Traitor Backstories

[itsmeow]

About The Pull Request

Adds unique backstories to be assigned to traitors based on some preferences, including some involving the character being forced into it, others where they are doing it for gain, and then just the straight up insane.

Objectives will have general flavor text, and greet text somewhat related to your backstory.

An advanced objectives viewer TGUI will be created, allowing players to write custom objective motivations, backstories, etc. Because this is only for personal use there is little moderation needed. Potentially non-custom motivations could be added to roundend reports.

Players may be able to choose specific options in their generation such as if they have family, a desire for money, etc which can inspire their backstory.

Fixed probabilities will also remain regarding murderbone, not all backstories will allow dagd, but some will. Some backstories are locked specifically to dagd traitors. Disabling these backstories will mean you will just not get dagd, and only enabling those does not guarantee dagd, as there is still a fixed chance.

Backstories are selected by the player after their objectives are picked, but before they are given an uplink or codewords. The backstory determines whether you receive codewords or not, and your objectives provide hints to the backstory/faction selector (if you are murderbone or not) which will tell the user that certain backstories are recommended or not.

It is up to the player to choose a fitting backstory for their character, and there is no gameplay incentive to follow it or other mechanics related to it. This is purely a roleplay tool. The only gameplay interaction is that independent and black market traitors do not get codewords and thus may not be able to team with other traitors as effectively.

Why It's Good For The Game

Provides players with an easier way to motivate their roleplay as an antagonist, and better shows the player that roleplay is of a priority when playing as an antagonist through ingame means rather than external motivators like rules. It makes greentexts and objectives themselves less central and incentivizes thinking about the character.

Testing Photographs and Procedure

Screenshots&Videos

Integration with new antag tips UI

Flavor matches your faction - no codewords for black market

Roundend report

Traitor Panel

Changelog

🆑
add: Added a backstory selection system for Traitors, allowing easier determination of the roleplay motivations behind a traitor.
code: Cleaned up traitor objective generation and split AI vs human traitors into their own files.
tweak: Changed how murderbone is determined for traitors. It no longer depends directly on your objectives, but instead informs your objectives. As a consequence, lowered the 'base' probability to match the previous overall probability.
fix: Fixes a bug from when soft-tracked objectives were added, it accidentally lowered the rate of murderbone traitors. This has been corrected.
add: Enabled the 'neutral' theme for emagged ModPCs, for use by non-syndicate traitors.
admin: Added traitor faction and backstory display to Traitor Panel. Added logging for faction/backstory selection.
/:cl:

[Tsar-Salat]

Finally.

Madlibs in my beestation.

😄

[PowerfulBacon]

This and #9043 will have pretty heavy conflicts due to that PR replacing how objectives are organised in the file structure. Shouldn't be hard to resolve, but might be something worth noting.

[Crossedfall]

allowing players to write custom objective motivations, backstories, etc.

Should put it here as well just to document it. Currently against player-inputted text for backgrounds. But I'm willing to give it a few TMs to see how it goes.

[PowerfulBacon]

Yea, I agree with crossed here. On top of that, I think we may potentially get better results from limiting the freedom we give to players in order to choose their backgrounds as the ability to choose tends to result in players choosing the 'safe' option which eventually results in little gameplay variation, leading to ignoring the system entirely.

[PowerfulBacon]

The backstories are clear enough that I don't think it matters too much, a very simple explanation could be helpful but players don't need an understanding of the syndicate as an entire organisation to be an agent of it.
Also, the automatic selection of a back-story after some time is a little bit annoying and I think removing that could be good (with the uplink and stuff only assigned after you go through it)

[PowerfulBacon]

Might be worth highlighting or displaying in either yellow/a bullet point list what mechanical changes the different factions have.

Independant:

• No codewords.

Or just have yellow highlighting around the bit that says "no codewords"

etc.

There was a peice of feedback saying that it would be nice to have a way of knowing what changes depending on the background.

[HowToLoLu]

https://discord.com/channels/427337870844362753/943311132007997490/1199203257185226873

Codewords are still highlighted for traitors who aren't given them, likely due to should_give_codewords (replaced with has_codewords) previously being a holopara only variable.

[HowToLoLu]

Looking at the use of it on TG, the solution seems to just be adding an if statement checking for if you have codewords on Line 280 of code/modules/antagonists/traitor/datum_traitor.dm