A humble request to /tg/station admins

[leibniz]

Bottom post of the previous page:

Okay but that is a lot different than the scenario you initially proposed. I don't mind a little roleplay on the part of the wiz, but you also need to remember that the roundtype hinges on the survival of the wizard, and there will always be shitters who try to lolvalid the wiz simply because "muh winning"

Well, that is given. There is a false assumption that you peacewizards dont have to do anything, but actually self-preservation can be demanding.
Wizards are valid, you have to play with that in mind.

[Timbrewolf]

There already is a lot of stuff that is just known and sets off our bad RP detectors. If a Wizard appears and says Nanotrasen has sent them to perform tricks for the crew we know already that doesn't fit at all with the little background we've established.

You couldn't go along with that because of your preconceptions?

Because we at the least agree that Nanotrasen is here for production, not for cheap entertainment, and the manifest of possible threats delivered to the Captain specifically lists the Wizard as an escaped criminal and highly dangerous.

Just like traitors can have a story of how their family is being held hostage by the Syndicate, wizards can have a story of how they were an innocent stage magician imprisoned wrongly by the corrupt Council of Archmages, now on the run towards a place without extradition laws.
Is creativity really dead around here?

OPINION ALERT OPINION ALERT OPINION ALERT

Now we're in it. The difference between a good roleplayer and a bad roleplayer. A bad roleplayer comes to the table with a character he already wants to do and if the source material doesn't fit it he cooks up mary-sue type exceptions, "head canon", or other weird shit that try to crowbar whatever it is he's thinking into the play. Because his character is flat and inflexible, it's easier to argue against "the rules" than it is to make alterations or start over.

A good roleplayer looks at what's on the table first, thinks about the moods and tone they want to portray, and then builds that vehicle for that expression inside the box of the world. At the very least when they think of something ahead of time and become married to it, they're witty enough to think on their feet and make minor adjustments TO THE CHARACTER to get it back inside the box.

Why is one good and one bad?

Because the good player's character and role is like a USB device. It fits anywhere in the world we've built together, it can have an interaction with any group that makes sense. It's not a weird shape that prevents someone else from "plugging in" to the game. It doesn't need story "patches" to make sense.

Creativity aint dead, it's just not easy to do it well. There's a difference between being creative and just making stuff up. You can't just force stuff into a group game and expect others to accept it when it often flies in the face of what the established world. Babby's first attempt at making a great character is to make something that is really huge in scope. "My wizard is the princess of all wizards but is also the heir to Nanotrasen!" *gasp wow*. It's much more difficult to take simple everyday characters and make them great.

It's why superheroes only appear in comic books and not the great American novel. Wit is learning to say a lot more with a lot less. And wit is priceless, it can't be faked or forced.

The bottom line is that we're not drawing a comic book and we're not writing a novel. There's a game to be played here, and if your character is a bundle of reasons NOT to play the game like you're supposed to or reasons NOT to follow the rules, you're fucking up twice over.

[Miauw]

>implying the goon code is good

130 players no lag baby

This pretty much. I fear that most parts of gooncode are unusable for us.

[Ricotez]

Didn't they achieve that by 1. increasing tick speed, 2. cutting power net and atmos simulation and 3. running even better hardware than SoS?

[Malkevin]

Its a bit disappointing that goon's foray into 'light' RP starts off with talks about ERP and limiting what jobs can do, sure it makes sense with the confinements of the current day that people can only learned a limited number of things due to the time investment, but this is the future where a new body can be vat grown in three minutes and the conscious/soul can be downloaded direct to it, the ability to download knowledge direct to the brain isn't that far fetched.

Whats always annoyed me about Bay is that their idea of RP is 'Present day office simulator... in SPACEEE".
Its a game set 500 years into the future, god only knows how things will be then. Christ look back 500 years and laugh at how we were all shitting in ditches and stunk of dung.


So what they need to do is think on what they want to let the players do, whether restricting certain behavior is good for gameplay - it might seem like a good idea to make it so that job workers are the only ones that can do their job, but is it really a great experience to be stuck in medbay waiting for a surgeon to arrive because none of the half dozen people around you 'know' how to treat your internal bleeding?

So come up with what style of play they want and then fit the fluff to that.
Want the lowest assistant to able to perform complex brain surgery? Fluff is that prior to deployment everyone gets every bit of knowledge they needed downloaded straight to their brain, like the matrix.
Want people to have an excuse to raise up a revolution? Nanotrasen are giant dicks, rev heads know how to modify a flash to implant a hypnotic suggestion playing on that to revolt, loyalty implants block that suggestion but can't prevent wanton traitory (i.e. they don't 'cure' traitors or other antag types.)



-----
What ever happened to the fluff we used to have?
That Nanotrasen was a massive megacorp, with the power and influence of a sizeable country, that was a largely dystopian society that practically enslaves its employees in multi-lifetime contracts.
A company that will happily send in a not-so-secret death squad to shoot anything that moves whilst they activate the onboard nuke so that the station and its secrets don't follow into enemy hands.
A company that employs a sec force that isn't your friend but jack booted thugs that are employed to make sure the rest of the crew does their job and beat down any that don't.

A company that is for all intents and purposes, a giant bag of dick.

Edit: Oh, and most of the crew are basically borderline crazy space hobos that were picked up out of the gutter, thrown in the Skill-O-Tron, and forced to sign a multi-lifetime contract of resentment and regret.
Which is why they arm themselves to the teeth, pack rat anything useful, and have a hairline trigger to bludgeon someone with the nearest blunt heavy object

[Ricotez]

We keep our fluff vague on purpose. It makes it much easier for people to invent stuff on the fly. Everyone is a special snowflake on Space Station 13!

But seriously, I think it would scare off a lot of people if they first have to learn a massive backstory before they can properly RP on the station. Right now you only really have to know that Nanotrasen == The hand that feeds, The Syndicate == Valid, and Plasma == The reason people kill each other in this particular part of space.

[Miauw]

Didn't they achieve that by 1. increasing tick speed, 2. cutting power net and atmos simulation and 3. running even better hardware than SoS?

aka they did bandaid fixes, which we try to advoid as much as possible.

[Timbrewolf]

-----
What ever happened to the fluff we used to have?
That Nanotrasen was a massive megacorp, with the power and influence of a sizeable country, that was a largely dystopian society that practically enslaves its employees in multi-lifetime contracts.
A company that will happily send in a not-so-secret death squad to shoot anything that moves whilst they activate the onboard nuke so that the station and its secrets don't follow into enemy hands.
A company that employs a sec force that isn't your friend but jack booted thugs that are employed to make sure the rest of the crew does their job and beat down any that don't.

A company that is for all intents and purposes, a giant bag of dick.

Edit: Oh, and most of the crew are basically borderline crazy space hobos that were picked up out of the gutter, thrown in the Skill-O-Tron, and forced to sign a multi-lifetime contract of resentment and regret.
Which is why they arm themselves to the teeth, pack rat anything useful, and have a hairline trigger to bludgeon someone with the nearest blunt heavy object

If we were to ever sit down and seriously talk about expanding our "/tg/station lore" I'm totally cool with this as a base.
My assumption has been that Nanotrasen is kind of like the Weyland Yutani of its time. It's the biggest fish. The only reason it doesn't own a competitor is because they aren't worth owning.
But meanwhile it treats its employees like expendable garbage and there are just as many enemies within the corporation as there are without.

[Aranclanos]

for a project this old I don't think anyone should be allowed, not even myself, to make up an entire universe of lore to justify the events in the game

[callanrockslol]

for a project this old I don't think anyone should be allowed, not even myself, to make up an entire universe of lore to justify the events in the game

No need for a stupidly larbe universe, just context, the big players vaguely mentioned and a whole heap of gaps to be filled in with rumors and suspicion.

Also im the lorefag now, if anyone has any problems fite me irl

[Cheridan]

for a project this old I don't think anyone should be allowed, not even myself, to make up an entire universe of lore to justify the events in the game

The thing is (and I was ranting about this in #adminbus the other day) people need a good platform for roleplay to happen in, before it can happen. Warhammer 40k, Shadowrun. These tabletop roleplaying games have fleshed out settings with prominent NPC characters and factions, like Kharn the Betrayer or the Saeder-Krupp megacorporation, while still allowing people lots of freedom to create their character's own role.

The fact that people can just make up their own backstory to be whatever they want can be problematic. Look at Malkevin's post. It highlights something I've had a problem with for a while; RP justification of poor behavior:

• Sec aren't supposed to be jackbooted thugs. The admins, coders, and host have all tried to make steps to end this kind of behavior with things like Departmental and No-Antag Sec.
• People justifying incinerating changelings who haven't done anything harmful because "they had to eat someone to get on the station", even though elsewhere in the lore it's said that changelings are a species unknown to Nanotrasen and that they should be captured for experimentation. Not to mention it's not even congruent with the current code.
• Grabbing gloves, guns, toolbelt, ablative at roundstart? I'm not powergaming, I'm roleplaying paranoia!

Even though a backstory is technically a constraint, it exists to give people a backdrop to 'paint' their character onto. The magic of a blank canvas is that people can do anything they want with it. But I don't think that's ideal here. We need some lines drawn, so players and admins can tell when they're coloring outside of them.

[paprika]

I don't think lore really matters for a joke game which is basically tropes: the game anyway

People trying to make too much in depth roleplay out of the game kind of kills the fun for me and they're usually hated for it anyway. Roleplay just isn't going to happen like people want it to on /tg/ and the only roleplayers I've ever seen were also ERPers on server 2 who were chased off by admins who viciously hunted them whenever they were online just to fuck with them when they started doing anything remotely suggestive. It was funny at the time but I'm not sure if 'thank god they're all gone now we can powergame in peace with out those autistic weirdos' is really a good thing.

[Jalleo]

I agree with what Cheridan says i easily can fall into powergaming in a round. To promote RP you kinda need to create a understanding within admins when things go too far or toe the line constantly.

It cant be done overnight.

[Malkevin]

The fact that people can just make up their own backstory to be whatever they want can be problematic. Look at Malkevin's post. It highlights something I've had a problem with for a while; RP justification of poor behavior:

Correction:
That isn't my backstory, its the back story the server had. A legacy of the TLE days, who was a much different host/admin/project manager to what we have today.

[paprika]

I don't think that sec being 'jackbooted thugs' is the right descriptor or what we want for that job. They're more like mercenaries that care more about their paycheck than oppression. Not mall cops, just normal security guards at a tech lab or something like you'd see here IRL. They aren't enforcing laws, they're just hired to make sure shit doesn't happen that impedes the progress of research and stuff. But they're not peacekeepers entirely either, they're also required to defend the station in case of a boarding party/blob/etc who their REAL enemies are. If admins tried to encourage people to play this kind of sec (a playstyle which still allows for a LOT of customization for roleplay) rather than powergame mcshitlord who brigs people for 20 minutes for something minor just because 'its lore xd'

I think space law should really just be removed and replaced with a more comprehensive 'guide to security'. There's no reason for the lawyer to exist anymore. IA from bay would work perfectly fine because they could report to admins through prayer or a special uplink in their PDA if there are IC situations that need to be diffused within sec, the #1 cause of most ahelps I tend to see. Space law as a concept is funny and all, but that's all it was supposed to be -- a joke, and people took it way too seriously. YOU BETRAYED THE LAW!!! etc. It's not judge dredd. It's just normal security guards being payed like any other job. That's why sec should be treated like any other job, just instead of healing people, mixing drinks, or repairing breaches, they ensure enemy corporation's spies do not make off with high tech gear or assassinate their employees to cause havoc on the station.

[Kavaloosh]

we should add money

it'd be nice

[Malkevin]

Jack booted thugs is a slight embellishment, I believe the actual original description was them being mostly a paramilitary organisation

[paprika]

Paramilitary fits a dystopoian or cyberpunk 80s/90s retro future, but 'paramilitary organisation' describes the death squad teams more than the fucking redshirts. I'm sure NT has plenty of private military to send out to shit on other space stations trying to mooch off the plasma gas giant and the asteroids (after all, i really doubt NT is more friendly than the syndicate when it comes to boarding parties and station nuking). But security is nothing more than any decently-equipped sec guard. There's no reason for them to be faceless and equipped like shock troopers aesthetically. Crime and punishment is fun but it's really really damaged SS13 as of late; even if the never-antag-sec has sort of washed the potentially traitor stigma away from sec, replacing it with faceless goon 'ahelp as soon as you get arrested lol' is not better at all. They aren't the rest of the crew's fucking law-enforcing overlords, they're there to do a job and protect them. To security, the crew should be their paycheck, and beating your paycheck in the face with a stun baton when they aren't a traitor isn't really the best plan to not get the HoS to shoot you out of an airlock.

Admins should approach cases of security with this in mind in order to improve the server. I don't want admins enforcing "ROLEPLAY THIS WAY" but I would like some better banishment towards officers who are clearly just trying to be OOC assholes instead of doing their job. Nerfing sec's gear won't do anything, this is ultimately an administrative issue that needs to be solved by the HOPEFULLY reformed administration following the headmin elections here.

I will, OOCly, say that dunking antags can be immensely satisfying and I only ever play sec anymore because of how fun combat against nuke ops is.