/tg/Station 13

Having a constant lifeline to the entire crew is terrible for intrigue, paranoia and mystery; something that is allegedly what most gamemodes are based on. Over the years it has caused antag balance to hinge on being able to shut down your victim instantly to avoid being called out over the radio which makes for boring and often unfair situations

The reason I'm suggesting a config option is because the removal of common has deep balance implications and while I think all servers would eventually benefit from this change, Manuel would be an excellent testing bed for this as the more reliable response from security and crew compared to other servers makes antagonists have a harder time than usual

Personally i like the idea of making calling for help more complicated, but i've witnessed a trial of this a few years ago, and it ended up making you feel kind of isolated from the other players, especially with a job that keeps you in your office. Which resulted in people clumping with their departments and interacting less with the others, and interdepartmental cooperation is tough enough to incentivize as it is.

That said, if the playerbase could adapt to that change without killing the rp, it would probably be beneficial towards all the stealth, deception, and paranoia aspects of the game, and would mean that antag tools could be nerfed a bit since they don't need to have a silence/stun or instakill to get away with murder.

I think this is a great idea. I'd really be curious to see how it turns out.
It also would have the hidden benefit of not crowding up the chatbox with irrelevant gibberjabber, and make station announcements and red alerts something to actually watch for.

The breaking in period would be insane but I like the idea of this. Maybe it'd even lead to people remembering holopads are a thing.
Would you want wall mounted intercoms to still function as common radio? Provided headsets do not have that frequency (I suppose the AI could still hear it? And the warden can monitor it?), and you must be in range of one to hear and in range to talk into them with the .i prefix.

I think you could keep intercoms working as they do, and I imagine they'd still be the most common way to call for help or get the attention of the AI, but assuming you even manage to reach one in time there's no longer the guarantee that every person on the server is going to hear it. So I suppose you'd simply be removing common from all headsets.

And if you need to get the attention of someone in particular we have a lot of interesting systems that are rarely used simply because it's more convenient to just shout over the radio (holopads, pdas, request consoles, newscasters etc.)

I don't like the idea of making such a game-changing thing config.

You can send security alerts to security radio with requests consoles. There may not be enough at the moment to replace Common as a means of calling for help or declaring emergencies but I think that sort of thing is preferable to being able to tell everyone with headsets when an antagonist tries to do something bad.

Also gives a bit more value to the comms console ability to make announcements

Adds value to station bounced radios

I'm not sure If I would like this or not but the concept does sound fun, it is something I'd like to give a try

Perhaps make it an admin button so it can be tried out here and there and if it turns out to be fun maybe it can be added as a more permanent thing.