Bottom post of the previous page:
I've raised this proposal a couple times in admin channels, and it's generally approved of there, so I'm gonna post it out here to get more feedback on what the wider Manuel audience thinks of it.Manuel's been having consistent issues for months centred around low energy rounds where nothing really happens, and I think a large part of the reason for this is the massive negative interaction between the murderbone rules as written and any attempt to engage in large-scale station sabotage. Under the current rules as written even a single invalid kill is classified as murderboning, and while I don't think that's a problem in small scale personal conflict (to be frank, valid reasons to kill people as an antagonist are incredibly easy to justify) it DOES basically prohibit any antagonistic action with the potential to kill many people. Something as simple as putting up a shocked grille in maintenance as an antagonist resulting in an assistant dying is technically murderbone, let alone something as cool as interesting as sabotaging the supermatter to release a singularity. (Clarification: to the best of my knowledge no one has ever been bwoinked for setting lethal shocked grilles up as an antag, and I'd personally probably instantly declare rule 0 if I saw it myself, frying assistants is a sacred right)
This has a further negative effect on the quality of actual RP on Manuel - In my recent experience nobody on Manuel cares much at all in character about the possibility of critical station sabotage in areas like atmospherics. The area is specifically listed as highly dangerous in the silicon policy rules but nobody has reason to care because of the OOC consideration that very few antags are ALLOWED to touch the bad times plasma pump. How your character actually acts is just as important to playing a role as what they say, and at this point people are treating massive threats IC as non-threats, because OOC they are.
With that in mind, my proposal is this:
Mass sabotage and indirect antagonist actions that are likely to kill people are allowed across the board so long as the antagonist who set them off does not take direct and specific personal action to maximise the bodycount of those actions.
Examples:
An antagonist who wanted to plasmaflood and then run around opening up air alarms to get the spicey going could do so, but they would be prohibited from taking an axe or esword to kill people escaping the flood.
Another antagonist wants to sabotage the supermatter and release a singularity, having beforehand set up a singulo beacon on the other side of the station such as to drag their new hungry baby through populated areas like medbay, they could do that, but running around stunning players attempting to flee and throwing them into the angry disk would be disallowed.
My hope is that this would result in returning freedom for antagonists to pull off dangerous gimmicks and simple but timeless strategies without resulting in the degeneration of antag play towards "how quickly can I make as many people as possible as dead as possible?"