The majority of times you roll antag you gotta kill some poor bastard that is just minding their own business. And I kinda feel bad about doing this, since you’re just ruining their fun of someone else who just wants to do their thing.
I used to think that I should wait with killing them as long as possible, so they can enjoy as much of the round as possible. But then I thought about jobs that you actually work on something over the course of the round, like botany and sci circuits, I’d get pretty pissed off if I’ve been working on something all round, then someone comes and ruins all my labour.
So my question is: how do I make it less frustrating to die for the victim? How would you like to die?
I know that I should try to incorporate RP as much as possible, but sometimes it’s just impossible to lure them away to their doom. What CMO is going to leave medbay and follow a cargo technician to a secluded spot?
general rule of thumb is to talk to them before you brutally murder them and do it in a somewhat interesting way if you can. I enjoy being horribly maimed so long as it’s interesting
This is kind to the direct victim but not to the round health and goal of antagonists as a whole.
While antagonists are supposed to be the enemies of the station, above all you should seek to make the round more engaging and fun as the star of the show. Succeeding as an antagonist is not the “goal” of SS13, the goal is for all players to have fun.
@Archanial is right - don’t worry about the victim specifically, their role as ordained by the RNG gods was to die this round. Kill them - you don’t even have to give them a chance to fight back, or have to talk to them first. Hell, it’s debatably better if they don’t even know who killed them because then you don’t have any motivation to round remove them aside from green text.
What’s important is how and what the after-effects are. Forget about your greentext and don’t make the death a round removal. Leave the body to be revived (which enables the victim to keep playing and even potentially be murdered again) and evidence along with it, but wash your hands of having it traced back to you immediately.
Engage the round and the crew as a whole. Don’t worry about the lone victim too much and don’t worry about whether you “officially” succeed or not. This can apply to other objectives as well
Without death, a lot of the projects lose their significance. It’s a natural part of the game, and being able to say “hey I finished my weird project despite all the dangers !” is a cool feeling.
Without the threat of death, the game becomes a boring job simulator. Make me an assassination target anytime of the day, even if i’ve been working on a gimmick for 50min-1hr
I’m personally not a fan of round removal. RR just sucks for the victim in general: you can’t RP with others, you lose control of the game, you’re locked out of the rest of the round. While it is part of the game, it still sucks to have your choice to play be taken from you. You get RR’ed early? enjoy observing for two hours. Get RR’ed late? Preferable for me. As long as you’re okay with leaving your hard work the whole round unfinished, it’s not that bad. I’m of the opinion that RR should be minimized when possible, because for all the talk about wanting more player interaction, there’s not much interaction happening when you’re a rotting corpse in a maintenance closet that people forget about in 20 minutes.
So my opinion regarding the Assassination objective: don’t even bother. I think that should be replaced with something where you kill the target but round removal isn’t necessary. As long as that greentext condition is there, people WILL attempt to do the shit move of silently removing you. Stealth is one of the most efficient ways to round remove someone without issue. So long as that remains, gamers are gonna game. But if you care about making assassinations fun for everyone involved, you’re already on the road to becoming a great antagonist and bless your soul for that.
If you want to make assassination interesting, my favorite route (whether as the victim or the antag) is to make it as flashy or loud as possible. Make it known to the station that someone has died. Security would have a mystery to solve, coworkers and friends of the victim would have someone to mourn, medical personnel would have a body to hunt down and fix. Or kill your target in the most baffling and amusing way that even your victim would be impressed. Observing is only fun if the round is interesting, and as an antag, your role is to make the round interesting. I find assassination more fun if you ignore the condition of RR’ing your target and to instead focus on making it more interesting. Just like what Ruko said.
What’s important is how and what the after-effects are. Forget about your greentext and don’t make the death a round removal. Leave the body to be revived (which enables the victim to keep playing and even potentially be murdered again) and evidence along with it, but wash your hands of having it traced back to you immediately.
Assassination Ideas
If you can do your homework on your target, you can involve their friends. Is your target a botanist who’s close to the chef? Kill the botanist and take a photo of their body. Slip that image into the kitchen or anonymously give it to the chef. Watch them freak out and call security as you silently flee the scene and allow the murder mystery to begin.
Publicly assassinate someone. Knock your target out and use surgery to implant a bomb on their chest. Wait until the target is in a crowded room, or even in front of security. Traumatize everyone in the room by turning your target into a pile of organs with a single press of a signaler.
Elaborate death machine! As an engineer, create a rube goldberg machine of death by transforming a maintenance tunnel into a disposal pipe/conveyor belt amusement park ride leading to a plasmaflooded oven room.
Depends, i’ve seen the opposite, sometimes people will follow the popular ‘‘statics’’ or their friends to whatever thing they’re invited without a second thought
Main example: Heretics (sometimes fully robed and bloody or just bloody) telling you to go to their rune in chapel and close your eyes because you’ll be fine!
So many people really forget they’re supposed to be adults, professionals working for NT, sure some characters can be a little more clueless than other but there’s a limit lol, same with contractors with the same boring old ‘‘hey wanna go on a vacation?’’ where people don’t question the random red blood pod that appears in a random place to take you off or don’t even report it to comms like ‘‘hey John Smith invited me to a vacation i’m gonna check it out’’ so at least they leave a trail for their coworkers/ai/sec to follow
A lot of people are way too conscious on not trying to ruin the gimmick of the antagonist with meta knowledge most notably heretics and contractors, but most of the time they end up making it boring for everyone involved, they forget to prioritize they’re playing a character with their own beliefs and reasons.
I’ve had several people walk up to me drenched in blood and with a chainsaw or some other weapon and… politely ask me to follow them. My reaction? “Fuck off” and closing my shutters, maybe even calling Security on their ass. So many, many people are expecting people to blindly follow others. Give me a bloody reason to follow you! I think people have trouble thinking up bullshit reasons to do something.
When I was messing with the pipes as an atmos with the goal of plasma flooding, I came up with the reasoning being that I am fixing maints by laying down floors to prevent rats from biting cables. You as an antag need a backup bullshit reason for whatever you are doing. “Why are you making a Durand?” asks the Seccie. “HoS requested one.” I’d respond. Then he might ask to see proof whether a PDA message or a note (which both can be faked), just pray and hope he doesn’t use comms to ask the HoS directly.
I feel the need to mention that if they aren’t being coerced to go along with them in some way that this situation would more often than not be breaking R1 (in general) and R9.2. It’s a fine line to walk; you shouldn’t be overly suspicious of everyone and unwilling to go along with anything, that’s no fun for anyone - but that doesn’t mean you should act out-of-character and practically throw yourselves at the antag either.
I often feel stressed in-character as I have many things to do asked by a lot of people. People seem to fail at giving me a reason to drop all that to follow someone for an unspecified reason to an unspecified location. Like, geez, sure! Lemme drop this shit and follow you!
As for the actual topic of this thread: I’ve never really found myself to be annoyed at getting killed - even permanently - by an Antagonist. It’s a part of the game and it is a substantial deviation from my normal rounds where I’m rarely in much danger, so I find it interesting. Although, I’d be lying if I said I really liked when it happens completely silently, I’d much prefer some sort of interaction happens as the result of it, doesn’t even necessarily have to directly involve me.
Time for a short rant that’s at least vaguely related to this thread.
There is something that a long of Antagonist players do that does bother me though; that would be when their ‘character’ for the round is completely hijacked by them being an Antagonist. You know the type where they roll Traitor and instead of continuing to play a reasonably cohesive character they devolve into “Generic Assassin Dude”? Just playing “Cold and calculated Syndicate Agent #643” is so damn boring.
I hate seeing antagonists do this, get their objectives done, then roam around rarely interacting with people and only focusing on their goals.
There’s so much more potential to be had from playing an Antagonist. Think about how and why your character would end up in that situation, how they would respond to it, and continue to play your character.
Your antag round shouldn’t act as a black box your predefined character gets banished to for a round. I’d worry less about how you assassinate people, and worry more about falling into that trap. That and avoid getting into the mindset that an Antag round is a game you have to ‘win’, these combined are usually the death of most interesting interactions.
Adding to what you and Ambiic said, the biggest problem is that antagonists don’t lie. I wouldn’t follow someone to a rune, but if they gave me a plushie and told me there was a dozen more in the chapel? Hell yeah I’m going.
Closer to the main topic of the thread, people always kill in an obvious way and start a manhunt, or kill and stealth the rest of the round. Where’s the false accusations? Self-report the guy you just killed after removing their brain and putting a monkeys one inside. Invite someone to where you killed someone else and start yelling on comms that they did it.
If you get caught? Just tell sec that you were setup by someone else.
Murder someone, give item to someone else. Tell Sec the second person murdered the first. Watch them try to explain away the fingerprints on the weapon.
I feel it’s pretty pointless to shoot them in a hallway and run, I know they are just going to get revived again as soon as they hit the floor. Death doesn’t seem like a big deal when I know they’ll be walking out of medbay within 5-10 minutes. No matter how bad I fuck up their body, as long as the brain is still there any assistant can just throw them in the cloner and they’ll be alright within 5 minutes. Getting caught by sec is more punishing than dying since you have to serve a minimum of 15 minutes sentence, more than enough time for your target to come out and forget what just happened.
Maybe I just got off topic or I just missed entirely what you said, but I think hiding a body to be hard to find is part of the package of assassination. And I don’t mean to hide it so they’ll never be found again, just a place that someone will stumble across it later, maybe even tell someone about their missing.
I try often not to, but a bit unrelated, in some cases were they have a chance to speak back they often just have a “get it over with” attitude, were they just seem genuinely OOC mad at me and see me like some shitter for killing them.
Had a Heretic game today were I was talking to my target (a roboticist) and I managed to be allowed to follow them to lavaland on the sci shuttle. When we got there I revealed my true intentions and even gave them a moment to react, but they just seemed to give up and just got annoyed with me, I try to be engaging, I’d probably let them go and dealt with them later if they had just begged for it, but they made me out like I was an asshole, like I got a choice to completely ignore that I was an antag.
Completely agree, as I said in another comment, I don’t find death that impactfull to a traitor, since people get revived so easily. Cloning is my main issue, since anyone could just throw their body in there and they’ll be back with no consequences in just a minute. I like the way they did it in goon, were if your target gets cloned you still get greentext, which probably deter shitters to not RR.
I often try this when I have the chance, not because I want the victim to have a better time, it’s just that it tickles my ego to know that whole stations attention shiften to something of my doing. Good exaple of it was yesterday when I delivered a TTV mailbomb to botanist which ended up turning botany into a crater and sending people flocking to see what happened.