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How much should the station know about antags?

Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2021 12:37 am
by MrStonedOne
This question applies to LRP and MRP alike:

How much should the station know about antags?

How much should the station expect antags?

An old old old version of our roleplay guidelines for sybil, from before i took over hosting the website/wiki (so i can't find it to quote), basically said something to the effect of "All players should assume that every round is the first round they have ever seen a code blue, let alone any antags/enemies of the station".

I also remember it once suggested via ooc policy (policy declared by admins talking in ooc, a previously common way of passing down policies in my heyday) that characters only knew about antag items if they were related to their department, or they were the captain or the hos. so security would know about emags, the cmo would know about the old medical analyzer that irradiated everybody it was near, etc.

These are some old policy arguments that sort of fell by the wayside, I thought it would be fun to revive them.

Re: How much should the station know about antags?

Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2021 1:50 am
by dragomagol
How much should the station know about antags?
I feel like knowing which antags exist is reasonable enough; maybe they've heard whispers about changelings and heretics and cultists. What I find kind of lame is players being intimately familiar with antag progression, saying things like "he's going ash path" or "who's the sac target?"
How much should the station expect antags?
I could see not anticipating antags to be more fun on MRP than LRP, because the MRP rules encourage greater antag creativity.

Re: How much should the station know about antags?

Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2021 2:41 am
by Timberpoes
Issue is felinid let out of bag now. Running around station cracking knuckles & clapping. Doing flips in hallway. Sending dank rod to handle issue.

Players already know antag mechanics IC. Difficult to change this. Ingrained in tgstation culture. Both apply to MRP and LRP. Reversing this culture not subtle change.

Not only issue, just most obvious issue. Bigger picture considerations too.

Rule 4, antag balance. Rule 4 sacred in tg culture. Part of what make tg so tg. Where normal player freedom restricted, antag power grows to fill void.

Political capital to change this unlikely to be found in either admin team or playerbase.

Could game be better with more restrictive rule 4? Depends on definition of better.

Game different, certaintly. New issues crop up. MRP example. Offer different experience. Players who like that experience flock to it. Players who do not, go elsewhere.

Only better if offer experience player looking for. If player looking for other experience, is worse to that player. Subjectivity abound.

However, tg broad church. Strength of tg also not emulating anyone else. Offer game experience not found elsewhere. Is why players play here.

Conclusion? Happy with status quo. Pull other levers to impact player & antag experience. MRP example. Good compromise between use of OOC & IC knowledge. Different to LRP. Still tg.

Number of players likely to resist change, number of admins likely to resist change. Example of controversial policy. Require excessively persuasive arguments to support change.

Re: How much should the station know about antags?

Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2021 6:28 am
by iamgoofball
We tend to balance antagonist abilities around people knowing they exist and how they work

Ask yourself, how stupid is it that in every episode of Yu-Gi-Oh that Pot of Greed shows up in, everyone asks what it does?

It lets you draw two cards, by the way.

Everyone knows Pot of Greed lets you draw two cards. Nobody needs a fucking reiteration that pot of greed draws two cards, or to pretend they don't know that pot of greed draws two cards.

Re: How much should the station know about antags?

Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2021 9:50 am
by Mothblocks
For LRP, I'm happy with how things are now. As said before, not only is people understanding what antags can do already what we (maintainers) design around, but it's also just significantly easier to design like that, and I think we've been able to still keep up the ability to create cool things within that design restriction. From an administrative standpoint, I can only see it as pretty finnicky to enforce. Better for everyone that we let people's character knowledge evolve with their own, both mechanically and administratively.
How much should the station expect antags?
They should expect that there will be antagonists--the paper note helps reinforce this. Preparing for extremely specific antagonists, such as power gaming holy melons before word there are cultists and whatnot, is lame and little enough people do it that I could see it as something admins would get mad at you for. Similar to how we already enforce not instantly creating laws of "Traitors, changelings, blablablablba are not human." because it's extremely boring.

Re: How much should the station know about antags?

Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2021 11:01 pm
by mrmelbert
For LRP, I think the situation is fine as it is.

For MRP, I think having certain antag knowledge obfuscated or obscured could work wonders in enhancing the roleplay aspects of the server. Seeing people call out "we have heretics" because the chapel's poppies were looted is really sad to see sometimes, as it feels like it goes against the whole idea of the server. Some players do go the extra mile to pretend to not understand certain antagonists and I think that's great but not all players stick their leg out like that.

I'd like for a certain amount of antag knowledge to be hidden from the players on MRP but I don't think it's incredibly feasible that such a policy would / could be implemented. That'd be something that the community should be polled on, accompanied with policy-bus discussion, to consider whether it's a popular opinion or not / the community is willing to abide by such a policy.

Re: How much should the station know about antags?

Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2021 9:00 pm
by Arcanemusic
It would be nice for there to be in-game literature on-station talking about different antagonist threats, but within the context of the game's narrative, similar to how space law is written in a way that if you read the in-game book, It makes sense as a kind of IN-character guide to how to treat and interact with certain threats and crimes, you could make a sort of in-game security book giving in-round context for what an antagonist is, how it works against the crew, and what to do.

But, you could also solve this problem with a series of in-database books written by players and distributed at their leisure. Either way :shrug: