round type: reverse

[Dauntasa]

Cons:

• What is to stop the officers from going on a murder spree before the five minutes are up? Not necessarily bad, but it would generate much heat for the adminhelp channel. Also carries a tiny meta potential as people will inevitable yell "it's reverse" the moment they are arrested before the 5 minute mark.
  
• The whole "I'm traitor, you're traitor but we don't know" concept sounds great on paper, but it carries a large potential for meta. The way this will play out is most of the time is 40 people shuffling to find hidey-holes for their traitor item spawning and inevitably at least one person will stumble upon another, whom will either murder one another for the crystals (if they're Rickie Basinger or Sasha Page anyway), or form an alliance. Now we have two people who are traitors, most likely from the same department, the odds of which are quite small. Doesn't take a TOO experienced traitor to begin suspecting a reverse, he comes up with this crazy theory, shuffles around near his department, boom, the game is basically revealed 3 minutes before it was supposed to.
  
• The average peak population is roughly 60 people at round start. What does this mean for the four-manned security force, the HoS, the detective, the HoP and the Captain? That is 9 people, leaving the 51 remaining folks to be traitors. That is 510 telecrystals from the usual catalog. You'd have to disable a lot more than just cloaks and mindslaves (which, by the way, should only stop functioning at the 5 minutes mark). Items which are far too incompatible with this mode include the artbox, stimpacks (what in the name of fuck are you going to do with 10 unstunnable dudes) and pipebombs (for both sides' sakes). There are far too many, far too horrible combinations I can imagine, thus the loadout of security needs to scale with the amount of dudes against them - which is hard to keep from being overpowered, so some serious balance considerations are needed.

For the first one, nothing, and it'd be a valid strategy for them to blindside as many enemies as they could with walls of shotgun fire before anyone figured out what was going on. However, in doing so they risk losing the element of surprise. Also, by yelling Reverse you immediately out yourself as a traitor, because the only way you could think it was reverse was if you were a traitor, so if you're wrong you've just fucked yourself pretty hard. The idea that the roundtype should be rarer than usual is for just that reason: If you roll traitor and go on the assumption that the round is reverse and immediately assault security, things will go poorly for you if you're wrong. And even if you're right, if you don't convince everyone else then you've just run into 9 heavily armed people who are expecting you. I think in practice the traitors would very rarely get organized before they're all told what's happening, and even then it would take them a while. There should be absolutely no penalties for accidentally killing people before you're told what's going on, since people fucking up and doing that is part of what keeps things fair.

I guess the artbox and bombs might have to be disabled, too. Buyable, but useless. Sec is outgunned enough that some of the several hundred crystals out there being spent on worthless items isn't going to swing things away from them much. Stims should be left in. That's what the tranq rifle and lethal shotguns are for. Only a few jobs can buy those and if the traitors are organized enough to set up a stunproof drugged-up assault squad they should be allowed to use it.

Maybe in high-population rounds sec should get a few Portable Flashers or stun mines to help with crowd control, but I don't think they should get a bunch of heavy weapons or anything. How about this: Give sec a tool that unlocks traitor PDAS, so they can get items from any that they manage to capture. I don't think anyone's gonna suicide as Sec either, since they're told right away that they're essentially the bad guy in a special roundtype. Maybe have Reverse Sec be an option to toggle on and off like Traitor, Changeling, etc. in the jobs menu.