/tg/Station 13

Byond account and character name: Gylifi - Swims-The-Sea
Banning admin: Ispiria
Ban type (What are you banned from?): Server.
Ban reason and length: As a non-antagonist, mind transferred into a nurse spider and mass produced more spiders, giving them no orders not to harm people. As a result at least one innocent person was killed by the ensuing sentient, wild spiders. Dayban.
Time ban was placed (including time zone): 19/02/2019, 14:31:06 UK.
Server you were playing when banned (Sybil or Bagil): Sybil.
Your side of the story: I joined as a scientist during a lowpop round and got to work in xenobio. Eventually came to getting spiders, I transferred myself into one and set up shop in xenobio, creating a few eggs and basically idling there. People were entering and leaving at this point without a problem, and nobody had taken control of any of the spiders. A miner soon came to ask for a red speed potion, and stood waiting at the door. It was at this point a sentient spider appeared and succed him while he was talking, he didn't realize I'm guessing, and began to web lower science. I helped in webbing robotics before idling there again.

Why you think you should be unbanned:

First of all, the actual note itself implies something unfair.
As a non-antagonist, mind transferred into a nurse spider and mass produced more spiders, giving them no orders not to harm people. As a result at least one innocent person was killed by the ensuing sentient, wild spiders.
"As a non-antagonist" - Implying that it's against the rules to mind transfer to a spider, when it's clearly not.
"As a result at least one innocent person was killed by the ensuing sentient, wild spiders." It was only one person else I would be receiving more than a day ban, and as far I seen, there was only one single wild spider actively doing anything. I couldn't get the ghosts to become magic carp previously, I doubt there would be many at all available to become spiders.

Players get zero information provided to them upon becoming a spider. I believe the comparison that Ispiria made during the ahelps was that it is similar to giving a cyborg/AI an order to do something and it going shitty, when it's really not a comparable case due to this.

There is nothing to indicate that spiders are responsible for the actions of whatever their spiderlings do - benos have fluff text, AIs have lawsets, but you are given little information when it comes to spiders. Now, if I gave orders for the spiders to do something malicious I could completely understand this, but that's not what I did. I minded my own business in xenobio, and am being held accountable for something that I did not instruct a spider to do, and did not even know was going to be MY problem.

If you're going to hold people accountable for other peoples griff, then spiders need some sort of their own text upon becoming one as it leaves you with little to no idea of what's expected.

In any event the ban will likely be over by the time this is sorted so it's more of a note appeal.

You mind transferred into something that can create more sentient spiders and then started laying eggs. Spiders are set up in such a way the offspring keep sentience if the parent is sentient. You've probably seen rounds where spider eggs start spamming ghost chat for more sentient spiders so I would be surprised if you didn't know nurse spiders could do this. Had this happened on a highly populated round the spiders would easily destroy the station as they quickly get out of control from ghosts taking up more spiders and making more spiders. As a non-antagonist you shouldn't be creating a scenario like this. I agree more warnings would help, but a certain amount of this is common sense. Eggs make spiders, spiders can vent crawl, spiders are often controlled by ghost players.

Nurse spiders can set objectives for their offspring, which means they DO get fluff text when spawned with orders to do such and such or to not do such and such. Nurse spiders down the family tree also automatically get their mom's orders as their default objective orders when they lay eggs, preventing any accidental mishaps down the line unless the spider intentionally changes their offspring objectives to not align with the mom's.

In essence, yes, if you do elect to become a nurse spider, all spiders you spawn, and their actions, become YOUR responsibility. If you do not set objectives for your offspring and they grief, it is YOUR fault.

This is exactly the same as a xenobio using sentience on mobs. It's your responsibility to give them orders and ensure they are aware what they can or cannot do. If they willfully ignore your orders, there is a case for them getting punished instead of you, assuming you did your due diligence. However your post indicates you were not aware of this and you made a bunch of grief spiders without attempting to give them objectives to not grief.

I do, to an extent, agree that perhaps a measure could be put in place in the future which would prevent spiders from going hog wild as soon as they spawn in, but as it stands the only mechanic preventing newly-spawned spiders from acting like the wild monsters they are is the nurse spider's directive (which, full disclaimer, I do not personally know how to set, but that's why I never put myself in control of nurse spiders unless my antag plan is to just let them go nuts).

As a non-antagonist, you transferred yourself into a nurse spider. Up to now, we're okay. As a non-antagonist, you then lay numerous eggs which hatched to become potentially sentient, station-destroying monsters. Up to here, we're also possibly okay, assuming you set the nurse spider directive ordering any hatchlings to avoid harming people. You neglected, however, to attempt any sort of control whatsoever to prevent your creations, which wouldn't have even come into the round without you, from doing what a monster is expected to do - that is, kill and destroy and expand. I can't and won't punish a player who takes control of a monster and then, absent any information at all that they aren't supposed to, behaves like a monster.

If, has as already been pointed out, you had given a directive for the hatchlings, and the spider had gone on to kill at that point, then yes, they would be the one eating the dayban, and probably a ghostrole ban to boot. It's a pretty well-established staple of the server, though, that if you're the one taking a risk in doing something crazy like bringing notoriously deadly creatures onto the station, you're the one who'll be held responsible for the consequences if you lose a handle on what you've made. To forestall a potential argument about this point, the difference between, for example, bringing xenos onto the station who later escape from containment, and personally spawning and releasing spiders into the station's main vents, is that in the xenomorph case whoever brought them aboard made some effort to ensure they remained captured and under control.

To touch a little on your point about spiders not being responsible for what spiderlings do, you were not a spider. You were a regular crewmember who transferred into a spider, and you were judged for the actions you took as a crewmember, not as a spider, since even after the transfer that's the agent you were acting as.

Also, I applied the ban relatively quickly as a mercy, because as I had anticipated, once the spiders smelled blood the hunt was on and additional people - at least one for certain that I saw, likely more but I was arranging an ERT to wipe out the spiders and may have missed others - were killed. I believed this was just you being grossly negligent and not malicious, so I didn't want to have to stack extra bans on you, and felt like punting you early would spare you from that because I'm not about to retroactively add ban time for additional deaths after you've already been hammered.

tl;dr If you're gonna breed xenospiders as a nonantag, you better be sure you're keeping them in check or I'll hold you accountable if they go kill-crazy.

Appeal denied unless a headmin sees fault in my reasoning.