RP Antag and Objective Changes/Ideas

[ArbitraryKnapsack]

Addendum about Conspirators:

Conspiracy rounds are very hit or miss for a few reasons, but the two big ones are objectives and communication.  In order for the conspirators to do anything worthwhile, they have to be able to talk to each other without being immediately outed as antags or metagamed against.  Furthermore, none of the current Conspiracy objectives are really all that appropriate for antags.  Most of the current Conspiracy objectives fall much deeper into the realm of "Organized Miscreants" than actual antags.

Example: "Convince the crew to abandon their posts and slack off."  This isn't a very antagonist-y thing to do, but rather a miscreant thing.  It takes a ton of effort by an experienced conspiracy lead to make this kind of objective fun as the driving antagonist force, and even then is usually by introducing some other gimmick that only achieves this as a byproduct.

Example (paraphrased): "Build a wrestling cage and hold a fighting tournament."  This is something that a lot of non-antags will do for fun, and also more suited to a miscreant type role than an antags.  How is a group of people trying to build a wrestling pit providing a driving opposing force for a station-wide narrative?  It likely takes admin intervention with something like macho man before this consumes the entire station with a good story, rather than being a miscreant-level shenanigan.

Most of the objectives for Conspirator tend to go like this.  I don't really feel like going through all of them or code-diving to get exact phrasing at the moment, but it leads me to make the following conclusion: Conspiracy in it's current form is not an Antagonist Game Mode.  It is a Miscreant Game Mode that is mislabeled as an Antagonist. I would honestly be in favor of leaving Conspiracy unchanged, but moving it to be a random miscreant spawn rather than antagonist for this reason.  This would also make it easier to let 'trusted' roles still have the potential to roll conspirator.


All of this leads to the second part of my thoughts: Team Antagonists can be very fun and engaging, especially with excellent players leading the charge.  So without Conspiracy to provide an organized antagonist mode, what can be done?  This leads to my second proposal: Establish a 'Covert Ops' Team-Based Antagonist Mode.  This would function as a small team of Syndicate Members spawning on whatever Syndicate vessel is appropriate for the map, but to be given Syndicate Comms (:z) and more supervillain/heisty objectives.  Example Covert Ops missions could be "Steal the AI and hold it for ransom."  "Kidnap all the Department Heads."  "Rescue Stirstir and bring him safely aboard our Assault Vessel." or even "Reports indicate a shapeshifting bioweapon is present aboard Space Station 13.  Infiltrate the station and extract the bioweapon so that we can study and replicate it's effects. (Capture/Retrieve the Ling)"  While the exact balance of traitor gear these teams would be given would take a fair bit of thought and balancing, it would provide a simple, easy-to-digest team based antagonist that would be fun for both new and experienced players.   Working with a team to do your evil is often more fun than the chaos or murder you could cause on your own.  With fun objectives, this would lead to some very interesting stories that are much more fitting of actual antagonists then having to choose between cooperating to cause a nuisance or venturing forth alone to cause some mayhem.

TL;DR

Conspiracy should be moved to a Miscreant Spawn instead of an Antagonist Mode.
Covert Ops would be a fun replacement for Conspiracy in the Antagonists Mode.

[nefarious6th]

Copying this over from Icraft's thread because I think their feedback is valuable too:

I know Intrigue was meant to facilitate better RP oppurtunities, but on my opinion, a few changes to the gamemode might be more convenient. I might get off-topic or etc. but this is just a suggestion.

1. Spy thief. This job is quite hard most of the time, on my opinion. And best tactic is just treasure hunting instead of limb or trinket stealing. Main point is that it's a stealh-based antag, making the players choose between abandoning the job to interact more with crewmembers, move around the station silently while claiming bounties or if even possible, something in between. This job is quite a challenge, but should be made a rarer in the intrigue gamemode. To reduce focus on the challenge and more on RP.

2. Wizard and wraith. I'm not sure the reason why Wizard and Wraith is removed from intrigue game mode but I think adding these would encourage more RP. For example, Ghostbusters or Friendly Wizard scenario.

3. Nuclear Emergency. I think this gamemode should at least be a rarity, allowing players to let loose and have fun once in a while and perhaps adding RP interactions between Nuke Ops Members. While this may sound like a personal request, I prefer not to go to Goon1 just to play Nuclear Emergency due to the chaotic amounts of chaos in said server.

[Spoodle]

If conspiracy were moved to miscreant as Knapsack suggested, I'd like a way to opt out of being a miscreant.

[data_err0r]

Posting a collection of thoughts from a big group discussion very late at night on Jan 7th on the rp discord channel. Combing my own thoughts and other people’s feedback so sorry if I get a little confusing.

Many members said they wish there was further variety in RP antags. I think most of mains antags were listed but the biggest one was of course nukies. There consensus came down to people like the idea of there being a set day, in the vein of assjam, where those "loud" or action heavy antags would be enabled. That way people who enjoy and want that sort of experience in RP know when to join for it and don't have to hope to be online during an admin event, while those who prefer the current server setup arent having things changed on them. The opinions were varied, with some calling for weekly, some for monthly, some for a vote every round if it’s a possibly “action” round. My personal vote would be weekly or monthly.

There was also discussion on making those antags more RP friendly. There were suggestions that it wasn't specifically nukey that was being missed by mainly RP players, but team orientated and loud/action antags, and general variety. A version of Nukies with rp friendly goals such as convert the station to syndicate, kidnap the clown, take over the bar. Something that would facilitate discussions and RP and have a chance of combat rather than just leading straight to full on killing.

Another suggestion was a super quiet version of nukies, something like a heist mode where they sneak on to the station and try to work as a team to steal some specific item / hostage / what have you.

Several people thought gangs would work better on RP than it does on Main, never played gangs on either server myself so I have no opinion, but I don’t want to skip anyone’s thoughts.

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As for personal thoughts when it comes to current objectives and antags:

Currently I find the objectives themselves extremely lacking. There seems to be little middle ground between cause mass destruction / ruin the round for a department (which I rarely seen enacted since I doesn’t work for RP) or do something super easy you can accomplish 20 minutes into the round. That’s not necessarily a big deal, it just means I do my own thing anytime I role an antag. I’m sure better objectives would help increase the overall quality though.

I love the idea of station wide objectives. Some of my best memories of the game have been when most of the station started focusing on one goal together. Often these goals are caused by antag actions (which is part of my push for the above higher action / louder antags), but the idea of a set goal just being the “mission” of that shift sounds fun to me! Maybe it would be a chance to roll, rather than a every shift thing though? I wouldn’t want to stifle the people who actually try to get station wide gimmicks going.

Of the antag options available right now on RP, I find conspirator and spy rounds to be by far the least exciting on either side of the antag/good guys. Spy rounds seem to follow the same route of almost nothing happening other than there always being the one spy offering to work with Sec, and conspirator rounds seem like they usually end up just fizzling out.

I don’t have many ideas for Spy, unfortunately for me its just a mode I don’t find fun. I’m not sure how you could make it more fun in RP. It seems to always lead to the same situations, and when a spy does manage to get a bunch of equipment I rarely see much interesting come out of it.

Conspirator feels like it could use more aggressive objectives. Maybe it could be somehow combined with the idea of the “quiet” nukie rounds from my above post? I’ve only rolled it twice and both times the objectives were not interesting, and the conspirators just disbanded without being able to form a plan of their own.


On a slightly off topic note, one of my biggest struggles when I first joined was understanding just what I was allowed to do as antag on the RP server. I saw the rules about no killing sprees on the wiki when I went searching, but I still felt like I couldn’t quite grasp what was expected of me. Was I allowed to setup some sort trap chamber to kill as a vampire? Am I allowed to bomb a department? What constitutes enough RP to make ling kills not just fail RP? Maybe the little blurb when you role an antag could give a better run down of what’s expected of an RP antag. Just a thought!