(If this isn’t the place for this, please let me know and I’ll delete it.)
I was actually just thinking about this. I have seen so many “friendly wizards”, especially on Salamander. I was going to make my own post but I think I’ll just share my thoughts here.
First off, friendly wizards are a problem. Not just because they leave sec in a constant state of “what if they suddenly kill someone”, but also because, if the wizard doesn’t antagonize, the round doesn’t have a story. If the squad of nukies showed up and said, “You know, we were thinking and we decided we want to join the salvage team and be part of the crew.” Nobody would be okay with that, because it takes away the point of the round and half the departments wouldn’t have a reason to do any work. Wizards who decide they want to be an extra special clown/mime should be looked at the same way.
However, I don’t blame players for this, I think the wizard’s objectives are too vague and don’t give them any real reason to antagonize. Every other antag has clear goals to achieve, and the crew has good reason to try and stop them. Even a ninja that doesn’t kill people still steals research and messes with the criminal records. Meanwhile the wizard is just told to show off and survive. While it does give a lot of freedom for creativity, this doesn’t really give the wizard any reason to be hostile, and if they are not hostile, why would the crew even care to fight them? The wizard’s description makes it pretty clear that they are supposed to be an agent of chaos, enacting their arcane will on the hapless crew.
So a rework to the wizards objectives would need to achieve two things:
- Give the wizard an actual goal that they can achieve in various different ways.
- Give the crew, (or at least, sec and command) a reason to want to stop the wizard from completing their objectives.
(I don’t have any coding experience, so all of this is just going to be my imagination of what I would hope could be done.)
First, the “show off” objective should require the wizard to go all over the station. The objective should be for the wizard to cast spells at a certain number of locations on the ship. Either at specific locations or just a percentage of the surface area. This is essentially the same objective as before, but it actually encourages the wizard to interact with the whole station and not just blow up one department. This would also be reasonably achievable by all types of wizard strategies. The fireball wizard can just fight their way through the station, the blink/jaunt type will turn the round into a wild goose chase. The stealth type will do their magic when no one is looking. the the “event” type wizard could use the chaos as cover to reach each location.
Regarding the second problem, how do we make the crew care? Since the wizard is all about sowing chaos, and since none of the other antags interact with it, I thought they should cause natural disaster events to happen. Like, as they make more progress on their objective, and use their spells in more parts of the station, events like meteor showers, solar flares, vent critters, and power outages would start to happen more and more often. At max power it should make the station basically unlivable. This, to me, is a unique way for the wizard to destroy the station that no other antag can do, and it seems thematically appropriate that this would be the way to display your ultimate arcane power. It also gives the crew a very good reason to want to stop the wizard. (If people really want to befriend the wizard, maybe he could lose his objective after being killed and revived, I don’t know.)
So that’s my wall of text ideaguys post. Let me know what you think.