[PR] Increase chances for clone defects & add new defects

[github_bot]

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[Balance] [Medical]

About the PR
Recategorizes all existing cloner defects:
"Minor" defects are now things that slightly inconvenience a player, things such as damage on cloning, vocal chord disfiguration, etc.
"Major" defects are now things that highly inconvenience players, such as missing limbs, organs or bio effects such as narcolepsy.

It adds a few new cloner defects:
Baldness (Minor), Deafness (Major), Blindness (Major), Narcolepsy (Major), Plasma Lungs (Major), Rare Mutant Race (Major).
Splits up Brute and Burn damage, and adds Tox damage as individual damage defects.
The weights have been placed low for more harmful effects such as large damage sources.

The biggest change is the change to the defect_count calculation.
Every cloned person now gets at least 2 defects, with a bias to skew towards 2-3.
There's now a 60% chance to roll a minor defect and a 40% chance to roll a major defect.

Why's this needed?
Over the years, there's been a some threads on the topic of cloning being too safe, as well as some conversation on the Discord. The general consensus seems to be that there's a general dislike toward cloning being an easy way to fix a patient without having to specifically engage in any of the medical systems. Doctors will often rather let someone die and have them be cloned than try to save them because it's easier.

Rather than make it harder or add restrictions to clone, this PR attempts to make cloning less "safe". Not more lethal, not more annoying, but being cloned now carries more risk if there isn't a doctor present. The likelihood of needing medical assistance goes up dramatically the more often one is cloned, and even after the first clone you may end up with a disfigured face or a missing arm.

The intent is for cloning to be a last resort that should be used if the patient is already dead, and encourages having someone with medical knowledge nearby that can assist the person, but does so in a way that doesn't require it.

Threads for reference:
https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid=20207
https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid=22809


Changelog

Code:

changelog
(u)Glamurio (Ryou)
(*)NT Clone Pods are now less safe to use. In case of defects, please refer to the nearest available doctor.

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[Glamurio]

Writing my last comment of the PR here as well:

Death isn't scary anymore, and I think it's causing problems both on a mechanical level as well as with people's attitude. It's hard to feel intimidated when you can be cloned easily with no repercussion. "Fresh" scans are probably the most common, so I'm not sure if that change alone would do much. The average person dies less than once per round I'd argue, and dying more than once should really make itself shown.

That being said, I do love the idea of implementing a way for geneticists to make the cloner more safe. Maybe they could spend some of their time researching cures for cloner defects, or have ways to easily remove them. Perhaps the recently revived person could go and get their defects checked at cloning, as an extra pit stop or something.

[Solenoid]

Glamurio, I love the changes you've made here! I'd just like to give my feedback on them.

Firstly, I'm not entirely sure if baldness is as "minor" as the other "minor" defects, or if it fulfills the role of making cloning feel more unsafe versus annoying. Now, I do agree that it is easy to fix, but relies on having access to hairgrowinium and it can take a lot of time to do solo barbering/convince someone to come cut your hair. You could also order wigs from cargo, but those are mostly brightly colored and randomized hairstyles. I don't really have any solutions to it, but I figured I'd just share my concerns since it seems a lot harder to get your hair back than to have some toxin damage fixed or to take some mutadone to fix your voice which medbay has on hand.

Secondly, I'm digging all your major trait ideas and like how they could encourage more use of VISORs and similar stuff, but I'm sort of curious on how Narcolepsy would be handled? Would it be able to be fixed at all through chems/doing certain actions? I just worry that having constant "stuns"(for a lack of a better term) could just be annoying rather than actually difficult, though I'm not sure how you've coded it and can't read code to save my life.

Finally, I like that you gave people at least 2 defects per cloning cycle. It should make the recovery process more involved for doctors and as a medbay main, I approve of that. It's nice to have some followup with a patient and not just shove them out the door the moment they pop out of the pod.

Ultimately, I'm down to see this merged and I think it'd be cool to have cloning be a more involved process.

[Mouse]

if you're gonna make cloning permanently cripple people in a fashion that cannot be fixed just fucking remove it

[mralexs]

if you're gonna make cloning permanently cripple people in a fashion that cannot be fixed just fucking remove it

Agreed. The goal of the game is to have fun, why are we trying to add downsides to cloning? Why not just make it take longer?

[Frank_Stein]

if you're gonna make cloning permanently cripple people in a fashion that cannot be fixed just fucking remove it

Agreed. The goal of the game is to have fun, why are we trying to add downsides to cloning? Why not just make it take longer?

Now, I do agree that it is easy to fix, but relies on having access to hairgrowinium and it can take a lot of time to do solo barbering/convince someone to come cut your hair. You could also order wigs from cargo, but those are mostly brightly colored and randomized hairstyles. I don't really have any solutions to it, but I figured I'd just share my concerns since it seems a lot harder to get your hair back than to have some toxin damage fixed or to take some mutadone to fix your voice which medbay has on hand.

I don't think they all need easy or dependable fixes, but having to go seek them out is where the emergent part of the gameplay comes in.

Sure, you could make cloning take longer as a downside, but is that fun? Instead you get a problem to solve, an adventure to go on, and friends/deals to make to help you.

[Lord_earthfire]

Overall, i like the changes. Most of them can be mitigated by medical assisstance and this makes cloning less free.

if you're gonna make cloning permanently cripple people in a fashion that cannot be fixed just fucking remove it

If you can't take the need to wear visors until the end of the round because you suffered from skill issue died too often, you can always take puritan. These aren't really that crippling.

[Solenoid]

if you're gonna make cloning permanently cripple people in a fashion that cannot be fixed just fucking remove it

Agreed. The goal of the game is to have fun, why are we trying to add downsides to cloning? Why not just make it take longer?

Now, I do agree that it is easy to fix, but relies on having access to hairgrowinium and it can take a lot of time to do solo barbering/convince someone to come cut your hair. You could also order wigs from cargo, but those are mostly brightly colored and randomized hairstyles. I don't really have any solutions to it, but I figured I'd just share my concerns since it seems a lot harder to get your hair back than to have some toxin damage fixed or to take some mutadone to fix your voice which medbay has on hand.

Sure, you could make cloning take longer as a downside, but is that fun? Instead you get a problem to solve, an adventure to go on, and friends/deals to make to help you.

In theory, I absolutely agree with you. In practice, making players go on a hunt randomly to fix their hair(a very big definitive trait of most characters on RP), is not always that fun as an emergent form of adventure. The first few times, sure. But eventually you'll just have players grumbling about being bald again as a result of some random death they had once, since baldness would be a minor defect as proposed currently.

Again though, I do agree with you on the other stuff. There's a lot of cool possibilities in exploring how your character interacts with others with the new aids they have or how they react to the aids themselves. I just think we shouldn't make a minor defect devolve into a character-altering fetch quest to fix your appearance and save those character-altering moments for major defects.

[Emimiyu]

Maybe blindness and deafness but you can heal it with occuline? Just like the voice and face thing with synthflesh

[Kotlol]

I think the idea of when you are cloned you might need more medical treatment is good.

It means doctors are less inclined to let you die and clone you since they have to treat you right away after anyway.

[Glamurio]

Glamurio, I love the changes you've made here! I'd just like to give my feedback on them.

Firstly, I'm not entirely sure if baldness is as "minor" as the other "minor" defects, or if it fulfills the role of making cloning feel more unsafe versus annoying. Now, I do agree that it is easy to fix, but relies on having access to hairgrowinium and it can take a lot of time to do solo barbering/convince someone to come cut your hair. You could also order wigs from cargo, but those are mostly brightly colored and randomized hairstyles. I don't really have any solutions to it, but I figured I'd just share my concerns since it seems a lot harder to get your hair back than to have some toxin damage fixed or to take some mutadone to fix your voice which medbay has on hand.

Secondly, I'm digging all your major trait ideas and like how they could encourage more use of VISORs and similar stuff, but I'm sort of curious on how Narcolepsy would be handled? Would it be able to be fixed at all through chems/doing certain actions? I just worry that having constant "stuns"(for a lack of a better term) could just be annoying rather than actually difficult, though I'm not sure how you've coded it and can't read code to save my life.

Finally, I like that you gave people at least 2 defects per cloning cycle. It should make the recovery process more involved for doctors and as a medbay main, I approve of that. It's nice to have some followup with a patient and not just shove them out the door the moment they pop out of the pod.

Ultimately, I'm down to see this merged and I think it'd be cool to have cloning be a more involved process.

I hadn't thought people would be upset about baldness. It doesn't have any mechanical downside, but it does cause less RP-ability. I'd have assumed people just need to wear hats and things to deal with it. I could either remove it, or we could add a small bottle of hairgrownium somewhere in medbay (but this kind of exacerbated the issue of medbay having too many meds). But if we add a way to rid ourselves of defects, this is a non-issue (assuming hair grows back).

if you're gonna make cloning permanently cripple people in a fashion that cannot be fixed just fucking remove it

This is a good point, and I think before this should get merged, I should add ways to at least semi-reliably remove clone defects. Genetics as a department seems like the perfect spot for this, though I'm brainstorming ideas of how to do this that won't result in them just sitting in their booth even more.

if you're gonna make cloning permanently cripple people in a fashion that cannot be fixed just fucking remove it

Agreed. The goal of the game is to have fun, why are we trying to add downsides to cloning? Why not just make it take longer?

This was actually one of the primary things I didn't want to do. The idea was to add things for the player to have to work around, not remove playability from the player. If it takes too long to respawn, people may just close the game when they die and not even bother waiting on cloning.

if you're gonna make cloning permanently cripple people in a fashion that cannot be fixed just fucking remove it

Agreed. The goal of the game is to have fun, why are we trying to add downsides to cloning? Why not just make it take longer?

Now, I do agree that it is easy to fix, but relies on having access to hairgrowinium and it can take a lot of time to do solo barbering/convince someone to come cut your hair. You could also order wigs from cargo, but those are mostly brightly colored and randomized hairstyles. I don't really have any solutions to it, but I figured I'd just share my concerns since it seems a lot harder to get your hair back than to have some toxin damage fixed or to take some mutadone to fix your voice which medbay has on hand.

I don't think they all need easy or dependable fixes, but having to go seek them out is where the emergent part of the gameplay comes in.

Sure, you could make cloning take longer as a downside, but is that fun? Instead you get a problem to solve, an adventure to go on, and friends/deals to make to help you.

Frank honestly perfectly summarizes my attitude. I want death to be scary, and I want it to be annoying to be cloned, but I don't want it to stop you from having fun afterwards. People should have the choice of "I guess I wear VISORs this round" or "Time to bug someone to fix this". In many ways this isn't too different from losing an arm after an explosion. You either roll with it, or you go get help.

[Decarcassor]

Maybe not permanent blindness and deafness. But add missing one or both eyes. Its a good excuse to visit robotics and get a funny eye implant. And yeah spawning with damaged ears that are going to need a good amount of occuline can cause some funny shenanigans out of the cloning vat too.

Needing cloning aftercare: Good.
Permanently crippling defects: Less than ideal.

[JOELED]

I like this, it makes me want to play my non-puritan character more.  Cloning defects are fun to play around.  I personally like the bald effect, as that's something genetics can fix in their console already.  Interested to see what you come up with for more genetics integration, but I personally am totally for this PR as is.

[meaow589]

I like this we might found somthing interest for cloning now

[TDHooligan]

i'm all for a lot of them. i wouldn't mind clone freshness perhaps adjusting these weights instead of just being a flat 40% chance to get fucked no matter what precautions you take.