Gatchapod

Then the host should clearly be renamed to the firekeeper. Fire goes out even for a second and there's a major uproar. Gods forsake the tribe as it collapses, one half of it breaking the sacred taboo of IC in OOC and the other trying to flay the firekeeper alive for failing his vital duty.

Is ORM upgraded yet???

Charliminator showing casual disregard for the rules in the middle of a hallway.

Have you ever fought a security officer on a bike? You obviously haven't, because you suggested giving them a proper vehicle. See, vehicles have this fun property of countering a lot of our glorious stun combat. Projectiles? Blocked by the vehicle. Melee stuns? Vehicle sprite blocks character sprite, possibly reducing the valid hitbox by over 50% (seriously, try hitting someone on a bike when they're facing south). I'm completely indifferent towards flavour of this idea, but mechanically it's potentially a nightmare. Even if you introduce slowdown for it, people will just drag it around the way they do VTEC-less security cyborgs. We're trying to reduce the amount of heavy artillery security has, not give them another stun-resistant tank.

1. Informing the crew about high profile criminal being handled is job of a captain. It's the captain who should ensure the crew feels safe, not a magistrate. The latter doesn't really care how the station operates as long as the Space Law is upheld correctly. 2. Clarifying judgments via announcement system is actually a bad idea. You end up dragging more people into an argument and the explanation provided rarely satisfies them. People just like being argumentative, especially with magistrates. Making announcements is just giving them ammo, so to speak. 3. Supporting IA is semi-valid argument, however it's not exactly magistrate's job, either. Conclusions of investigations, if necessary, should be announced by Heads involved. If investigation is basically station-wide, it already warrants involvement of a captain. This means magistrate's support would boil down to non-essential spammy "yeah, we have IAAs on board" 5 minutes into the shift only to be never used for them again. 4. Helping against riots is not magistrate's job. It's what HoS and captain are for. Not to mention the fact the entire authority of magistrate allows exclusively for "stop rioting or you'll end up in jail", which they already know and it won't stop them. If anything, it will infuriate them even further. Overall, giving magistrate access to the system wouldn't be necessarily detrimental, but they have no real use of it outside a few very niche cases. Even in those cases, it's usually better for someone else to make an announcement. I have many, many hours played as a magistrate and never actually needed that access. I asked for it once or twice, but it was non-essential whim of mine and I was fine with potentially being denied it.

I'm pretty sure majority of shot-callers in this regard are against skill systems. And what you're suggesting is just a skill system lite that would open the road to fully blown skill system. Next would be non-chefs messing up correct recipes, non-surgeons botching surgeries when they shouldn't, etc. While I personally wouldn't mind, Paradise is unlikely to deploy such a system any time soon, if ever.

I'll echo people here a bit. Most importantly that a Blueshield should be resourceful, not full of resources. What Blueshields use AA for the most? Anyone who worked in RnD knows. Honestly, makes me feel like giving Blueshield RnD and armory accesses would be enough to satisfy them. Something's horribly wrong when smacking our favourite blue loot pinata is, in practice, more lucrative than killing an ERT member. Full access (not just airlocks, but comm console, sec records and ID console), all channels, enough weaponry to use RnD forcefully for even more weaponry, secHUDglasses (only unrobust Blueshields use medHUDglasses), bowman headset, 2/3 IDs required to launch the shuttle early, the list just goes on and on. If you kill a non-red ERT, you get only one ID and no secHUDs, in exchange for mostly useless ERT-exclusive access (have fun getting killed by admins for hijacking the ERT shuttle) and one channel that ERT rarely uses for anything relevant. A regular crew member carrying more goodies than ERT member should probably fall under powergaming rule, especially on code green.

For those who prefer forums over GitHub, outside of the PR mentioned by Keppler, I now also made an alternative PR for those who scream "improve, don't remove". https://github.com/ParadiseSS13/Paradise/pull/15475 This ports a decay mechanic from /tg/, where each node has its own endurance stat that decays. Once it reaches 0, node gets removed. Each node spread mutates, giving a semi-randomized endurance stat based on parent's stat. There are some more nuances and if you're interested, the PR and links therein explain everything.

Useless. As you've pointed out, it's just genes nerf. It won't affect anything but the mycelium available in the vendors. At best, it'll delay the inevitable. At worst, it'll be entirely bypassed by a knowledgeable botanist. I think the best solution here would be to make glowshrooms never spread. You can plant them to get a source of light on a single tile, but that's it. This solution would allow people to use glowshrooms in aesthetically appealing ways (i.e. chapel dedicated to nature illuminated solely by mushroom) without causing disgusting outbreaks many admins and players seem to detest.

I'd just like to point out it that this is largely pointless as a change to powergaming rules. As you've said, no antag benefits from self-spreading light source. If crew is not supposed to use glowshrooms to combat antags, remove the feature from the code. Rules are mostly for things we cannot enforce mechanically. This we actually can enforce mechanically. As a code change, I'd wholly support it. Glowshrooms are obnoxious, ruin rounds for antags, probably lag the server and basically serve as yet another annoyance from the hydroponics. This should, obviously, apply to glowcaps and shadowshrooms, too.

While I agree it's hard to make assassination interesting, your idea makes it pointless. As Spark said, might as well remove the objective. Antagonists should impact the round. Killing another player permanently is one of the most impactful things you can do without setting the entire station on fire. Rather than changing the objective, we should change attitude we have towards assassinations. They happen. Not all rounds will go as you planned. Expecting to survive the round is a good way to get disappointed as you accidentally run into electrified grille after someone hotwired TEG. Someone is taking your body? Tough luck, it's a changeling dragging you into maints, not saviour taking you to medbay. The only problem with assassination is that the meta is basically to silently stun the unaware victim and send them to the shadow realm. That is a problem lying actually in stun-based combat, not how assassination objective is handled.

Contraband should be contraband. You want to keep it? You carry the heat. You get caught? You serve the time. I never ask for permits; just keep what I want and turn in what I don't want. That's what you're supposed to do with contraband. Not jumping through loops while making sick backflips to legally break the law. Security using contraband is iffy, too. It's already the most legally privileged department on the station and they still feel like the Space Law should allow them even more freedom.

I'm not even certain would that be possible without rewriting the entire chat system from a scratch. Pretty sure it just waits to grab a full string and then runs checks for silence. There's no silence checks as you type to find out the state of your string right before silencing. If you want to send partial messages via radio after being EMPd, that would require you to likely rewrite how T-comms equipment and EMPs work, too. Massive amounts of work and regardless of how people feel about it, it's unlikely for anyone to code it for you. If you learn how to do it and present a solution, it could be considered. Assuming it's doable, Bryan already presents the most obvious issue: While realistic, how does it make the game more fun? Once you know you're about to be silenced, you'll just squeeze as much info about assailant in as possible without worrying about sending the message. Instead of stupidly screaming ";HELP MAINTS" you'll now scream ";HELP MAINTS URIST MCBEARDSON CHANGELING MURDER ME (...)" without worrying your message will take too long to send it. Overall, it'd be an antag nerf in the name of realism and we don't need that much realism in a silly video game.

Party poopin' time, or the bad things you should consider. Roundstart 5-6 space explorers invalidates nearly all threats designed in space. Syndie depot is already free loot for decently experienced mechanics, your changes would make it a complete joke. Having a group of people dedicated to space operations might affect the flow of the game more than you expect. Blobs now have to deal with 5 space pods they can't even touch. Hiding anything in space will be a nightmare if it's constantly patrolled by people with nothing better to do. The final gameplay problem might be me misunderstanding maintainers, but I'm fairly certain they want the action to focus on the station. Your idea pushes in the opposite direction, one that makes other Z-levels part of regular gameplay. That doesn't even touch the issue of writing brand new SOP, which is anything but trivial. You want the mechanic to respond to the entire Command? Did you know geneticists belong to two departments, but most of the time neither wants to take responsibility for the geneticists' actions? In your idea, the mechanic would answer to de-facto no one, because everyone would assume it's someone else's problem. Overall, it's not a horrible idea, but you're hyped and you haven't considered the potential negative impact it might have.

I understand Mitchs' worries, but they do seem to think it's somehow an efficient killing method. It is not. You can't really prepare an ambush for a specific person like that and randomly killing anyone who checks your pulse would be restricted only to the vampires. With vampires around, you probably don't want to approach "dead bodies" that aren't pale, anyway. Calling security and a paramedic to a dead body instead of having civilians gleefully dragging rotting cadavers around is, in my opinion, definitely a fair trade for a minor buff to vampires. A buff they most likely won't use, anyway. I'd even go further and say that vampires trying to pull that off are also vampires that don't space your body after draining you to 0 and decapitating you, because they want to be fun antags. Basically, I don't see it as a major change to mechanics, just adding some flavour to the game. And if you can't handle not being cloned 30 seconds after dying, well. Don't die next time, I guess?

Well, I'm a phytomancer with a twist or two. If you ever approach my hydroponics, you'll think "Farmer John", because there's nothing interesting in there. It's entirely possible that even my vendors are not hacked and I'm using L4Z to mutate my plants. Now why would I do that, you ask. Why would someone with the power to change the station grow unnaturally filling wheat and sunflowers that seem to do nothing, in the slowest and most inefficient way imaginable? Why would they even use L4Z when my mentor told me to never use it? Because phytomancy is a boring chore of a powergamer. Nothing interesting comes from using the full extent of your knowledge every single round. Instead, I actually employ interdepartmental dependency. I request engineering to hack my vendors and if they don't do it, I'll simply play without it. With a bit of luck and supplies, I could get you all the research samples 10 minutes into the round, even ones you didn't know hold value for RnD. Sadly, I am not an RnD guy, so I don't know which plants you want. You have to ask me. You need omnizine? Earthsblood? Growth serum? Corn oil? Morphine? Sure. If you ask, that is. On a related note, you can sometimes find phytomancers among ash walkers. If a tribe has enough brain cells to at least listen to their shaman, miners should be wary. They're basically immortal unless you get a lucky internal bleeding on them. And even then, it's quite likely said shaman will also know ghetto surgery well enough to patch a patient up.

Putting an ananas on pizza is almost as bad as calling it a pineapple.

Yeah, avoid friendly book clubs. Especially the Enthusiastic Readers of Poetry. Those guys completely disregard instructions regarding social distancing.

More excuses to enforce stamp hunting yes oh god yes.

Gangel does make a very valid point. I'd rather end up as a spiderbot than tajaran with a slime core or cortical stack. Unless you completely ignore the fact you are a completely different species in every imaginable way, you're in for an extremely boring run. MDs just don't care they may have created a broken monstrosity that makes no biological sense. Playing a slimeperson or vox requires one to accept permanent death possibility, and I do believe to many it's still more appealing than playing wolpin (613). How is that not off-topic? I think top tier CMO will not just think in terms of efficiently bringing people back into the round. That's purely mechanical CMO. Top tier CMO, who takes RP into consideration, would use an MMI to get the patient's consent for what should be considered a dangerous experimental transplant, as suggested above. Slime cores and cortical stacks are only compatible with other bodies because they're reskinned brains code-wise. There's no good IC reason why those transplants work.

Funnily, I was about to address the fact you seem to not mention tough decisions, but I guess it's just not exactly clear. There are too many captains who ignore problems only they can solve. Most common is obviously the eternal problem of Supply and Science either loving each other or waging economic war. Sometimes just a regular war. I have seen HoPs shooting at RDs who are breaking into cargo warehouse to get to the ORM. I have seen CEs having to beg cargo for a sheet of metal to patch anything, because "ORM is no longer public". I have seen HoSs trying to solve the problem by applying the Space Law where the application of captain's authority was needed. All while the captain was sitting silently and hoping no one notices them. As a captain, you will make massive mistakes. You are supposed to make big decisions with limited knowledge and time. That's it. An A-tier captain must be aware they will make wrong shot calls. Once that is achieved, they can work on humility. It's a funny little thing that helps a lot with calming down the disgruntled crew and becoming a leader that's actually liked by their people.

That's a good start. In this case, IC response from admins is de-facto a gratifying experience for the player, even if the character is punished. Many may dislike this change, but rewarding people for being plainly bad IAAs wasn't doing the job any good. Sure, this may make the job less popular, but who will miss these missing IAAs? The crew, who never saw them, because they were BSA'd 1 minute into the round? Admins, who don't have to check and respond to another buttfax? I believe if all admins follow suit, IAA situation will improve. Maybe not immediately, maybe not noticeably, but forcing IA to become a more respectable office is a push in what I believe to be a good direction.

You can't fix the most evident issue of IAAs - lack of time. Most rounds last less than 2h 30min. A complaint filed in before 30 minutes into the shift is basically completely unheard of. More often than not, these happen after the first hour. That would leave you with a reasonable amount of time, but "the shift is over" mentality grows as we approach 2h mark. You are effectively left with 30-45 minutes before all investigations and decisions are overruled by "the shift is over". It's enough to interview one, maybe two people, provided they are willing. However, if the issue is larger and you have an appropriately larger group to investigate, you are forced to do your job half-assedly. You don't have time to confront all points of view with each other, so you just end up taking a bunch of guesses on who is wrong or lied, which isn't particularly impartial and plainly against your job description. My point is: IAAs would work much better if the rounds were longer. It's unreasonable to change it just for IAAs, so it will stay like this. Regarding "obstructing an investigation", I'm afraid it would lead to further corruption of both IA and Security. Firstly, Security doesn't care about IAAs reporting crimes. I have been repeatedly assaulted as one and Security always ignored me. Once I even brought a body scan proving someone tried to stab my eyes out with a fork. They weren't even set to arrest. Secondly, if it applies to Security Officers, we will see people enforcing police state. "Let me in, I'm investigating. No, you can't know what or why. Just do it. You won't do it? Fine, then you're under arrest." It's assault of an officer, but far easier to abuse. That being said, perhaps we are (or is it just me?) a bit too afraid of giving IAAs some power. Maybe, rather than being abused by bored players, it will attract those who want to put said power to good use? And regarding moving them under NT Rep, I would say no. There's already a lot of positive energy between IAAs and Reps, which I've experienced from both sides. They can make an awesome team without making it official. So why not? Because, frankly speaking, Magistrate needs IAAs more. I know I've just said IAAs usually don't have enough time to investigate, but they are still doing a stellar job in comparison to Security Officers or your average Detective when it comes to proving guilt or innocence. Call me crazy, but as a Magistrate, I rely on IAAs. They can be foolish, overzealous, incompetent and all imaginable flavours. However, the most common thing is being bored and when you address it, they honestly try. I feel like Magistrate does much better job at finding tasks for IAAs than NT Rep ever will.

I would suggest sticking to the topic for now. You are touching a different subject. Instructors are about making Security more approachable and less of a Dark Souls-like experience. YOU DIED. Git gud, scrub. You are talking about the fact one person, who often finds themself in the field, simply can't coordinate a team spread around the station. Why? Because it's not actually a team. Do note that when Security coordinates larger operations, probably the most common (the only, really?) case being attacking cult bases, they usually are capable of cooperating. Because it's possible to cooperate a few people within your sight. Hell, they probably won't need much communication. But again, let's focus on one thing. If we start throwing ideas what could be added to/changed in Security, thread will quickly lose its value due to a lot of ideas that get no attention whatsoever.

Nukie forgot to put magboots on. Nukie forgot to get a hardsuit. Nukie forgot to even get the NAD. But what did nukie remember to do?