no doubt funny and i like seeing detectives with a supernatural edge to them, but using ghost knowledge frequently to out antags can get lame. Nothing better than covering your tracks but only for an assistant who suicided 10 minutes in to out you with a oujia board
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Inland empire moment
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I certainly DONT like the idea of detective having some sort of supernatural edge that another role already has. Specially to metagame.
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For a simple idea how about just a coat or gloves that act like a bag with the only goal to fill it with random stuff akin to those old point and click adventure games.
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Dont forget the tie!
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Honestly I think the best we get as a balance of this is something like the curator or chaplain beacons. I don’t want it to be a full-on minigame based on solving things of previous shifts, I’d like it to be something interactive with the current shift but I can’t get any ideas that wouldn’t be metagamey.
Maybe when money becomes more useful, a combination of it and science and a tiny bit of input from you like a certain item/items you got to search for, could fetch you some new toys for your investigation on this hypothetical shop, but how things are right now I think a beacon is the way to go. Maybe to stay true to the idea you can use TC from traitors to get more beacons but I highly doubt it as that sounds extremely broken AND niche and would encourage playing the metagame more than trying to solve crime.
On the other hand, there are some corpses that spawn sometimes in maintenance. Maybe those work for that previous shift crime solving idea? But again, I think detectives would just search maint for those in order to get new toys and that is no fun as design.
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Gonna be the ultimate ideas guy (as if I wasn’t already) and say what if… we take a print of a specific person blood, DNA samples and crayon markings in dorms. And they have to figure out what happened and who the antag was? ez, rite?
So a small section of public hallways, dorms or maintenace would transfer between round, but with items and bodies being marked out and related bodies stripped and put in the morgue.
If this were to actually be added I think the det scanner would have to be reworked or removed in order to make the search actually interesting. Like Ironhammer inspector from Eris levels of tools. It would certainly justify adding a lot of the tool ideas put in this thread.
But two problems I see with that aside from what I said before are: I think this process would just take too long in a practical setting where the detective wishes to be useful if he doesn’t have his scanner, specially with several of these previous shift cases, and people could just tamper with it for the lols as it’s actually kind of public. And second, I think this would make the detective have to manage his space way more, which will be hard with the future storage PR.
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Did I hear… Detective toolbelt?
Make it a random shift! Store the last 10 and use one of those assuming it wasn’t used in the last two shifts.
In any case. This is waaaaaaay too much work for one role, could be a game in of itself!
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In any case. This is waaaaaaay too much work for one role
Honestly why I think it’s easier and more in-line with the way things currently are to just add a beacon until someone decides to do a big rework
wyci
I absolutely agree with your suggestions! Fingerprints and other evidence needs reworking, currently either there is no evidence that scanner can pick up or it straight up points to a person responsible.
Just having scanner pick up partial prints and people sharing sections of print string would be a huge change. Everything else adds a lot of layers, especially autopsies if they could suggest what kind of object was used to kill the victim.
I like the DNA suggestion, it may be actually a good moment to push for it since we are currently again dealing with viro/genetics complaints and ideas to merge them into one bio-tech role, giving it another thing to do and interaction with additional department (that is with det/security) would be an additional validation for that change
Years ago when we had some issues with security and treatment of criminals I’ve made a suggestion for how we should rework things and I still stand by it, especially when it comes to lawyer, detectives and trials and their roles in them.
So on top of what was suggested by you and few others in this thread I’d like to add three things:
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Detective shouldn’t spawn if there isn’t at least one sec officer and lawyer, optimally if there isn’t HoS or Warden. Detective is not a cooler looking security officer, it’s a more RP focused role dedicated to investigating and gathering evidence so it has to have other people around it for proper interactions.
Not sure how much we can complicate role selection at round start, it already seems like complicated process so if it’s technically impossible we could make it so there are no round start detectives and could only late join if presence of other roles is met, that’s a bit jerry rigged but would still work -
Requirement of X hours as member of security and ADDITIONAL X hours as lawyer so detective players would be familiar with space law, court system and more RP oriented playstyle.
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As we know pinboard is a classic investigative tool, until recently it didn’t seem possible or practical to implement it but two things happened:
First, a game Shadows of Doubt came out which proved this type of organising evidence to get a grip on your case not only works for players but is actually useful and fun
Second, we introduced circuits. And circuits are the technological missing link we needed since they allow to add items (all those input and output devices) to shell that will make them show up in circuit management window where they can be freely moved around and linked
It doesn’t seem like a far fetched idea to combine both of these things into one. Let’s have a device into which detective could put all the evidence they’ve gathered-photos, scanning reports, bagged items, notes written by detective himself, make them show in a window where they can then be moved around and linked as player wishes.
Bonus points if we could integrate it with generating few standard forms which could be made by selecting or dragging things from pinboard so detectives have an easy and standardised way to summarise their findings. Once they are done machine/device could print it out and spit out items that were loaded into it in boxes that could go straight to either evidence locker or lawyers that will handle the case
But yeah, that’s getting kinda off topic of what original thread was talking about so I guess post of mine and @Ravencorp would best fit in separate discussion. When it comes to original post and responses to it I don’t have strong opinion for or against additional gear or how it is meant to be received (either via kit beacon or some sort of shop) but I strongly oppose any idea of using metaknowledge of the ghosts to solve cases.
Solving previous rounds cases sounds interesting, I believe Bacon or someone once confirmed they are technically able to ‘save’ changes to map made by players and use them in next round but I’m not sure how exactly are we expecting it to work since obviously damage to station hull, air and such needs to be restored and even if we would limit it to the ‘mess’ starting a shift on regular basis with blood and bullet holes in walls would be odd as well, not to mention it would be a race with janitor before he sweeps everything up. Even if we were to limit it to one case, its not exactly easy to determine what damage and items are related to it and issue with people cleaning it up would be the same.
I guess it would be all a bit too complicated. Easier way would be to just generate a case with evidence scattered around, we already have rooms spawning dead bodies in maints and such. That would mean detective would have always something to do but as was already mentioned in this discussion it seems like a lot of work for one role which results won’t even affect players of current round since it is all based on previous round/random generation
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TL;DR slightly repurpose the circuit UI to act as a conspiracy corkboard for detective work
let people put photos, items, reports, and notes into a window where you can drag them around and connect them like circuit diagrams
i would use the HELL out of this, I already don’t like the detective scanner and prefer to reconstruct from physical evidence so it would be a godsend to keep my brain organised.
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Thanks for summary, I am clinically unable to write anything in form shorter than unhinged rant, which is why I’ve started to add images to most of my post as eye candy
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I’ve always been a fan of the corkboard idea but didnt think it was possible to implement it, it would honestly put detective gameplay through the roof to have.
And as for the hours, I think sec hours is fine, I have like 300 hours on detective and not 1 on lawyer, I have a great grasp of space law and think detectives job does not involve applying it, thats for the redshirts.
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Rants are ok
Just remember
to use this here ol’ Hide details function if you don’t want to take up too much scroll bar.
I love this idea yesyesyeyesyes :DDDDD
This is the only suggestion of yours I see a major flaw with, and that there are barely anybody with ballistic weapons (or types of guns in the game) for this to work as intended. The ammo already tells what caliber the gun is, and that’s already a dead give away on which gun because I believe all the guns use different ammo (outside of shotguns)
yeah, .37 means your handiwork, .357 and 10mm mean tators, and anything else means nukies (and u probably already know nukies are here at that point
)
close, .38 is you, .357 and 10mm are syndies, 7.62 is cargo mosins or nukies and the rest is nukies
.357 could mean the detective if they decided to change the ammo type on the revolver