Traitors

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Overview

Traitors is the bread-and-butter default gamemode of Space Station 14. The Traitors gamemode is characterized by a select number of crew members being chosen to betray the station, hindering its functionality and pursuing their own goals. Traitors, aesthetically, should range from professional insurgents and spies to unsubtle corporate goons. Traitors should feel scrappy; explicitly loud confrontations should be suicide missions, and more tactfully planned approaches should feel rewarding. When fighting a larger foe, you must rely on your wits primarily to bleed them dry through attrition, that and a handful of expensive state-of-the-art toys.

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Game Design Rationale

Traitors are intended to be a major hindrance to the station, with as few restrictions as possible to accomplish that goal. It should be a traitor’s goal to cripple the station as much as possible through betrayal and sabotage without artificial restrictions or limitations placed on them. This should be no easy task; if it is trivial to cripple the station, then Traitors cease to be interesting. On the other hand, if it’s too difficult, they cease to be a threat. Creativity and freedom should be the highlights of the Traitors antagonist. Objectives should be designed so a player can flex their skills and creativity, keeping the gamemode unpredictable. High skill plays and creative thinking should be rewarded and supported. The greatest strength a Traitor has is their evasiveness. Traitors are ordinary crew members covered by space law, which gives them much more freedom for social manipulation and a much bigger cushion for failure. Stealth and deception should be the forte of traitors, but a more direct and violent approach should always be an option to give them a strong backbone. When a Traitor is hard to pin down, they keep the station busy and make the round interesting.

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Tools

The main hindrance of traitors should be resources. Health, ammo, and materials, with much of their time spent gathering resources to achieve their objectives. A Traitor should never feel like their uplink can provide everything they’ll need for every situation. Specialization and planning should be important if a traitor wants to complete all their objectives, and much of their time should be spent accounting for holes in their kit. All items in the traitor uplink should be distinct. This applies both in comparison to other items in the uplink and items from other antagonists. No item should completely eclipse another item, even if it costs more. All items should also serve a Traitor’s needs, no tool should exist in the uplink that serves no value to a Traitor trying to do their objectives. No item in the uplink should just be a direct copy of another non-syndicate antagonist’s item either. Traitors shouldn’t be buying spells, nor should they be getting changeling abilities or revolutionary flashes. Items that are similar to other antagonists’ tools are permitted, but only if they are able to distinguish themselves visually and/or mechanically. Do:

• A traitor needs to prevent a department from functioning, so they scrounge up some materials to create a bomb that will level that department, then spend their TC budget on items to accomplish this unseen, with a bit left over for insurance.
• As one of their many objectives, a traitor has to kill the captain. They spend time finding armor, ammunition, and a disguise so they can kill the captain and escape into the shadows before security catches them.
• A traitor who needs to kill many people goes all in on weapons and armor, but finds themselves lacking on ammo and utility items, forcing them to pick their fights until they can acquire more resources.
• A traitor purchases a grenade launcher that fires projectiles that explode with identical strength and radius to the wizard’s fireball.

Don’t:

• A traitor with one kill objective buys a gun with plenty of magazines and kills their target. They then spend the rest of the round doing nothing.
• A traitor needs to disable a single machine in a department, so they buy a single brick of C4 to level it.
• A traitor purchases a fireball scroll, which lets them cast the wizard spell “Fireball.”
• A traitor purchases the super energy sword, an energy sword that costs twice as much and swings twice as fast!
• A traitor purchases a macrobomb implant, which lets them gib themselves whenever they want destroying all their items and blowing a hole in the station.

Traitors, being a main-round antag, should be driving the round, and their objectives and tools should reflect that. Similarly to the ninja, traitors should be an evasive threat that’s hard but possible to pin down, and who causes lots of disruption when not dealt with. Unlike the ninja, the traitor should have a lot more freedom in their ability to accomplish this. Deception, stealth, sabotage, murder, and anything else a traitor can think of should be on the menu. Stealth and deception tools should be ubiquitous. Traitors gain a lot by blending into the station, which makes them interesting. Stealth, however, is very strong in combat as well, so all tools need to be balanced carefully.

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Tools of Deception: Blending In

Tools that help a traitor blend in. These tools are best suited for a traitor with big plans that rely heavily on deception and subterfuge. An ideal tool of deception concretely supports any deception a traitor may try to pull off, with the main pitfalls being the deception itself. A tool of deception doesn’t really work if there’s a master key that can quickly or easily negate it; rather, the station should have to try to disprove the deception actively. The usefulness of these tools, much like the tools of violence, comes down entirely to the skill of the traitor using them, compared to the skills of those they are using them against. Anything that changes a traitor’s identity or changes concrete station information would be considered a tool of deception. These tools should never directly benefit a traitor in combat; they should only be used to evade and misdirect, which can buy a traitor more time or more resources. These tools should also be some of the cheapest to acquire, as they are context-dependent, and deception should play a large role in the Traitor’s gamemode.

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Tools of Stealth: Evading Detection

Tools that help a traitor forward their objectives stealthily. These are different from tools of deception in that they are intended to help prevent discovery while an agent is being proactive. These would include items that disrupt vision or communication, and tools or weapons that appear to be something completely mundane. Unlike tools of deception, these tools are useful across a wide variety of approaches and actively help complete objectives. As such, they should be designed with clear flaws, limitations, and/or tradeoffs so they aren’t oppressive, especially for items that could potentially turn the tide in combat. Generally, these items should be easier to unmask compared to items of deception; the point of these items is to help you avoid getting caught after all. Ideally, stealth items should be proactively used, not something that you keep on you, which provides a passive and permanent benefit. They’re an investment a traitor is making, and they should be priced appropriately. While not as expensive as more offensive options, their TC cost should reflect the doors they open to completing objectives and acquiring resources while remaining undetected. Do:

• A disguise that lets you pull off a one-time ambush before it needs to be recharged or discarded.
• An invisible box that lets you sneak into places, but prevents tool usage while active.
• A normal pen which, when triggered, can hack open doors, but takes a while to do so.
• A gun that looks like a normal briefcase.
• An item that jams communications and cameras, delaying the ability for the station to respond to your attack on a department.

Don’t:

• A suit with a rechargeable battery that makes you invisible while also providing armor.
• A set of gloves that allows you to strip items quietly and is completely indistinguishable from normal gloves.
• A remote-controlled car that can grab objects off of tables, move under tables and moves slightly faster than running speed, and cannot be traced back to the controller.

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Tools of Sabotage: Bending the Station’s Assets to Your Will

These tools generally cover items that assist a traitor in hindering the station or collecting resources for their objectives. These would include items that allow a traitor to hack open doors, hack lathes to print ammo, or blow a hole through a wall. These items can be used alongside stealth, but shouldn’t ever be stealth tools or exclusively useful for stealth. They should be obvious when seen, obviously syndicate contraband, but also quick and easy to use. Speed is often your best friend in both combat and stealth; a single second could mean the difference between getting caught and getting away! Ideally, these tools should have broad use cases so they’re rarely a sunk-cost purchase, but not so broad that they become an “all-in-one” tool. These items should always be a worthwhile investment, balanced by quantity and cost. A Traitor should feel that they never have enough to get all the utility they want so as not to become too disruptive. An item so strong that it’s only balanced by a high cost should be broken down into smaller, cheaper items with distinct uses to increase the choices available to traitors. Do:

• You buy a station blackout to give you the cover of darkness to sneak into a place you shouldn’t be sneaking into.
• You buy an item that draws a lot of power from engineering, and if it isn’t dealt with quickly, it explodes violently.

Don’t:

• You buy an item that allows you to make a massive portion of the station uninhabitable and leaves behind zero evidence of who did it.
• You buy an item that allows you to hack doors, hack borgs, print ammo, and change your PDA light in one compact package.
• You buy an item that allows you to hack one particular door on the station and nothing else.

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Tools of Violence: Making the Station Bleed

Tools that are useful for disabling, killing, or severely injuring crewmembers. This includes both lethal and nonlethal weapons, since nonlethal weapons typically give lethal opportunities. These tools must be threatening; they are what give the traitor the backbone to make security second-guess itself about chasing a traitor into maintenance alone. Weapons should be balanced with a “role” in mind, and no two weapons should feel identical in use and playstyle. For example, an SMG and a shotgun may both be loud weapons designed to kill, but they play distinctly differently due to different rates of fire, sizes, and ammunition available. Two guns could use the same ammo type, but one may be silent and have a lower rate of fire, making it a strong assassination weapon. What’s most key for all weapons is that none should ever be the best for all situations. A powerful gun that can deal a lot of sustained damage should never be stealthy and always be large. A silenced gun may be great for single-target assassinations. Still, it doesn’t have the DPS or magazine size to sustain itself in a firefight—Melee weapons trade reliability for range. Explosives are loud, obvious, expensive, clunky to use, and typically single-use! Armor is incredibly useful, arguably more than guns. Guns can be acquired easily without an uplink if you know where to get them, so armor is often the more pressing purchase. Armor should always be visually obvious and distinct; one should be able to immediately tell that you’re a traitor if you’re wearing traitor armor. It’s not a purchase you make if you’re trying to do anything subtle. Armor should be bulky, expensive, obvious, and greatly extend your survivability. As such, these tools should be balanced cost-wise, where if you want all the tools to commit unspeakable acts of violence and only violence, you will exhaust your TC budget and still be lacking in some areas, which will require some planning. Maybe you don’t have enough medicine? Maybe you don’t have enough ammo? Maybe you’re going to need to find a weapon? Maybe you only have one weapon? Maybe if you get cornered, you have no way out? Violence should be a test of game knowledge and skill in and out of combat to acquire the tools to make a strong kit.

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Tools of Utility: Keeping Yourself Useful

This covers “everything else,” which completes a traitor’s kit. Primarily items that extend a traitor’s survivability. These would include: medicine, speed enhancers, or teleporters. Anything that keeps a traitor alive and out of cuffs without necessarily being made for violence would fall into this category. These items should be cheap and expendable since they extend a traitor’s impact on the round. Items that last long amounts of time or provide an indefinite passive buff to a traitor shouldn’t exist. Medicine runs out, batteries drain, and money doesn’t grow on trees (at least not without some effort in making it grow). Context should also be important when designing a utility item. No utility item should work for every scenario or have too broad of a usecase. This should be achieved by either breaking up items that serve too many roles into multiple cheaper items, or making the items expendable such that they don’t last the whole round. However, items shouldn’t be so niche that they’re effectively never purchased or only exist to crowd the uplink. Utility items are competing with what is available to the station, so their pricing should also take into context the difficulty and availability of substitution options when being designed. Do:

• You buy an implant for a negligible amount of TC, which allows you to evade security in a pinch, but only a limited number of times.
• You buy a one-time use healing item, which heals a sizable chunk of your damage for a small TC cost, allowing you to turn the tables in a skirmish you would’ve lost otherwise.
• You buy a crate full of materials for a small amount of TC to build a nefarious contraption with.

Don’t:

• You buy an item that lets you inject effectively limitless medicine and drugs into your bloodstream instantly.
• You spend a large chunk of your budget on a kit of stimulants, which are only enough to evade security once or twice.
• A traitor needs to break into the bridge, so they buy an assortment of 1 TC tools that together allow them to get into the bridge faster than just using tools.

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Tools of the Trade: Being Unique

This covers job-specific tools and, as such, is extremely nonspecific. Job-specific tools should be strong and very unique. There is a risk in using an item that heavily narrows down the number of suspects, and that risk should be rewarded. Normal balance suggestions for all other categories still apply, but generally these items should be cheaper rather than stronger, such that they don’t become meta. In addition, job-specific items should justify themselves through flavor and playing into the strengths of the job they’re specific to. These should, if possible, play into the normal duties of a job without replacing those duties, and especially shouldn’t be beneficial to the station if used. Do:

• The clown buys a banana peel that explodes.
• The engineer can purchase faulty machine parts that cause machines that use them to break down.

Don’t:

• The doctor gets access to better or cheaper medicine.
• The engineer can purchase insulated gloves, or a faster RCD.

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Objectives

All Traitor objectives must have a meaningful impact on the round. This can range from a temporary setback to round-ending destruction. These objectives should also cause chaos and help further other objectives through their completion. Sabotaging a machine may open up new opportunities in its wake. Objectives should be diverse in scope and destruction to prevent repetition and predictability, and should always allow multiple viable approaches for completion. Objectives should not be easily reversible, either because they become locked in when completed, are unable to be reversed due to permanently altering the round in some way, are so broad in scope that they’re extremely difficult for the station to recover from, or because they fail due to inactivity from a traitor. The station should also never feel like a traitor; doing traitor things is ignorable. We never want the reaction to an objective being completed to be an ambivalent shrug; someone needs to clean up their mess. Recovery from objectives should be directly proportional to their rarity. A machine being broken is easy to recover from and, therefore, more common. Losing a department head is a big security and command headache and should be proportionally less common. An entire department being rendered unable to operate should be appropriately rare. No traitor should feel less impactful than another due to their objectives. A traitor with a single extremely rare objective should be as much of a nuisance as one who only has extremely common objectives. Quantity should be used to make up the difference. The completion of objectives should naturally bring traitors into conflict with the station and, by extension, with other traitors. For example, one traitor needs to prevent science from completing their research; another, a scientist, wants to complete their research to help them with one of their objectives; and in addition, a third traitor needs to steal research. These objectives naturally conflict and require either cooperation or competition to resolve such conflict. Do:

• A traitor has to kill multiple people. They get a gun and some utility items to carry out a series of hit-and-run attacks, keeping the station on its toes for a while.
• A traitor has to kill the captain, so they disguise themselves as the head of security and assassinate the captain stealthily, allowing them to continue acting antagonistically throughout the round.
• A traitor has to sabotage a piece of key infrastructure, so they spend the majority of the round preparing the tools needed to disable it, then break in and kill anyone trying to stop them. This action forces evac to be called.
• A traitor needs to keep science from completing their research, so they spend the majority of the round blowing up anomalies and sabotaging the science department.
• A traitor needs to destroy a few high-value assets; they plant bombs and remotely detonate them, causing trouble for the crew that is reversible, but their objective remains completed.

Don’t:

• A traitor has a steal objective; this will put a target on their back the whole round, so they stealthily take the item on evac.
• A traitor needs to steal the chief engineer’s magboots, so they kill the chief engineer, then hide in space the whole shift.
• A traitor has to kill one random passenger and survive. The passenger is killed in maintenance, and nobody notices or particularly cares.
• One traitor has to steal one item and escape; three traitors need to help them achieve their objectives. All of them need not get caught.

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Solo Antagonists

Every Traitor is a solo antagonist. This doesn’t explicitly forbid teamwork nor does it encourage betrayal, but all design must treat Traitors as solo antagonists. Items, objectives, or abilities that explicitly force teamwork or confrontation with other traitors should be avoided. Conflict and teamwork should be built naturally through the individual actions each Traitor makes. No Traitor should ever be forced to rely on another Traitor.

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Roundflow & Player Interaction

Players should feel the impact of traitors as the round progresses. Ideally, the traitors gamemode is a slow burn, similar to survival. There are a couple of highlights here and there, but things begin to ramp up as the round progresses. Traitors with larger and more difficult objectives begin completing or attempting to complete them. Department heads should start going missing and requiring replacements; machines should start breaking and requiring workarounds; and the station should struggle to maintain normal operations, eventually pushing the station to evac. Traitors should be felt but often unseen. Part of the traitor experience should be the worry about who is a traitor; as such, unmasking and catching all traitors should be a rare but possible outcome. Most rounds should end with all traitors completing some of their objectives, with a few completing them all. A round where the majority of traitors completely redtext and nothing happens should be completely avoided if possible. On the other hand, a round where all traitors greentext and completely sweep the station and security department should be exceedingly rare. Rounds should ideally sit in a sweet spot, where both sides make small and large victories but neither is able to completely demolish the other. Traitors should feel like they’re always just out of reach of security without security feeling oppressive. Security should feel like they are always on the back foot when it comes to catching the traitors; catching a Traitor should feel like a major victory. The whole station should be in an uphill battle against constant sabotage and workflow interruptions that they’re only just barely able to deal with. A typical round of traitors should start with each traitor receiving their list of objectives. These objectives should encourage antagonistic activity throughout the round, either due to quantity or difficulty. Higher quantity objectives should be easy to complete, hard to reverse, and have a tangible impact on the round, but never be round-ending on their own. These could include killing a random crewmember or actively sabotaging some common machine. This allows even new traitors to have some tangible impact on the round, even if they are caught immediately and executed. A lower in quantity objective would be something that requires active effort to complete. These shouldn’t be things you can wait until evac to do; for example, you may need to prevent a department from functioning normally lest they complete some objective, or you may need to prepare yourself to do one very difficult job that will draw a lot of attention once you start. In both scenarios, the Traitor should be encouraged to spend the round causing problems either to complete their objective or gather resources for their objective.

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Administrative & Server Rule Impact

The poor balance of Traitors is one of the main reasons for 2.9’s existence. Balancing Traitors properly would allow further 2.9 loosening with the goal of eventual removal. A primary goal of this document is to provide direction for balancing Traitors which makes them more interesting and impactful, while also reducing required administrative action.