So this is a weird one where I am not quite sure to start? (also the main reason im just putting this out into the general forum ether rather then a proper suggestion of a change cause I want to know other peoples opinions on this since I do think that my current idea is incredibly foggy).
The basics of it comes down to that most wizards, atleast the ones I see, are of the kind where they wish to RP and fuck around, at least a tiny bit, over just instantly starting to go murdering people, something that often seems impeded by security being hostile to them from the get-go
(which, dont get me wrong, makes perfect sense with their current pure antag status!)
The common suggestion I hear for that is âoh just make them free agents!â but I think that that might make the reactions that are there around âhostileâ, Murderbone wizards even more negative since then its not just the âjobâ of the wizard, but an active choice undergone by them.
So my suggestion for this is the following: Wizards have a chance to be EITHER free agents or full antagonists.
Roundstart wizards I would say having something like a 25-75% ration of either free agent or full antag, with midround wizards being a more equal split (40-60% or something). (higher number in both cases being full antag).
Furthermore I would suggest that maybe on a roundstart free agent wizard there is the chance for some regular traitors to also be rolled (just in reduced number.)
What I hope this would actually achieve is the following:
Give an actual space for "friendly"ish wizards where they are not committing a straight up rules break while still making it not the default so wizard first and foremost still is an antag.
Give Security some amount of uncertainty when dealing with a wizard, is it a full on antagonist or a neutral guy who we ideally do not want to piss off. (and if traitors are still rolled during the free agent wizard this can add an even greater amount of uncertainty from a meta standpoint).
Tweaks that I feel like this would probaly need instantly if implemented:
Free agent wizard should probaly not have access to the event spells and maybe even have fewer wizcoins (2 less or something).
Wizards are like rat kings. Obviously an antag, but some people want to RP with them while other people want to kill them on sight. If a wizard just decides to chill in the bar, some rando (often sec) is just gonna walk up and try to kill/arrest them, and their round gets ruined.
The issue isnât really whether the Wizard gets told they are an antag or a free agent, itâs how the station reacts to them. If people didnât validhunt endlessly, the wizard could just smite all of sec and spend the rest of the round RPing, but wizards are often pushed into a DAGD situation because many non-sec crew decide their character is secretly a vigilante.
My take on wizards is that they are somewhat incompatible with NT stations and not only do they know it, they love that fact. Especially that wizards are likely all kinds of jumped up on their own egos. What magic user wouldnât be, when they can gib somebody with their mind?
So a wizard showing up to an NT station really likely isnât there solely to just kill for fun (Well they could, but whereâs the fun?) but perhaps more to toy with the people there.
Just for a fun example scenario, wizard shows up and demands a banquet with the captain and department heads, with an exaggerated claim of being horribly offended if they get rejected. This banquet had better be perfect, or they will be even more âoffendedâ and possibly rod the entire command staff before turning the AI into a loaf of bread.
Iâm sure you can see that as much more interesting than just showing up and fireballing everyone or handing out free wands.
Another example? Free trial of magic, hand out some fun magic trinkets (Still very much contraband) directly to people that amuse the wizard. No not a mass spell, but a few random fun items. Want more? Better be ready to appease the wizard.
Wizard being a hard antag puts them on the same tier as a nukie, who purely wants to destroy the station. A wizard whose only option is be antagonistic feels⌠Kinda reductive. They have absolutely no place being crew aligned, but nor do they have too much reason to be as banal as a nukie⌠The wizard should be there to have fun, not to get magdumped on sight or destroy everything in secret.
Server and game culture definetly plays into this a lot, my hope is that a change like that though could reduce the amount of valid hunting against wizards at least a bit by fucking a bit with players meta knowledge. While also giving friendly-ish wizards a chance to exist (every once in while) without committing a rule break.
There has been a lot of discussion internally about wizards.
The fact is that while weâre okay on the admin team with a wizard showing up and doing âtricksâ and âshowing offâ - as their goals state - we have a bigger problem with them simply doing nothing for the entire round.
Even more than that, we have problems with command and security actively defending the wizardâs presence, involving them in command or security affairs.
The wizard is positioned as a primary antagonist on 5% of all rounds, and a secondary (main) antagonist on another 5%. It is also sometimes a midround antagonist.
If the wizard does absolutely nothing then the game is stale for an hour and a half. We do not want this.
As far as the admin team is currently concerned, if someone goes and kills a wizard or a rat king on sight, we not only approve of it - we encourage it. Both antagonists represented in the conversation so far are just that: antagonists. If these antags are getting upset that crew are killing them they should honestly just play or position themselves better. A wizard doing nothing or playing peaceful is like a nukie squad deciding that they donât actually want to nuke the station and deciding to go run blue wrecks in space instead.
Hello if you want a good vibe test i recomend reading;
and
The first one espically folks go pretty indepth about the various feelings on wizards and has long posts going over how I personally feel.
The TLDR for myself though is; I feel forcing wizards to be an exersential threat to the station is restrictive from an RP perspective, even though it is the current intended design.
Personally I like the idea that wizards should be assumed to be hostile by Sec, but Wizards can choose not to be hostile, leaving open the 5 wizards archatypes players generally RP as listed here;
Wizard Archatypes
Open Nukie wizard: You start the round announcing your presence and proceed to attack like a nukie
Prankster wizard: You use your magic to prank the crew, locking them in lockers making things slippery ect.
Secert wizard: You never announce yourself acting in stealth until your cover is blown.
Chaos Wizard: Round event spam go!
Crewmov Wizard: You decide to try and ally with the crew, very hard to do considering sec will want to KoS you, it takes gile, charsima and actions that support your claims. (currently aganist the rules despite multiple people wanting to do it and some wizards doing it anyway)
That being said I will literate for the record that the maintainers have made it abundantly clear they are not in favour of crew-aligned wizards.
I am still in favour of having a round start wizard pick an archatype they are going for and having round events tune to the desires of said wizard. such as making Sleeper agents activate if they choose prankster mode converting the round to Traitors with a clown wizard, and tailoring their Win Condition based on the selected ones. for example a crewmov Wizard would need to arrive at CC align and unrestrained after casting at least three spells. while nukie wizards would have die a glorious death and kill at least 3 crew.
It is my belief an archatype system would allow Wizards to RP how they want to RP while also ensuring a balanced experiance for the rest of the crew. rather than if a wizard decides to be friendly its now a greenshift
âFriendlyâ wizards get attacked because a non-hostile wizard is like a crew member using a loaded China Lake as a fashion accessory. Maybe theyâre telling the truth and things will be fine. But maybe theyâre lying, or they change their mind later, and now thereâs bodies everywhere. You canât take that risk, especially as Sec whise job is to protect the station.
i mainly play MRP and even there people try their very hard to not RP and ruin somone else s round, there is countless examples where people walk into free agent that was casually RPing and just stun cuff or magdump immediately (or attack with shiv) mostsly security does that even agains what captain / HOS said, most recent example is security officer walking up to friendly ratking, not listening or ignoring HOS s repeated âdon tâ s and magdumping said rat, immediately throwing his ID to HOS and saying âi quitâ afterwards, while i am uncertain i belive i seen same player did same stuff multiple times, he is doing this immediately quitting whatever job he has then cryoing (cough cough âleanâ cough cough)
Iâm curious, how do you justify on MRP a hos that protects a ratking? It seems like a completely alien concept to me that the head of security would start to protect a random giant rat creature that just crawled out of a vent, against their own potentially years long coworkers.
Surely it takes a many years of a career to get to such a position on a space station, only to then mutiny against the station itself at the first opportunity because OOC you want a rat?
Isnât the rat king a free agent (havenât played it but the wiki says so)? Weâre supposed to shoot free agents on sight now ? Should we kill skeletons that have a valid ID and were enrolled into NT by the HOP ? Thatâs really what the admin team wants us to do ?
Maybe im taking the â- we encourage it.â too seriously, but is this really what the consensus is? Crew skipping over provoking the antag and going straight for the âshotty hos shuffleâ˘â is always really frustrating and only seems fun for the person doing it and nobody else. If you dont know what I mean, the antag is yet to commit any crimes and the hos shuffles up close to them while theyre still talking, aka both hands on keyboard, and unloads the shotgun into them as to kill them before they can react. This is not compelling rp no matter how you cut it. Had the wizard already turned qm into bread and ate them or had the ratking already threatened to kill, I understand how an rp-less aproach is permissible then, but in that case theyre already on edge and wont let someone get close for no reason.
Killing the wizard before they do anything is just as boring as the wizard doing nothing all round. This is not the same as a nukie, there a wiiiiiide margin between those two antags.
Edit: i didnt see froglivals post until afterwards, i was writing this when they posted it oops.
I honestly feel that RKâs are treated very poorly same with skeleâs. just cause they are not forced to be crew-mov doesnât mean they cant do so.
As for wizards, Iâve seen friendly wizard pulled off. it is very hard to pull off though, defusing the urge to kill from Sec is the hard part and can take a large portion of the shift to do.
As sec, my experiences with wizard are pretty clear cut. It is rarely fun, regardless of friendliness or not.
I saw once command saying to play nice with the wizard, not having the support of command i obviously could not take on the wizard even tho space law REQUIRES it due to the contraband. Meaning i could only keep an eye on them.
Since friendly wizards are bwoink-valid, i knew they would have to act eventually, and when they did (turned someone into a cluwne) i actually attacked.
Now, going against commandâs wishes would both be bad for self preservation AND make me a âshitterâ among the crew. (also boring ngl).
Was i supposed to try to arrest someone wearing lethal gear even tho they appeared friendly so i could get instagibbed by a mouse click? That is just shitty for me as a player.
Was i supposed to instantly open fire on the threat and ignore orders despite no intentions of harm? Is that really what the game expects from me?
I am sorry, but wizard as a design is simply lazy. People tought âlet us just make an antag with ALL the powers and no real objective, then see what they doâ, and expected that to work.
It hasnât and it wonât. Wizard needs an actual design document that more properly addresses how they are expected to act and what MEASURES there will be in place to encourage it.
NT is a corporate business end of day, and no matter how powerful a company is having people die on their station never looks good. Even (MegaCorp of choice here) would balk at the idea of having their security kill somebody in the corporate office lobby and would want a pretty solid reason if they had to.
Really the biggest snag here is the constant battle between NRP and all others. Yeah you canât be expected to RP everything when an antag is trying to kill you, but if theyâre taking time to at least make a round interesting as antags (eg. A wizard with âperfectly reasonableâ impossible demands) itâs just plain boring to walk up and give them both barrels mid sentence. Like said earlier; a wizard that stays in their ship or dies to bullshit before arrival is functionally no different from generic tider beating the wizard to death with a toolbox because they can. Almost (not quite) as boring as a wizard showing up and being enforced to go full nukie 0-11.
I mean, the reason is VERY simple: They have weapons of mass destruction on their person. As such, they are a lethal threat to the station.
A wizard is more dangerous than a nukie, would you make the same argument for a red suit wielding a china lake? Because a wizard is WAY worse.
