New antagonist idea: the accomplice

[Gomp]

The accomplice is a sympathizer to all those against NT they do not have the tools, nerves or powers to act against them, but a if cunning enemy of Nanotransen can find the right leverage they can be a trustworthy ally.

In gameplay terms the accomplice is a roundstart or mid-round antagonist which does not focus on doing things themselfes but instead focuses on helping other antagonists achieve their goals. I say "antagonist" here because I would like to have them apply to as many as possible but in cases like Blob or Flock I do struggle to imagine how it would work.
They are not guaranteed to actually meet another antagonist and they can be made more self reliant through a sleeper agent activation like anyone else, perhaps they would even be rolled for after antagonists where already selected so there is always at least some in a round.
The standard server rules apply to them but they are allowed to behave like antagonist if another antagonists orders them to do so. They are essentially mindhacked but for with all antagonists as their masters. It should be discussed here what should happen if multiple antagonists give them orders and how an antagonist "activates" an accomplice.

They do not have a unique toolset at their disposal besides that which the antagonist decides to give them but they can be very useful for all those scenarios where you want or need to work together with another person. Anyone who picks the accomplice should be ready to not have anything happen to them in a round and if an antagonist does want to use them to listen to them as the number two in two person team.

I had the idea for this antagonist while recounting all my best moments with antagonists and all of them where with people who I could have another interaction with then killing them and I would love the idea of being able to threaten someone into serving my evil plans or begrudgingly (in rp) work with someone...without making them or me breaking the server rules. This antagonist is something I imagined on the rp servers and I don't imagine it would work well on classic. It is also what I would consider a clear buff to almost every antagonist but since rp-escelation does limit antagonist and it is hard to balance antagonist for rp, since just making them stronger doesn't make them have any better rp, I consider this a good thing. Maybe there should be a whitelist since it does blur the line between antagonist and non-antagonist, I reccomend at least a minimum play time, but on the other hand you could say it gives the player a lot less chances to act on their own making it perfect for learning to play antagonist, this is the discussion forum so I am sure I will find out what people have to say about it very soon. Please stay civil and don't insult people.

[Lefinch]

So, from my initial read of this idea that I'm still absorbing: It's kind of like a less cohesive conspiracist, or as you've posited it primarily for RP kind of like a rev without the revolutionising part, combined with a mindhack that costs 0 points but has more potential obstacles.

I think you've highlighted one big issue that'd have to be worked out: how would we handle contradicting orders? I'd add and say how do you think we could handle making sure this doesn't have the same problems that lead to conspiracists being taken off as a mode (primarily that they weren't great at actually organising, a lot of them just went off and did their own antagonism) or miscreants, another type of "grey area antag" we used to have that also got removed because people would not really keep to their lane on doing that.

There is a core theme of your idea that I do really like but I think has a lot of questions to answer to make sure it's implemented well:

"I would love the idea of being able to threaten someone into serving my evil plans or begrudgingly (in rp) work with someone...without making them or me breaking the server rules."

This is always a tricky area as is and it crops up all over: What's the line between signing a chaplain's faustian contract? What about someone using syndicate intelligence to coerce you? What about gangs using intimidation tactics to keep you in control? I've previously advocated that while it's complicated moments like this are very cool and I'd love to see them implemented in a way that makes the line less blurry for players. My personal opinion is with a bit of common sense it's actually possible right now as long as you're doing it in a way that's well RPd but I appreciate it's a commonly cited problem.

I think the fact you're putting a lot of caveats into the original idea (round limit for the role, specific to RP, openly saying we'd need to work out how they'd handle conflict antag orders) means you also get this is a difficult idea to actually implement in a way that won't potentially cause a significant uptick of ahelps. The way I've seen something like this work usually has involved admin intervention: specifically picking people or midround spawning them with specific objectives to aid a person, but I'm not so sure how viable this would be as a mechanical thing. Admins can supervise in ways the code/players with incomplete knowledge of the situation can't.

So, I'm not saying "this is a bad idea" I actually really like the idea, but I think it's fair to say anything that adds an extra layer of players having to balance their interaction with primary antags to help resolve an issue around players interacting with antags is going to be a tricky thing to balance.

[Gomp]

So, from my initial read of this idea that I'm still absorbing: It's kind of like a less cohesive conspiracist, or as you've posited it primarily for RP kind of like a rev without the revolutionising part, combined with a mindhack that costs 0 points but has more potential obstacles.

This is basically my alternative to changing the rules so antags can force you to do something only they could normally.

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I think you've highlighted one big issue that'd have to be worked out: how would we handle contradicting orders? I'd add and say how do you think we could handle making sure this doesn't have the same problems that lead to conspiracists being taken off as a mode (primarily that they weren't great at actually organising, a lot of them just went off and did their own antagonism) or miscreants, another type of "grey area antag" we used to have that also got removed because people would not really keep to their lane on doing that.

A lot of the greyness of it comes from not knowing when they would be allowed to do antaggy things and who they should be following at the moment. I think a on-touch sort of activation by the antag or maybe a keyword that makes an Accomplice follow a specific antagonist for the rest of the round is a good way to solve that but I think it might open the issue of antagonist just rushing getting as many Accomplices as possible so in that case there might need to be a cost for knowing their identities but I think but THAT basically just makes it so that most antagonist also get a mindhack if they want to.

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I'd add and say how do you think we could handle making sure this doesn't have the same problems that lead to conspiracists being taken off as a mode (primarily that they weren't great at actually organising, a lot of them just went off and did their own antagonism)

Ideally people who aren't team players wouldn't pick this role since, to reinforce this I made sure to say they can't set their own objectives.

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There is a core theme of your idea that I do really like but I think has a lot of questions to answer to make sure it's implemented well:

"I would love the idea of being able to threaten someone into serving my evil plans or begrudgingly (in rp) work with someone...without making them or me breaking the server rules."

This is always a tricky area as is and it crops up all over: What's the line between signing a chaplain's faustian contract? What about someone using syndicate intelligence to coerce you? What about gangs using intimidation tactics to keep you in control? I've previously advocated that while it's complicated moments like this are very cool and I'd love to see them implemented in a way that makes the line less blurry for players. My personal opinion is with a bit of common sense it's actually possible right now as long as you're doing it in a way that's well RPd but I appreciate it's a commonly cited problem.

I do also think it is possible with common sense but I don't think it is very likely to happen. Also, while I wish it was possible, having any rules rely on common sense is basically a guarantee that they will get broken.
Right now as far as the server rules as read on the wiki say "Only minor crime is permitted for non-antagonists." which gets ignored a lot sometimes for good sometimes not I think breaking the rules for cool moments shouldn't be required in the first place.

[Lefinch]

It's something worth discussing for sure, and not just with me. For now, I feel like the idea in its current shape still doesn't quite escape the same problems we have now. People are still going to have a wide field of interpretation of what "help" means. Mindhacks work well enough because the language is very, very clear cut about your motivations and even there plenty of edge cases seem to crop up. This idea as it currently stands is a fair bit looser: You don't know who is an antagonist, you don't have a single potential target of loyalty.

Those could create some fun situations but I'm also leery on the basis of people being lead up a garden path by someone who isn't actually a bad guy. If you see some dweeb self-antagging it's possible in the moment you just go "Ah well, that's clearly my guy" and jump in, and we get some snowball effect that understandably you didn't know about, but accidentally assisted.

There too is something I didn't cover before, but theoretically right now security is balanced around handling a certain number of players doing bad things. Now I know, sometimes that's hilariously not going to be the case, some players cause more chaos than others, some rounds are going to have a more or less organised security team. People get mindhacked, admins add a little spice so on. I accept it'll vary. But an accomplice system would have to bear in mind it's another person security will be theoretically processing. That's probably doable, but then you've got to counterbalance it with the fact accomplices might not actually find their antagonists. Or what if antagonists die? Are they bringing them back from the dead in the hopes they were real antagonists or is it going to be a "only help people you have confirmed are bad guys" which opens up another can of worms about how we handle identifying people (unless we use a codeword system or something like some other codebases)

This is a personal thing, and it definitely shouldn't be taken as the norm, but bear in mind some players actually don't tend to team up with antagonists. I don't: I'll certainly happily do it if things come together that way in the round, but I never go out looking for it: I like running my own show. Now, there might be some value in having some random guy come up to me for no reason looking to help me out with my evil, because I might be second-guessing if they're really an accomplice or some kind of patsy for security and that might lead to some fun RP, but just bear in mind not everyone is going to actually utilise accomplices, and without a fallback plan for "what do I do if the bad guys don't ever make contact?" You're just sort of doing your normal round while potentially just fretting you should be doing more.

As for breaking the rules, I don't want to get sidetracked too much as I feel like it's a whole other discussion from your idea and that's the focus here. So I'll just say I don't think you need to break the rules to organically react to antagonism and that misunderstanding probably has its roots in this very idea and why I'm hesitant in its current shape I think the conceptual problem it's trying to solve isn't a bad one to try and solve.