Risk Legacy-style condition unlocks

[popecrunch]

OH LOOK ANOTHER TERRIBLE IDEA FROM THAT DRUNKEN ASSHOLE
Okay so I've been reading a Let's Play of Risk Legacy - the elevator speech on that variant is that it's intended to be played repeatedly by the same 3-5 people, because Things Can Happen in each game that can change the game board or rules. This sparked an idea! We already have random events, and there are ways for player actions to profoundly change the game - let's step it up a little.

The basic idea I'm having is that each round, the server picks from a list of conditions, each with a 'significance' value (this comes up later). Examples:
- 10 different players fart in the span of a second (this would be 'low significance')
- Any player gets a bank account balance of at least one million space credits (this would be 'medium significance')
- 75% of the players that started the game are dead (this would be 'high significance')
- Or anything else, these are simply examples. There should be enough of these such that when the server picks a few conditions for the round, it isn't easy to predict whether or not any given condition that a given player knows about will be active.

When these conditions are met, Something Happens. Actions would be divided into groups based on low, medium, or high significance, so it wouldn't result in something dumb like the chef dying triggering a meteor apocalypse or something. Furthermore, each significance level group would have an assortment of beneficial, neutral, and harmful effects, making it EVEN HARDER to predict what exactly will happen. Examples:
- All living players get 1000 space credits added to their bank account (low significance, beneficial)
- All light sources change to random colors (low significance, neutral)
- A randomly selected APC or two has its main breaker switched off, its battery drained, and set to NOT charge from the power network (low significance as it's trivial to turn it back on again, harmful)
- 3-4 crates of $department supplies are spawned in $department (medium significance, beneficial)
- The station is pelted with 'meateors' which are just giant meatballs that explode into dozens of gibs on impact with no damage (medium significance, neutral)
- 3-4 randomly selected unlocked genes are deleted or relocked or whatever (made as if they were never researched) in Genetics (medium significance, harmful)
- All living players are healed to full (high significance, beneficial)
- All space tiles are changed to fullblack, all ambient sounds muted including sounds generated by actions like fighting and whacking on windows, heartbeat.ogg plays on repeat (high significance, neutral)
- A group of hostiles are spawned somewhere, number of group dependent on how nasty the mob is, so you might get 4-5 spacebears, you might get 2-3 syndicate killbots, you might get a single king wendigo. (high significance, harmful)

Ideally the server would roll a given amount of conditions, weighted so most of them were low significance, some were medium significance, with only one or two high significance. Perhaps this could scale with player population so a skeleton crew would only get 4 conditions (2 low, 1 each medium and high) whereas if the starting population is in the 40s, it would roll seven (four low, two medium, one high) and if it's something ridiculous like 60 then it rolls ten (five low, three medium, two high).

Again, there would be enough conditions so that people wouldn't just arrange to all fart all at once every round because Something Will Happen, so any given condition won't fire every round or even most rounds. Hell, maybe when the server is rolling for conditions, there should be a chance that there are NO conditions that round (a third? half?) so the players won't even be able to consistently know if there ARE conditions waiting to fire.

I dunno, it just occurs to me that this might add a fun twist sometimes, but if it's structured properly, it won't make things into a meaningless muddle of KRAZY HIJINKS. Conditions would ideally be things that can happen organically in a game and not trivial for someone to trigger intentionally, actions should be things that CAN'T happen normally in a game and range from barely noticeable to gamechangers (heavily weighted away from gamechangers, obviously). There should probably be some sort of announcement when a condition fires so we don't get a billion adminhelps wondering what the fuck (though we would still get a few because the surest way to make sure a bunch of players don't know something is to outright tell them). GALACTIC CONFEDERATION UPDATE: A SPACE WIZARD TWO SOLAR SYSTEMS AWAY HAD A SEIZURE, EXPECT SOMETHING WEIRD TO HAPPEN and cue the chemical dispenser adopting critter AI and wandering around randomly

Is this idea decent? Is it shitty? Do you have ideas for conditions and actions? POST POST POST

[BlackPhoenix]

I could see this either being a constant thing if the triggers were secret and drawn from a large enough pool, or a once in a while thing if the triggers are from a smaller pool. In the latter, the assumption would be that the game would consider if these triggers were enabled or not on a percentage chance that was considered seperately from the round type.

[Karakoran]

I like the idea of more variety being added to rounds. The more conditions and the more results the better too, just to make sure that people don't sigh at the fifth time meatball meteors hit the Station.

[Bologna Prime]

I will always approve of giant meatballs.

ALWAYS

[Kaet]

This sounds like it would add some variety but not completely random like the spacial tears and vortexes we currently get.
If done correctly then more situations could be programmed and actually put in the game despite being "wacky" since it happens with a purpose.
Like space lions on the shuttle if telescience teleports x amount of space lions into a random z level other than the station.
The amount of lions could be random each round so they don't just do 10 and call it a day. And then theres the % chance of that triggering despite having the condition met.
The engine could create lightning golems. A random (dead)player could appear in the cloning tank despite not being cloned and come out as an abomination.
Buttbots would start chanting some ritual to summon a bigger buttbot. People in VR would be teleported into real life and their real bodies would be inside the VR.
Basically things like this could happen during a round and it would be fun. If enough things like this were coded to happen so we don't see one of them several times a day at least.

[Ali0en]

If the meatballs hit someone, they should instantly be forced to swallow it whole and make them fat.

Yes.

[Daeren]

Chaos, and the exploitation of chaos, is what takes SS13 from a space murder mystery dinner with a clunky UI to a magical emergent storytelling machine. This a bit of a double-edged sword here.

On the positive side, random events tied to semi-random triggers would be fantastic for spicing up a round. A condition might be leaked once in a very long while through some arcane but relatively accessible channel like emails, guardbuddy chatter, trader requests, and the like, so someone who catches on might be able to arrange Something happening, with no guarantee of the Something being beneficial (or harmful, if that's what they want!).

The problem here would be populating the conditions and events enough so people can't make an exhaustive list of conditions and gun for them every round. We'd need a LOT of them, and maybe a delay or compounding trigger effect for some stuff. We'd also need a lot because, again, chaos is what the game thrives on, and if there's too few events, or events with too few permutations, they'd get stale really fast. On the other hand, too many events means it might just be a giant overdone pile of crap.

Tl;dr there is definitely gold in them thar hills, we just have to dig.

[Splatpope]

How about we make it so the crew has to survive and thrive in spite of all these chaotic conditions instead of being giant traitor sniffing beagles (yes that means no more antags, just a crew of friendly people helping eachother (I can always dream))

[Noah Buttes]

I love this idea, pope.

This feels like it'd totally be worth the effort to implement. Especially the meateors.

[APARTHEID]

NO SUNDANCE(S) ALLOWED

[Grek]

I thought the big idea in Risk Legacy is that changes to the board apply to later rounds of the game. Like, if you win super hard, you change the point value of Australia in later games. Or in SS13, getting a huge QM budget in one round means Security starts with a crate full of phasers 1d4 rounds later.

[Erik]

I thought the big idea in Risk Legacy is that changes to the board apply to later rounds of the game. Like, if you win super hard, you change the point value of Australia in later games. Or in SS13, getting a huge QM budget in one round means Security starts with a crate full of phasers 1d4 rounds later.

I both like, and dislike the idea of having cross-round persistence. Yes it'll add a whole heap of fun and interesting possibilities, but people wanting to grief or fuck the game over for other players could easily nab the entire QM budget before round end to prevent that from happening.

[Nnystyxx]

This is fucking neat. Please do it.

[misto]

is risk legacy that one that has the secret compartment of evil difficulty cards hidden in the lining of the game box labeled "do not open ever" or something

[Nnystyxx]

is risk legacy that one that has the secret compartment of evil difficulty cards hidden in the lining of the game box labeled "do not open ever" or something

yes it's that one, where it changes the game forever afterwards
edit: they're supposed to be opened under specific conditions i THINK??