Make damage knock you out of stamina-stuns

[glowbold]

which it would inject 

chem life ticks are every 2~4 seconds (the time it takes to get more than 1 hit in, maybe more if lag is bad) and chem is also not really designed for this use case. 

if this were to be strong enough to actually fix what this change targets, it'd have to give you an insane quantity of stamina. whereby you could exploit all the other systems in the game (kidneys, slow metabolism) to get more than the desired amount of stamina

it would also be purged by any purgatives (which are not related to this change at all)

you'd end up with a laggy, unintuitive, buff of variable length that could be useless for 1 person and overpowered for the powergamers.

all to beat a simple, hard and fast rule of 'someone hitting you will knock you out of stamina stun'

okay, make it a status effect instead

[Cal]

If I were to suggest a thing, it’d be a new, higher-depletion chemical “Natural Adrenaline” distinct from Epi.

This seems like a kinda cool way to implement this sort of thing. It would fuck over morphine's use as a "get away now" thing, but eh, morphine's weird

[TDHooligan]

Antags prefer to use batons because they do that faster thsn antag gear. Yes, two C-saber hits put soneone into crit, but you need 3-4 to put them into deep crit to make them stay on the ground.

This change wont affect this dynamic.

...except after each CSaber hit you land, the person you're swinging at will get up and have a chance to fight/retreat again?
To put it in the simplest terms:

This will make it so when you baton somebody, you get 1 CSaber hit in before they can act again.
And if you're batoning someone 1-2 times just to get 1 CSaber hit in. why not just hit them with the CSaber??

If you're using a stun baton for environmental kills, more power to you. If people start dragging people halfway across the station to do this, just make being dragged add stamina to you.

[Frolicsome Flufficorn]

...except after each CSaber hit you land, the person you're swinging at will get up and have a chance to fight/retreat again?
To put it in the simplest terms:

This will make it so when you baton somebody, you get 1 CSaber hit in before they can act again.
And if you're batoning someone 1-2 times just to get 1 CSaber hit in. why not just hit them with the CSaber??

If you're using a stun baton for environmental kills, more power to you. If people start dragging people halfway across the station to do this, just make being dragged add stamina to you.

Have to agree with TDHooligan here. It makes sense that while using a weapon that can kill someone everywhere, aka the C saber, having some way to fight back and it now just be i click baton instant die would be far more fun then having the 15-30 seconds of literally being unable to do anything with no counter play.

And in terms of environmental kills, If someone is going out their way after batonning someone and they are not near either a crusher/entrance to space carrying a body through a hallway is fair enough. On a bit of a side rant here but, I agree without the muscular enhancement gene carrying bodies should receive a nerf. You shouldnt be able to carry someone with 1 hand at a reasonable pace. But carrying people and the stamina to go along with it is probably a discussion for another thread since I could rant on about how the carry system is a bit broken (in terms of balance) for a while. 

I think the whole jist of the post here is. More damage on someone = more time taken off of their stun duration (im assuming its pure stun that we are on about and not like the stun where your knocked out, sorta like through sodium thiopental). so if someone stuns you and then uses the baton to hit you it would reduce (purely a example here I obviously know nothing about the balance of this change) the stun by 5 seconds per hit. compared to the C saber which would probably remove the 30 second stun entirely.

Either way, I see this change as nothing but a net positive for everyone. Sec receives practically no nerf with this as they should be cuffing people anyway with their stuns. And it encourages antags to do more prep if they intent to use stuns as their kill method. 

Althought I would just rather see stun cap reduced to 15-20 seconds but thats not gonna happen so.

[Flaborized]

IMO this idea has some big issues: I think it's generally unintuitive that beating on a knocked out person should potentially help them considerably in a fight, like, stamina as a system isn't broadcasted to players extremely well and now you'd have to make it clear that hitting people who are knocked out (in specific ways) actually helps them up. I also think that there's lots and lots of ways to guarantee someone dies who's stunned that don't involve directly smacking them necessarily, to the point that I think stuns would *still* be very prevalent and strong for murder. To me, making a core system that's so important to understand in moment-to-moment gameplay more opaque for such a minor upside is just not worth it. It's genuinely the opposite of how I would intuitively think it should work from a "does this make sense in-world" perspective.

This is tangentially related, but I don't really agree with arguments that "Once you're stunned and being beat to death it's not very fun that you cannot do much about that" because like, the counterplay was *before* you got stunned and started being beat to death. The combat in this game is very fast and unforgiving, and if you're caught out alone in a situation where someone can smack you like that, then yeah, you lost. It's supposed to be fun *before* you lose, since it's so high stakes. I don't see "The 20 seconds you're being wailed on to death isn't very fun for you" as a huge problem because of that. And it's good that it takes a little bit to be killed with low-damage weapons, since if you have allies it gives them a chance to help you out.

[Kotlol]

IMO this idea has some big issues: I think it's generally unintuitive that beating on a knocked out person should potentially help them considerably in a fight, like, stamina as a system isn't broadcasted to players extremely well and now you'd have to make it clear that hitting people who are knocked out (in specific ways) actually helps them up. I also think that there's lots and lots of ways to guarantee someone dies who's stunned that don't involve directly smacking them necessarily, to the point that I think stuns would *still* be very prevalent and strong for murder. To me, making a core system that's so important to understand in moment-to-moment gameplay more opaque for such a minor upside is just not worth it. It's genuinely the opposite of how I would intuitively think it should work from a "does this make sense in-world" perspective.

This is tangentially related, but I don't really agree with arguments that "Once you're stunned and being beat to death it's not very fun that you cannot do much about that" because like, the counterplay was *before* you got stunned and started being beat to death. The combat in this game is very fast and unforgiving, and if you're caught out alone in a situation where someone can smack you like that, then yeah, you lost. It's supposed to be fun *before* you lose, since it's so high stakes. I don't see "The 20 seconds you're being wailed on to death isn't very fun for you" as a huge problem because of that. And it's good that it takes a little bit to be killed with low-damage weapons, since if you have allies it gives them a chance to help you out.

This sounds more like: "I take forever to die, kill me faster" to be honest Flaborized.
Though 20 seconds is still fast in my book.

But I get the sentiment. When you lost the fight and it ain't fun so the winner gets to have their fun and the loser doesn't since you waged and lost.

That said I still think allowing players to chose between defending against STAMINA damage or HEALTH DAMAGE would be a good idea to expand the combat system.

People keep wanting to nerf stun, but insted why not allow players to defend against stamina damage in a way, but taking health damage insted would also deplete stamina in this case or something like that.

[TDHooligan]

a lot of really good stuff

some really good points here!

Unintuitiveness:
I agree that it's somewhat unintuitive as a standalone change, and stamina as a whole could do with some better broadcasting. i'll write a small writeup below on it.

Stuns are still lethal:
Perhaps, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think this encourages a lot more resourcefulness than just carrying a stun weapon and a lethal weapon. It cracks stuns open to creative uses (if you refuse to use lethals) and can be handled seperately.

'Stun = death', this is okay:
Honestly, this was my take for a long time. My key issue is that I find it's turned stamina into 'old health 2', where you hit 0 and may as well disconnect unless someone helps. Being unconscious isn't fun! Shallow crit was added because old crit is not fun, and I think stamina could be much more interesting than it currently is, with more unlikely comebacks.

Additionally, I think players prefer the idea of security weapons not being best-in-slot for murder. This is at odds with the idea that stamina death = combat loss. To make them non-BiS, they'd have to be much worse at stunning people than traitor weapons are at killing people! Then what would sec do when the traitors start using traitor weapons again?

---

Unintuitiveness:
I don't agree that this change *has* to be opaque. I think the barebones idea is unintuitive, but with a bit of work it is a better framework for making sense.

Right now, stamina stuns are like so:
'This players' stamina is somewhere below 0 and regenerating at some speed, you can attack/move/stun/whatever them freely til it's above 0'
- Literally impossible to predict with drugs, status effects etc
- Scales in benefit anywhere between 'you get 1-2 hits' to 'you can hit them infinitely and they cannot do a thing'
- Even if it was telegraphed that it's occurring, it's really hard to know if/when they get up.
- Requires meta knowledge of which weapons keep stamina below 0 best to perma-stun

The alternative i'd want to see:
'This player's stamina went below 0, you get X seconds to do non-damaging actions and get 1 free hit with benefits.'
- This is purely binary, players know exactly what's occurred
- The reward is much more measurable, admittedly with a non-exact timeframe (which could be adjusted)
- Easily telegraphed, and the criteria for removing it is crystal clear
- Both sides can spend the stun time thinking what they might do next

---

Perhaps stamina knockouts should give your character the ring of stars over their head, and the next hit on a downed player gets some bonus? For example, the game Rumbleverse used an identical stamina system.

Hypothetically, with the current work on environmental effects, you could make it so heavy stamina weapons knock back these stunned players into the environment. Lethal weapons get bonuses to damage/bleed/etc.
As a result, players will get a measurable reward for stunning the opposition. I prefer the idea of two extinguisher staffies smacking each other all around a room, into tables, etc... It's a a lot more dynamic than the current "staffie 2 fell over. beat them as hard as you can til they never get up"

[zcrow]

ehhh. random idea. security training trait all sec start with gives them the current level of stun effectiveness of their tools. anyone without that trait only gets half effectiveness. traitors can still use stuns if they want. sec can still put up a half decent fight against traitor lethals. just makes things less boring for everyone else when they fight a meta warrior.

[unfunnyperson]

Controversial opinion: Lower ttk across the board so antagonists lethals will be on par with tasers and batons

Perhaps crit prevents you from doing combat actions and has harsher downsides? Lower ttk would make more sense than other methods of fixing the problem such as getting hit reducing your stun time(imo this makes no sense even if it mechanically works).

This would need an insane amount of rebalancing(nukies) but I think it would lead to more interesting gameplay

[Kotlol]

Controversial opinion: Lower ttk across the board so antagonists lethals will be on par with tasers and batons

Perhaps crit prevents you from doing combat actions and has harsher downsides? Lower ttk would make more sense than other methods of fixing the problem such as getting hit reducing your stun time(imo this makes no sense even if it mechanically works).

This would need an insane amount of rebalancing(nukies) but I think it would lead to more interesting gameplay

It's good in my opinion.
But I think we forget one thing.
"The targeting system"

We only aim at the head or chest. No point in hitting legs and arms as much unless it's for medical reasons.
Stun CLEARLY will not "harm" arms and legs.

The katana for one is a great weapon cause it can cut off arms and legs, forcing security to be more careful.

But if something like lethals could shoot a bullet into the arm, making it unable to be used due to damage... suddenly lethals get a whole different ball park.

I am not saying Staffy number 1 with a fire extinguisher could "break" the bones of your arm easily.
But stronger lethal weapons shooting at the arm? Defintally.

This is probably something that will balance out Stun vs Lethals. Since stun is a temporary but STRONG near instant disable without lasting effects.
Where as Lethals are suppose to send you to medbay... so why not allow more lethal weapons to take out legs and arms of players? 
Now suddenly arms can be put in casts or have to be replaced with cyborg ones, wich makes you want to get "stronger" cyborg arms that do not fall appart at the slightest shot, wich means robotcists have even more use.

[Cheffie]

Limb damage is interesting and something i've been wanting to look into for future, having the ability to target limbs in ranged combat to cripple/delimb with stronger firearms them would add an interesting dynamic. Perhaps it could make armour true locational then so a security vest would only protect your chest.
I don't think casts and broken bones is the way to go there though at least not initally just simple damage to the limb and fractional damage to the main health pool to have a tradeoff.

In the lowering TTK ballpark making getting put in around negative 50-100% critical could hard stun you for a while to bring crit closer to stamina crit in terms of lethality, current damage crit is the main reason why people don't like lethal combat because its not very punishing unless constant damage is applied or you get put really deep making it common to just walk it off or healed with little effort by doctors. Though I think having tools to combat harsher crit is needed also, I think a more advanced injector with a cocktail specially for crit or an increase to the oxygen healing of epi would help.

But this is getting off the topic of the thread.