Think piece : The problem with trying to make combat "fair" in vanilla SS14

[EthanQix]

I couldn't help but notice a disturbing trend in combat-related PRs these days where everything gets nerfed because of "fairness". Instant explosions aren't "fair". Hypopen + Nocturine isn't "fair". Toolbox bombs should leave enough time for the recipient to throw it back because that would be "fair". Ninja no longer being able to teleport with the body they're dragging because this is "cheese". Pneumatic cannon ammo inventory getting shrunk because it could do actual damage.

And like, I get it. Getting instantly exploded/slept/killed/gibbed isn't particularly fun when you're a civilian just trying to do their job. But there's something very important we need to remember when designing this game's combat.

This isn't League of Legends. This is SS14, a disaster simulator.

Civilians dying, heavy property damage, and other messes are gonna happen because that's what makes rounds interesting. Traitors, nukies, changelings, cultists and other antags are what drive the round and they have tools to make fights unfair. Civilians are not supposed to be able to fight them on equal terms or even "have a chance". A civilian being an assassination target is supposed to die unless the assassin fecks up. Civilians are supposed to background characters in the story of the shift, barring unexpected heroics such as the clown pieing the nukie's face as they were arming a cluster grenade.

Antags need options. Antags need to be able to pull off "bullshit" that puts them at an immediate advantage against a civilian, such as the ninja's instant stun, the nukies' military gear, the wizard's Ei'Nath. Nerfing everything and limiting those options leads to a higher likelihood of same-y and boring shifts.

(As a side note, I'm not saying all nerfs are bad. Nukies losing access to desword, for example, needed to happen because nukie rounds were boring before that.)

[Errant-4]

No one is nerfing "everything". And, in fact, nerfing the most broken and op strategies should lead to less "same-y and boring" shifts, because it will make it less likely that all antags will be using the same meta strategy

A civilian being an assassination target is supposed to die unless the assassin fecks up.

Even if I am to accept this premise, it then follows that there needs to be a window for the assassin to mess up. A strategy that explicitly exists to make that window smaller, then, can rightfully be scrutinized and changed if necessary.
Toolbox bombs are a way to negate the few built-in limitations that minibombs have, so obviously they needed to be nerfed.
Requiring that an instant-crit bomb that will be thrown at the (likely unarmed) target out of the blue has some telegraph is still extremely far from any notion of fairness.

Pull teleport was a flat out bug that people just happened to like as a useful trick, and from what I can tell it was less used as a combat technique (the target already had to be stunned to pull it off, at which point you might just as well cut them down with the sword, teleporting them to space is just a dunk) and more as a way to steal the research server so they can do the hacking doafter in peace.

I do not think that either of these changes meaningfully reduced the amount and magnitude of disasters that are going to befall the station and its inhabitants, or made the inherent advantage that antagonists have over regular crew too narrow

[K-Dynamic]

I'd like to comment that toolbox bombs scale up and basically become mini maxcaps that break through nukie armour