Antagonist

The 'bad guy' for a given round. They are exempt from the rules about griefing and murdering, and come with a set of objectives to complete before the end of the round. Current antagonist types can be divided into three categories that in no way reflect their actual statistical chance of appearing:

Common:
These antagonists appear in their own game modes. Some can even appear in other modes.

• Traitor
• Changeling
• Wizard
• Nuclear Operative
• Blob
• Conspirator
• Gang
• Revolutionary
• Spy Thief

Uncommon:
These antagonists appear solely during Mixed rounds.

• Vampire
• Wraith
• Werewolf

Rare:
These antagonists can only spawn under certain circumstances, such as through particular random events or during certain times of the year.

• Predator
• Krampus
• Grinch
• Gimmick antagonist roles

Antagonists can also recruit lackeys in the form of mindslaves and Syndicate cyborgs, or subverted the AI and its regular cyborgs. Traitor Chaplains with a Faustian Bargain Kit can convert other players into Vampires or Macho Men, which the game calls Faustian Vampires and Faustian Macho Men. Vampires may also convert people to loyal thralls. Changelings can turn their own body parts in eyespider, handspider, and legworm minions. Emagged cyborgs are renegades bound to no one!

Antagonist Selection

Player selection for antagonist is random but weighted; it is based on how many previous plays as that antag type a player has had before. The more times someone's been selected as a certain type before, the less likely they will be selected for that type in a later round. However, there still remains a low chance to ignore weighting for an antag pick and just select any old schmuck.

Antagonist selection happens before job selection. Thus, as a certain Tip of the Round will tell you, it is entirely possible to end up the round antagonist even if you have Security Officer or Head of Security on Favorite, in which case the game picks a job based on your preferences for other station jobs and available job slots.

Antag Tokens

Antag tokens are basically vouchers for a chance to play as the round's antagonist. They're not in-game items in the way Discount Dan's tickets are vouchers; rather, they're purely out-of-game, and, more importantly, "bestowed" by an Admin. The "bestowed" part is in quotes, because there are five reasons why an Admin will give you antag tokens:

1. You did something Exceptionally Interesting or otherwise Highly Pleasing to an Admin.
2. The server crashed during your antagonist round.
3. A game-breaking bug ruined your antagonist round (e.g. not being able to exit a help/tutorial mode).
4. Your antagonist round was ruined/significantly impaired by Admin fuckery (often goes in hand with both of the above).
5. The antag token previously given for one of the above four reasons did not actually give you the antag's associated abilities or uplink (happens more often than you think).

You get a prompt/choice to redeem these whenever you join the server and press the Declare Ready button, regardless of whether the round's in progress or in setup. Antag tokens ignore antag preferences, so you can't become a Wraith by configuring your preferences to only accept being a Wraith and then using a token. As the prompt says, if using that token would make you into an Antagonist that isn't supported by the round type, you'll get the token back.

Tokens are infamously known to be mysteriously buggy. For example, if your token makes you a Traitor, it's possible for you to get the prompt and status but not the uplink. In especially worst cases (of which there are many), the magical Admin buttons for handling antag status freeze up or otherwise fail to remedy the situation. If something like this happens to you, absolutely adminhelp it, via the adminhelp command or the F1 button.