Syndicate Contracts

[Akrilla]

Your employers have reason to believe that certain individuals on-board the station hold valuable information. You're to bring these people to a designated spot on the station (I'm thinking that it'll always be a dorm room) for pickup and payment, dead or alive doesn't matter, cloning isn't an issue for the Syndicate, but keeping them alive will grant a bonus since the cloning procedure isn't perfect, and it isn't fully understood how it may augment memories and lessen the quality of the information they want.

You can start a contract by emagging a cargo console, this will open up a new part of the interface that allows for you to roll a target. The person and payment will be completely randomised from the crew manifest, with a limited number of rerolls, having the player need to weigh up the options between difficulty to kill, and overall payment. However, payments for heads of staff, or other high ranking crew members may have a higher weighted payment. They'll also need to consider that the target may not realistically be recoverable, i.e. gibbed, etc.
To collect payment, you drag the body to a dorm room (or however I end up making the drop off point work), open up your uplink and select dropoff. A syndicate operative (NPC) will teleport in, maybe say a line of dialogue just to add some flavour to it, and give payment before teleporting themselves and the body away. This might also replace the null crate, since this was how the idea got started.

Since the scope of this is bigger than the "replacement for null crate", I thought by expanding this to the regular traitor gamemode, e.g. random chance to be a contractor on round start, with their objectives to be to complete x number of contracts, where at a certain server pop, there's always at least one guaranteed contractor. They can roll their contracts directly from their PDA, without the whole cargo emag thing. They start with much less TC, perhaps even 0, but with a randomised low TC traitor weapon, but have the potential to gain more than the traditional 20 TC if they do a good job.

I feel like there's a really interesting idea here, but needs fleshed out a bit, I'd appreciate some opinions.

[Plapatin]

having it always be the dorm rooms will 100% lead to metagame, i'd think something like a randomized maint area would work better
the gimmick will get stale quickly if there's ALWAYS going to be a contractor, maybe make it something like traitor+bb where it can happen as a side thing
im pretty interested in how this idea could work out but you'd also probably have to change abductors while you're at it, because the two ideas are really similar

[Stickymayhem]

Use the existing droppod system and syndicate pod sprite for retrieval and make the target editable by admins in game and I will love you for ever.

[Akrilla]

having it always be the dorm rooms will 100% lead to metagame, i'd think something like a randomized maint area would work better
the gimmick will get stale quickly if there's ALWAYS going to be a contractor, maybe make it something like traitor+bb where it can happen as a side thing
im pretty interested in how this idea could work out but you'd also probably have to change abductors while you're at it, because the two ideas are really similar

Yeah, completely agree about it being metagamed. Maybe randomised areas that aren't too difficult to reach, and also quite out the way. Maybe things like custodial closet etc. Not sure how it might work on all the different stations though, I don't want to end up manually setting possible areas for each map.

Use the existing droppod system and syndicate pod sprite for retrieval and make the target editable by admins in game and I will love you for ever.

The pod system is pretty nice looking so yeah I'd be up for using that with the reverse mode for retrieval. By target do you mean the red crosshair before it lands? Could change that while I work in the feature, sure.