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Having tested newcrit today: If you simply attack someone until they die, the amount of hits required to kill them seems excessive. 2-4 full stetchkin clips. 24 esword hits. 39 egun shots. 22 dual esword hits. 43 welder hits. However, only a fraction of that (e.g: one stetchkin clip) is enough to deal someone a mortal wound that will kill them in a minute or so. During that minute they can get back up temporarily, even grab a weapon and shoot you. The advantage of this is that it makes fights more interesting, gives people a chance after they're ambushed, etc. I think it is actually a net benefit to the game. The disadvantage is that the more damage you are applying, the longer it subjectively seems to take for the person to die. Because the more hits you're doing, the more damage you're dealing, and the more it seems like you SHOULD have exhausted their health a long time ago. I had a few times when I VV'ed someone after they died and they had >500 brute or burn damage before dying. As such the main tweak I suggest to newcrit is that the threshold at which someone simply dies from accumulated damage should be significantly lower. It shouldn't take >500 points of brute or burn to trigger instant death. If you're already in crit and you take say another 100 combined new damage beyond what put you in crit, you should probably just die at that point, without any RNG involved. That said, the system definitely has pros and cons. It makes fights more interesting (less one-sided) but it also strains immersion at times. It feels a little ridiculous the number of bullets I can pump into someone in a row before they die. But, equally, giving someone the ability to surprise you in combat may help keep the game fresh and make fights actually better.

So my dislike of new-crit is not a secret at this point. I've given up on seeing it reverted and, after looking at PRs, I see that a reversion was already shut down so it's extremely unlikely that it would ever happen. https://github.com/ParadiseSS13/Paradise/pull/11815 So instead of trying to bring back the old system I will propose one change to the new system that will fix it's greatest flaw. The greatest flaw with new-crit is how players are basically immune to death until they've ticked out to brain damage or cardiac failure. I've seen, and have also experienced personally, players that have gotten wailed on by energy swords, guns, lasers, ect. and have taken hundreds of brute/burn damage and just lie on the ground, gasping for breath as they slowly tick out to brain damage or heart failure. I've even seen players take hundreds of damage and still stand up to fight back or even put their own attacker into crit or even kill them. This is, honestly, unacceptable. Player conflict is one of the core mechanics of the server and the fact that someone can get hit with an energy sword dozens of times before they finally die is unacceptable. Therefore, here is my proposed change. Everything about how new-crit works now will remain exactly the same. Players have a chance to go into shock at the same point, and then cardiac arrest and what-not BUT once the player has taken 200+ combined brute/burn damage they die. Period, no exceptions. That means that if the player is sitting at zero HP or -20 or whatever, they can still go into shock and die from untreated wounds but that ALSO means that if the player takes a large amount of lethal damage from lasers or swords or whatever other weapons then they will still die. This change will make it so that terror spiders don't have to wait to wrap people who are ticking out to cardiac failure if they just keep biting them. It'll also make it so that holoparasites will die properly. It'll make it so that players who have already lost the fight don't have a chance to just stand back up suddenly and perhaps pull a taser or stun weapon out to turn the tide. It'll remove a lot of the RNG from combat in a system that is already woefully RNG heavy.

*slides in and quietly drops his mostly ignored crit patch https://github.com/ParadiseSS13/Paradise/pull/11543

In my opinion, the problem isn't that people don't die. The problem is they don't go down, or if they do they get back up, even in crit. All that needs to happen is have it so once you hit critical, you'll be incapacitated fairly shortly without some serious drugs. I'm not sure the best way to accomplish this... via stamina damage seems like it would work. I can tell you it's really annoying with new crit how you get two idiots fist fighting in the bar and both of them can keep a bar fight going until they've dealt 300 damage to eachother. Everything becames a lethal struggle with new crit because it's so easy to get into a position where you'll die eventually but so hard to be put into a position where you can no longer fight. You can't hurt someone to the point where they stop without hurting them enough that they'll die without medical attention. If you don't have stuns and zipties you have to flat out murder them to get them to stop, and it makes proper force escalation very difficult.

I’m personally under the impression that no one should survive past -100 health, that’s 200 combined damage of any type, crit occurring at 0 health as it does now, this is what it used to be and makes sense as all the weapons in the game were balanced around this. This keeps the changes of new crit while still not turning people into tanks. While this can make fights more interesting people can accommodate for this by using stuns along with their murder weapons and it can also be underwhelming in situations like executions where it’s unlikely the person you’re executing will be able to fight back

I've come to realize that my rate of producing sketches correlates to how much I'm procrastinating from doing important things, because what happens is that when I have something important on my plate I can't buckle in for a proper round of SS13 without feeling guilty about it, but with sketching I can stop whenever I want. Just this last batch and I'll go do the stuff I've been putting off, I swear. I think I'm going to start putting technical rambling (ie. Discussing challenges involved with creating the sketch, new techniques, lessons learned, etc.) into spoiler sections. I realize not everyone's interested in that but I also really do like talking about my work. It's with great regret that I admit I've never seen a Chaplain attempt this, let alone pull it off. Chaplains really should take a more direct role in fighting the cult, though. Trying to figure out how to draw animal snouts from a frontal profile, so I figured I'd draw @Furasian's sec main. I consider Fillmoore to be a fairly competent sec officer, though admittedly he and Cecilia rarely see eye-to-eye: Cecilia tends to push for more expedient, open-ended interpretations of Space Law, whereas Fillmoore tends to emphasize a no-nonsense, by-the-book approach. Upon occasion Cecilia has brought this up in a less-than-helpful manner. Of course, this is not to say that Fillmoore doesn't have a sense of humor. ...To be honest I'm not actually sure if it was Fillmoore who had the 'lick the microphone' gimmick or some other Vulpkanin sec main. Figuring out how to draw Unathi. Now that the more interesting stuff is out of the way. I usually don't upload studies (as they vastly outnumber the 'proper' drawings I create and would quickly overload the thread), but I saw @PhantasmicDream's studies in the forum art club and I found them quite helpful, so here goes: And of course, we leave the best for last. - Bane of Security Thread, again. Given @imsxz's rather "colorful" track record, part of me wonders if giving Ares fan art is encouraging the right behavior, but he kicked my ass fair and square multiple times, and he'd stick around and use his robustness to help out when he wasn't an antag instead of just antag fishing science, so he has my respect for that much. In regards to the sketch itself, it wasn't until I had finished scanning that I remembered that Ares had bright pink eyes but by that point the paper had already started warping from repeated eraser use and I didn't want to tear the page by trying to fix it.

Vespa. One heck of a squish! Pretty goopy.

August 10: Spartan and Shattaredcoyote/Dragonslayer932 are now On Leave from the staff team. August 13: Alffd has retired from the staff team. @Norwest @xProlithium @MysticLiger @Dovixx and @Abydos have been promoted to Game Admin.

I posted this batch at 4:00am so I'm probably going to have to edit the captions later. Trying to figure out how to break Same Face Syndrome. - Thread. Not sure where Alissa Bennett went, but before my most recent hiatus she had a gimmick of devoting an unnerving amount of energy into expressing how much she liked Cecilia and how much work she put into trying to emulate her habits and appearance -- which was immediately unusual and a little unnerving considering that Alissa was a bit of a bubbly socialite whilst Cecilia was, simply put, not. Supplementary. Cecilia hasn't had a lot of great interactions with plasmamen. There's been more than a few rounds where the Syndicate Comms agent decided to have a laugh at Cecilia's expense. I was also getting a bit bored of constantly drawing Cecilia's 'RBF' expression so I took a shot at drawing Cecilia in a more exaggerated style. Just so I'm not setting a precedent, if you want me to draw your SS13 character, please just message me on the forums or on discord. If you dedicate yourself to pestering me IC in the hopes I'll draw about it, I cannot guarantee consistent results. I think I've drawn Cecilia enough times by now in her default 'RBF' expression that I can start branching out. Particularly, I've found I've had a lot of trouble drawing shouting/yelling: Usually with drawing a face it's easy enough to just throw down the outline and add the features after, but once the jaw opens the underlying outline of the face has to change without making the face seem like someone else entirely. While security tends to have an uphill battle in most situations, they do have a handful of annoying tricks up their sleeve. Cecilia in particular has a fondness for overusing flashbang grenades since they're basically a "fuck you, I win" button (which tends to be the case for all area-of-effect stuns). Personally, I find not all greytiders are bad.