
Additionally, it can't know if the person who was assigned Acting Captain actually is the Acting Captain. There is a non-zero chance that someone will just pass the ID to another head, who might be a traitor or might become a traitor due to a midround.

[Higgin]

edit as to what jacq said: this isn't really a policy issue, as there's not even a config to which this idea or the original correspond. should this be moved over to ideas?

I would not be opposed to just preventing heads from being concurrent roundstart antagonists. As far as I'm aware, all that would require is adding them to the roles excluded from the roundstart rulesets alongside sec and the cap.

Midround? sure, cool betrayals. Latejoin? sure, if there's a hiring shortage, maybe the vetting has gotten a bit more slack.

I remember the days of antag sec and captains. One of the reasons we don't do it any more is it gives antags who basically fall or opt into power a cakewalk that makes the whole dynamic around trying to work with those roles frustrating if not impossible.

► Show Spoiler

something a lot of folks might not know or remember is that this was concurrent with the time of the original "grey tide" bug - tiding arrests and sec was a different ballgame back in the day when, legit, "HALP OFFICAR FRIENDLY KILLIGN ME" was very possibly an antag doing it, and disappearing into the brig "for no raisins" might very well be for greentext. closest you get to that these days is antags disguising as or getting made into sec, but it's much less common. you had to watch your fucking back and also watch the guy to your left.

It can also be a lot more challenging and interesting for my money's worth - when there's somebody there to oppose it.

Disable roundstart antags on heads to add a gradient of trust in there. You'll get acting captains who aren't bad
.. yet, and that credibility will be something they can use later in their favor if they do turn bad for the interesting heel turn.

By the time that happens, whatever power they'll have will, at least, be something the crew has gotten used to and seen.

Seems like a good middleground to me. It'd be a loss if all heads were perfectly trustworthy, imo, but it's also a loss just how damn often they can't be counted on, people know this, and the people who roll Acting Cap antag very often either hobble themselves to be sporting or get a total milk run (like the captain with the "steal the jetpack and hand tele" objectives - a certified classic.)

idk, I'm open to the idea in one form or another.

[warbluke]

On lowpop rounds, removing all heads from the antag pool may leave it so shallow that you can essentially just predict who the valid antagonist choices are.

I can tell you that at lowpop levels it's already easy to predict who's who.

[Vekter]

No, because you shouldn't be able to use meta reasoning to determine who is and isn't an antag beyond what we already have. Additionally, there isn't really a way to reasonably do this even in code because you'd have to somehow indicate to the game who is and isn't "acting captain". You could indeed make it where heads can't be antags again, but that's dumb and boring and I don't think this really needs to be solved.

[Constellado]

I do not want roundstart antags taken away from heads thank you! I want to be able to see the HoP acing all har har evil, ya know?

Acting captain heads do suck but I know a few people (including myself) that would just ask an admin to get rid of it if they get it themselves and they usually comply.

[kieth4]

Code issue