Cloning Defects/Benefits

[CosmonautButt]

Had a talk after cloning with another player (Stephen Rhinehart) and we thought of the idea of possible cloning defects or benefits. Like extra limbs or improper body types like monkey, roach, fish genes, etc. I haven't fully come up with a good list of defects and benefits that could help my case on this one but I'm sure there's no shortage of good ones from everyone here.

I'm not sure maybe if this should be a result of upgrading the cloner, or maybe the repercussions of having too little biomatter, or maybe something entirely different. I like to leave any ideas I post open to tweaking and brainstorming.

[aft2001]

Perhaps this should be a result from ejecting someone too early in the cloning cycle, or running out of biomatter in the middle of the cycle?

[DasBrain]

What about activating a random mutation?

A bit of background:
* An other popular server recently removed cloning entirely.
* There is already a genetic defect in the code (2 times cloned)
* Cloning a third time is harder (monkeyclone)
Just FYI. Not that anything above is good or bad.
Just some of it has to be considered when doing such changes.

[CosmonautButt]

Defects could be easily implemented and thought up in my opinion, thuogh I definitely do like the random mutation idea in a sense. However I want to delve more into the possible benefits too, because not everything would be detrimental. Imagine that one-in-a-million feeling of getting cloned and having an actual functioning third arm, or a third leg, allowing much quicker move speed or maybe less stamina consumption. Things like that. It would be neat to have the (VERY very rare) positives going along with the negatives in that aspect. I just can't think of a good reason IC that a cloning kerfuffle would be beneficial.

[Ion Mage]

Interesting idea. I always thought that cloning kinda trivialized death for those who know to get scanned. Perhaps make it so the odds of a defect appearing increase with each successive cloning, so a persons first death isn't -too- big a deal, but then those jokers who love taking advantage of my hippocratic oath and constantly suicide time and again right after getting out of the pod finally have a consequence to deal with.

Also, yes to making it likely when people come out of the cloner too early.

Such a game mechanic opens up the possibility of a geneticist traitor doing sabotage. Every time I do it with the existing gene power module, it basically gives me away as an antag the moment its found, because who else put the module in there in the first place? But if these defects could occur naturally, said sabotage has a chance of not being immediately found out, they could just think it was a natural occurence.

Also, for all this to work, the defects would need to be tough to remove somehow, since the cloner is either literally in or at least adjacent to the genelab, trivializing removing regular genes.

[polivilas]

The mechanic already exists and it already does that? For example, clone of a clone of a clone gets a -30% max health, there is a chance to come out half baked, etc.