Roundstart

When the round starts, players are internally split up into two groups. The first are those that will play the station roles (split across multiple groups in the case of multistation). This group ideally comprises around 75% of the total readied-up population.

Wildcard Roles

The rest (25%) are those that are chosen to play the "wildcard" roles, which can be effectively anything interesting, including things like:

• Solo free agent roles (shitty pod guy)
• Antagonistic team roles (pirates)
• Neutral team roles (asteroid inhabitants like ashwalkers)
• Helpful solo/team roles (traders)
• Grey team roles (swarmer drones)

Wildcard roles are never considered part of the crew faction at roundstart, are not part of the typical role pool, and have goals of their own that may lead them into conflict or cooperation with the crew and other wildcards. Gameplay for them should be crafted so that they have reason to interact with things that will affect the station's inhabitants in a nuanced way, but they do not necessarily need to directly interface with the crew in "roleplay".

Notes: It probably makes sense to select some roles first, and only shunt players off into the wildcard pool if they only selected roles that are already fully saturated, or once an adequate number of each role has been selected?

Wildcards will often be humanoids with the same capacity as the station crew, in which case they may opt into having masks. Specific wildcard roles can decide whether they will roll masks, and what subset/weighting of masks they should use. Wildcards may also be nonhumanoid, in which case they should not roll masks.

When the round starts and the players who will be put into the wildcard pool are selected, they are given a selection of wildcard roles and allowed to vote on which to play.

Notes: I don't really know what the voting mechanism for this should look like, to be honest, but I want the wildcard players to have a good degree of freedom over what wildcard they get to play, since they didn't get to be part of the crew.

Arrivals

At the start of the round, the station crew spawns in cryosleep aboard a transport ship. The ship has detected that only a few minutes remain until they arrive at the station, and now the crew must reorient themselves and prepare to board. It's been a significant length of time since the crew was put into cryosleep--maybe years--and they're going to be a little dazed, or.. worse?

The station itself has also not seen activity in quite a long time: crews have come and gone, and this one is simply the newest batch. There may be living inhabitants, like spiders or rats, that need to be cleaned out before work can get done, and the backup power for the station has only recently been re-enabled. The station isn't in disrepair--but it may be a little messy and undersupplied.

The arrivals transport ship has only basic supplies. The crew will be very hungry upon exiting cryosleep, and should use the transit time that's left to eat something in the ship's basic cafeteria while familiarizing themselves with their coworkers.

Once the transport ship arrives at the station, the crew is expected to make their way to their department. The non-hallway lights and basic machinery will be off to save energy, and they may need to bat past a couple cobwebs on the way to their assigned post.

Variations

The arrivals flow may be varied by round modifiers/"station traits". Some examples of possible variations we could do include:

• Drunk afterparty: instead of the ship, everyone wakes up on the station in random places, drunk out of their mind
• Overdue arrival: the ship ran into a few detours on the way to the station, and it's taken approximately 10x (or even more) as much time to reach the station as expected. The station may be far more decrepit than expected and its prospective plunderers far more numerous. They may have even.. taken refuge on the station itself !!
• Crash landing: The arrivals ship miscalculated trajectory a bit and is hurtling towards the asteroid. No one is seriously hurt in the crash, but you'll need to acquire emergency gear and make your way to the station as fast as possible!

Motivation

The motivation for this arrivals flow is generally clear IMO, but to reiterate what kind of gameplay experience is intended:

• The crew should feel more tight-knit, since they're forced to take in the face of everyone on board before entering the station--additionally it just helps you understand what the makeup of the crew is like without having to check the manifest or anything
• An opportunity to connect and converse means working relationships can start to take shape, and people can start working their background and character into their improv. Some semi-secretive spaces on the ship should be mapped to help facilitate sneakier alliances, if possible
• Time to ponder your role and mask without much worry about timing lets people strategize better and come up with more interesting gameplay for when they do arrive at the station
• New players should feel a little less lost than they would if they were placed directly in the department--they can just see who their coworkers are, and follow them to the department if necessary, familiarizing themselves with the station's layout

Latejoining

For a couple reasons, it's necessary to discincentivize latejoining as an alternative to readying up. It's better for gameplay if the logic for roundstart has more players in the round to work with for assigning masks and roles and such, and it's also better for social deductioncoin if the crew you see at the start of the round is pretty much exclusively who you can expect to see for the entire round, instead of having to account for everyone new that joins.

However, it's simply unreasonable not to have latejoining in some form--rounds are too long, and telling people "wait an hour and a half to play" is a little silly and would just lead to people not playing ever. There's a couple ways latejoining is integrated into the game, more restricted than normal:

• Latejoin is only be allowed 5 minutes after the round begins. This is to allow time for the crew to arrive at the station and get acquainted, and to incentivize people to ready up if they want to play immediately.
• Latejoin slots immediately after roundstart are only opened for roles that have less than the ideal number of slots the map should have.
• If a player enters cryosleep or goes AFK for >10 minutes (or some other amount of time, idk), their role slot will be opened up and latejoining as their role will give you control over their previous body and mind.
• If a player dies immediately after the round ends (<10 minutes), their slot is opened for latejoining (mulligan).
• All latejoiners enter through cryosleep on the station, as "holdovers" from the last shift. The arrivals ship doesn't come and go--the station is more of a closed system.

Notes: could probably allow using the arrivals ship as a pod for other purposes tbh like for space exploration purposes