Remove the wraith from RP servers

[AGreywolfe]

as good of an idea as the wraith is for an antag to play, its style doesn't fit into the role play environment. while there have been rounds where I've seen the wraith RP'd out 9/10 times all they do is camp medbay destroying the department and consuming corpses with little to no actual interaction. i don't think this is due to the players not wanting to RP but rather to the role not having any real ability to easily RP due to the powers that the wraith possesses. i know there was an attempt to rework the wraith but im not sure where that went.

im not sure what the rest of the RP player base thinks about this but i see talk all the time about removing it in the discord so im posting this suggestion here.

[CalliopeSoups]

I may be biased but wraith is a favourite on RP for me, and RP already gets less cool antags as it is, sometimes a little chaos is nice.

That being said, the wraith rework is in final stages of code changes and reviews I believe? We're in a feature freeze right now, but even though it adds things like summoning minions, I think the fact they can talk will be great.

[Kotlol]

I am going to say 3 reasons why the wraith has trouble in RP.. and I seen fun rp wraiths.

1: It's a rare antagonist that not many get to play.

No matter what you say. I, in my years of playing now. Haven't had wraith once. I been admeme antags, I been changeling so much, vampire and more.
But never wraith. So when you get to be a wraith.. what's the 1st thing you do? TEST YOUR LIMITS AND EXPERIMENT!
I am not sure if it's rare on Main too due to Nukies and Wizards adding to the slots...but on RP it's rare to see one and even rarer to be one.

2: Interacting is very limited and slow for wraith.

We may have removed wizards but wizards can easily interact with players via RP. They can talk, cast funny spells and more.
Even Nukies can have fun interactions with the crew in RP as we see with Admeme's.
I can easily see a passive wizard turning people willingly into cluwnes to film an "attack of the cluwnes" movie , adding special effects with spells.

With wraith.. what can you do? You are always a spirit. Who can communicate limitedly via drawing and mind talk. Your tools are ment to do mega disuptive things...
So yea... if more of your powers and kit is ment to cause problems... and the passive part of your kit is harder to use... and infact you need a body to posses to even talk normally... You can see how most Wraiths refuse to interact and talk... but... even if they have expirence and patience to talk and do a fun RP.. we get our last problem.

3: POLTERGEISTS

Like it or not.. the Wraith can make Poltergeists now it's the decision of the Wraith to spawn these guys. But when they do... the wraith has NO CONTROL over what they do, only the area they effect. If the wraith wants to do something like: "Cook me a giant omelette" and then has the poltergeists "help the rancher"
If one of em spawns hostile.. the wraith's gimmick is dead in the water. Cause now no one can stop the rogue Poltergeist....
It will take considerable effort for the wraith and fellow poltergeist to OUST the rogue one without the crew going after them.
But denying poltergeists spawns might upset players.. cause... "COME ON WRAITH! I AM DEAD GIVE ME SOMETHING TO PLAY! I WANTED THIS! I DIED FOR THIS!"
Now these players are entitled sure.. but it doesn't mean they might complain.

Overall... Agrey is right. While I love the wraith and want to do a RP as one who would demand alot of pizza... and have the chapel be filled with pizza walls and floors.. It is hard to get that going due to the 3 factors I mention about wraiths.

Scarsity + not enough tools to passively interact/cooldowns + poltergeist able to go rogue on your plans (wich ain't against the rules as far as I can find). Means it's hard for a Wraith to have a good RP session.
AND PEOPLE COMPLAIN ABOUT WRAITHS AND CHANGELINGS NOT BEING RP CAPABLE ON A MONTHLY BASIS! So the wraith is especially incapable of it...

Though I would like the return of werewolves maybe.

[nefarious6th]

I was interested a while back in maybe IFDEFing some of the revenant abilities for RP, namely crush and shockwave because they can instantly gib.

Part of the problem too is that a wraith that's consumed what I feel is a relatively small amount of corpses (6 to 8) can essentially have infinite revenant chances after that point and prove incredibly destructive. The wraith interface and skillset is actually pretty intuitive and developed as far as antags go, so most players probably can achieve a fair number of corpses even with the rarity/first time of having a go at it, which opens them up to destructive abilities that IMO, the escalation of wraith ultimately guides your hand to. There's a lot of opportunity to escalate and escalate well as a wraith, I think my biggest problem is it feels like there's no '"middle state". It very much is an inverted bell curve where the wraith is a trivial nuisance absorbing corpses but never manifesting outright, and then after an hour they have the potential to be round-ending. Ideally there'd be something more in that middle section, and barring that, lowering the sort of maximum of the revenant so that someone couldnt realistically be gibbing everyone every 30 seconds but still can manifest as a tangible and serious threat (think the wraith damage boost ability and the stamina drain during a physical altercation). There's still an appreciable level of challenge there for the rarity of the round type, without instantaneous ability to kill people that may not have felt fairly escalated with. Kotlol is right too, the passive RP building parts of the kit costing a non-trivial amount of points for early-stage wraiths means they probably will gloss over those abilities in order to save points for the climax of the round.

6-8 isn't even a terribly hard goal to get, after an hour of pretty focused play, you can get there and spend the next 30 minutes revenanting. I do like the RP of Salt and the ways a chaplain CAN get involved and that it's one of the Only antags that can invite non-sec players into regularly countering it, but the balance of the end-stage in particular seems to be a little off for the RP escalation and way wraith is played.

I havent looked at the rework to see how that would change any of this yet, one thing I do like about wraith though is that you dont have choice over who ends up working with you as a poltergeist which I think limits ability for power and metagaming that some antags like vampire just cant avoid. I hope the minions system preserves that.

Also poltys have a sort of superior set of abilities for RPing versus the Wraith, but forcing the burden of escalation onto poltergeists seems unfair for obvious reasons.

Unrelated but if woofs didnt have a rampage-specific kit and integrated barriers to communication and thus escalation (scoobert doobert speech), they would be fun on RP, I think, for the same reason wraith can be, since it involves bigger swaths of the crew in fighting, particularly civvy jobs (botany, bartender; science)

I'm into a little threat on RP from time to time; definitely when I hear it's wraith though, it's a little irksome that the round ends up as "okay salt the floors and wait 45 minutes for the wraith to manifest and THEN you can actually get to inter/action". Long story short, I wish there was more interface with the antag to fill that 45 minute interval

[Retrino]

"wraiths on rp is a good gamemode"

[Waffleloffle]

I'd say at least see how things go after the wraith rework finishes up before putting it to bed for sure. I'm on the opposite end of the Wraith On RP spectrum where most of the wraith rounds I've seen consist of of wraiths psychologically torturing crewmembers which builds very well until they have to looc "hey are you cool with violence" to which the people around them go "sure just don't like KILL me you know" which kinda takes the teeth outta them

[Lord_earthfire]

I don't think wraiths should be removed RP.

We are actively missing antags on RP that warp the round around themselves. This means that i spend many rounds not interacting with the chaos an antag can cause. Which is a problem, since antags should be a driver of the round.

One reason for this is of course the rather small amount of antags in RP, but also the removal of the biggest impact ones, nukies, blobs and wizards.

While 2 of these 3 antags require immediate combat action and 1 got too few non-combat spells, the wraiths abilities allow it to play out gimmicks quite well.

The interaction betwen wraith and crew does not happen directly, but rather through the consequences the wraith causes. (Which is a reason i think flockmind would be a great RP antagonist as well). So in contrast to the other voices here, i think the disrupting abilities of the wraith support RP.

Of course the problem exist of overly destructive wraiths. Although admittedly i haven't witnessed that often enough. And often times people on RP aren't really accustomed to dying, which is honestly a problem and takes the teeth out of many antagonists, like waffle described for the wraith.

Tl;dr i think the wraith is one of the better "force of nature" - kind driver of a round for RP and instead if their removal, we need more of it.

[Kotlol]

I don't think wraiths should be removed RP.

We are actively missing antags on RP that warp the round around themselves. This means that i spend many rounds not interacting with the chaos an antag can cause. Which is a problem, since antags should be a driver of the round.

One reason for this is of course the rather small amount of antags in RP, but also the removal of the biggest impact ones,  nukies, blobs and wizards.

While 2 of these 3 antags require immediate combat action and 1 got too few non-combat spells, the wraiths abilities allow it to play out gimmicks quite well.

The interaction betwen wraith and crew does not happen directly, but rather through the consequences the wraith causes. (Which is a reason i think flockmind would be a great RP antagonist as well). So in contrast to the other voices here, i think the disrupting abilities of the wraith support RP.

Of course the problem exist of overly destructive wraiths. Although admittedly i haven't witnessed that often enough. And often times people on RP aren't really accustomed to dying, which is honestly a problem and takes the teeth out of many antagonists, like waffle described for the wraith.

Tl;dr i think the wraith is one of the better "force of nature" - kind driver of a round for RP and instead if their removal, we need more of it.

Essentially this.. I think 2 things need to change for the wraith 1st and that is it's communication shouldn't cost points just cooldowns.
If the wraith can talk and communicate more, it always makes for better antags on RP.

Remember that in advice for RP it says: "Antags should mutter things or say things to hint players they are antags?"
For example the changeling could whisper to itself: "We must feeeeed!"

Wraiths need to expend their points for something like this. So removing the cost of that will make the wraith by itself more interactable since it will communicate what it wants... and if someone does something wrong... it goes chaotic.

2nd thing they need is an abillity to talk over radio... not hear the radio, just say something over it like haunting over general.
(I would love to add a mechanic where the wraith can only be heard on non used frequencies and you can ghost hunt it with your own radio headset, closing in but eh :P)

This would help alot in wraithing.

It will eliminate 1/3 problems I said and to me the biggest one on RP.
Also I am fine with the return of some antags on RP.

I still think Wizard should get another shot.
Werewolves can get another shot (they are probably most likely)
And blob is a maybe... 
Nukies is a definate no. They are destructive, combative and the round ends when the nuke is down. Imagine not engaging with nukies to do your own RP and their nuke is destroyed... your RP unconcluded.

But the problem with wraith at the moment is not they don't create great scenerios.
it's they create the "SAME SCENERIO" without either side directly interacting with eachother most of the time.
And the wraith also mostly forces interaction being so destructive. It will hinder everyone, including other antags.

I like the wraith too don't get me wrong, but in their current state they do what the OP said:
"Medbay chaos so people die and can have their body drained for more points then rinse and repeat till you can do big damage"

[Decarcassor]

I'd wait for the rework, because the last thing the RP servers need is less antag variety.