Nerfing SR: a Discussion

[Kotlol]

If you want to stay alive, don't take puritan. It's meant to be a "one life" deal except for being borged.

This is what I always believed with the trait and that borging is the only way..
Wich is why I brought up the side effects/meat cubing idea.

Mostly since in RP SR is ready in over 50% of rounds now in 3 mins as Cal stated.

But insted of removing the feature all together, making SR.... way less valauble and just to avoid clone rotting / clone interrupting.
I'd say still let it work with a downside. Cause Puritan to have a fun mechanic tied to it, insted of "One life no deal"

Wich is why I loved Lord_earthfire's idea of "They need to be kept alive with SR all round or become a meat cube"
Now the only way for them to escape a meatcube fate is either by keeping SR or getting their brain removed and put into a borg.
Also if they die now.. also meatcubing.

Essentally put... the "one life thing" is gone to a "two life thing" but the second life is hell with side effects and a timer that you need to reset and maintain.
And if you fail... borging is out of the question.

Also I just wanna see more meatcubes. Those things are rare to begin with and have a rare life time. Only the immortal cube is even more rare.

[cyberTripping]

As someone who plays (well, played, I havent actually touched the game in a while for various reasons) puritan, I'd be down with making SR fail to revive puritans. I've always seen the "real" way of reviving puritans to be the cloning method, where you jam the failed clone full of shit and cryotube them while pulling them out for further stabilizing. Even that's a bit too free imo, but at least it's messy, can easily lead to accidents, and is best handled by multiple staff. SR, in comparison, is piss-easy to the point of puritan being meaningless if it really has become standard fare in medbay.

[KikiMofo]

LESS STRANGE REAGENT AND MORE BORGING YES

[Sov]

imo puritans should be unrevivable by any means. 1 life only, use it well

Also I dislike people treating it like free points and getting salty in dead chat / toxic towards players who don't bother looking for the trait when cloning them

I guess borging is ok as a way to get more bodies to the roboticist

[zjdtmkhzt]

I think making it not revive puritans is great, those people have it coming.

But I definitely don't think it should be hard to make. Cloning people is trivial, I don't see why the chem equivalent of a cloner (but with more prerequisites in damage thresholds) should be hard to make.

[Lord_earthfire]

Since the discussion takes the direction that most people don't want puritans to be revived under any circumstances, and the some people seem to like meat cubes, how about this:

Instead of reviving, SR treats a puritan the same way it would treat a rotting corpse. Instead of gibbing in a normal way, SR turns rotten bodies, too strongly damaged bodies and bodies of puritans into docile npc meat cubes, gibbing the body in the progress.

I don't really care for puritans. My problem is SR being absolutely laughable weak in comparison to cloning. But this way, SR will shift its focus to become a more gimmicky chem with a potential usefull effect (reviving non-puritans). Meat cubes would also fit SR being used in many life/mob creating recipes.

We can also add the global mob spawning limit onto the chem, although i don't think it's likely someone will scrounge together 50 corpses and turn them into meatcubes (altough that would be hillarious)

[Shiiba]

Give SR a side affect? It's a chemical that brings you back to life, maybe it gives you some issue that you have to deal with? Maybe something genetics can't remove or something else entirely.

[Waffleloffle]

technically SR does already have the side effect of causing tox damage when ingested by people who are alive, but evidently this is pretty trivial to deal with when there's medical staff available

[Kotlol]

Give SR a side affect? It's a chemical that brings you back to life, maybe it gives you some issue that you have to deal with? Maybe something genetics can't remove or something else entirely.

We already suggested side effects earlier like a chance of becoming a meatcube (and becoming a full on mechanic)

[Cogwerks]

Some context:

Strange Reagent is old as all hell, maybe 12 years or more. It's way older than the puritan thing or the trait system. It's a nod to Re-Animator. I don't think it was ever meant to be an important part of medbay playstyles and being able to bypass Puritan with it is kinda weird and bad. I still don't like puritan as a trait and think the problems here are more to do with Puritan than with strange reagent.

It's more on the mad science gimmick kinda side of reagents.

[NightmarechaMillian]

Main player butting in:

SR is EXTREMELY rare on main, In two years of daily playing, I've only been revived with it twice, and can count on my hands the number of time I've seen it used to revive other people, especially post-nerf. In my opinion, SR is fine- If botany is contributing to the station (Big if on main), and the doctors are on their A- game, they get a chemical to help take some strain off of the ever-growing pile of bodies that develops in cloning.

With that in mind, I feel like Strange Reagent is absolutely a RP issue, where 90% of the time departments actively work together and contribute to the station, but I think it's in a perfectly fine position on the main servers. I feel like SR, in that case, should really only be further nerfed on RP.
Maybe give it a nasty side effect of causing organ damage?

[babayetu83]

i think i saw somebody on RP with a medical bracelet that read "PURITAN" on their character thing. i think that was a neat touch. as far as SR goes, i think it being considered a crucial/standard piece of kit is a bit overblown. i've been playing rp for a while and it's not too often i see SR being used. i think it's already countered by the fact that bodies will rot rendering it useless. i had a body rot on me in a morgue tray when i was out preparing SR. if it must be nerfed, maybe consider adding another stage of corpse decay, where you will immediately need to put them on ice as they will go from fresh -> decomposing -> rotting -> heavily rotted -> skeletonized

[Cogwerks]

Strange Reagent is a bit weird role-wise and story-wise - it's kinda ambiguous where Necrovirus and Strange Reagent overlap and where they differ, and where that ties into Anima / Life reaction. Necro and Strange are both related to Jam Mansion and the zombie stuff around it.

Strange Reagent shouldn't really be considered a standard practice for Medbay - it's mad science and it ought to have some more risks to it, like maybe getting an NPC mind sometimes or some weird awful effects (delayed onset rotting or something.) Using H. Jam's Magical Space-Bullshit Undeath Tonic to revive dead critters is very entertaining. Berating medbay players for not having this weird obscure chem around to help you skip the drawbacks of the Puritan trait is much less entertaining. It's been pretty frustrating to see that happening so much.

[avimour]

constant puritan player here hi, i also am guilty of making SR within the first five minutes, usually because it's a very simple chem to make as an mdir and i'm already grabbing wine to drink.
i think the main issue can stem from there only being 3 real ways to bring someone back into a game, ie cloning, SR, or borging (minus antag bring backs). i don't think it's a good idea to completely nerf SR, to cause someone to become a meatcube and such, but i do think SRing someone should give them more downsides, as it is weird magic science stuff. i liked the previous idea, of highlight the Strange aspect of it, and i think giving people that one mutation where your limbs start attacking you would be neat, and making it unremovable like deaf trait's deafness.
maybe a trait called 'Revived' or 'Frankenstein's Monster' something like that, that's only achievable by being sr revived. makes your limbs all wonky, and maybe adding a random mutation that can be removed (so we don't get someone with radiation aura that kills all of medical bc someone used sr) (though that could be fun to deal with)
but i will say, playing as puritan for almost a year now, i've only had someone bring my body to robotics to be borg'd once. when given a puritan people usually just shrug and try cloning anyways, monkey clone, grind the corpse, or SR. only once, when i was talking about it in dead chat and an admin who was playing saw, was i brought to robotics.
it's a shame and i think it's due to an rp culture thing that's relevant to SR as well. for some reason, part of rp culture has this idea that playing as a silicon is a punishment. to that point, they'll fight tooth and nail to clone, monkey clone, or SR a puritan. which leads to rp docs making a dragon's hoard of SR at the start of the shift. they also avoid robotics like it's the plague, even though many people, myself included, enjoy playing silicon.
my end point is, i don't think, no matter how much you nerf or change SR, rp docs will change. they'll just adapt to the new meta for SR, because they rather SR someone instead of borging them.
((im also guilty of SRing someone instead of taking them to be borg'd, but that's mostly due to me having easy usage of SR, i've made it a point to bring puritans and rotting corpses to robotics if i'm out of the stuff, in the hopes that others follow my lead))

[nefarious6th]

what if puritan removal