Change "Assasinate X" objectives to "Send a message to X"

[Alriac]

Assassinate objectives are the worst. If successful, its usually a one-side player interaction, where one dies without a chance(and a word) and the other disposes of the body and walks away, while adding nothing to the round overall. Also, miners usually kill themselves.

My proposal is to change that to "send a message" with the intention that the target stays alive and can report what happened, both to security and the crew.

Here is an example of "messages": "Cut off the legs of X and ensure X stays legless", "Turn X into a vox but dont give a n2 tank", "Make X experiment an horrible death, but ensure X revives alive to remember the message", "Take the identity of X and destroy X's life from inside out", etc.
Or simply "Badly hurt X to send a message"

The difficult part would be to check success of each different condition, which I ignore how is it programmed. Maybe just remove greentext at once? But that would be another suggestion...

To make it a bit more elaborated it could add some reasoning to the message, like "X work is a danger to our organization", "X name was given at the interrogation of an enemy", etc. Although assassinate objectives come without context, it could really improve if we have some to talk about.

Edited September 25, 2020 by Alriac

[maxfromsweden]

I also think player elimination is a pretty zero sum game in this case. Being murdered randomlyl for no reason with no warning isn't really my idea of fun.

I have suggested "Find out password from X" which works similarly. A random player gets told the "password" at the start of the round. A traitor gets the goal to find out this password. However, the only way to get this password is for the random player to tell the traitor. This means roleplay IS required to aquire the information. You can't murder the person, you won't get the password. Torture might work, maybe trading the information for a favor.

Your suggestion runs along the same lines and I think those ideas are great!

[ID404NotFound]

imagine objectives like "ensure there are no mechs" or "make sure research level for X never passes 5"

[henri215]

Or objectives like ''KILL ALL STATION ANIMALS''

[Blessed]

Assassinate X is most likely never going to change, however, you can make a proposal to add these objectives into the game for added variety.

Also, ontop of that, the proposed objectives of gathering information could be elaborated on, such as adding a secondary use to the PDA which would take a code and give you something to do with the newly added password. 

Edited September 28, 2020 by Blessed

[Norwest]

I like the idea of this, and wouldn't mind manually updating objectives if someone ahelped asking for it in-game. Problem is, it's a lot easier to track "dead" than "legless," or any of the similar suggestions. The closest we can get is "marooned," which is fairly easy to record (target not present on escape shuttle/pod at end of round), ditto for "dead" one way or another. To give an example, let's consider how you'd record if someone is legless at the end of the round:

-The first obvious approach is to log whether or not the target mob still possesses "/obj/item/organ/external/arm" and "/obj/item/organ/external/arm/right" at the end of round. Problem is, what happens if they get prosthetics? Those are logged separately, ditto for if arms&legs are augmented as opposed to simply robotic replacements.

-This also glosses over species complications, as different species have different limbs. IPCs have an entirely separate listing, and different race's limbs are coded slightly differently. Organics and cyborgs can be screened out from this particular objective, or issued a separate one (EMP target AI at least once, perhaps), but the coding complications start to build up once you add in new species into the mix.

-This also doesn't account for BS cases like slimeperson limb regeneration, or IPC rapid limb re-attachment. Do we require that the original limb (as marked by its in-game unique ID) be re-attached, or will the target regenerating a new limb fix it?

 

Basically, while I can appreciate not wanting to assassinate people, what you're proposing is a lot more complicated than you might imagine. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes coding which'd be needed for even one of these objectives, let alone the whole list of 'em. I'm not saying this is a complete block, and I wouldn't mind manually replacing objectives with a similar "send a message" sorts of ones, but I'm unsure if it could be easily and effectively automated.