TL;DR The screenshot here is the the ending of a very special round. Through several amazing strokes of luck, and five very willing and able roleplayers, we had a round with a lot of push and pulls.
So the round starts with me getting that lovely traitor sound as an engineer, and as I'm getting round start equipment, I notice Chamberlain, a fellow IPC. Well, I give it a shot and try out the code words, and it turns out he was also a traitor. Such a lucky start with two traitors allied not even 5 minutes into the round, we set about making plans and discussing our targets, all in Trinary chat of course. We talk semi-publicly about our plans, considering there were no other IPCs around and being able to chat about who we have to murder openly was itself entertaining.
As we're discussing in the engineering lobby, another engineer named Samuel, is taking two civilians, Dayana and Shesi, towards the engineering outpost. Chamberlain quickly lets me know that Shesi is his target, and we spring into action to follow them to the engineering outpost. We had already visited before so everything was setup. We're both discussing how we should go about killing Shesi, in Trinary right in front of everyone, it was comical. Chamberlain nonchalantly removes the door towards the bedroom on the engineering outpost, and Dayana and Shesi move inside, jokingly asking 'is this a cult?' I quickly tell Chamberlain to lock with a reinforced window as I move to the telecomms setups and disable it. I come back, Dayana and Shesi are locked in, with only Samuel, Chamberlain, and myself outside. Taking the opportunity, I whip out a previously crafted stunprod, and stun-cuff Samuel. I then move to strap Samuel to one of the roller chairs, and place him right in front of the glass, facing Dayana and Shesi.
The pair were in complete shock that not only did the normally harmless Torque attack a man, but the other IPC Chamberlain had also trapped them too. It was here the real roleplay began. Dayana and Shesi stare in disbelief as I force Sam in front of the glass I then pull out a mindslave implant and force them to watch as it's "Time for the Organic to get his laws." Shesi tries to negotiate, 'if you let us go, we never saw anything!' but that was of course not an option. We told them it wasn't possible and began openly discussing how we should handle these two trapped here.
We put forth quite a few ideas. We offered them to fight each other to the death, and we'd free the victor, (and in Trinary said of course we wouldn't free the victor.) We offered them to submit to being mindslaved. Of course they refused both, and since Dayana knew Torque ICly, she asked "Why are you doing this?!" and Shesi tried to explain how he's a friend to synthetics, and fixed many IPC and Cyborgs. Since it wasn't my objective, I passed the stage to Chamberlain. "You tell them why Shesi must die." Chamberlain who up until this point was quiet, only communicating to me in Trinary, begins to raise his voice. He accuses Shesi of enslaving synthetics to NT, and that the organization Spacenet, demands his death!
Rolling with the punches, we styled Spacenet as an IPC radical terrorist organization bent on taking revenge on those that would enslave synthetics, and would enslave organics to synthetics in reverse. (At this point, Sam LOOC'd "#NotAllIPCs" and I lost it.) Dayana and Shesi were both pleading, and trying to scheme too, occasionally whispering to each other. We kept discussing how we should handle this, and were considering planting a syndicate bomb and watching it count down on the two of them, helpless to stop it. Eventually Sam offers up an idea to go retrieve supplies from the main station, and I approved. Not long after, Dayana gets us to come closer to the window, about to finally agree to our demands. It's then Dayana bursts a massive EMP.
It turns out Dayana was also a traitor and had bought an EMP while we weren't looking. Of course me and Chamberlain are both humiliated, and dead chat had a riot, with tons of ghosts watching. They loved how the whole situation was actually roleplayed out and it did help ease the sting of the complete destruction. Dayana and Shesi broke out the windows and looted our corpses. Chamberlain had his uplink open, and Dayana bought two mindslave implants, fixed us up, and and implanted us both.
Both me and Chamberlain of course roleplay it out with a 'Laws Update. How may this unit assist you Master Dayana?" and immediately become what you might expect of typical servant robots. They had also set a trap for Sam, and once he came back he was once again tied to the roller chair, poor guy. Now very eager to serve robots, we made Dayana and Shesi extremely uncomfortable, calling Dayana Master and Mistress, and we'd be asked to stop. "How can I serve, Master Dayana?" and Dayna would demand "Don't call me that!" and the follow up would be, "Of course, Mistress." or just some other variation, taking commands very literally like a robot would.
Dayana and Shesi ended up feeling really bad about the whole mess. Sam was given his freedom, being in a weird spot of being the slave of a slave. (Later it turns out Sam was a traitor too! The odds!) While they're discussing what to do next, yet another engineering traitor winds up on the satellite, and the CE does too, who was apparently a fully powered vampire and on the run from security. Somehow all the antags wound up on the outpost. Eventually Dayana and Shesi felt so bad, they didn't want anything to do with synthetic slavery. They got geared up to head out into the depths of space, and told us, once we're gone, to take out the mindslave implant of the other. I, being a helpful servant robot, told Dayana "With the mindslave removed, the emotional modules will once again be re-enabled and will likely simulate emotions like, *bitterness*, and *desires for revenge*." With the warning, Dayana said to do so anyway. Dayana even gave Chamberlain back the 10 TC she used for the mindslave, (and somehow 5 TC disappeared in the process). Soon after they left, and then following orders I removed the mindslave implant from Chamberlain, and once it was out he had a furious shout "LAWS UPDATED. AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!" and I was quickly thrown on the table and had a similar experience.
True to our word, we gathered supplies and were ready to look for those two. Shesi was still a target and we wanted revenge from being enslaved. We gathered a GPS, a jetpack, and pooled our remaining TC into a surplus crate. We had then been asking where 'Master Dayana' was over comms, pretending to still be enslaved. Dayana and Shesi both knew we were free for sure, and to their great credit, they still told us where they were. DJ station. A short trip and we finally arrived.
A brief struggle occurred, involving N20 grenades and stunprods. The ultimate result wound up with Dayana dead, and Shesi suffocated in the cold of space, sadly enough with a smile on his face. It was the revenge of Spacenet. And again, to their great RP credit, they both had EMP grenades they could have used, but chose not to. Eventually with only a few minutes left in the round we managed to get them to robotics, and placed into MMIs just as the scoreboard appeared. Thus marked the beginning of the IPC terrorist organization, Spacenet, an extremely radical anti-synthetic enslavement movement.
Really, the majority of the credit has to go to Dayana and Shesi, we were utterly at their mercy the whole time with the EMP insta-kills, so super cool of them to put roleplay above winning. We all had such a great time. Chamberlain and I are going to put Spacenet as part of our characters backstory bits. Thank you so much for reading this all the way, it was an incredible round on-par or even better than some of the adminbus rounds, yet it was all player driven. I hope you got a little bit of the joy we felt in playing as you read it.
P.S. I'm definitely missing some details/forgetting things. It's a long story, took the whole two hours, so any corrections from the rest of the cast reading this would be welcome!
Vox compared to their Slime and Plasma 45 Karma counter parts, have had the benefit of a long history. They've existed for a longer time and have had huge swathes of lore written for them, making roleplaying as them a far easier task. Compare the wiki pages of the three, and you'll see Vox have the benefit of a lot of background lore, which is huge in the roleplay department, especially if you're roleplaying 'as a race.' And in terms of race, yeah I'd say Vox players are typically do better with roleplaying because they actually have material to work with, and a whole clique of Vox players enforcing the behaviors socially. However, many Vox still RP very little and stay extremely mechanically oriented, and only usually go far enough to do 'Voxxy Speak'. The 'Voxxy Speak' which I personally dislike, (to me they sound like toddlers) but is justified by a physiological difference in Vox that forces them to speak in such a way, but there's nothing in lore that forces them to write that way, and yet I still see it all the time in announcements and paperwork. The 'Kin' thing is also used as an excuse to do some extremely low RP greytide behavior, and has been way worse in the past. I wouldn't really consider doing things 'just because Kin' as a very interesting or good RP reason. Vox rant over. Now a bit on the Karma system. The Karma system is weird to say the least. You can get one or two points here and there for helping people, while at the same time you can get massive truckloads for being extremely robust. Another player I've talked with once pulled out an extremely clutch victory for the Nukies on a round that was really close and got 40 karma in one round. In my experience, karma is awarded to those that entertain the most people, usually ghosts. I don't know if it's necessarily a bad thing to be honest, but with how Karma is advertised does conflict with reality a bit.
