/tg/Station 13

I noticed that quite a few machines don't have any effects when emagged, so I decided to make a thread for putting emag effect ideas in.

Ideally, these interactions shouldn't give much of an advantage (since emags are already one of the best/strongest traitor items in the game), but should still provide an interesting interaction that someone could probably use for a gimmick (or laugh at when they discover it).

For example:
P.A.N.D.E.M.I.C.: Any future vaccines dispensed by the machine still act as normal vaccines, but also apply a random (mild?) brain trauma upon being added to a creature's system (sort of like how mutagen adds a random mutation upon the calling of on_mob_add()). If necessary for balance, these "tainted" vaccines could only apply a random brain trauma if their consumer doesn't have any brain traumas already (to minimize the effectiveness of tainted vaccines in smoke). Alternatively, make the tainted vaccines cause a special "autism" brain trauma that does nothing but show up on medical scanners.

Holopad: Lets you call other holopads without someone needing to accept the call at the receiving holopad. Alternatively, the emagged holopad (but not holopads that it calls (unless those holopads are also emagged)) automatically accepts all holocalls without those holocalls needing to be manually accepted.

Crew Monitoring Console: Turns the sensors of all jumpsuits currently on the same z-level as the crew monitoring console up to the "tracking" setting. Alternatively, sets the settings of all jumpsuits currently on the same z-level as the crew monitoring console to random levels ("none", "living", "exact vitals", or "tracking").

Does anyone else have any ideas to add to the list?

For reference, the existing list of emag effects is here: https://tgstation13.org/wiki/Emag

Eh not a fan of a lot of these. Overall I believe the emag shouldn’t have a function that is purely positive to the crew and has no downsides or illegal uses. I think change the holopad one so you can instead spy on any other holopad. With the crew monitoring, if a crew member gets an emag they can now track down criminals hiding with sensors off with little ways for the criminal to counter this. I think it would be better if it could somehow show everyone as healthy so if a doc looks at it they are less likely to realize someone is dying

Yeah, an emagged crew monitor should report incorrect values for things in some way, such as showing dying people as completely healthy, tracking beacons giving the wrong coordinates, and so on.

Screemonster wrote:Yeah, an emagged crew monitor should report incorrect values for things in some way, such as showing dying people as completely healthy, tracking beacons giving the wrong coordinates, and so on.

I had initially considered that, but I figured that someone making a suit sensors console in maint and repeatedly emagging it could feel bad/like an exploit. I guess it wouldn't be too unbalancing, though.

Could only affect the computer you emag, not all others. Of Course, that makes the hand-held ones even more valuable.

I'm not a fan of being able to remotely affect people without counterplay. Randomly changing peoples suit sensors would feel more like a bug than any sort of entertaining gameplay.