Additional Information: According to escalation policy, the teratoma acted within the bounds that they were allowed to act - Teratomas are not forced to be friendly to the changeling that spawned them and there are many cases where they don’t even know who spawned them. As far as “Rules as Written” go, this teratoma didn’t strictly do anything wrong, this report is being made on behalf of the spirit of the game and keeping rounds fun and entertaining rather than doing something just because you can.
Reasoning to claim R7 and R8 be considered: The action taken by the Teratoma appears at a glance to have been done purely to ruin things for the clown, based on the described account in the quoted and linked forum post. It is entirely possible that the Teratoma had no idea what they were specifically getting into when they took the role, but @techtrogs may be able to give an account to whether or not they were the talk of the ghosts.
Reasoning to claim R14: It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that someone who has died decided to abuse an easy ghost role to get revenge. If the controller of the Teratoma had previously been in conflict and/or killed by the clown’s shenanigans I think it is worth considering.
Final word: I don’t really expect anything to come of this report due to the rules-as-written being followed more or less and the difficulty of proving intent - but players who do shit like this deserve punishment in some form or another if the shittery was intentional.
I also wasn’t involved in the round in question at all, so I will not be able to answer questions about it.
As per R0 this report can’t get processed as it was already handled in-game by an admin, you’d need a Staff report for that.
In this case that would be me. It doesn’t quite sit well with me either, but rules as written it’s fine. And most of the other admins I asked said it was fine
I do think that a discussion around this specific incident could prove productive though.
This is unlikely to be the case here as far as I can tell.
I do appreciate that it was checked anyhow, it sounds like the report can just be locked and closed. There’s already a thread for the discussion to take place in the general forum.
I’m not really sure what points to make for changing anything though - teratomas would be too powerful of a tool if they were forced to be subservient and obey the changeling’s will. It might just be that things aligned extremely poorly in this case and nothing even needs to change.
Go for the middleground. Terratoma isn’t obligated to be subservient to ling, but DOES get informed which ling spawned it and has no right to kill/attack it.
That is pretty difficult to do when the ling that spawned it could be changing identities at any time.
Giving them changeling sniffing along with a message not to harm changelings might work, but also increases the risk of a teratoma pulling what friendly changelings already do and just explicitly sniffing them out to kill despite rules saying not to.
How about have terratomas get a sort of built in sechud which only displays which ling spawned it, and doesn’t actually sniff like hardsuit HUDs do? Have it detect CKEY instead of job/identity too.
Not necessarily. Apprentices are constrained by rules to help the wizard. Teratoma must be explicitly stated to not be such. The only reason why that HUD would exist is to give Toma a very visual warning: “Don’t kill this thing that has the glowing “PAPA/MAMA” icon above it”, but beyond that the toma should be as free as possible. That should be enough to prevent direct combat between the Ling and the Toma that it spawned, and since tomas are “hostile monkeys”, the chance of it killing the ling accidentally through sabotage is low. Tomas aren’t supposed to plasmaflood/sabotage fusion/tesloose/singuloose anyway.
Ultimately, this report can’t well be processed due to the fact an admin already handled it, and as you mentioned, it’s not explicitly against the rules. Closed & rejected.