Admins Messing With Rounds - Please Vote

[sartorius]

Stuff like the dead plasma spores or talking plants showing up on the station never fails to be amusing.

[Boa Jacque]

Shotgun Bill had a wonderful round last night -- He unleashed a swarm of NPC and player controlled drones upon the station. He gave 15 minutes of prep-time to the crew to modify their pods and get spacegear/guns. FTL battle music queue'd in and the crew set about prepping for "oh shit"

ShotgunBill also secretly had a few people turn traitor on the station - no gear was issued, instead they got orders to sabotage the station/crew and a license to kill when "the time was right"

There were 3 waves of drones, pitted against the crew. They arrived in 10-15 minute intervals. Dead crew and dead saboteurs were recruited to increase the size of the oncoming waves. Some things were learned from this experience, such as perhaps not having any HE-shell drones. Otherwise it seemed to go off without a hitch. Drones and crew had a great time out-witting each other. Some clever crew built an array of gun components using mechanics, turned the escape arm of the station into a battery of laser guns. I'm not sure who had that idea, but it was good. I'll immortalize Dexter Grifflez by penning in his courageous decision to weaponize his warp-drive
-- He charged the dreadnought and teleported it to the debris field.

This kind of round is the perfect incarnation of admin shenanigans -- it got everyone involved in a crisis and polarized the players into clearly defined teams pitted against one another. Some saboteurs complained that drones hit them with friendly fire but as a saboteur I knew that risk -- they had no way of knowing. Besides, in this game mode respawns were handed out and everyone got to keep having fun.


I think everyone had a blast with this game-mode. I think it needs to be made a thing! One nameless drone complained in deadchat about their lot but everyone else was ecstatic.

[Roomba]

Most of the recent admin gimmicks have involved stuff like infinite-point blobs, unkillable admin monsters, setting the station on fire and inflicting terrible space diseases onto crewmembers with the temerity to complain about it.

I think it's about time to tune it back down.

E: The current round is running a pretty crappy gimmick that makes half the station jobs unplayable on a relatively high-pop round, but I can't state exactly what it is on account of no meta

E2: Edit from a day later - it was setting all wrenches on fire, deleting all wrench blueprints from manufacturers, setting golden wrenches people won from arcade machines on fire as well, and filling anyone who complained about it with spiders. I left shortly after roundstart so I don't know if anything slightly more creative was done with the premise later that round.

[Noah Buttes]

Most of the recent admin gimmicks have involved stuff like infinite-point blobs, unkillable admin monsters, setting the station on fire and inflicting terrible  space diseases onto crewmembers with the temerity to complain about it.

I think it's about time to tune it back down.

It's the quality and interactivity of a gimmick that matters.

Most of these had little or no interactivity, therefore I'd classify them as being subpar.

[Frank_Stein]

Most of the recent admin gimmicks have involved stuff like infinite-point blobs, unkillable admin monsters, setting the station on fire and inflicting terrible space diseases onto crewmembers with the temerity to complain about it.

I think it's about time to tune it back down.

E: The current round is running a pretty crappy gimmick that makes half the station jobs unplayable on a relatively high-pop round, but I can't state exactly what it is on account of no meta

Yeah, I played a syndicate round last night where they filled the area around the bomb with plasma tanks and then spawned over 1000 rocket launchers nearby. 

It was a slam dunk for us, but felt so unfair to the crew

Before that was a prison gimmick where all jobs were replaced with "guards" and "crimers" (wearing, untastefully in my opinion, Cosby sweaters) that was pretty directionless.

[Noah Buttes]

Before that was a prison gimmick where all jobs were replaced with "guards" and "crimers" (wearing, untastefully in my opinion, Cosby sweaters) that was pretty directionless.

Yikes on the Cosby sweaters.

In general, it feels like someone needs to step in and enforce some subtlety or at least some PLANNING.

Most of the admin gimmicks I've seen over the past week have been either half-baked or embarrassingly over the top yet somehow vapid.

If you're going to run a gimmick, keep it as unobtrusive as possible for those who don't wish to get involved. At the same time, keep it as engaging as possible for those who DO want to get involved.

Above all else, stay dedicated to the gimmick, don't enter it half-heartedly, otherwise everyone will be disappointed.


Some examples:

Game shows:
Unless the whole theme of the talent contest or quiz show or what have you is centered around how untrustworthy or shitty or underhanded it is, DON'T FUCK OVER YOUR PARTICIPANTS UNANNOUNCED. Don't spawn a wendigo king on top of your contestant as a "prize" for correctly answering a question, it just discourages people from participating. Let your participants become victims of their own hubris. Take a page from Bob Barker's book: give the participant a choice between a safe, smaller prize and an enigmatic yet tantalizing mystery prize. If they decide to go for the big prize and get screwed over because of it, they'll more than likely laugh it off rather than throw a hissy fit.

Spooky stuff:
If it's meant to be an actually spooky gimmick rather than just a horror-themed gimmick, then don't fall prey to a very common mistake: OVERTNESS. Don't do that dumb shit where you make announcements about "the void taking over" and then just creepify the station and spawn zombies or some shit. No, you have to personally commit to the gimmick. Take control of a mob, noclip through walls, blink in and out of existence, emote stuff, etc. Whatever you do, don't call attention to yourself directly. Let your actions and behavior speak for you. In short, be The Shining not Saw 3D.

Prayers, religions, cults, gods, etc:
Respond to all prayers. I can't stress this enough. RESPOND TO ALL PRAYERS! Hell, you don't have to actually GRANT them. Just acknowledge their reception. If you've set yourself up as a space deity, then you knew what was coming to you. It's even better if you grant them all, but not necessarily as the wishers intended. Obviously, that isn't always practical ("KILL EVERYONE BUT ME" comes to mind), but for those exceptions you can just tell the wishseeker to fuck right off. If they persist, smite them in a hilarious manner in divine rage. Whatever you do, don't just ignore their requests.

THE BUS:
If you're going to use THE BUS, then don't just drive it around willy-nilly. Give it some direction, some goal, some purpose. A field trip isn't fun if it's a mindless drive through the country. Drive it into a portal to the ice moon, drive it into a raging engine inferno, drive it into the brig and dump everyone out. Do something PURPOSEFUL. Make BUS STOP announcements, offer to take people on tours, engage pods in space combat, DO ANYTHING SO LONG AS IT ISN'T AIMLESS.

ANYTHING AT ALL:
CATER TO THE PLAYERS
What I mean by this is that you should always be ready to change up your act at a moment's notice in order to keep your players invested. If a gimmick isn't working out, don't force people to keep slogging through it. Inject some spontaneity into it. Nobody willing to join your wrestling tournament for the title belt? Offer some better or unique prizes. Nobody smoking your omega weed? Triple the size of the icon and call it alpha weed. Did a bunch of people bite the dust thanks to your swarm of geese? Respawn some people as a syndicate strike team with the objective of capturing some of the destructive birds for future use.

Don't let your gimmick stagnate or feel forced, it should flow freely and should be adaptable to the situation at hand.

However, the most important thing to remember when running a gimmick is to have fun and try to let other people have fun too.

P.S.
Oh jeez, I didn't mean for this to turn into an essay. I guess I'm just really passionate about this sort of thing.

[UrsulaMejor]

The best gimmicks, in my opinion, come from a dungeon-master mindset.

The crew is not your enemy, and you shouldn't be the enemy of the crew. The point of the Dungeon Master is to set up a scenario that allows the players and moderator work together to make a cool story, not to stomp on the players just because you hold all the power.

[Noah Buttes]

The best gimmicks, in my opinion, come from a dungeon-master mindset.

The crew is not your enemy, and you shouldn't be the enemy of the crew. The point of the Dungeon Master is to set up a scenario that allows the players and moderator work together to make a cool story, not to stomp on the players just because you hold all the power.

I guess that's the short version of what I was trying to say.

[Noah Buttes]

I guess that rant is really the sort of standard I would hold myself to if I were in the same position rather than what I would actually expect to be followed.

[lambskin]

Yeah, I played a syndicate round last night where they filled the area around the bomb with plasma tanks and then spawned over 1000 rocket launchers nearby. 

It was a slam dunk for us, but felt so unfair to the crew

Before that was a prison gimmick where all jobs were replaced with "guards" and "crimers" (wearing, untastefully in my opinion, Cosby sweaters) that was pretty directionless.

hey, I was there for that round and I had a shit load of fun. I didn't notice any cosby sweaters though.(which have been around for a looong time,) somepotato made me a prison guard that had to guard a bunch of people with traitor items. it was a fun low effort round that relieved some stress.

[Frank_Stein]

The sweaters were part of what was set as the default uniform if you respawned as a prisoner. I swapped mine for an orange jumpsuit right away.
I know they've been around for awhile, it's the fact that they were set as the "Crimer" default suit that I thought was in bad taste because of the connotations. I even remember someone saying something like "Cosby sweater? No wonder I'm a crimer"

Otherwise the round was fine, it just seemed directionless from my point of view since as far as I know the prisoners had no goal and no restrictions placed on their movement.

[TheNewTeddy]

There is a difference between admin fuckery out of an attempt at (self or shared) entertainment, and admin fuckery out of a fuckup.

The latter should be minimized, of course, but the former is great.

[Boon Yoon]

I've always had a good laugh at the admin shenanigans. The prison gimmick was good fun for those that went to the brig and played it out! I can see the superblobs being of some trouble, but in general, there has always been a sense of humor involved. I've always gone into the spirit world due to some horror of space time with a laugh.

[Roomba]

I don't really see the humor in deleting every door on the station, then after that resulting lagfest was over with, filling the entire station with plasma and setting it on fire.

The admins also seem to take anyone who doesn't play along real personally, doing stuff like filling complainers with spiders, tossing meteors at anyone who gets into a pod to flee offstation or just straight up teleporting the entire crew into whatever danger they've cooked up.

[Huff H Law]

Before that was a prison gimmick where all jobs were replaced with "guards" and "crimers" (wearing, untastefully in my opinion, Cosby sweaters) that was pretty directionless.

However, the most important thing to remember when running a gimmick is to have fun and try to let other people have fun too.

hey, I was there for that round and I had a shit load of fun.

Do you see the dilemma?