Hermit rework idea

[Sadhorizon]

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A CODER, I AM NOT PLANNING TO WORK ON IT (OR AT LEAST NOT ANYTIME SOON - MAYBE SOMEDAY IF NOONE ELSE TOUCHES IT FIRST)

 

Many, many ghostroles are rather unappealing as of now, bursting with issues. Hermit, while having cooler idea behind it, lacks at some fronts too.

Let's first take a look at how a hermit round plays out as of now:

1. You join it as a ghost, choose species

2. You get randomly assigned a backstory (there is like five of those) and gear appropriate to it (for example, backstory of an NT doctors gives you a labcoat)

3. You wake up, all alone.

4. You start playing. You have a couple ways to do so. You could: hunt, focus on botany, look for help (which is silly but people do that), RP something out and get ignored by miners. There are also some other ways but those are the main one I thought of. There is an issue with those however - they all require luck. If you want to grow something more than little you start with, you need to hope RNGesus blesses you with good weed luck. If you want to get help from miners, you need to basically roll the dice for where you spawn. Close to the base? No? If you want some funny gimmick, besides the previous point, finding some cool gear, either from ruins or legion corpses, adds to flavor (technically you can pray for some things however). But truth is, once you run out of ways to play as hermit, it looses most of its replayability. 

 

 

And that's what I mostly want to focus about in here - replayability.

 

What's my idea to increase it? Adding more playstyles and enforcing them through code!

 

Whole idea is as follows:

-You spawn as a hermit

-A popup letting you choose your backstory appears

-You choose your species (it'd be done this way, as it COULD allow banning some species for a few backstories)

-You spawn with the gear dependent on backstory, as before, BUT, it is actually changing your gameplay in some way.

-You check your chat - what is it? An objective that's also dependant on your backstory. Said objective can be greentexted.

 

 

Examples of how some backstories would work:

Name: lavaland hunter

Backstory (simplified): You are a respected hunter with a dream to conquer wildlife. You work for nobody.

Starting equipment: fluff clothing, armored vest, a bone axe

Objective: Kill 5 Goliaths.

 

Name: syndicate agent

Backstory (simplified): You are a syndicate sleeper agent hired to hinder NT mining operations.

Starting equipment: fluff and obvious clothing, garotte

Objective: Murder a miner and impersonate them.

 

Name: a botanical researcher

Backstory (simplified): you are a free researcher, performing an illegal research on NT claims.... but you just need to see flora in here!

Starting equipment: fluff clothing, botany belt with gear, bonus seeds (including ambrosia, cotton), some limited chemicals (like a bottle of ammonia and saltpetre, one each).

Objectives: 

-Grow ambrosia Gaia.

-Grow ten separate plants.

(the ambrosia can be achieved with glowshroom luck, as they contain radium)

 

Name: Internal Affairs Agent

Backstory: You are an NT employee who crashlanded on the lavaland. You seek rescue every day.

Starting equipment: fluff clothing, some form of communication.

Objective: get back to station

 

Other ideas I had include: prisoner (no gear, only objective is to survive, valid to miners), lone ash walker (ashie gear, objective is to protect lavaland from miners), some other survivalist (double barrel shotty with a couple backshot shells, no ideas for lore nor objectives), yet another survivalist (sword and shield, no ideas for lore nor objectives), engineer (RCD, objective is to build something nice [it autocompletes])

 

The above were written mostly as examples of how I'd like to see it work (and to show the diversity of possible scenarios - NOT only combat focused ones), but I'd be more than happy if someone got inspired by them, or wrote their own ideas down below! Keep in mind, making some hermit a partial antagonist would need an approval of a design team member first, so please limit those for now. But besides that - go wild, sky is the limit.

 

Here, I also believe giving admins an easy way to add/remove backstories would be a good idea, for events.

 

Another cool thing I'd like to see implemented, is giving you a little checkmark for backstories you've completed already. Checkmark would be in the popup that lets you choose them.

 

And lastly, it would need to be documented on the wiki. I could probably take care of that one myself but just throwing it here, as it adds to the complexity of this change.

 

Now, would that completely fix hermit? Absolutely not. But, I believe it to be a step in right direction to make them a fun and viable ghostrole.

Edited April 23, 2023 by Sadhorizon

[henri215]

Syndicate agent backstory speedrun lets gooooo

[Sadhorizon]

Yeeeaaah, I wouldn't be surprised if letting hermits be antags on demand wouldn't be accepted.

On the other hand however, there is only one hermit, that isn't even guaranteed to spawn.

What's really the difference between 3 angy lizards that can multiply indefinitely and singular sneaky syndie boy?

Edited April 21, 2023 by Sadhorizon