BeeStation 2

BeeStation 2 is a collection of many of my unfinished projects, bundled into 1 for a totally incomplete attempt to showcase what a director's cut of Beestation could have looked like.

Design Pillars

These are the core design pillars. These are the greatest authority for design and all features should be made as derivatives of these design pillars.

Tell a Story

Every round tells a new and interesting story.
Every character is part of this story, and plays a roll.
Every story needs tension, conflict, drama and an ending.
All mechanics should be designed to compliment the story we are trying to tell.

No Normalcy

Everything should be designed to prevent routines from forming, a player should not be doing the same thing as part of their job between every round.
Every mechanic should be designed to push players to create drama, tension and other interesting scenarios which affect the other player’s experiences.

Immersive Roleplaying

This is a roleplaying game, the player is an actor in control of their avatar.
Gameplay should be independent from the skill of the player, whether you are highly skilled or highly unskilled, the gameplay should depend on the skill of your character and not the skill of you as a player.
The game is designed so that players feel the feelings that their characters feel, if they are meant to be weak and avoiding combat then the player should feel that too.
Players are given the freedom to play their role as a part in the story. We should never tell a player what they should be feeling at any time and how they should be acting in a particular situation.
The administrative rules are a core part of the game design and should be aligned with both the gameplay and the game pillars. There should be no rules added that contradict what we are communicating via mechanics (such as forcing players to be non-soldiers when their characters are strong and brave).

Dark, Satirical and Somewhat Comedic

Life for this space station is not happy and joyful.
There are many satirical elements.
There should be funny moments, including deaths which are comedic in a dark way (being sucked out of a breach caused by an asteroid hitting the wall next to you).

Progress Report

injures-2: 299 compilation errors, significant work required. Unlikely to be completed in time and focus is on skills and the security rework portion instead.

character-stats: No UI implementation, and no specific skill checks have been implemented yet. Skills will apply stat changes to characters.

specialists: Surgeon role completed, Geneticist completed

human-printing: Completed & Tested.

Features / Changes

Note that I made this list before finishing all the features, so they might not all actually be implemented.

Refactor of damage and sharpness

Damage has been refactored to be extremely lethal on people that are not wearing armour.

Tell a story: By making damage more lethal, the barrier to entry for a character becoming important is significantly lower. You will be punished for taking the easy way out of ending an interesting story by responding with force and this will have consequences.

No Normalcy: Making damage more punishing reduces the probability of event outcomes being solely self-healing and continuing on with your day. Some penetrative damage, such as organs being struck, is random.

Immersive Roleplaying: We don't need to tell the janitor that they should be avoiding combat as the player is now free to choose to enter combat, which will result in almost certain death.

Dark, Satirical and Somwhat Comedic: Mostly N/A, but it's dark for obvious reasons.

There are now 2 types of melee damage, blunt and penetrating.
Penetrating damage applies to the user without being reduced, but can be blocked by penetration armour which converts it into blunt damage.
If not blocked, penetrating damage will hit organs, cause bleeding and result in delimbing if the bone is destroyed.
Consciousness damage can cause concussions when applied to the head of unarmoured opponents.
Sharp attacks deal 3x their standard damage if the user has no penetration protection, which linearly decreases to 1x damage once the user has 20 penetration protection. This makes being unarmoured extremely lethal in combat.
Adds a new damage type, unconciousness damage. This heals passively over time and adds on top of regular damage (unlike stamina damage). If you are put into crit by unconciousness damage, you will be unable to see or move until you regain conciousness.
Blunt damage applies 50/50 as regular damage and unconciousness damage.
Structures being hit by penetrating attacks will now have their contents recieve the attack, but it will be reduced by the penetration resistance of that structure. Lockers and mechs shot by bullets will hit anybody inside of them.

Code-wise damage is now fully standardised:

deal_damage: Deal damage, running standard armour checks. Sharpness will result in bleeding.
take_direct_damage: Take direct blunt damage, without armour checks.
take_sharpness_damage: Take direct damage without armour checks caused by penetrating damage. Causes bleeding.

This standardisation is shared between all atoms, including mobs. This simplification means that the coders no longer have to worry about applying bleeding or dealing with armour and secondary attack effects, which makes interacting with damage code significantly cleaner.

Complete refactor of armour. Armour is now divided into 5 categories

This change mainly compliments the damage refactor. Penetration is key towards the more lethal damage which was explained in relation to the previous section.

Penetration: How much the armour resists against penetrating attacks.
Blunt: How much damage reduction the armour provides against blunt attacks.
Reflectivity: How much damage reduction the armour provides against light/laser attacks (divided by 2), as well as the chance for those attacks to be reflected.
Heat: How much the armour protects against thermal attacks such as lasers (50/50 split between heat and reflectivity) and fire.
Absorption: When armour is attacked, the damage applies to the armour too. Absorption represents the amount that damage is reduced by before applying to the armour. It also represents the armour's ability to protect the user from extreme damages such as explosions.
Certain protection stats such as radiation and biohazard protection are now just flags, so are 100% or 0%. This allows for gimmick armours such as the rad-suit to exist (as for the way bio and radiation are presented to the player, having 50% feels kind of pointless).

Skills

Skills are a way of differentiating characters and closing the gap between player skill and avatar skill.

Tell a story: By giving each character skills that are independant to player-skill and items, the roster of characters in the world is more diverse which creates greater opportunities for interesting stories to unfold.

No Normalcy: Every character is different, and the stats of other players may affect how the round plays out.

Immersive Roleplaying: If you create a weak character, you will physically be weak gameplay-wise. Your skills determine what you can do as a player, and will affect how you play and think about the environment around you.

Dark, Satirical and Somwhat Comedic: N/A

Introduces skills, which are assigned to characters via the character creation screen.
Skills range from 0-20 and generally replace most quirks.
Skills are modified by some jobs, but otherwise do not change throughout a round.
All skills are designed to be very powerful and will have a large influence on how your character plays. Skills can naturally be set to a maximum value of 16, with some jobs providing additional skill points (The security martial gains very large bonuses to strength and resilience, which makes them incredibly strong).
Skills are chosen in the preferences menu and are per-character. You initially gain 48 skill points which are distributed evenly (all 8) by default.

Strength: Represents how physically strong your character is, which affects how potent they are with unarmed and melee combat. Characters that are both very strong and significantly stronger than another character gain tackle abilities and other close combat arts. A generally high skill delta means that the person with the higher strength skill will almost always win in unarmed combat, but that of course doesn't mean you are safe from weapons. Reduces the slowdown induced by wearing heavy items.
Resilience: Represents how robust a character is, high resilience grants high stun resistances, increases the crit threshold, reduces slowdown caused by damage and makes a user bleed less. It also grants other resistances such as stronger bones and skin which protects against attacks penetrating through the body.
Agility: Represents a characters ability to move around their environment. Higher agilities allow a user to move faster, vault tables quicker (or instantly if high enough) and makes it so that a person can wiggle out of capture easier.
Coordination: Represents the hand-eye coordination of a character. High coordination gives a character better accuracy with ranged weapons and reduces the amount of time required to perform actions.
Intelligence: Represents the problem solving ability of a character, high intelligence levels unlock unique recipes and actions which provide more opportunities for navigating various situations. These recipes include improvised weapons, improvised hacking devices and other various tools that may be useful no matter your role or status. With a high intelligence you can operate machinery more efficiently and specific machines have additional options that are otherwise unavailable. Intelligence has the additional effect of protecting a user against some forms of manipulation, that is a low intelligence individual is easilly fooled.
Luck: Represents how lucky a character is. All randomness checks use the luck stat as a bias for weighting. With a high luck stat you will be less targetted by negative random events, will have random good things happen to you and gain an ability called 'active luck' which will force a good result from the next random event that your character performs.

These changes come with a rework to how security is played:

The disabler has been removed, instead replaced by a lethal ballistic side-arm. Pure non-lethal weapons are now limited to melee weapons by design.
Stam-crit no longer incapacitates someone, instead making them vulnerable to tackling.
Disarm attacks now result in stamina damage.
Disarm attacks against a wall no longer result in knocking the target down, unless the target fails a skill check which is biased by the amount of stamina damage they have
Tackling is unlocked at strength 10, and allows you to pin someone down when they have stamina damage.
If someone is not vulnerable to tackling, then this action will instead result in a shove and some stamina damage being taken for both players. This action results in the tackler grabbing the target.
Higher differences in strength make tackling a target easier.
If a player grabs another player while both of them are lying down, this will result in pinning which prevents both players from standing.
If you are pinned but enter stam-crit then you will be unable to use items or fight back.

Specialists

Specialists are job roles that can perform specialist taks which other people on the station are incapable of performing. These characters are made to be important to the story and there will be problems if they go missing. Other roles generally exist to support the specialists in their duties.

Tell a story: Specialists are important. If one goes missing then that is a major story event, you can't just do their job yourself as they have special skills that nobody else has.

No Normalcy: If they go missing or are acting crazy, then the round has been pushed out of its standard flow.

Immersive Roleplaying: Only the specialist can perform specialist tasks.

Specialists have a specific skill that nobody else has, making them very important to the story we are telling in this round.
If a specialist is not present in a department, then another person in that department will be picked to take on their skills.
Security Marshal: A single, exceptionally strong officer with very high stats. They are very hard to bring down and are significantly stronger than the rest of the cannon-fodder security guards. They answer to the security director (The HOS), who acts as a coordinator for the department but isn't actually that strong themselves. They are the only member of security who a powerful antagonist would consistently struggle to easilly deal with.
Surgeon: The surgeon is the only person on the station capable of performing advanced surgeries. While everyone can tend wounds, they are the only one that will be able to fix up exceptionally damaged bodies and revive the dead.
Phychologist: The phychologist is the only person who can perform psychoanalysis and prevent people from going insane. If someone is experience deep space isolation symptoms, which includes distrust, hallucinations and disorderly conduct then they can help deal with these.
Geneticist: The geneticist is the only person trained in operating the human printing machine, which is the replacement for cloning. This makes them pretty fucking important. Antagonists should be designed so that they continue to need the geneticist (such as cult revive only being able to revive people as phantoms).

Human Printing & Permadeath

Cloning and revival has been reworked to introduce more opportunities for interesting stories to develop. It increases the stakes of dying without a soul, while avoiding the problems that come with making all deaths perma-death.

All crew have a cloning record stored in the cloning machine at round-start.
Producing a clone can now be performed at any time.
If you are dead, then you will take over the body of the clone.
If you are alive, the clone becomes the prime you and you will no longer be revivable on death unless you become the prime again.
To become the prime, you must kill all other duplicates of yourself and then get a scan at the cloning machine by deleting the old scan.
Revival surgery is removed, and brain-death occurs after 15 minutes, or less depending on the damage to the brain. If the head or brain is destroyed/remove then this essentially drops to 0.
You can only be scanned while alive, instead of the current system which only allows scanning when dead.
While only the geneticist can use the machine, anyone with access to it can delete items from the server. The backup server is replicated with a server in medical, and an off-site backup stored in science on a disk-drive.
The following different events can take place:
- Accidental production of duplicates, in which the duplicates may fight each other or work together to survive without a backup life.
- The geneticist is killed which prevents revival (as a result, they will become quite the protected role during times of crisis).
- The machine is sabotaged, deleting the local records temporarilly (the machine itself can store 5 local records).
- The server is sabotaged, which prevents storing more than 5 records from being stored.
In terms of space law crimes committed by a duplicate are crimes committed by all instances of the clones.
- Standard policy for dealing with duplicates is to wait until there is 1 remaining clone, delete the record and then re-scan the surviving clone.
- If the death penalty is given to any clone, then the record should be deleted and the death penalty should be applied to all duplicates.
If an antagonist is made into a duplicate, the duplicate will inherit the antag datums of the original, but they will not be on the same team. Their objectives will remain in sync (as it only changes when the target cryos).
If a mind with duplicates becomes an antagonist after the duplicate has already been created, the antag status will not be shared.

Questions

What happens if you create duplicates of important roles like the geneticist/surgeon.
- Then the important character can exist multiple times, however if the original dies they will be permanently killed.
How do antag targets work when there are duplicates?
Does this mean that there will be infinite respawns on rounds like cult and nukies?
- Yes (With the condition that this process is quite resource intensive). Should the clones get more and more corrupted over time?
  - Corruption over multiple new prime prints could be an interesting mechanic.
Could an antag duplicate themselves to get an accomplice?
- Yes, but this process would make them permanently die if they are killed so is highly risky.
- This process would require the geneticist to cooperate, however since the geneticist is the only person that can revive people, they are very important and the threat of you killing them should be enough to convince them to do something. (However, they may also be heavily guarded due to their importance)

User:PowerfulBacon/Beestation2

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