Reincarnation

Reincarnation is a mechanic designed to reintroduce players that die in potentially unsatisfying ways into the round, with a strange twist for variety.

When a player dies, their soul will be weighed. If they die very early into a round (<15 minutes), if they were killed by someone else (especially of their own troupe), if they were the last remaining member of their troupe, or if they haven't killed anyone, their "karma" increases. If they have killed others, especially of their own troupe, their "karma" decreases.

This "karma" heavily affects the chance that a player will reincarnate. If they are chosen for reincarnation, their soul will instead be transferred... into any living pet on the station!

While in this state, they will retain their mind and thus objectives. The reincarnation happens immediately, so they have no chance to gain meta information from stagehanding beforehand--however, they can simply choose to not reincarnate if they'd rather spectate. The amount of living non-reincarnated-into station pets also affects the base chance that reincarnation can occur at all.

Pets have some gameplay features that make them distinct from (and generally lesser than) humans, but more than just a vessel that walks around and can't interact with anything:

• Cannot speak or freely emote, except for a handful of unique emotes per pet.
• Cannot hear the speech of others--simply appears garbled.
• Movement speed decently faster than even a completely unburdened human, to aid with escapes
• One item slot (generally rationalized as like, being in the pet's mouth or something), albeit with a doafter to pick anything up, and the ability to do basic interactions
• Different abilities depending on the specific pet: Polly with the ability to speak random sentences from your memory, Ian with same action as the Avenger for sensing your killer if you had one, etc.

There are a few gameplay goals with reincarnation:

• To reward players who may have died in unsatisfying or narratively unfulfilling ways with a final chance to enact their story
• To incentivize keeping good care of station pets when possible--maximizing the chance that you reincarnate later if you die
• To minorly incentivize avoiding certain behaviors (killing when you really don't need to etc) that tank your karma (although I doubt it will alter decisionmaking that much)