Need SoP update-

[Kozack]

So, the cure all for cultists, may need some work. I'm proposing a small change to holy water in the SoP. You need solid evidence to make someone drink holy water." The way I'd like to enforce this is to maybe make it actually cause toxic damage. Make it so "If you're wrong, you're in deep shit for poisoning someone" It's far too easy to just say "You're suspicious, come with me and drink this while I search you" I'd be fine with the search, but shoving a drink down someones throat seems like it shouldn't be allowed without proof of needing it. I was told by Admins that there is no defined procedure in regards to holy water. outside of the mechanics of "This deconverts" I've got a coder who can make it actually have a consequence when used. If you just want to change the base SoP instead of making it more dangerous, that's fine too. I just don't like that it can be abused with no consequence.

 

The idea was to make it do brain damage or cause tox, or both, enough to put you into cardiac if you use the amount needed to deconvert. This would also do little to nothing on cultists unless you go over the 30 unit amount(Give insentive to watch for the convert message). If you go above this, it would do disasterous amounts. So you need to also pay more attention to how much you shove down their throat.

(line 247 of the code would have damage added to that)

Edited August 31, 2020 by Kozack

[Spacemanspark]

...Doesnt holy water cause brain damage or something already? 

Not that I oppose this necessarily, but it was my impression that there were side effects already. 

[Spacemanspark]

I could have sworn... 

Hrm. 

Yeah, I'd definitely be down for this. 

[EmilyFontaine]

3 hours ago, Kozack said:

The idea was to make it do brain damage or cause tox, or both, enough to put you into cardiac if you use the amount needed to deconvert. This would also do little to nothing on cultists unless you go over the 30 unit amount(Give insentive to watch for the convert message). If you go above this, it would do disasterous amounts. So you need to also pay more attention to how much you shove down their throat.

It takes 50u of holy water to deconvert cultists, if I'm not mistaken. Also, If this does nothing to cultists, then you can easily track the damages to non-culted individuals and instantly know they're not actually cultists, which seems pretty meta. I agree that there's an issue of security giving holy water to anyone who wears a gas mask in maints, but there are actual instances where security have to give holy water to suspected individuals with no cult items on them. An example could be a known cultist is apprehended in a room in maintenance with runes and a cuffed crew member. They're caught with their pants down, and you're unsure if the person in question has been converted. They'll tell you the same in either case. "I'm not a cultist." So you naturally apply holy water. Probable cause.

I seem to remember that giving out holy water randomly to try and catch cult and vamps was against the rules under validhunting at some point? Not sure if I'm just imagining that, though.

In any case, I'm definitely in favor of some kind of measure to prevent security from rampantly testing random people who don't have supplies beneficial to cult on their person (Stacks of paper, cuffs, stunprods, etc.) but cardiac arrest seems excessive. Perhaps a base amount of brain/toxin damage to people, no matter if they're cultist or not, but not lethal? If they're cultists and get converted, worst thing is they need to spend some time to get medical assistance. Cuts down on reconversion (which happens a lot). If they're not a cultist, and there was no reason to believe they're a cultist, the officer in question could get an aggravated assault charge.

There's also the issue of vampires. If holy water also adds brain/tox damage, vampires are in even more trouble when they get put into processing. 5u is enough to test and empty a vamp of blood, but it still harms them quite a bit. Often security gets overzealous and overfeeds the vampires holy water, though. Something to keep in mind, at least.

Edited August 31, 2020 by EmilyFontaine
Clarification and spelling

[Pokebro2000]

3 hours ago, EmilyFontaine said:

If they're not a cultist, and there was no reason to believe they're a cultist, the officer in question could get an aggravated assault charge.

I'll preface by saying I might be bias, but I dont think I've ever seen an officer get charged for doing anything, ever. In practice, I dont see any officer taking the consequences for shoving holy water down the wrong persons throat and giving them brain damage.

[EmilyFontaine]

15 minutes ago, Pokebro2000 said:

I'll preface by saying I might be bias, but I dont think I've ever seen an officer get charged for doing anything, ever. In practice, I dont see any officer taking the consequences for shoving holy water down the wrong persons throat and giving them brain damage.

Depends on who's in security. I'll pass out sentences to officers as HoS.

[Rythen]

This change in SoP would have an impact on balance in favor of the cult by slowing down processing times and leading to more releases of cultists.  Because of this I think it'd be a good idea to ask whether or not there's currently a balance problem in cult rounds before deciding if this is worth doing.  And if the answer is yes then it should also be asked, is this the best way to fix the balance problem?  I'm not going to give an opinion on whether or not I think cult needs balance changes or not because I'm honestly not sure.  I just wanted to bring up some impacts that this change would have on balance as a topic of discussion and to play devil's advocate.

Processing is already super chaotic on cult rounds due to the number of people who end up as suspects, especially if the cult has been doing a lot of converting.  This change would increase the complexity of processing suspected cultists and slow things down.  Right now you're just able to test anyone who is brought in, which makes things simple, but time consuming.  If you need to first evaluate whether or not each person who is brought in has enough evidence to be tested then this will slow things down and also increase the number of cultists who get released.  Both things give an advantage to cult with this change.

Also, when cult has gotten to the point of being out of hand, it's already valid in SoP to authorize security to use lethals against cult and then revive and deconvert.  If that's allowed to be an option then I think testing of suspects as long as it's not "mass testing" should be allowed.  You should NOT be allowed to set up a checkpoint and test every single person who goes by with holy water.  You should be allowed to test Joe if Joe was seen working closely with Bob and Bob was confirmed to be a cultist.   If Joe turns out not to be a cultist, should the security officer be charged for this mistake since they were acting based off of evidence?  If officers are charged for each mistake that is made when testing cultists this will even further reduce security's capacity to deal with the cult and will have another impact on balance.

In summary this would give three main advantages to the cult:
1. Slow down processing.  This increases the amount of security's resources that need to be spent on processing vs bringing in more suspects.

2. More released cultists.  Less testing means less deconversions which means it will be harder to chip down cult numbers.

3. Officers arrested for incorrect tests.  Security's capacity for handling cult goes down for each mistake they make.

Edited August 31, 2020 by Rythen

[Warior4356]

So, coder chiming in here to rectify a few misconceptions for what holy water does and doesn't do.

When you ingest holy water for the first 12 units/60 seconds/30 chem ticks it remove some jitter.

Once that passes you will be made to stutter and be dizzy. Additionally if you are a cultist, you have a 5% chance to stammer cult words.

Once it has been in your system for 30 units/150 seconds/75 chem ticks every tick past that it will have a 33% chance to make you confused and remove cultist/thrall.

if it removes cultist or thrall it purges all remaining units from your system.

If damage was added at this point it would only slightly affect people who need to be deconverted. If they are not a cultist or thrall however they would continue taking damage until it is out of their system.

 

The reason people think holy water does brain damage is because the bible healing has a chance of inflicting brain damage.

[Gaty]

I don't see why would it be necessary to crit the suspect if security guessed wrong, that's just unfair for you and for the sec officer who has to deal with a dying suspect now.

The current system only wastes 5 minutes or so of your round, so I don't see why making people die out of holy water would benefit anyone.

[Kozack]

1 hour ago, Gaty said:

I don't see why would it be necessary to crit the suspect if security guessed wrong, that's just unfair for you and for the sec officer who has to deal with a dying suspect now.

The current system only wastes 5 minutes or so of your round, so I don't see why making people die out of holy water would benefit anyone.

The reason is, that sec has no reason to not just shove holy water down peoples throats for whatever reason. Now with some consequence, they have a reason not to. Ultimately, the best way to deconvert would be having the chaplain bless them. That's would be the balancing factor, make sure the chaplain is there to actually do their job, rather than rely on something that could be potentially destructive to the person.

 

This would also make the chaplain a bigger gameplayer during cult rounds and make them possibly wait to get prayer beads, rather than just "Make a tank of holy water then fuck off with chainsaw arm"

Edited August 31, 2020 by Kozack

[Pennwick]

Can confirm Warrior is correct on what Holy water actually does. After 75 ticks it has a 33% chance to deconvert each additional tick. 35u will have a 99% chance to deconvert and 40 will 99.99%. It'll pretty much lock you in confusion until it fully purges from your system past that point. If you're a cultist or thrall it all gets purged from your system on deconvert.

I wouldn't want to add any kind of real negative side effects. Its just going to end up hurting the imbiber more than security. If someone is being real dumb about it then you can ahelp it. I was once given 200u because I picked up a tome as a librarian and never de-converted because I wasn't a cultist just a bookkeeper.

Personally I think this might best be solved with a change of SOP. Make the deconversion procedure more standard. 40u or 4 sips. IAAs can yell at officers that give more and security have less of an excuse of 'I didn't know how much to give'. Usually I'm against Security having perfect knowledge of how to deal with Antags but in this case it makes it easier on the person stuck in processing more than anything.

I kind of agree that security just hoarding a big holy water tank is a bit of an issue. Though I wouldn't say that holy water shouldn't deconvert. The fact you can make it through Chemistry means that there's an option if the Chaplain is absent, negligent or dead. Otherwise the only choice is to lethal cultists and leave them to rot. You could possibly make it so only handheld items could be blessed. That would mean they best they could do is have a couple buckets on hand at a time. Alternatively, and I'd rather see this, make it so cultists can sully holy water. That turns holding onto a holy water tank into a liability because if the cult steals it they suddenly have an unholy water tank OR they can even leave it in the brig and let security forcefeed everyone unholy water. Healing their cultists and killing the innocent.

(This is also mostly irrelevant to the discussion but I'd like it if Cultists showed the deconvert message always when the holy water purged from their system. Even if it wasn't successful. It would allow for some counterplays with dental/chem implants. As it is now if you don't deconvert and they're pretty sure you're a cultist they can just feed you more and more until they get their happy little message. If it showed any time the chem ran out you could just pop your charcoal pill halfway through your deconversion and slip through security's fingers. Maybe you could even get a mindshield out of the deal too!)

[Spacemanspark]

Antag tests in general are fairly poor form. I can't necessarily come up with a better method of deconversion, but something that would make security hold off from doing such unless they have actual evidence of cult activity would be lovely. 

[Kozack]

I did AHelp it before, and was told that by being suspicious, you can be tested (Skyping)

 

The best method which Warior and I spoke about together, was that we would like the chaplain to be able to "Pray" in the chapel, and with a 2 minute cooldown, be able to change their nullrod item if they already chose it. That way, they can get prayer beads should the need for de-converting arise. Make the chaplains role much more dynamic for cultists. It would also help counter balance the holy water change should it be allowed.

 

I really don't like the idea of having to rely soley on SoP, I think it does need a TRUE negative effect if you aren't cultist/ low powered vamp.

Edited September 1, 2020 by Kozack

[Gaty]

16 hours ago, Kozack said:

The reason is, that sec has no reason to not just shove holy water down peoples throats for whatever reason. Now with some consequence, they have a reason not to. Ultimately, the best way to deconvert would be having the chaplain bless them. That's would be the balancing factor, make sure the chaplain is there to actually do their job, rather than rely on something that could be potentially destructive to the person.

 

This would also make the chaplain a bigger gameplayer during cult rounds and make them possibly wait to get prayer beads, rather than just "Make a tank of holy water then fuck off with chainsaw arm"

Chaplain is not always avaliable and killing people just because sec suspects from them is not gonna solve anything, is just gonna make stuff more frustrating as now you gotta be resurrected instead of just waiting some minutes.

[Pennwick]

If an admin ruled you were being suspicious then YOU might have been the problem in that situation. Or its possible that nobody is at fault in particular. If its code red you're supposed to stay in your department and comply with all lawful orders from security. Cults are serious. Spessmen die and some can't even be brought back. A vampire is one of the most dangerous regular antagonists once they reach full power. They can't be faulted for trying to protect the crew.

In fact if Security says stay out of maint and you go into maint you can be brigged for 10 minutes for creating a workplace hazard. Thats twice as long as your confusion from holy water and fully justified under space law, SOP, and common sense.

Now if you're just in maint, its kinda borderline. You stuck your toe over the line, the officer jumped on you and you both ended up wasting your time. But if you're carrying a stun prod, cable cuffs, unknown, carrying paper or any combination Security is fully justified. At that point you're either validhunting or looking to get converted. Both are rule breaking violations.

In either situation even if holy water did have adverse effects I feel like security would be justified in using it. Except now if you're just in a bad place at a bad time you're all messed up instead of just taking a 5 minute timeout.

As for making the prayer beads the only method of conversion thats just... bad. I'm all for chaplains taking a more backline role against the cult but if you tie the only method of de-conversion to the null rod in a single form then you're making everything worse. If the null rod or chaplain goes missing Security's only option is to kill all cultists until a replacement can be found. And in more extreme cases they are going to want to kill suspected cultists.

Take a scenario where you find a discarded tome and decide to turn it into security, on your way security decide to stop and search you due to a large number in your department being confirmed cultists. They find the tome and take you back to the brig for deconversion. The officer calls for the chaplain but hears on the radio that he hasn't been seen in 5 minutes and his sensors are turned off. The officer has 3 choices. They can let you go, there is little reason to believe you aren't a cultist at this point, if they do so they would be endangering the station. They could lock you in a brig cell and hope that both the HOP opens another Chaplain slot and that somebody latejoins, they're competent, and can make it to the brig alive. All the while they run the risk of you being teleported out of their grasp. Third option, they execute you on the spot for being an uncontainable EoC, they can revive and deconvert you once a chaplain is available. This isn't a great option either because there is a slim chance you're not a cultist and your story about just wanting to turn in the tome is true but as the cult gets stronger and stronger option 3 starts to look better and better. None of the options are good and in the two arguably best options the detainee ends up worse off.

----------------

Responding to Kyet's idea that antag tests are poor form I broadly agree but in this case I feel like the fact the test is accessible and slow means its a little more balanced. If the justification is loose then security is punished by having to hang around 3 minutes for the de-conversion to dud. I'd support making it less foolproof though. Ways to give security a false negative would mean it could have some interesting counterplays. See my suggestion of having it fake deconvert if the test fails for one example.

[Mitchs98]

I pretty much disagree with this whole thing, at-least as far as changes go. I do agree that security testing everyone at random is an issue, I yell at them for it myself, but making holy water lethal or having a lot of downsides isn't the way to go about it. I'd be more in favor of Pennwick's idea, if anything, and even then I'm skeptical about changing the mechanical side of things. An SOP change or something would do relatively fine I'd think, as Security is OOCly expected to follow the more serious parts of Security SOP and I'd think that would count as something they were expected to follow.

I main sec and I dislike officers testing every single person that goes through processing as well. However, security can already be incompetent as it is, I see no reason to add another layer of incompetency to it.

Much less one that can end up killing other players.

[Kozack]

I didn't say the chaplain would be the only way, I'm saying it would be the safest and quickest way. Holy water is too easy to obtain, use, and abuse. Giving security an easy out is a cop-out. Yes SoP needs an update, but in my opinion, it's just not enough.  Also, if they make someone who isn't a cultist drink, then this gives the brig physician more to do as well. It's not hard to toss mannitol down someones throat, shock them out of arythmia, or shove charcoal down the throat. Or hell, make a doctor stick around to make sure people stay alive. This gives more interdepartmental cooperation. More interactions with each other is better. In a cult round it is essentially mindshielded vs cult.

 

the idea on there isn't always a competent chaplain or a chaplain at all, feels a bit moot because you could say that about IAA for punishing sec for breaking SoP.

 

As far as being suspicious it should be a need for actual evidence before forcing water down someones throat, suspicion should definitely warrant a search, but no way should it be a forced drink. Whether DNA on a rune, contraband on them, or caught in the act, or hell, even witnesses, then yes, make them drink. But barring that, suspicious isn't enough.

 

I believe people learn more from If they go "Oh shit... I fucked up, he's dying" rather than the IAA saying 'You can't do that! Nope! You can't do that!!! Against the SoP"

[Pennwick]

Okay. Got it. So you're saying in addition to Holy water being poisonous then chaplains would be able to change null rod variants. Thats not as bad.

I still think though you're going to run into issues. The biggest I think it is it will have little if any effect on security's choice to buckle and sip their suspects. Goodsec I wouldn't holy dunk someone without physical evidence/paraphernalia or testimony. And would likely do it regardless or not if it crit them or flatlined them. And a Shitsec officer who tasers the paramedic probably is going to force holy water no matter the consequences either. The fact that the Holy water is dangerous didn't change the behavior only made things worse for the innocent. The former is justified in their actions and the latter should be Bwoinked regardless if the suspect had 5 minutes wasted or were crit.

Second.  I can't see a great way for holy water to damage the imbiber without giving information we don't want the player to have. If it starts causing brain/tox damage immediately. Then a 5u sip becomes the new holy water test and removes all counterplay from cultists. If it doesn't start taking effect until the deconvert step you've created a rather stealthy and powerful poison. If it does brain damage then security really just needs to have a handful of Mannitol pills on hand. If it does Tox damage it can and will fuck livers every time. Now just because I can't think of a good way to do it doesn't mean there isn't one but it should be kept in mind.

Third. There can be legitimate reasons to test someone who aren't cultists and neither player nor security should be punished severely. There are a lot of cases, where by your own standards, someone innocent could be incriminated and subjected to a near/lethal test.

Security are held more tightly to SoP than other jobs. Both by players and Admins. They're expected to know it well or they risk copping a jobban. If some standards were established. Both in proper application and threshold needed before testing in the first place I think it would have more of an effect than making holy water poison.

[Corocan]

Assuming the initial issue brought up at the start of this thread is that cultists are getting deconverted in an unfair manner because they hadn't really done anything cult-worthy and security just did so on a whim, I feel like a SoP clarification will not change anything in a significant fashion. It is not really a server rule to break SoP and is even permissible ICly given an appropriate context to do so. Additionally, it is not even against space law to violate SoP, at least in a direct sense, so this change would completely rely on either the Captain or HoS desires to pursue the infraction to be effectively enforced and even then, I don't think we'd see very much come of it beyond a stern warning. It's also important to point out that making this an OOC rule would be quite unfair since punishing someone for being wrong about a suspected cultist when they genuinely thought that was the case would be very unfair to the security player since we cannot expect players to be 100% accurate with these kinds of things and to be wrong is not some form of griefing, so punishing it is just outright.

A mechanical solution would be equally hard to sort of fit in because when you talk about making holy water poisonous you have to remember you're also affecting more than cult rounds. You're adding a new toxin, which is a new weapon to be used outside of cult rounds and at that point you're kind of going beyond the scope of the original issue and risking creating more problems down the road. If you're dead set on a mechanical solution, you might want to consider having the holy water affect the security officer negatively somehow instead of the person being tested, but I have no idea how that would work beyond conceptually.

Unfortunately, the likely answer to this problem is a rule clarification and while I don't think that's the best solution, it's far from the worst. An alternative might be a space law clarification that prevents forceful imbibing of holy liquids against non-cult or non-vampire crew members without certain probable causes like prints on a drained corpse, witness statements, or occult items found on person.

[maxfromsweden]

How about just making holy water more rare? The chaplain blessing a huge watertank creates a near infiinite supply of holy water at a moments notice. Wouldn't an easier solution be to make Holy Water harder to make? Like you can only bless X units per Y minutes or something? Making it more rare means you shouldn't waste it on every gasmask-wearer in maints.

I've also played around with not handing out Holy Water freely to people who don't believe in my religion as a chaplain. That did not go over well with security.

[Mitchs98]

I actually didn't even think of the implications outside of cult/vampire rounds.

Big no on adding an/another extremely easy to acquire and extremely potent poison to the long laundry list of chems that antags can already make to kill people with, this is outside of the fact that it'd just make things harder overall for everyone involved in testing. I just don't see a way to change things outside of reworking cult or the chemical itself beyond 'chem bad, chem poisonous' that wouldn't be an overall massive detriment and needless change.

[TheMaveran]

I think there should just be stricter ooc rules against meta behavior such as random testing like this. I’ve been arrested for invalid reasons and found to be a cultist, or tested on a whim for literally no reason; and have had the admin say ‘IC issue’. How is this an IC issue when I am supposed to have no knowledge of being a cultist, this is an IC issue I can do nothing about.

[Warior4356]

A few other points worth raising.

If I were to give holy water damage, I would make the damage happen around the point a cultist gets deconverted. No antag will ever use a toxin that takes 150 seconds to do anything. 

Even if it was codified into SOP, as someone pointed out, SOP doesn't have much teeth unless command wants to enforce it, or an IAA/NT rep raises a stink about it. 

There is currently a PR under review to allow the chaplain to switch rods mid round, which would allow them to use rosary beads against cult much easier. https://github.com/ParadiseSS13/Paradise/pull/14206

People mention that the chaplain is required to make holy water, however there is a second way to acquire it, people are just spoiled about having a 1000u tank. Combine water, wine, and mercury, sec could easily take wine bottles to chem. On the subject of it dealing damage however, pure mercury does brain damage if ingested, so it dealing damage wouldn't be that odd.

Mechanically I think toxin damage is better than brain as brain can be fixed with manitol, almost everything that fixes toxin damage also eliminates chems in the body.

[EmilyFontaine]

5 hours ago, Warior4356 said:

Combine water, wine, and mercury, sec could easily take wine bottles to chem. On the subject of it dealing damage however, pure mercury does brain damage if ingested, so it dealing damage wouldn't be that odd.

There are many examples of harmful chemicals being mixed together to become a harmless chemical or, in some cases, a beneficial chemical. While it wouldn't be odd, that's not necessarily how chemistry works. Turning this into a mechanical issue won't fix the problem, it'll only add to it. Cults are nebulous by nature and security often make mistakes in an effort to stop them, due to ignorance of the gamemode or impatience. Punishing crew by dealing toxin or brain damage due to security's mistakes isn't gonna make the issue less of an issue, you create a new issue.

As I stated earlier in the thread, you sometimes attempt to decult people who aren't cult to begin with, because there is reason to believe they could be exposed, despite the lack of physical evidence. If the cult is running rampant, you now have to pause the effort of chasing them, because you've just heavily damaged, or killed, an innocent crew member who now requires your attention, while the rest of security falls apart because word gets out that you're wounding or killing innocents. Security's least favorite gamemode (to me and many others, at least) has now become that much more of a chore to deal with. Nobody wants to risk punishment in a round they're already reluctant to play, so the number of security personnel who cryo during a cult round rises.

If we want to make this an IC issue, let's find a way to do it without punishing people who shouldn't be punished, i.e. the innocents. There are already plenty of examples of security killing people who shouldn't be killed, let's not add to it. Making the null rod changeable would be nice, but prayer beads does not cut down on the "just in case" testing in the slightest, it only increases their frequency. (Usually "just in case" testing happens in processing for seemingly unrelated crimes)

Alternatively, make this an OOC issue, under either the metagaming, powergaming or validhunting rule. The problem here is that, again, the cult is nebulous at the best of times. Should a security player be warned, or even banned, for cult testing someone running through maintenance with no ID and their face hidden? Probably not. Should they be punished if they force holy water down the throat of everyone staying safely in their department during red alert? Absolutely. 

[Krossarn]

How about a third option. Not making the holy water poisonous or changing anything major in SoP.

But simply add another step to the processing of a suspicious cultist. 
Body scanners can detect implants, borers and stuff like that, right? What about detecting if the patient is brainwashed by some cult?

Just a thought.