Reroll player traits upon cloning

[TDHooligan]

i think sundance's post-cloning doctoring suggestion is great - things going wrong permanently is a punishment that is often the fault of the doctor treating you not being good enough. Things being wrong until you're patched up is a nice middle ground, granting the dead player control much earlier than old cloning did, but also ensuring they or someone else have to pay some sort of 'technical debt' if they do get cloned.

My ideal would be so that terrible doctors will, at worst, leave patients with permanent mild maladies. For example, a missing limb, a missing organ (I'd personally prefer only non-lethal organ loss), random mild genetic maladies, maybe even 'shrapnel' from bone chunks. This would also introduce doctors to these maladies during calmer rounds.

[Mouse]

If there exists a mechanism within the game by which players can be returned to life, then death, by definition, is not game over and it's utterly absurd to suggest it is.

[Frank_Stein]

I think it's important to rebuttal the whole don't die argument: There are too many ways to die or be murdered that death is inevitable, and common for most of the crew. There are a lot of things that can and will instantly kill someone, not even counting things that insta-gib. Plenty of chem mixes, kinetic and traitorous weapons, antagonist abilities, natural game mechanics, random events, the sheer will of a robust person/mob to cave your head in with a toolbox, and plenty of other ways and things to die to. It's also not a fair argument to make for newer or unrobust players, or those who get ignored while being killed by an antag, who through no fault of their own have died because of it.

I think my general notion was something to make the process of being cloned feel a bit roguelike, in that you'd get a new set of advantages and disadvantages to work with on a second life. Traits seemed like the current mechanic best suited for that.

Like your current set? Don't die.

Need to tweak or offset some of your new body traits? Visit the doctors or geneticists

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There should also be an element of luck, with getting traits that are unique to this method that are better than you could normally have

Except ss13, and especially goon, is not a roguelike. Mucking with traits, a currently completely player determined part of their character, is changing a fundamental part of character creation, and arguably a core aspect of any given character. It's not something to take lightly, or throw the idea around and about like there isn't a major consequence to it. Traits are a way to change how one's character acts or appears from other characters and distinguish them as unique, and making it a giant lottery spin upon cloning fundamentally changes that character, the player's intent, and even the fun in how the character was built. Traits should NOT be luck based in cloning nor be even altered in almost any way by a standard game mechanic, because at that point I would argue you lose the ability to make a unique character that can and will only be that character.

Those are all good points, but consider this...

What are the downsides to a second life? It used to be, waiting. Wisely, we changed that in a way that keeps people in the game longer.

Now, people seem to think I want this to be harsh and punishing, that you should get traits like puritan and immediately die. I don't. I just think there should be some downside to an instant revival. Having to deal with some kind of lasting trauma, especially from a character death is also a significant opportunity for RP

Characters can, like people, experience major life events like accidents of diseases that permanently disable them. Gaining or losing traits as a consequence of death really, in my mind, can reflect that.

[Drago156]

Why not just slow down the current cloning process or replace it with a slower one? Why not change the current medical system to make treating people not so complicated or as resource extensive? Why not a mix of both? That's the biggest part that I don't understand, you are ignoring two larger issues with easier to fix solutions and instead suggesting to change a core gameplay mechanic and instead add more complexity, randomness, and balancing to something that certainly doesn't need it, because it does currently still completely change your gene set and not update the genetek console.

Sure death is supposed to be bad and cloning is currently near instant, but there are negatives still currently in play, especially for being cloned three times, and it doesn't compare to SR by a long shot, because I know you've seen some round where some nerd MDir mixed up Insta-heal mixes and SR en masse, and just have to pop a pill into a dead person's mouth then apply SR to bring them back perfectly as is, mutations included.

Maybe instead of dying on the hill of randomizing traits we all could just instead focus on refining and polishing the current medical and cloning systems. Maybe to start a pre-clone the cloning pod would require 75-80% biomass. Maybe we could be lessening the severity of dead organs a tad bit and making it so certain conditions ramp more slowly over time? Certain chemicals could be changed to have better or different effects. New methods or chemicals for treating people could be added.

There are plenty of alternatives that aren't nearly as difficult to implement or as drastic of a gameplay change, and I highly encourage you to consider them over changing traits.

[Fonduede]

I think a possible solution would be to make some sort of system or minigame take place in order to prepare the next clone body. 

Right now it just happens for free. No one has to monitor anything, and anyone who dies reaps that benefit. 

But what if we created some sort of interactive process that good doctors can learn to prepare a body? Like the quantum telescope or the genetics scanner, some system that can be learned and interacted with in order to reward good doctors with a good result. In this case, the bad result isn't bad, it's just less convenient than the small effort of a good doctor.

[Frank_Stein]

I think the reluctantance of having traits messed with as a consequence of cloning kinda convinces me that I'm on to something in terms of finding a thing to make you want to not die, but no it's not a hill to die on.

I actually don't mind the new speed of cloning, in so much as how it completely disincentives and longer, life saving medical procedure.

I think we can agree that

1. Cloning needs good downside to it's new speed
2. Saving someone's life should be worth it over letting them die and be cloned

Sundance is probably onto something with more cloning aftercare. I'd love if it was something that was kinda optional. Like you hop out and can choose to deal with it, or wait around to have it fixed.

What if each time a trait was simply added. Could be bad, could be good. It wouldn't "change" your character identity so much as add a new thing.

Or would y'all be more comfortable with mutations? A reroll of your potential genes, with random ones activated during the cloning process?

[cyberTripping]

Or would y'all be more comfortable with mutations? A reroll of your potential genes, with random ones activated during the cloning process?

Getting bad genes activated is an interesting and logical downside to the cloning process, but unfortunately it wouldn't be much of a problem on its own since you can just pop a mutadone.

I'd agree that sundance's aftercare stuff was a pretty solid idea, or at least a foundation, since it's something which can't be swiftly resolved with a single med and, more importantly, requires the input of doctors to resolve.  On the other hand: traits can't really be affected by doctors and would just feel bad without actually being a disincentive for doctors to clone, and mutations can be fixed really thoughtlessly. That being said, chance for random mutations could work fine as part of a larger series of medical issues, since then it doesn't just become "give the clone a mutadone and walk away" and instead "get mutadone ready for potential mutations as part of the broader aftercare process" which is a bit more interesting.

[gleb09]

I feel that having cloning aftercare doesn't fix the issue of doctors choosing cloning over doctoring. The doctors choosing to clone would still choose to clone. What incentive would they have to do doctoring after if they weren't willing to do doctoring in the first place?

[Frank_Stein]

I feel that having cloning aftercare doesn't fix the issue of doctors choosing cloning over doctoring. The doctors choosing to clone would still choose to clone. What incentive would they have to do doctoring after if they weren't willing to do doctoring in the first place?

...let them charge for treatment?

Like uh, bill the NT insurance company for services performed?

[Studenterhue]

I think Sundance is on to something with the cloning aftercare idea. Under that system, you could still choose cloning over doctoring, but you'd still have to do some treatment, just a different kind that could be just as difficult, or at least more difficult than the current post-cloning medicine. (I sense brain damage due to cloning, and "cellular damage" for tgstation's version of cloning before cloning was removed might have been intended to function like this.) So you have the choice of either dealing with a patient's present ailments or cloning them and dealing with future ailments.

Personally, I think it accomplishes the goal of "give cloning a harsher downside" as part of "make doctors more likely to treat people rather than letting them die and cloning them" better than Frank's ideas about traits. There's a higher variety of effects, some of them are more debilatating than traits, and they're all stuff you can treat, unlike traits, which generally can't be removed. Plus, personally, I think rolling a random mutation alone is more entertaining than rolling a random trait (hey, you could wake up and discover you can go invisible now! but you could also find yourself deaf, mute, or Swedish)

If mutations turn out too easy to treat, there could also be the possibility they spawn reinforced. Or always come with a good mut, so you might need to consider if you'd be okay with parting with a good mutation if it means parting with a bad one.

[vampirate]

We could make it so that in order to make precloning instant you have to add twenty five units of the players blood to the cloner otherwise it takes 75 percent of the normal time to "configure new body" to the players presets. Adds a lil work to fast cloning for the medic.

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Alternatively, we could tie being able to be speed cloned to amount of time dead. Have to be dead for at least two minutes to get speed cloned. Call it "ectothermic detethering" or something.

[Mouse]

Or we could just revert the patch that allows for precloning. It makes no goddamn sense anyways.

[gleb09]

What about having precloning as an upgrade or replace that speedcloner?

[zjdtmkhzt]

Honestly, I like speedcloning because just sitting there doing nothing for a minute or two is in no way interesting gameplay for anyone.
Neither is cloning people instead of interacting with our fun medical system for organs/mutations/reagents/etc. (Which I think is fine in how much work it takes to fix people, generally.)

The only issue for me is that cloning is now so quick that it bypasses that cool medical system for something which is instant and easy.
That is why I think cloning should have a downside, but it should be one that is not just "you gotta wait while doing nothing".
I like adding a reinforced negative mutation or a negative trait, because that gives a real consequence to dying, but not one that is *too* bad.
We could also just add a negative trait while keeping the rest of the traits the same, so people can keep their trait "identity".

[KikiMofo]

The problem with cloning aftercare is THE PERSON WHO IS GOING TO CLONE SOMEONE ISNT GOING TO BE THERE FOR THE AFTERCARE. They will just pop the person in the cloner and run off leaving the cloned person to either just wander around and die or hope some other medical guy is going to be there to help. So that doesnt really incentivize the person that SHOULD be healing them instead of cloning them to actually heal them. It just passes off to be someone elses problem.