Give Roach Mutantrace a new gimmick ability

[0oze]

So i got this idea from the discord, but i thought taking it up here for a bit more in depth discussion.
Gist is, cow-people get the ability to eat bushes, or lizards being able to pop their tail. Useless but very fun FLAVORFULL features! The roach however got... the ability to withstand radiation pretty damm good, and be squished by any kind of blunt weapon. The idea here was to get some different ideas of new things the roach-people may be able to do! Fun things and not something INCREDIBLY usefull. Like eating bushes :3

Two of these ideas that was trown around in the discord was the ability for roaches to hide under tiles (with incredible limitations) such as brute damage, and loud bone cracking sounds. Of course unable to move around.

Another was to give roaches the ability to eat trash/any kind of food without food poisioning. Allthough these aint AS FUN as chomping a bit bite outta a bush.

Yet another idea was to give roaches a way to communicate with other roaches trough pheramones. Limited to simple gestures or emotions however.


That's just a couple i made, or other folks did. I would love to hear your ideas/why these ideas are terrible/good, etc etc etc!

yeh :V

[Lefinch]

First: thanks for taking it to the forums. Discord is great for spitballing but as soon as the conversation ends it may as well not have happened at all, and anyone who wasn't even there hasn't got a clue about it.

Second, the roach tile thing is very funny. I'd suggest making sure they occasionally make a bit of noise or something, akin to an arcfiend's spark just so we're not all having to develop a roach meta of pulling every single tile up in a room every time we look. However, the actual idea is extremely funny and I like it.

Eating spoiled food is pretty inoffensive. directly poisoned food? I actually kind of like that though it does mean it shuts down a significant amount of traitor play. Then again, it's one mutant race, maybe a partial resistance, or maybe just spoiled food.

They do already have their innate radiation resistance which is a real workhorse for some departments, but it's also clearly not tempting enough that everyone wearing yellow plays roach, so I'm fine with adding something a little extra to them.

EDIT: Random bonus option to throw at you: If suddenly exposed to bright lights (post flashbang disorient) they get a little speed buff "Running from the light". Or maybe if they switch from a dark area to a bright area it happens, like a brief speed boost lasting a second or two.

[jan.antilles]

A few ideas that come to mind, with the banner statement that I have discussed absolutely none of these with anyone on the dev team so none of them have any more likeliness of making it into the game than anyone else's ideas:

-Did you know that roaches can live IRL without a head, for about a week? Terrifying. I don't think that would work here because that's a special thing we have for skeletons already, but that's just something I have to know about now.

-Giving them a sort of dash ability with the animation of tegmina/wings. Tegmina (forewings, similar to elytra but just rough instead of hard) could inherit the roach's "skin" color, and wings could be clear-ish. This would just propel them a tile or so in one direction, mostly usable for getting out of immediate danger or maybe flying a particular direction in space. I dunno, seems cool.

-Eating spoiled food, sure. Maybe they're not affected by Ants, so they can eat whatever is on the floor without worry.

-Maybe they can hear from a tile farther than usual, since they have built-in antennae.

[Lefinch]

-Giving them a sort of dash ability with the animation of tegmina/wings. Tegmina (forewings, similar to elytra but just rough instead of hard) could inherit the roach's "skin" color, and wings could be clear-ish. This would just propel them a tile or so in one direction, mostly usable for getting out of immediate danger or maybe flying a particular direction in space. I dunno, seems cool.

Seriously though, I like the dash concept more than my light-reactivity one. Also while I'm not surprised, I am mildly horrified and more informed at finding out about the head thing. The slight hearing thing might be good for a detective though we seem to talk a bit about how easy it is to hear things anyway. It might be good if it's entirely about hearing/"seeing" dialogue a little further away for sure. Or like a weird audio version of meson goggles, where you can hear people on the other side of walls perfectly well. Very spy.

[0oze]

One other idea that was on the discord was the ability for roach-people to scutter (crawl) a lot faster than normal humans can crawl. As in laying down and moving.
prolly still aint faster than walking, or maybe on par?

Just thinking out loud :3

[WyrdDoe]

Roach people being faster at crawling would be a simple and elegant way to introduce some freaky little guy flavor that is both not that powerful and also very useful for day to day domestic convenience, and that's very funny and cute to me.

[Frank_Stein]

give roaches the ability to eat trash

Makes a lot of sense

Yet another idea was to give roaches a way to communicate with other roaches trough pheromones. Limited to simple gestures or emotions however.

This would be interesting. Type up a little note, toot out a little gas cloud, and another roach could just examine it up close to smell/read it

Some other spitballing ideas:
Molting - Leave behind your exoskeleton as a hollow husk. Maybe this heals you in some way, or can be used to recover from something?
Safer Crits - Weaker chances to roll things like cardiac failure while in crit, or slower breath loss. You're a roach, you're hard to kill.

[Lefinch]

The molting thing is amazing. It would be an absolute shame not to use that at some point. Just a room full of roach molts to pretend your department is staffed, the bits you could do with even a very -obvious- molt are wild.

[Bartimeus]

What if molting would consume a chunk of hunger and thirst, heal you for some amount, but also leave you even more vulnerable to damage for a time while your carapace hardens? You could molt once in a long while to heal minor damage, regrow a limb or two (or regrow a shittier version of it, which is funnier) or to leave a decoy of yourself behind, albeit a very obvious and fragile one. It'd remove things like paint, gnesis colorings or similar. Molting would also likely take a fair bit of time. Perhaps fully regrowing a limb would require several moltings, so you can get rid of it's inferior version.

About the headless roach suggestion, what if headless roaches just randomly ran around sometimes for several minutes before finally dropping dead? One last hurrah before finally keeling over or before a doctor can reattach your head.

Perhaps roaches could be completely silent when they run while lying down, as a skittering critter, though that isnt as fun.

[Waffleloffle]

I like the pheromones idea a lot - the idea of a rudimentary dark souls message left around that only roaches can read and see is very fun to me. would probably have to be boiled down to simple concepts/emotions to not add too much of a Communication Advantage

[Lefinch]

I like the pheromones idea a lot - the idea of a rudimentary dark souls message left around that only roaches can read and see is very fun to me. would probably have to be boiled down to simple concepts/emotions to not add too much of a Communication Advantage

You could do the old "Signs/code/cant" thing like this but with roach symbols/expressions. 

[valtsu0]

Give them the ability to eat clothes

[Mouse]

have them take damage from stepping on mousetraps

[Silent Majority]

I like roach people being able to clamber into transportation pipes and move like plague rats do

[0oze]

One last discord suggestion i saw was to give roaches two extra hands.
These would of course not be able to carry anything larger than a small item.

This one is very debatably annoying/OP/whatever. But its a fun and unique idea.