TTT det ported to SS13, includes detective TC shop
-Crow, on Discord
Let’s add this!
I have no solid ideas and zero hours on Detective so consider this pretty much open ended. They obviously shouldn’t be able to get everything and it’ll mostly be utility and no guns.
Questions and Ideas
Should only real Detective spawn with this shop? Similar to the Requesition beacon the Chaplain and Curator allegedly has.
Should it always spawn in the Detectives office so HoS or someone else can use it if needed?
What should it be named? Not TC at the very least.
What should be in it?
Thermals with a short range?
Binoculars?
Fake mustasch (voice changer) and fake ID to go undercover?
Remote ear which allows you to listen a short distance through walls?
The regular ol’ scanner?
The smell-o-nator? Basically the smell gene, but for when you have no geneticist or want it immediately.
Ok so this kind of change would make the detective more of a tech progressive kind of role, something sec lacks, similar to the minigames of science, mining and genetics. In order to make something like this balanced I believe you’d have to start weak. For the questions:
On one hand, it would make the detective more of a unique role than a secoff+, on the other, if it is limited to only real detectives, security would be missing out on a mechanic that would help them do their job when missing a detective. I believe something like a panel on their office that you’d need access of either detective, warden or HoS in order to access the shop would be good.
Yes
I dunno but I think it should have the word ‘Cipher’ in it.
As for how the currency would work. I believe it’d have to do something with finding real clues and getting points that way. I leave that intentionally vague because it’s hard to elaborate, but maybe it could be done through keeping a way weaker version of the detective scanner.
We gotta think a lot about the gameplay of the detective right now if this were to be implemented. Some people think it’s ‘terrible’, and I want to hear it and how to think of ways to fix it with something like this.
Someone suggested that the Detective and Chaplain should somehow be able to cooperate in finding and doing things. Perhaps, antags will systematically drop vague clues? So antags who take too long will be found eventually and allow the Detective to snoop on them to find dirt. Though, this might encourage metagaming so it should give false positives too.
As for clues. It could be things the Detective can only find by randomly scanning areas someone has been in and have it reveal unique traces specific to possible antags? More thoughts are needed on this.
Mmmm it would be nice to scan a broken APC and find like ‘shadowy flesh remnants’ to identify a nightmare instead of going off ‘no prints so it was probably a nightmare’
Having additional tools that could possibly tell what type of tool caused damage to a corpse; Brute from a toolbox and brute from a sword would look different on a body. Burn from a welder would look different from burn from a laser, etc etc.
Maybe not specific tool, but having it be like, “injuries congruent with those caused by X (bullets, lasers, fire, blunt trauma, sharp implements)” and being able to narrow it down based off of the murder weapon.
Edit: Maybe have it go full TTT style for ease of coding; The last weapon used on them is what is logged as the “cause of grevious injuries” in the Det’s autopsy report.
I’ll be honest. I can’t think of any way to integrate a ‘points’ system without simplifying it through science or something like that. It’d just be too metagamey/powergaming to give points for something like scanning husks to figure out their true identity, or finding someone that has been missing with no suit sensors, or even worse, putting an arrest on an antag… If anything, I’d like the detective have to depend on a member of science in order to craft tools like that, but with some effort on the part of the detective in order to reach that.
My question is, what would that effort be? I’m trying to compare it to something like heretic but with the gameplay of finding clues in mind.
As for another tool idea:
Brainwashing detector: With a big cooldown or one time use, will tell you if a person has been brainwashed or not. Useful for abduction cases.
Taylor pitched the idea of having a curator beacon, so not like an item shop but when you start you could select what kit you wanted on top of the normal items.
As for detecting brainwashing, don’t medical scans or penlights already do this?
I don’t want this to just give the detective more tools, I want this to give the detective better gameplay akin to that of a real detective. Right now it’s just: scan thing and fuck someone over because of it 30 mins later into a round. Scanner is busted, and detective gameplay shouldn’t be just a click of something and be done.
Also I didn’t check the ways to brainwash, my bad.
The scanner is great when your target hasn’t put any thought into covering their tracks.
Let’s say I’m an assistant who wants to murder some xenobio gamer who doesn’t leave the department, the first thing I do is ask a miner for black gloves since they have plenty. Already, you have thrown off the scanners #1 advantage (prints) and even put it at a disadvantage as most detectives will see black gloves and assume security or themselves touched it.
In my experience, glove fibers are the only fibers that consistently make contact with held or touched items, and even if you were worried about ‘grey jumpsuit fibers’ it’s not suspicious and not illegal to buy and swap jumpsuits.
Not to mention if your suspect actually WANTED to cover their own tracks they can always clean things with soap to remove all traces and leave you clueless
I don’t believe anything short of destroying the item actually removes fibers and prints, just the blood.
My problem with it is that it’s too simple with no thinking involved. Both the process to catch a careless criminal and the process to cover your tracks are way too easy and without depth to make it really interesting with the scanner (other than your own or other’s input, like calling cards or witnesses).
I’ll be stumped if cleaning something with soap doesn’t remove prints as I thought it did for the last like 200 hours of detective I did.
In regards to the simplicity, have you tried Baystation’s forensics? There are some nice things (like UV light and a spray to find hidden or cleaned blood) but the fingerprint and fiber system is such a chore compared to ours.
If you’d like my completely off the cuff and unsolicited suggestions for a revamped evidence system, here it is (wyci is very much in effect):
Revamp the fingerprint system slightly. However fingerprints are generated, change it so each person recieves a fingerprint made up of maybe 5-7 sections; people can share specific sections, but not a fingerprint as a whole. Instead of scanning for whole prints, the detective can find partial prints, which can narrow down suspects (“suspect has prints with sections B and E, only 3 people on the station have that”) or be pieced together into whole prints for positive identification akin to what we have now.
Species-specific identifiers. Gloves leave fibers, and that’s great, but but what if people left fibers too? Clothing items or touched items/turfs can have skin flakes, or molted scales, or tufts of fur, or a slight trace of plasma, etc. Give the opportunity to narrow down the suspect by species.
Rework DNA Identification. Maybe add a time-barrier (giving the detective a full-on forensic lab would be cool here (and in general), with a DNA analyzer that takes maybe 5-10 minutes to give a result). If we’re feeling daring, don’t have DNA records populated in sec records at roundstart. Give a way to collect that info and input it manually later, and then change DNA so that even if you can’t match it to a person, you can get traits out of it (hair and skin color, species, genetic mutations or medical conditions/traits, etc) If you take away sec’s access to medical records, you could add a bit of interaction with medbay here, searching for evidence in their records (and giving an opportunity for malicious actors to lead you astray).
Explosive residue. Nothing more frustrating than a bomb going off in medbay and the extent of your lead being “a hole has mysteriously appeared in the station”. Bombs can leave behind chemical residue that can clue you in to the type (TTV leaves chemicals characteristic of an oxy/plasma reaction, syndicate bombs leave an advanced explosive compound, makeshift bombs leave behind traces of their chemical components). Maybe rarely casing fragments can be generated, with potential DNA or fingerprint evidence.
Autopsies have been suggested already, and are cool
Ballistic evidence might be interesting; bullets can get embedded in the victim, and each gun gives a unique “fingerprint” to the bullet (or maybe the casing too, but that give too much to work with)
Traumatic Memory. Getting a bit esoteric and out there here, but perhaps when someone is put into crit by another person the victim can sometimes gain a “traumatic memory” which dumps some information about their attacker (clothing, physical features, etc) into their notes (and memory is unreliable, so perhaps a chance for details to be incorrect)
Most Importantly: give the detective a synthesizer to play noir music or musical stings when he has a breakthrough or finds a clue. This is essential to any revamped detective gameplay loop.
My very simple idea was give the Det X amount of points to be able to buy Y amount of things, where X is less than Y. Exsctly like TC for traitors. You can round start buy things, but you can’t buy it all and have no way of getting more.
Maybe some of the old “ghost/ecto” stuff will be nice to add to the shop. I barely used it a long time ago so I don’t remember much of how it worked but. It’ll be cool to be called the “Ghost Detective”. Hopefully it’ll give the detective something to hunt/help/investigate especially during those quiet or long green shifts.
aka the metaknowledge kit. Leave the supernatural shit to the chaplain and curator. The only voices in the Detectives head should be a group of internal monologues masquerading as different skill types
What if the Detective is able to solve murder mysteries of previous shifts? They got to piece together a set of clues in maintenance. And if they get the right one, they get some reward from CC. Unless the Janitor gets to the evidence before them.