/tg/Station 13

Would you support nonhuman heads of staff? The topic will very likely come up during this term and it would be nice to see where your heads are at regarding it.

i personally have no interest in this.

do i OOCly dislike nonhuman players? no, of course not. it's a fictional character in a video game.

there are good arguments for allowing nonhuman heads of staff, but alas if it's down to personal taste then my personal taste is that it's an interesting limitation of the setting. i would vote strongly to keep it in place.

we rarely have elements of the setting appear in the game in this way. it's interesting to see and experience the ways in which different crew respond to the emergence or enforcement of this kind of prejudice. sometimes slimy individuals will use it to put someone in a bad position because of their nonhuman status, and sometimes people will band together to overcome that prejudice and allow a nonhuman to self actualize.

there was also a policy thread where i argued for this pretty strongly:

dendydoom wrote: ↑Sat Dec 09, 2023 6:42 pm there are a lot of good, valid arguments in support of this but honestly to me it just comes down to a preference in how i like to see the setting enforced. allowing non-human heads removes the human supremacy aspect of the setting. i like the asymmetrical aspect that this brings to the game, and i'm saying this as someone who only plays a non-human character. humans are only superior because they say they are, when in reality the differences between the species is skin deep. this is interesting to me to see in action as an obstacle. it feels like it's sanding off a very nice and respectable sharp corner of the setting.

there are more posts from me elaborating on this in that thread if anyone feels so inclined.

Predominantly flavour reasons. Nanotrasen is a human-run operation so of course they want humans to remain in power. It creates in-universe animosity that can lead to some interesting stories, in theory.
Secondarily, alongside Asimov (I am anti-crewsimov) it gives humans an actual advantage over non-human players, as Dendy has written above.

I like to play non-humans in an inferior position. Nanotrasen flavour wise is comically evil but our reflections of this in game are mainly limited to human only heads of staff and asimov, and I like these elements. I find the asymmetry really fun when playing a human and when playing a non-human.

It would just feel really off. I'm used to human command personnel and the fact that they can count on the AI most of the time. Coincidentally this also means changing the definition of human to other species changes the entire command staffs status. Gameplaywise it's not a big deal, but it'd feel more soulless than changing toolbox sprites.