The Wizard

[keronshb]

The fabled wizard document.

This still won't unfreeze Wizards, Spells, or Actions but it's to give people a more solid idea of the plans for Wizard and goes over some of the finer details.

Relevant urls -
space-wizards/space-station-14#40983
https://forum.spacestation14.com/t/remove-wizard-roundstart-antag/24764

[ArtisticRoomba]

Thanks a bunch for sitting down and writing the document despite the recent weeks. Since nobody has reviewed this yet I decided to sit down and take a look.

After reading the design document, I have some point concerns and general concerns. The biggest one of them being that this reads very much like a post-mortem implementation document that simply describes what is currently implemented and lightly clarifies some points about the Wizard. A lot of the information reads as if it was a bit scattered around and it isn't concurrent. In a sense, it reads like a FAQ rather than a design document whose intent is to lead future development and design direction, which is most important.

At the end of the day, contributors and players want to see a vision. A design cannot be implemented or understood by future contributors and/or maintainers if a design is not laid out, after all. I can't read your thoughts (though I wish I could read Vera's.)

[ArtisticRoomba]

For future ref, if you're going to line break for readability, be sure to do so between sentences.

Suggested change

	This is for The Wizard antagonist - which is to help answer any frequently asked questions for the Wizard and to help
	others understand what the Wizard is about. The Wizard in short is a highly disruptive/chaotic antagonist that does
	anything to their whim. A lot about the Wizard is that it doesn't conform to standard rules so it very much is the
	embodiment of "a wizard did it." Players will be encouraged to come up with their own gimmick, while still being an
	antagonist to the station.
	This is for The Wizard antagonist - which is to help answer any frequently asked questions for the Wizard and to help others understand what the Wizard is about.
	The Wizard in short is a highly disruptive/chaotic antagonist that does anything to their whim.
	A lot about the Wizard is that it doesn't conform to standard rules so it very much is the
	embodiment of "a wizard did it."
	Players will be encouraged to come up with their own gimmick, while still being an antagonist to the station.

[keronshb]

It was more for in-code readability but this makes sense too, good deal!

[ArtisticRoomba]

The document should be explaining the Wizard in the perspective of a person that has never seen or experienced the Wizard before. Relying on the reader's experiences is bad, as these experiences vary across players and can change over time, so it becomes necessary to document the reasoning at the time of writing that went into the Wizard and its design.

All-in-all, this background section is very short and very brief compared to a document like the Pursuer which outlines:

• What the antagonist is.
• Where it's derived from (whether it be a certain game or SS13 server).
• Why the antagonist exists.

Right now this section doesn't really state much of anything.

[ArtisticRoomba]

Something I also forgot to mention about this document that is really important:

The Wizard is an antagonist that has existed on SS13 for a very long time, yet this design document makes no reference to it at all, which is a pretty big misstep IMO. Ideally this design document references the SS13 Wizard and its implementation(s), what features it had, what problems it faced during its lifetime, and how the SS14 wizard plans to overcome the previous problems.

[ArtisticRoomba]

This section is very brief and simply lists a technical TODO of desirable features, and not how these features are used as the Wizard actions throughout the round. This document should treat the Wizard as if it was not implemented and avoid pretending like the user knows about the Wizard and its current mechanics - this knowledge can change and vary from person to person and must be written down so that it can be properly referenced and understood at the time of writing.

For example, it would be like if I had removed the section on atmospherics devices respecting basic fundamental laws of physics, because all of our devices respect this as of right now, so there's no need to reference it exactly. This can lead to situations where we may have to explain to someone that it's generally not a good idea to violate the laws of physics (without good reason), which is a waste of contributor and maintainer time when it can be easily referenced.

You can contrast this section to the end of the Features to be added section of the Pursuer document, which states:

A key feature of the Pursuer’s balance is its speed. The initial speed of the Pursuer should be slow enough that the target will have little difficulty running away, putting the onus on the Pursuer to facilitate coming closer to the target. This can be done by destroying walls, smashing windows or relying on other station issues to slow the target down or force them into a dead end. These destructive acts, along with the overarching goal, should force other crewmembers into acting by attacking the Pursuer (the Pursuer may even encourage this by attacking crew directly, though note that being distant from the target will make the punches weaker). Once the Pursuer takes damage it will gradually become faster and faster, first reaching a speed at which it can pressure the target better, and as damage increases it will become oppressively fast. When near death the Pursuer should be able to easily catch up to the target, though at that point being injured much further will cause death.

In this paragraph, we list:

• One of the limiting balancing mechanics of the Pursuer
• Why we limit them like this, and what we want the player to do as a consequence of this limit
• How this mechanic changes over the course of the round
• How the player is supposed to respond to these changes over the course of the round
• What the rising action and climax look like for the Pursuer.

For the Wizard antagonist, the only thing that is listed are just technical features and what spells may look like. It does not describe the effects they are supposed to have on the player. Note that any effect written down here can be valid - if the response is to obliterate the player, go ahead, put that down. But simply writing down what needs to be done is suboptimal - we should be asking why.

[ArtisticRoomba]

The pillars that the antagonist violates should be enumerated. This is something that should be explained and elaborated on instead of briefly mentioned in passing.

[ArtisticRoomba]

It should be elaborated as to why these are being done, in some form.

[ArtisticRoomba]

It should probably be clarified that no game-winning purely meta combo should emerge that players pick every single round in order to guarantee a "win" (even though the Wizard has no defined win condition).

[keronshb]

I feel I already state that with this blurb.

[ArtisticRoomba]

Friendly wizards is defined but we do not define why this is good or bad. If it's good, what are we doing to promote it? If it's bad, what are we doing (or what are we GOING TO DO, rather) to prevent it, mechanically? If we want a mix, what is the mix, and what are we doing to mix it up? Something I forgot to say initially: you define that friendly Wizards are bad in the later section, but it should be defined up here, and the why should be included.

[keronshb]

As I stated the doc there's not much we can do reasonably mechanically to prevent someone from playing as a friendly wizard. There are certain things you can add to encourage more antagonistic behavior and doing things such as buying optional challenge runs, etc, but it's an impossible ask to mechanically limit a players behavior.

Using a Traitor for example, if someone 100% helped out the station every time they rolled one ... how do you mechanically enforce that outside of rolebanning that person?

[keronshb]

I also don't feel like I need to explain why a friendly 100% crew aligned wizard is bad because we have that sort of definition in the antagonist doc. It's not just something that applies to the Wizard, so I feel that explaining what is and isn't friendly wizard is good because a lot of people have a misconception on what a friendly wizard is.

[ArtisticRoomba]

In any sense, it is a goal of the antagonist pillars, so we should at least try to enforce it mechanically:

Antags should be discouraged from simply playing as crew, or being friendly/assisting the crew.

The game needs less admin workload, after all.

Using a Traitor for example, if someone 100% helped out the station every time they rolled one ... how do you mechanically enforce that outside of rolebanning that person?

Traitor is of course a different circumstance, however there are ways to mechanically motivate Traitors to do their objectives (and they honestly need some motivation right now). For example:

• Traitor objectives can be on a time limit to encourage traitors actively seeking out their objectives instead of playing incredibly passive for the entire shift or ignoring them.
• If all objectives fail due to the time limit expiring, the traitor is excommunicado - their store is locked and they are marked for death, with another traitor on station given a target to hunt them down and kill them.

This promotes players mechanically playing their antag rounds - if they fail to complete their objectives, they are hunted. It's also fairly fitting for a killer contractor corporation like the Syndicate.

[keronshb]

• Traitor objectives can be on a time limit to encourage traitors actively seeking out their objectives instead of playing incredibly passive for the entire shift or ignoring them.

• If all objectives fail due to the time limit expiring, the traitor is excommunicado - their store is locked and they are marked for death, with another traitor on station given a target to hunt them down and kill them.

This dives more back into the optional contractor buy that we're likely going to add. Not an exact 1:1 but also having it as the main mode isn't great either because now you start to introduce the inverse: Traitors rush their objs at the start of the round ASAP (or just one) to tick the box off and then either roll over too hard or stomp too fast.

Which is why I think implementing something similar for the wizard - optional contract buy to do rituals (which has overlap with cults and heretics but different ™️ ) can be encouraging, but the main mode should still be relatively freeform.

Like we could add objectives to the wizard like traitors, which would relatively be fluff in comparison, but I know we're also floating the idea to either hide or remove greentext as well from Traitors which would just end up being the same situation.

[ArtisticRoomba]

This does not consider or acknowledge any roundflow issues like beginning-of-round or end-of-round round stalling, which is a concern that was raised in feedback thread.

[keronshb]

Please explain what beginning of round or end of round stalling is in this context or summarize it.

Edit: If End of round stalling is a Wizard not calling the shuttle or crew not calling the shuttle, that's not something this document should be handling. If a mechanic isn't introduced for it already, an unrecallable shuttle should be automatically called if a majority % of crew are dead.

[ArtisticRoomba]

Please explain what beginning of round or end of round stalling is in this context or summarize it.

Beginning of round stalling is when the Wizard intentionally does not visit the station or tries to stay as far away as possible, leading to an effective greenshift for the crew. This can be anything from staying in their Den or hiding in space. It should be noted that, due to Dynamic not existing, it is ideal that chaos ramps over time, or at least arrives to the station at a reasonable time. Nukies have this very same problem where they can just stall in space and arrive whenever they please, so they just arrive at the one hour mark where all of security cryo'd or everyone is bored. And then everyone malds.

End of round stalling is when the Wizard intentionally tries to delay the calling of the shuttle, whether it be making the caller inoperable or killing everyone on the station so nobody can call. In any sense, yes, this is something that should be handled, at least partially, by the design document - nuclear operatives have two natural end states, they either all die and the shuttle gets called, or the nuke blows up and the round ends.

Wizard doesn't have any EOR stalling prevention and it leads to piss poor experiences where ghosts have to vote to restart the round (if this is happening persistently, the game is not good).

[ArtisticRoomba]

This section does not elaborate on how the Wizard will scale its power to the current round population, which is a problem that was raised in the feedback thread.

[keronshb]

It's not going to scale power based on round population. While that was feedback from some players, that's not going to be implemented.

Some spells will be adjusted accordingly, but it won't be based on population.

For example, Rod is obviously busted based on some bugs and because it deletes. Once the backend on that changes, the Rod will be changed accordingly so it's exceedingly more fair.

Another is Fireball, which is meant to be high-ish power and dangerous to use at close range, which is just going to be balanced a little better.

[ArtisticRoomba]

In this case, it would be good to elaborate as to why it isn't going to be implemented, just so that those reading the document can know and understand why.

[ArtisticRoomba]

You should add a Current Problems subsection that details problems raised by admins in the feedback thread and how you plan to address them. A person looking outwards on this document does not know concretely what event spells are, why free agents are involved, and why it makes it a headache for the Admin team.

[keronshb]

All ready for another review.

[EthanQix]

I think teleporting the Wizard to the station if they try to fire an event spell while in space is a bit too strong and disorienting. Just not firing the spell with an explanation popup ("too far from station!") would be sufficient, and leave more agency to the player.

[keronshb]

I think teleporting the Wizard to the station if they try to fire an event spell while in space is a bit too strong and disorienting. Just not firing the spell with an explanation popup ("too far from station!") would be sufficient, and leave more agency to the player.

Event spells are being changed to use game rules so it will be doing it every time it fires. So they can't just go off into space after using it.

[beck-thompson]

Could you explicitly address why you think event spells need to exist? Its a very big departure from the normal round flow and I think it deserves its own section.

[keronshb]

They're mass-effecting spells. They can range from extremely goofy (floor is lava, summon ghosts) to extremely chaotic (summon X). They can highlight how much reality bending a wizard can do.

And the doc explains the changes:

  - These are spells like Summon Guns or Magic - which turns everyone into a free agent. This was added initially, as a request _by a wizard_, because it would be too much of a net positive for the crew to get a bunch of guns and magic for them to use against the Wizard without any intra-conflict. 
  - The current implementation turns all crew into a free agent, which has caused some admin headache. Instead of mass-changing crew, the new solutions is that a small group of players will be made into a free agent at a low percent based chance each time the event fires off (and the event will fire off automatically instead of manually).
Which will considerably lower the amount of free agents it makes which in turn reduces admin headache.

[beck-thompson]

I understand that but gameplay wise why is it necessary? I'm not a super big fan of them because they kind of just turn the game into a shooting contest (If I wanted this I'd play RMC or CS:GO!) - I think it needs some more justification to exist besides just the fact that wizards are powerful.

[keronshb]

They're not just limited to summon guns/magic.
It's mostly a reference to this comic:

Which sums up the Wizard, they really do not have a sense of right and wrong.

And as said, changing the event spell to a % chance than total 100% chance instills even more paranoia between crew.

Future event spells are going to be much more than turning X% of people into Survivors. (They'll also be triggering outside of the Wizard triggering it manually)
The Survivors bit is just to prevent people from just turning their guns on the Wizard immediately.
And if a Wizard uses it in a nukie round, the nukie team has an equal chance of getting extremely good guns too.

[slarticodefast]

A few problems that I would like to see addressed are:

• What prevents wizards from picking the same few meta spells every single round? This seems like something that currently needs an extreme amount of microbalancing that just does not feel viable,
• Especially the event spells currently violate the wizard's own design - he is intended to be a wildcard antagonist that has the round go into a completely different direction each time - but if a player picks summon guns/magic it pretty much ends up in a free for all deathmatch without many possibilities for roleplay every single time.

[slarticodefast]

I would split this section up a little into the status quo and the abilities the wizard already has, and what's planned for the future. You mostly talk about the latter, but the doc should be written for a reader that does not know about the current state of the implementation. This is especially important for documenting the original intentions behind the features since they will change over time.

[slarticodefast]

Violating each rule should come with a reason why it's ok to make an exception, and how the problems this causes are circumvented. The pillars exist for a reason after all.
Especially breaking the Just a Spark rule is quite problematic in my point of view. Right now the meta for example is to always buy the rod spell as that can easily cause major destruction and space large parts of the station. Sure, you can give it an extremely long cooldown to somewhat try to balance it out, but that does not fix the fundamental problem breaking the pillar creates. Especially if a specific spell becomes so powerful in combat that it becomes a must-have and breaks the wizards own design of encouraging the player to try out different gimmicks this is problematic.

"It's ok because it's rare" makes it somewhat better, but is not enough on its own.

[keronshb]

I personally hate "Just a Spark" because it was tailored towards Traitors and other standard-solo antags and not towards antags like Nukies, Wizards, etc when we were working on it.

Sadly I can't find what we talked about in discord about it, so it's lost to time. I wouldn't consider a Wizard buying a rod spell and destroying parts of the station violating this rule, but I would consider their highly disruptive nature as a way to do it.

And the new event spells (well this specifically applies to neo summon guns and summon magic) do apply towards just a spark a bit more. While it highly disrupts with giving everyone guns, it also gives a spark with the much smaller pool of survivors (5% or less per roll), and the equipment that people can get (a traitor or a nukie could get something that gives them an edge, or the crew gets it instead).

[slarticodefast]

I think a clarification is needed on what chaos actually means in this context, it is mentioned several times thoughout this doc without a definition. I would go with a title like "chaos, not carnage". Having a wizard slaugher all of security could be called chaotic, but it's definitely not fun for most players in the round. The wizard should be focused on gimmick spells with creative ways to use them, driving emergent gameplay rather than being just another form of nukie.

A balance example here is the smite spell - exploding a single player with comedic timing is funny, but telling the same joke multiple times and permanently round removing multiple players not so much. Therefore the spell's cooldown and requirements should be balanced with that in mind.

[slarticodefast]

A suggestion on how to clarify the meaning of chaos here:
Spells can have a wide range of abilities, using weaponizing different features and game mechanics across the codebase. By combining them through freeform selection the wizard is able to have these features interact in emergent gameplay with wildly unexpected or rare results. The creativity of the wizard player is the tool that drives the round.

[keronshb]

I really like the sound of this!

[keronshb]

What prevents wizards from picking the same few meta spells every single round? This seems like something that currently needs an extreme amount of microbalancing that just does not feel viable,

This is the same issue that any antag will have - what prevents any of them from doing exactly that?

Choice. Having choice and good choices are key.
That being said, balancing too. This is addressed in the doc

The Wizard being quite strong will be limited by the amount of spells they can buy. The ideal situation is to _avoid_ making "the game winning build" but instead
allowing the creativeness of the player to mix and match different spell & equipment combinations to make something interesting.
That being said, timestop and fireball is a classic combination for a reason, but giving players way more interesting options will help cut down on pure offensive Wizards.

Especially the event spells currently violate the wizard's own design - he is intended to be a wildcard antagonist that has the round go into a completely different direction each time - but if a player picks summon guns/magic it pretty much ends up in a free for all deathmatch without many possibilities for roleplay every single time.

This is also addressed already

  - These are spells like Summon Guns or Magic - which turns everyone into a free agent. This was added initially, as a request _by a wizard_, because it would be too much of a net positive for the crew to get a bunch of guns and magic for them to use against the Wizard without any intra-conflict. 
  - The current implementation turns all crew into a free agent, which has caused some admin headache. Instead of mass-changing crew, the new solutions is that a small group of players will be made into a free agent at a low percent based chance each time the event fires off (and the event will fire off automatically instead of manually).
Which will considerably lower the amount of free agents it makes which in turn reduces admin headache.

[ThatGuyUSA]

A few problems that I would like to see addressed are:

• What prevents wizards from picking the same few meta spells every single round? This seems like something that currently needs an extreme amount of microbalancing that just does not feel viable,

• Especially the event spells currently violate the wizard's own design - he is intended to be a wildcard antagonist that has the round go into a completely different direction each time - but if a player picks summon guns/magic it pretty much ends up in a free for all deathmatch without many possibilities for roleplay every single time.

Well, there will never not be a reason for someone to pick the same meta options every single time. It simply comes with giving the player full agency of what they can choose. Right now the Wizard has very few options, and because security is always going to respond lethally Wizards have been choosing loadouts that gives high evasion and high lethality since there is a lack of options.

To fix this we must provide alternatives that feel equal to what the 'meta' can achieve. Right now Jaunt and Rod are popular because they provide true invulnerability and high unpredictability. Other spells like force wall that cost 3 Wizcoin can't even come close to providing the amount of protection that they could for how little effort they require.

I mean even giving the option to summon magicarp as a buy option would be some variety at least. They could lean into a summoner archetype if they paired it with a staff or animation.

There's also all of the unimplemented spell glyph traps. Sure they're all lethal in some way, but they're options. If a Wizard wants to power trip and kill the whole station they've been given the tools to do so. But if a Wizard wants to slowly and meticulously turn the whole station slippery via mindswap and slippery slope. There aren't many ways to defend yourself without giving yourself away in a flashy manner. At least with glyphs they're subtle and dangerous as opposed to the very obvious fireball or very obvious rod and its path of destruction.

When fireball and rod destroy, they destroy absolutely. But we don't have many less-lethal options to work with that aren't intimidating.
Stuff like the wand of locker is great because it's disruptive enough to get assailants away from you, but not lethal should you want to play a Wizard that doesn't kill.

Now this isn't here or there, but I feel the spell freeze is contributing to this. And a lot of people aren't going to develop things they know will be put on hold, even if it doesn't necessarily mean it won't be merged in the future once the freezes are lifted. But we don't want to take a leap of faith and open the floodgates since it could create technical debt.

[ThatGuyUSA]

thematics