Removal of cloning

[EvadableMoxie]

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. 

[ZN23X]

19 minutes ago, EvadableMoxie said:

Because sitting in a locker instead is boring.

Half the people who play vamps would tell you this is the only way to play ??

 

[EvadableMoxie]

3 minutes ago, ZN23X said:

Half the people who play vamps would tell you this is the only way to play ??

 

 

The other half apparently think the way to play is to be friendly vampire and come to Medbay asking for blood and have the entire station totally okay with that so we end up with a 2 hour snooze-fest.  This is a whole other rant, though.... 

[Fox McCloud]

8 hours ago, ZN23X said:

 

I think that's why many here keep focusing on the RP aspect. When RPing you are trying to imagine how your character feels and how they would react based on the situation they are in as opposed to how you feel and react based on the fact that you are playing a game. But again not everyone enjoys RP...which is fine. The blessing and curse of a MRP server, you get a bit of both LRP and HRP players.   

I imagine as much as HRPers look at the LRPers and think "Ugh...this shit..." the LRPers look at the HRPers and think "Ugh...this shit..."

It's still a more stable environment than a pure LRP server and it's not as slow and cringey as a HRP server.

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.

 

 

 

[Tayswift]

2 hours ago, Fox McCloud said:

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.

This is a policy on stations like Aurora, but there's actually no official position, as far as I know, about whether every shift is canon and how many shifts occur between every played shift. I think it's better for RP in general if we didn't think we were gonna be dying all the time, because only the bravest of people would continue walking into their deaths over and over again. Also, there'd be no reason not to be fully armed up at all times if the station were really that deadly. Code green wouldn't make much sense if every shift, a crisis happened and 1/5 of the people died. I like to think that a bunch of normal shifts happen between every played shift, making life less horrifying for these people repeatedly working on the station.

Also, dying is traumatic regardless of how easy revival is. Organics have an innate fear of death and pain built in. It only makes sense for synthetics to not really care that much about dying. Even if I knew I had a high chance of being revived if I were brutally murdered and decapitated, I'd still be really scared of that happening. I feel like people would actually develop severe PTSD from dying repeatedly, rather than death being easier as time goes on.

Edited April 5, 2017 by Tayswift

[Jovaniph]

I have to disagree that paranoia and fear is tied to the ability to be easily revived from cloning or dying in a sense. Its more of what SS13 in general of what it is. Everyone already knows that there is going to be chaos in almost every round.

I would try to backup this claim when playing as a security officer almost many times in a row. A lot of players who play sec have no chill and are always looking to find out who the antags are. The "I'm going to maintenance, If I scream then I'm probably dead" is the most annoying shit and very cringy to see on chat. They are basically not afraid to wander around maintenance just to die pretty much.

Now the debate on whether or not removing cloning would make a difference on player mentality is something no one can predict. All we can do is assume unless its already been done before. Its the matter on how we change the awareness of how the game treats death that will affect the way the game is played.

Edited April 6, 2017 by Jovaniph

[apneaman]

I can see your point. There are plenty of people who just die and go "whatever ill be cloned" i once cloned the same guy 3-4times in a round because he was being a moron and kept screwing around. I have also been in antag situations where ive dragged corpses into deep space only to have them be cloned 15 minutes later (but thats a whole other thing about metafriends)

Im also in the camp of round quality however i take death seriously as usually it means im out of the round for ages and if im security will most likely be looted before i get taken to medbay. there are plenty of times ive died from simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time (freak explosions, anomolys, bad doctors, welderbombs during blob rounds) sometimes really early in the round too. Just hate the idea that it would mean im done with the round for over an hour.

 

 

[WingedYordle]

I still would like to just do a trial run of not having a clone revival for a week and gather everyone input

[GelatinousGlob]

FIne with me, they can always get botany to grow them anew.

[HarakoniWarhawk]

As someone who mostly plays Mediborg and handles Surgery I can safely say there are some situations where Cloning is necessary.

SR/Defibbed is nice and all but in some cases it's just not enough.

I've had cases where someone had destroyed organs and every bone in their body was shattered. In that sort of situation its either

1: Desperately scramble to patch up their failing organs while fixing every damn broken bone which would take 30 minutes easily or

2: Just clone them.

When I'm running surgery, if someone can be returned to full health without Cloning I will do everything I can to fix them.

Any removal of Cloning just makes Medbay's job far harder, incompetent Doctors non withstanding.

 

 

 

[Jovaniph]

4 hours ago, HarakoniWarhawk said:

Any removal of Cloning just makes Medbay's job far harder, incompetent Doctors non withstanding.

There are things beyond a player's control, it doesn't make them incompetent. It doesn't make your job harder, it just means you reach the capabilities of what you can do. It's not medical's job to save everyone, but to try there best to save them.

Edited April 8, 2017 by Jovaniph

[BiberDark]

Maybe restrict the times of cloning. For 10 play hours you can only be cloned 3 times. Antags  and Borgs, Drones ect. excluded.

[SomeGuy9283]

5 hours ago, BiberDark said:

Maybe restrict the times of cloning. For 10 play hours you can only be cloned 3 times. Antags  and Borgs, Drones ect. excluded.

Difficult to code; Easy to evade.