The Good Sec Thread(tm)

[mozi]

The orange uniform locker in crew quarters contains orange shoes for you to play with. No need to bother the miners.

[Sundance]

The orange uniform locker in crew quarters contains orange shoes for you to play with. No need to bother the miners.

This.
I tried out shackles, and quite honesty I think I'll be using them more in the future. If I know a particular player is going to be run happy, then if I'm alone and I have the time, using this to transport them if I don't have the port-a-brig, or sometimes you might even need to transport two prisoners at once, maybe even 3! Using shackles in combination with this may be of some benefit.
I would also never ever use a straight jacket, because if shit goes down, that's like a death sentence.
So adding to my list of control mechanisms:
♦Shackles & cuffs
♦Electropack (for aggressive traitors)
♦Tracking Device (I use this alot now, for shit players and passive traitors)
♦Mindslave implants (Removed from mindslaves and used against the traitor, or an unlocked PDA)
Anything else people have in mind?

[Coolguye]

A dude making shackles is just as likely to be up to no good, if someone is known to be run-happy the stunlock works fine and if they've already tried to run once they've lost their right to complain. I'd use my flash instead of my baton for a couple of reasons, though - safety for me in case a hooligan disarms me, looks less like abuse on the way back to Sec, a lot less tempting to try a random disarm, etc. If someone's wearing a welding mask or sunglasses when you arrest them it's not a big deal to confiscate them as long as you give them back later.

Putting shackles on a prisoner would be a no brainer if you could simply apply and remove the shackles the same way we handcuff people, but as it stands you have to remove the prisoner's shoes, which takes 10 years and looks really shitty, then pick up and keep track of his shoes which also looks shitty when you put them in your backpack, then manually put on the shackled shoes but this admittedly looks a lot less shitty than a straight jacket. The problem with that is though, if you'd just flashed your prisoner and run back to the office at all speed, by the time you've put on the shackles you would otherwise already be back at the office.

I like the functionality that shackles provide but as they are coded right now they are unusable. It would be way better if, instead of needing some stupid custom item, you could apply a second set of handcuffs to someone who is already cuffed. If others agree with me that this is a good thing then go post it in the Ideas board, I'm not going to go do it myself.

As it stands right now though, the only time I can see using it is when you have a confirmed antagonist you're trying to control, in which case they've got no rights and a straight jacket is the ticket. If you're gonna be fun and release the traitor, just cuff them and tell them they've got a 3 minute head start. Your other ideas are pretty much exclusively Head things though, I can't ever remember a time when Security naturally got both the tracking implants and the GPS units required to use them unless the Captain, HoS, or HoP delivered them. I can't really ever envision the Electropack being of any real use, though. An aggressive traitor with a c-saber or something that goes down is always, always, always murdered with his own weapon seconds afterward, even if I'm yelling at everyone to leave him alone because he's harmless. Even in the theoretical situation that you got an electropack on someone, they'd probably just find some gullible idiot to remove it the second they're out of your sight.

[mozi]

Yeah if you have the time to remove their footgear then you'd already have the time to remove their sunglasses/welding helmet and just use a flash to keep them stunned.

[btek]

I'm still curious as to why this thread exists.

I've only read the first few posts but i think i get the gist of the point of this thread and I personally don't like it. I don't want security to be a faceless group of competent and uninteresting assholes. My theory has always been that what doesn't get you banned is ok in my books. There are a few golden rules that a sec officer should goddamn follow:
(1) Don't beat/execute and/or strip prisoners who aren't confirmed changelings, vampires or traitors.
(2) Set reasonable brig times
(3) Don't let prisoners die in your care.

Those are the only things security should care about. There shouldn't be anything else defining what the fuck they should do. You guys are on a slippery slope, turning security into some sort of fucking baystation bullshit. You're still really far from that but I definitely see where it's going.

Asides from the points i laid out above, it's a security officer's prerogative to do as he/she pleases. For example, they should choose whether or not they want to give someone shackles. are you guys seriously fucking arguing about that?

A security can be play to win if he wants. You're a fucking traitor/vampire/changeling/wizard/spy. It's your prerogative AND your duty to be prepared for whatever maelstrom of fucked that might come your way. If i'm any form of antagonist, I'm always prepared with emergency gear or made sure that I am advantaged in every way so as to ensure my relative safety. Instead of complaining about how sec was P2W, kill them. I have never had difficulty in killing security officers. The detective, yes, because detectives are always assholes.

As for being good security, people shouldn't be told outright what they should be doing besides from the points listed above/the rules. They need to learn by first being terrible. Different sec officers with different styles are more interesting. Hey, have your baton out? well too fucking bad. This game is partly about taking advantage of situations and profiting from them. The only person who's responsible for security other than themselves is the HoS. That's why we have an application for that job. So no one else has to deal with it like we are in this thread.

But that's my 2 cents.

[Coolguye]

I'm still curious as to why this thread exists.

I'd respond to your post longhand but it's pretty obvious you're taking this to a place it was never meant to go to. I'd suggest you read some of the followup posts and the wiki article revamp that came out of it. The entire point was not to turn everyone into drones, but to provide some guidance beyond those 3 horribly holey and painfully vague rules you mention. The wiki itself has a big red warning box saying 'DON'T BE SHIT', which is kind of hard when your only direction on how not to be shit is 'don't bash peoples' teeth in with harmbatons'.

[CaptainBravo]

As for being good security, people shouldn't be told outright what they should be doing besides from the points listed above/the rules. They need to learn by first being terrible. Different sec officers with different styles are more interesting. Hey, have your baton out? well too fucking bad. This game is partly about taking advantage of situations and profiting from them. The only person who's responsible for security other than themselves is the HoS. That's why we have an application for that job. So no one else has to deal with it like we are in this thread.

this seems like a bad way to think. aiming for 'people start off really shitty but get better' just seems worse than aiming for 'some people start off as sensible, decent security officers and get better(and some are still shit anyways, but we tried!)'.

[Dauntasa]

You know, on one hand I kind of agree with btek. Incompetent Sec can be amazing sometimes. Some of the funniest shit I've seen has been because Sec was full of bumbling retards. And having a competent and intelligent Sec team is great and working in such a team is probably one of the most fun things I've ever done in this game, but only if the criminals are a match for them. And a round where both Sec and the Antagonists are both very good at their jobs is rare. The problem is that if the Antag is an idiot then they'll get caught by a good Sec team right away even they aren't really trying. A round with Good Sec and Bad Antags is the least fun kind of round. If the Antag is good and Sec is bad then he'll have free reign to enact whatever horrible schemes he has in mind. If they're both bad then you get to watch a kind of hilarious comedy where people keep fucking up in retarded ways. And if they're both good you can get a pretty cool dynamic going on. But if Sec is good and the Antag is bad, then shit tends to end quickly. As an Hos, I've had this happen to me a lot:
"Hey, HoS, I caught a guy with an esword."
"Alright, keep a lookout for-"
"Nah, he's already cuffed and in the brig."
"Oh, well don't kill him, maybe we can think of something fun to-"
"Sorry, he committed suicide right after I cuffed him."
"Oh, well, uh, good job, I guess! There's still like 6 minutes left before we can call the shuttle, so I guess we should hit the bar or something."

The thing is that it's kind of a permanent problem just with the way that this game works. The person who gets made an antag is totally random and the people who get made Sec are also totally random, so you're rarely going to have a perfect match between them. And since Sec is a 4-man team that (theoretically) works together while Antags tend to be on their own, it's just much less likely that you'll get one person capable of taking Sec on unless Sec is staffed mainly by complete retards, in which case they might as well not exist except as mobile stun baton dispensers.

[btek]

im a dummy

yar har fiddly dee dee

Ok, I read a few pages and I still stick to what I said. You're all trying to get security to act "proper". The way I've always seen it, there should always be ambiguity in this game. I mean sure, there's the basic facets of what to do as a security officer but what doesn't get them banned should be a learning experience. Being a security officer is like a sword of Damocles. There's all that power but comes at the cost of going horribly wrong for you based on your own decisions. If everything is premeditated then where's the fun?

If someone's read the rules and knows how to handle a job such as security in a semi-competent fashion, then they'll know what to do and what is the wrong thing to do.
Granted, my rule on brig times should be and is hopefully elaborated on in the thread.
But those rules are the rules that are there to not get you in trouble. Everything else is up to the security officer to figure out what to do while not breaking any other fundamental rules on this server.

this seems like a bad way to think. aiming for 'people start off really shitty but get better' just seems worse than aiming for 'some people start off as sensible, decent security officers and get better(and some are still shit anyways, but we tried!)'.

How about "inexperienced"? Gaining experience is still a huge part of ss13. No one just starts "good". I'd rather have an experienced security officer rather than some insufferable greenhorn jackass who tries to emulate "the good cop".

How about I put it this way: "These security officers were hired by nanotrasen. They're rent-a-cops. Paid dirt cheap. They only do their jobs grudgingly because they don't want to be fired. Any of the finer points in their job, they believe it's within their rights to choose how to do it. Some serious RP for those of you fans out there.

[Sundance]

I'm hearing all this noise about pairing "good" and "competent" and "bad" and "incompetent"
Y'know there are people who are bad and competent.
The kind of people who wear infrareds and watch a person with their pda spawning items, then immediately spacing them afterwards, because that person has lost his rights to part of the crew.
Then there's those who can be good and incompetent. I've often been yelled at as HoS, called incompetent when I release a traitor back into the wild: tagged and demoted, w/e. I don't give a shit because my idea of justice is different than theirs.
I'd like to touch on what btek is saying, is that we have fun security. I don't mind a bumbling useless security who sits around the office eating the donuts and then says "how do I use baton", in which I pat him on the shoulder and feed him another donut.
I DESPISE bloodthirsty security who beat the living shit out of prisoners, and murder traitors because they can, that shit ain't fun, y'know you have incompetent traitors too. There is something really wrong if a player feels the need to suicide if caught.
If anything I wish this thread could show a passive side, a fun side.

[UrsulaMejor]

There is something really wrong if a player feels the need to suicide if caught.

I feel really shitty irl whenever this happens to me as an officer its like... and then I feel doubly shitty when I go to clone them and they've rage quit.

[Cogwerks]

imo a "Good Sec" is just like any other "Good Player" by doing things to help more people have fun than just themselves. Sure, you can cave a dude's skull in and win if they're a traitor, whatevs, or you can set up an elaborate Box Your Way to Freedom gauntlet, put in just vaguely enough effort so you can pretend you did your job, or smoke up with the bad dudes and complain about the crew.

[Truth]

imo a "Good Sec" is just like any other "Good Player" by doing things to help more people have fun than just themselves. Sure, you can cave a dude's skull in and win if they're a traitor, whatevs, or you can set up an elaborate Box Your Way to Freedom gauntlet, put in just vaguely enough effort so you can pretend you did your job, or smoke up with the bad dudes and complain about the crew.

This would be tempting if they wouldn't try to murder me half the time.

I never have my weapons out because I want to talk it out, but instead I get stunned/shot/sprayed/who knows, stripped, and murdered. Also, there's been far too many times when someone has been acting very suspicious, but I don't want to act without physical cause, and then, of course, I get shot/stun-shot/acided in the face/etc, stripped, and murdered. Do I/we start shooting first, worrying about the screaming later, or act in caution and continue being murdered?

[Shoddy]

Do we really need all this to tell us how to be good officers?
We already know how to be good officers for christ sake, educate the people who don't or don't, Everyone here knows what to do, RULE 1: DONT BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF PEOPLE, RULE 2: DONT BE A SNARKY ASSHOLE, RULE: 3 DONT LET YOUR SHIT GET STOLEN, RULE: 4 BE FUN, JUST TRY TO HAVE FUN.

See the similarity between these rules for sec and the rules for every single job?.

I'm having trouble trying to make this as short as possible and not being overbearing and angry.

I'll just say this, Not more hand holding please, no extra dumb rules for sec, no dumb questions like " Is it ok to poison ( read, keyword: POISON) someone as sec?".

I'm trying to hammer in the point that you should know inherently that beating someone as an officer is bad, poisoning, beatings, equipment theft, execution without permission.

Please, don't act like you're too dumb to figure out this shit.

In summary! Deal W/I.

[Coolguye]

Ok, I read a few pages and I still stick to what I said. You're all trying to get security to act "proper".

In my second post in this thread:

I'm hoping to more get nuts and bolts that there's no guidance on, anywhere. Most other jobs have step by step instructions to being 'good'. A Roboticist should make these upgrades to be 'good' to the cyborgs, the Botanist should grow weed like this to be 'good' to the fuckoffs on the station, whatever. There's no such specific help for Sec.

There is no mystery as to what I've wanted here. I spelled it out very early. I even yelled at people a few times to get them back on track when they started getting off that subject. The point was specific help for sec on how not to be shit when the fucking page has a big red square up top telling them not to be shit.

There's all that power but comes at the cost of going horribly wrong for you based on your own decisions. If everything is premeditated then where's the fun?

It isn't, since half the paths on the wiki end in vagueries for people to fill in. In particular, the high arrest for people who have been caught with traitor gear specifically tells you to bring in others to figure out a punishment for them, and only prescribes a boring brig punishment as a last resort for the terminally uncreative.

I think part of the reason we're talking past eachother is that I think these nuts and bolts are really important to communicate, and you don't, figuring that everyone should just sort of magically figure it out through experience. I'd agree with you if we were talking about some process with a specific payoff, like basically anything in Science, or fucking around with building. There's some cool stuff you can do there. Security kind of goes all over the place and it very often ruins everyone's day when Officers don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. Also I'm just going to say that I think part of your mindset comes from the fact that you love to screw with everyone, everywhere, and half-decent Security Officers are what most often ruins btek's fun. That sort of mindlessly selfish thinking is what got you the nameban you still can't get lifted and nearly made popecrunch permaban you when you were smoking harmful shit in Chemistry for the billionth time. So yeah I'll be generally civil with you but I don't think you've got a huge amount of room to talk about this.

Do we really need all this to tell us how to be good officers?
We already know how to be good officers for christ sake, educate the people who don't or don't, Everyone here knows what to do, RULE 1: DONT BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF PEOPLE

I fed a prisoner Unstable Mutagen that a chemist gave me because he wouldn't stop being shit! Now he's too busy having epilepsy and blindness to be shit! I didn't beat the shit out of him so it's okay, right?? I'm a good Sec Mans, right???

And then the entire rest of the world goes "no, that's not alright, you're an awful person." Then you move onto Discount Dan's, but whoops, that can cause disabilities too! Okay, fine, now I'll just take some sleep toxin and inject that, the sleep mimics brig time! But no, that's awful too because inevitably someone who's sleeping gets their shit robbed before they can wake up! But none of these had me laying a finger on the person, why is it bad???

Every half-cocked rule list that's been thrown out is fucking terrible, has huge gaps, and doesn't even cover a quarter of the situations people run into as Sec. I wouldn't think this was such a massive problem if a badly informed or misguided Security Officer couldn't ruin so many peoples' days. Being a badly informed and misguided Security Officer is also not fun when you find yourself abruptly in a confrontation with an admin who might not be feeling like giving you the benefit of the incompetence doubt today. If we want to say that ignorance is no excuse for being awful at Sec, we should fucking have a resource that makes it nakedly clear what awfulness at Sec is.

Also the wiki article says like 3 times that killing traitors you've apprehended isn't a great idea because boringness, though the reality is that the more aggressive a traitor is the more likely he will be to get butchered by his own weapons the second he falls down.