Goonhub
09-04-2025, 07:17 AM
(This post was last modified: 09-04-2025, 07:23 AM by Skotcher. Edited 1 time in total.)
Going against the grain here and even my own personal feelings on this (I do really enjoy a harbinger round where the wraith & summons go hard on killing the station), but I think this change is probably for the best in terms of RP. While harbinger summons can have some funny and interactive RP, it does often tend towards 'friendtagging' where we keep around obvious threats we should be dealing with because "they're just a funny silly guy". I've seen summons ignore their masters orders, and I've seen crew defend "the peaceful one" summon from security when clearly the wraith and its summons are a threat.
Trickster has lots of tools to create interesting/unique RP, and Plaguebringer has elements that require interacting with the crew and station, but Harbinger really is just bringing the hammer down on the station or being relatively passive (at which point, why not go one of the other routes?). Personally would like to take a look at some of the mechanics from Harbinger and see if they could do with tweaking for more interesting interaction. Plaguebringer already has a mechanic where bodies need to be rotting in order to absorb essence; why not have a mechanic where the portal acts as a sacrifice zone? Could encourage having the Harbinger cooperate with the other antags in order to collect bodies to be sacrificed to create stronger summons or better point generation? Have some cult elements to it; maybe there's a corruption mechanic where you can begin hexing someone and if it's not dealt with, a ghost gets to inhabit the body of whoever you've hexed and is an antagonist. All that to say, while I'd prefer keeping Harbinger in the mix, I can see reasons why it's being disabled and might need some tweaking before being brought back to RP servers.
Trickster has lots of tools to create interesting/unique RP, and Plaguebringer has elements that require interacting with the crew and station, but Harbinger really is just bringing the hammer down on the station or being relatively passive (at which point, why not go one of the other routes?). Personally would like to take a look at some of the mechanics from Harbinger and see if they could do with tweaking for more interesting interaction. Plaguebringer already has a mechanic where bodies need to be rotting in order to absorb essence; why not have a mechanic where the portal acts as a sacrifice zone? Could encourage having the Harbinger cooperate with the other antags in order to collect bodies to be sacrificed to create stronger summons or better point generation? Have some cult elements to it; maybe there's a corruption mechanic where you can begin hexing someone and if it's not dealt with, a ghost gets to inhabit the body of whoever you've hexed and is an antagonist. All that to say, while I'd prefer keeping Harbinger in the mix, I can see reasons why it's being disabled and might need some tweaking before being brought back to RP servers.