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Showing content with the highest reputation on 04/06/2017 in all areas

  1. I like the clown that flies around from time to time
    1 point
  2. I'm not sure how realistic it is to do this mechanically but the idea is this: When you use the Give Karma command, instead of the person being awarded the Karma immediately, they become your "Karma Target." They are not actually rewarded Karma until the end of the round. If you use the Give Karma command again, the person you target becomes your new "Karma Target." You can switch targets as many times as you want, but only the last person you targeted gets a Karma point at the end of the round. This way, you can award Karma early in the round without having to worry about not being able to give your Karma to someone more deserving later, and you'll never be in a position where you want to award Karma to someone but you can't. I think this would encourage people to give Karma a bit more freely overall. One potential problem I can see is if people disconnect or leave a round early, I'm not sure how easy it would be to still make sure the Karma goes through in that case.
    1 point
  3. This, pretty much. Also, you have people who are solidly medium roleplay and are annoyed at things both the higher and lower RPers engage in. This is a concept that probably isn't ever going to change, unless we choose to go fully one direction or another. As for "well, it's obvious they're powergamers because they're overly paranoid or don't take the cloning process/dying seriously." I Kinda object to this notion. While I can understand not liking that behavior, I think this is an example of "not liking something and using roleplay as a false justification to stamp out said behavior". Much like any roleplay game, such as D&D, there's established paradigms and "laws of physics" within that universe. For SS13, there's a few things that are very clearly established. For one, cloning is available, doesn't cost anything from your paycheck, and is viable----for another, souls do exist and this fact is only going to be more cemented into Para, going forward (ie: https://github.com/ParadiseSS13/Paradise/pull/5890). Given these two fact, it's fairly logical that people treat death in a nonchalant; dying is going to hurt, sure, but the fact that you are the same person you died as and the fact that "revival is cheap", well, it's going to absolutely cause people to behave differently. Again, I can understand if some people don't like this, but to say that "remembering everything and treating death as trivial is bad roleplay", I would argue, is patently false. On that similar line, due to the fact that shifts are, in some form and light, interconnected, it's also fairly reasonable that characters invariably would become paranoid over time. Not a day goes by without at least 15-20 crewmembers dying, someone shooting up medbay, nuke ops attempting to bomb the station, or aliens trying to dissect you. The frequency of this events happening is extremely high, to say the least. Due to the frequency of these events and the fact that all shifts are interconnected, again, it's only logical that, even from a roleplay perspective, people become paranoid and defensive. Again, I'll repeat; I can understand if someone doesn't like those effects, but again, labeling this as "poor roleplay", comes across as playing D&D then complaining about the wizard using magic (because you don't personally like magic or the impacts it has on roleplay in said game). Now to get on to the main point. Removal of revival methods is only going to further serve to entrench paranoid behavior. Recall that I said that "revival is cheap", earlier; note that I didn't say "death was cheap", because in SS13 death is very expensive; there's a lot of situations where you can die and be out of the game for the next hour (or more). Making revival more "expensive" is going to make death more "expensive", which means people are going to do even more to avoid it, which will include paranoid/overly-suspecting behaviors. This is one reason why I don't think removing cloning is going to have the impact suggested; it's going to make players more paranoid than they already are (and thus going even further in their mechanical proceedings to stay alive) while simultaneously making revival even more expensive. The latter of which, I don't think is needed; as pointed out, death is already extremely expensive in SS13--it makes sense that if is easy to come by and you're likely to stay that way, that if you are under the circumstances to be found, revival should probably be a little bit easier. It's a way of keeping players active and engaged in a game that is a 2 hour slog between rounds. So, at the end of the day, I don't think removal of cloning is going to have nearly the "positive" impact on roleplay as some think; it ultimately requires a very very strict ruleset to address all the behaviors associated with it which are often illogically contradictory in nature (ie: cross round relationships/friendships are allowed, but experiences and events around the relationship are not), as seen on stations like Polaris or Bay. This is an insane level of administrative involvement that isn't going to happen on Paradise because of how taxing and time-involved it is, not to mention, the idea of "feigning stupidity" in a lot of situations isn't too popular with the majority of the community (or admins), either.
    1 point
  4. I'm still fairly new to SS13 but I DMed/Developed for a NWN persistent world RP server for 5-6 years. Making players fear death was a pretty big issue because clearly people were not on our server. And after struggling with it for a long time, I've come to the conclusion that you have to pick your battles and this particular hill is not one you want to die on. Players don't fear death. They fear boredom. That's why players are always going to charge into dangerous situations. Because sitting in a locker instead is boring. Safe is boring. A server full of people doing the safe thing is boring. People won't play a boring server. It's okay that people are reckless. Chock it up to the fact that the type of person who signs on to work at a deep space plasma research station in a world of cults, space carp, vampires, shadowlings, changelings, terror spiders and Xenos are probably not people who shy away from danger. We're all a bit crazy if we decided to be on the Cyberaid in the first place. As for Cloning roleplay, the problem here is that mechanics and roleplay are in conflict. Fixing this problem means putting the two back into sync. When I play MD, my patients are real players with their own agendas and their own things they want to be doing. Now occasionally, you get the guy who wants to RP his trip to Medbay and those players are great and I will definitely take the time to chat with them and tell them what is going on, ask them how they got injured and describe the treatment I'm giving them. But, often I will have a patient who has things to do and they just want me to fix them and get them back into the round as quickly as possible. And this is why the Cloning versus Treatment debate is more like a balance than treatment being always the correct choice. Yes, I will roleplay that Cloning is a last resort because it means the person died and a replacement is now walking around. But at the same time, if I have a player who just wants to get back into the round, and I know I can get him back into the round twice as quickly by cloning him as I can be reviving and treating him, is it really right for me to force my own roleplay preferences onto them, to enhance my experience at the cost of theirs? I'm not so sure it is. The solution to this problem is to change design so that the roleplay motivations and mechanics motivations lead to the same behavior, rather than different ones. This can be done by either changing roleplay or changing mechanics to bring the two into sync. To change it mechanically: if we want Cloning to be a last resort in terms of roleplay, then it must also be a last resort mechanically. That is, it must be the most difficult and time consuming way to revive someone. How exactly to go about accomplishing that, I'll leave to people more experienced in ss13 mechanics than I am. To change the roleplay: Give roleplay reasons to clone over treating. For example, add fluff about how science proved ghosts exist and migrate to a new body. Or make NT SOP say you have to use the least expense and time consuming methods of treatment and even though we don't like it, we all signed the NT contract so we have to do it. My preference would be to fix it mechanically by making cloning more time consuming and difficult. When I play MD I want to do more than just throw people into Cryotubs or Cloners. I want there to be a reason for long, complicated surgical procedures. That said, it's less work to fix the issue from the roleplay perspective, and while doctors might like longer and more complicated treatments, patients typically don't.
    1 point
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