Siphon Data

ATTENTION, OPERATIVE. It is imperative you siphon the crew's medical data. This whole radstorm situation is our golden opprutunity to steal this info. Don't squander it.

Siphon Data is an objective involving the siphoning of important data from various consoles. It is a timed objective like Bug Department. meaning it slows down the pace of the game and gives crew more opprutunities to react the traitor's actions.

Gameplay

Traitors with a Siphon Data objective have an innate verb that they can use on any machine that's their target. Using the verb on an machine with its panel open will trigger a doafter that plants a data siphoning device in to the machine.

Once the siphoning device is planted, the machine will begin to malfunction and start sparking, and make strange sounds when in very close (1-tile) proximity. Additionally, anyone who examines the machine while the panel is still open will be able to tell that it's been tampered with, and can remove the siphoning device if they see it.

After 8~ (vauge estimate) minutes have passed since planting the bug AND the bug has not been removed, a continuous degredation event be triggered corresponding to the type of machine that was hacked, and the objective will be marked as complete. The degredation event will not stop until the bug is removed.

Outside of the post-objective-completion degredation, this objective's behavior is more-or-less shared with the bugging behavior of the Bug Department. objective.

Target Design

Siphon Data can be seen as a counterpart to the Sabotage objective, and its objectives should be designed as such - which is to say, mainly focused around siphoning data from important machinery, like the Medical Records or Criminal Records. The consideration for if something should be a sabotage or siphon objective is mainly up to if the device it's on would make more sense to have as a continuous event. Other variables like location, machine loudness, etc. may also act as a factor to take note of, considering the crew should probably have a chance to stop & notice the event.

Why

In addition to acting as an interesting variation on Sabotage, Siphon Data also encourages more creative strategies and systems interaction then Sabotage typically does, due to the slow-burn nature. Players might consider things like causing chaos as distractions against their objectives, bunkering their objective down heavily in order to ensure the bug isn't removed before the time limit is up, or even dragging the offending console away in to maintenance, if they can get away with it.

The slow-burn nature also makes traitors more falleable by giving crew a chance to discover their antics, and helps prevent rushing objectives (like was previously possible when only Sabotage and Kill existed in playtesting.)