Blob Away mission

[Helios]

A blob is eating another station, and it is up to Space Station 13 to try and save it. When connected, there's various loot, but this could be eaten by the blob. The opening room to this away mission is unable to be eaten by the blob due to indestructible walls, so the blob can't just cheese and eat the gateway immediately.

The main idea for this is that Away mission wizard is great and gives ghosts a chance to play an antagonist that is rarely rolled. Having the usual defense against the blob switched to an offensive to another world is an interesting play during slower rounds.

[ShadowDimentio]

>Blob
>More often

YES

[Zilenan91]

Yeah that'd be pretty sweet. Or like if there was a planet that was being taken over by a blob (maybe not even a player) and you would be tasked to go through and do stuff, maybe even the option of letting the blob invade the station through the gateway?

[ShadowDimentio]

The loot at the end would need to be pretty sweet though, otherwise the crew won't stay interested.

[kevinz000]

>ITS BLOB
>COMPETENT R&D
>IN COMES CHARGING 20 GREYSHIRTS WITH XRAYS AND ADV EGUNS
>GG

[ShadowDimentio]

I can count on one hand the amount of times I've lost to x-rays in any of my many rounds as blob

(It's 0)

[Helios]

The loot at the end would need to be pretty sweet though, otherwise the crew won't stay interested.

I was thinking just having a reward delivered directly from centcomm once it was killed, so that the blob couldn't eat it.
Like "We're bluespacing in all the loot to the bar for clearing out the blob, enjoy crew"

[ShadowDimentio]

But then there would be no incentive to beat the blob quickly, unless the reward decreased depending on the damage the blob did before it was killed, which sounds good on paper but impossible to code.

Actually you could have a thing count the highest the blob's blob count went, and the higher it is the less the reward. Should be easy enough.

[Helios]

But then there would be no incentive to beat the blob quickly, unless the reward decreased depending on the damage the blob did before it was killed, which sounds good on paper but impossible to code.

Actually you could have a thing count the highest the blob's blob count went, and the higher it is the less the reward. Should be easy enough.

Why do you want an incentive to kill the blob immediately?
The incentive to killing it immediately is having it be easier to kill.

[Anonmare]

5 layer shield blobs can stop x-rays and it takes them about half their charge to knock them down.

Source: I actually managed to test this

[J_Madison]

No more away mission player controlled antags.

Either people abuse it to get out, or someone spaces/uses up all the loot to spite people that try to complete them.

[Incomptinence]

Blob can literally be locked to a z level like how they can't survive on mining so it could easily be an alt blob that needs to stay on the away mission and the only way it could send walls it could control through a shuttle I think.

The concept just needs a bit of polish same with the wiz guards.

[ShadowDimentio]

But then there would be no incentive to beat the blob quickly, unless the reward decreased depending on the damage the blob did before it was killed, which sounds good on paper but impossible to code.

Actually you could have a thing count the highest the blob's blob count went, and the higher it is the less the reward. Should be easy enough.

Why do you want an incentive to kill the blob immediately?
The incentive to killing it immediately is having it be easier to kill.

Because otherwise people will just wait until they have like five x-rays thirty minutes in and nuke the blob who hasn't had anyone to fight all round in seconds.

That won't be fun for anyone.

[Helios]

But then there would be no incentive to beat the blob quickly, unless the reward decreased depending on the damage the blob did before it was killed, which sounds good on paper but impossible to code.

Actually you could have a thing count the highest the blob's blob count went, and the higher it is the less the reward. Should be easy enough.

Why do you want an incentive to kill the blob immediately?
The incentive to killing it immediately is having it be easier to kill.

Because otherwise people will just wait until they have like five x-rays thirty minutes in and nuke the blob who hasn't had anyone to fight all round in seconds.

That won't be fun for anyone.

It's possible to beat because of 2 reasons.
1. Unlike on station, you don't know where the blob is cenetered.
2. With a single entry point, the blob knows exactly where to defend

No more away mission player controlled antags.

Either people abuse it to get out, or someone spaces/uses up all the loot to spite people that try to complete them.

Which is why I suggest the loot be teleported in. I think people enjoy player controlled wizard because it lets them be wizards.
As for escaping the Z-level, I would suggest that blocking the blob from entering the room would work, but I would suggest letting Blobbernauts go through the gateway. This would give the crew an incentive to kill the infestation off level, so that they would stop being harassed by Blobbernauts. They could stop this by walling the gateway as wall, but this would act as a "valve", which any antagonist could destroy to get the flood of Blobbernauts back into the station.

[Zilenan91]

For this blob away mission to work, the gateway would have to be relatively far away, possibly through dangerous and mob-infested territory from the teleport zone. Otherwise people will pop in, pop out, and come back a few minutes later with 9000 xrays.

[Helios]

For this blob away mission to work, the gateway would have to be relatively far away, possibly through dangerous and mob-infested territory from the teleport zone. Otherwise people will pop in, pop out, and come back a few minutes later with 9000 xrays.

You can win against X-rays as blob

[Zilenan91]

Not if they come with 9000 of them immediately. Why would you spam blobbernauts to fight them if all they'd do is sit around doing literally nothing waiting for a crew that may or may not even come in the first place.

[Helios]

Not if they come with 9000 of them immediately. Why would you spam blobbernauts to fight them if all they'd do is sit around doing literally nothing waiting for a crew that may or may not even come in the first place.

Because Blobbernauts can go through the gateway.
The blob can't

[Zilenan91]

Oh yeah I forgot about that. Though is that really what we want from an away mission? An endless tide of blobbernauts? Granted you can just trap them inside the gateway room itself but they can always ghost out and the nauts become NPCs that can still move around and attack anyways.

[Helios]

Oh yeah I forgot about that. Though is that really what we want from an away mission? An endless tide of blobbernauts? Granted you can just trap them inside the gateway room itself but they can always ghost out and the nauts become NPCs that can still move around and attack anyways.

That's what we get from the gateway mission if nobody chooses to acknowledge/attempt it.
What do we get from other gateway missions if nobody does them?

[Zilenan91]

Absolutely nothing. Though I do feel like it'd be cheesy to just have like 9 blobbernauts swarm through the gateway and kill everything all of a sudden.

[Zellion]

Here's a controversial idea:
If the blob manages to eat the entire station, it can eat the gateway which makes it go through the gateway, to the station. Then the crew has to clear their gateway, the away mission gatway, and then kill the blob. Y/N?

[Yakumo_Chen]

Why not just have several rooms of loot far behind the blob, which spawns at a chokepoint between the loot rooms and the gateway entrance, so that the blob can slowly make their way towards to eat the loot as it grows?

This serves a dual purpose. The crew has to fight the blob and kill it to be able to get to the loot. They have to start fighting quickly or else the blob will eventually be able to eat all the loot.
However, by placing the loot behind the blob, the blob has to make a choice: Does it expand forward to create more defenses the crew has to hack through to be able to kill the core (and get the loot) or does the blob expand backwards to deny loot to the crew?

The loot will have to be in rooms that are inaccessible to blobbernauts, ie surrounded by rwalls and a locked door, so that blobbernauts can't simply fetch the loot and have the blob eat it, but still easy enough for a blob to simply chew through to consume the contents.

There could also be minor loot rooms in front of the blob too, with tools that can be actively used to fight the blob (lasers, rechargers, welding tools) which encourages it to expand forwards first to deny important assets to an away crew wanting to fight the blob. Some or all of these could be made accessible to blobbernauts, who will obviously want to work to deny blob-fighting tools and gives nauts something to do at first besides swarm the gateway.

There should also be plenty of corpses to give aspiring blobs an early bolster to defense in the form of spore zombies. Also naturally because it makes sense for there to be corpses in a station that's recently had to deal an outbreak of Blobitis.

The away mission needs to be littered with decorations that show signs that this blob wasn't the only one. Have plenty of dead blob tiles all over the place (especially around the gateway entrance so that crew will have to hack through ~something~ to start fighting the blob right away) as evidence that there's a blob menace that's been plaguing this station and it's been nearly successful at eating the entire damn thing at least once. neutral blob spore mobs and also maybe a blobbernaut mob hanging around will also give the crew a small distraction before they can fight the blob to give it time to make preparations and have a head start in expanding.

Normal blob rounds have blobs that get a head start through the element of surprise (assuming they don't pop right out in the open like a fucking dumbshit), but with the away mission, the crew will immediately know there's a blob, and where to find it, and there has to be something early to force the crew to wade through to give the away blob proper time to make early moves so it's not helpless.

[Anonmare]

An admin did this on Basil some time ago, I rolled blob antag rolled at the 1 hour 20 minute mark and one of the admins asked to borrow one of my nodes and placed it on the Away mission (it was the one with the bullet casings every fucking where). It was actually rather fun though the crew already had x-rays by virtue of it being a 1>hour round and I was on both the Away Mission and Station z-levels so I was doing a dual pronged attack.