Convince me off the efficacy of roleplay rule 5 (antagonist restrictions)

[Itseasytosee2me]

So our roleplay rules have been through hell (and back?) and I remain deeply skeptical of many of the rules intentions and efficacy. Although I consider myself an avid roleplayer, and would love to see a higher standard of roleplay on the servers I play on, it does not seem like our MRP rules our providing that, at least by my personal experience.

I believe it is fair to say that a roleplay rule is successful if it promotes a higher quality of roleplay within the server, and if you disagree with this definition, you also likely disagree with the mission statement of our MRP ruleset in the first place.

Lets focus our attention into one of the most hotly debated roleplay rule, rule 5
[quote = 5. Antagonism and roleplaying as an antagonist.]
The goal of antagonists on MRP is to create stories and make rounds interesting, for both antagonist players and crew-sided players alike. Antagonists are expected to put in at least some effort towards playing their designated role, though may break with it given sufficient in character reason. Some antagonists are restricted in the ways and quantities they may lend themselves to visiting death and destruction upon the crew.[/quote]

Now the first part of this rule is not controversial. Antagonists are vital to many interesting stories, and antagonists should put forward some effort to "playing the role" of the given antagonist. If you area traitor you should do traitor things, and if you are a changeling you should do changeling things. This first part is also not enforced very often, friendly or passive antagonists are stigmatized but very rarely punished by administrative action (although an admin would explicitly be in the right to do so, as confirmed in precedents).

The full list of precedents can be found here for review : https://tgstation13.org/wiki/Rules#RP_Rule_5_Precedents

It makes intuitive sense to me how the first half of rule 5 encourages roleplay, it requires you make some effort to "play your role" as an antagonist, and forbids actions that would be antithetical to your role without good reason.

The second part of this rule "Some antagonists are restricted in the ways and quantities they may lend themselves to visiting death and destruction upon the crew," is where I and many others begin to take hesitancy. These exact restrictions can be found at this link: https://tgstation13.org/wiki/Rules#Rest ... estruction

What is not immediately obvious to me, is why these restrictions on antagonist action benefit the quality of roleplay. They appear convoluted, difficult to remember, and arbitrary, at least at first blush. Additionally, it seems like this would diminish the quality of roleplay in interactions with this antagonist because they are being explicitly prevented from doing actions which would otherwise be "within the scope" of their role. Furthermore, the complicated nature of the rules text leads to misunderstanding of exactly what a restricted antagonist can or can not do. This alongside the threat of punishment would presumably lead players, myself included at some point, to be very fearful of what kind of actions they are allowed to preform. This means the player is now worried about not breaking the rules of the game, instead of following the action that they think their character would best take.

For these reasons, the restrictions provided by the second half of rule 5 intuitively seem to do more harm than good for the quality of roleplay in the server.

But I come with an open mind, is it perhaps that there are roleplay benefits to rule 5 that outweigh negatives? Or is it perhaps that these negatives are not actually negatives in all reality.
To all the supporters of roleplay rule 5 (the second half specifically), I ask for your attempts to convince me that my logic is flawed.

[Imitates-The-Lizards]

So from my understanding, one of the main points to consider is that this rule is a co-rule along with the "Stay in your lane" idea. Basically, if antagonists aren't allowed to freely massacre everyone, then people who are not security should not be running around hunting all the valids. So if you want to fight the valids on MRP, at least in theory, you should be signing up as a security officer, not an assistant or assistant+ (Paramedic).

So, both sides are restricted in tandem.

[kinnebian]

Sorry, policy is 2 blocks down?

[dendydoom]

at the end of the day it's the player's decision to create a good environment for RP by engaging with the creative space productively. we ultimately can't micromanage people into roleplaying well or funnel them into doing it with lots of rules and regulations. the most we can really do is put a stop to behaviours which commonly result in a poor RP environment with rules.

more often than not when i'm looking at these situations i'm trying to unpack the mindset of the player and their intentions rather than what they actually did. a traitor bombing something can either be done in a way that encourages a story because it was for IC reasons, or it's done because the player wanted to see a lot of people die in a big fiery explosion. we want to encourage the former, so we ask traitors to have IC reasoning before doing destructive things which are not strictly part of their objectives.

the reason the "IC reasons" part is so important is that other players pick up on this and it creates a narrative that becomes more than just clicking on sprites and getting the "you're winner" greentext. people who enjoy RP often remember the narratives and stories more than the mechanical outcomes.

[CMDR_Gungnir]

Because it's based on RP Reasoning.

If it's what the antagonist would do, you can kill someone for it. The main thing it exists to stop is the dude with the DEsword just going department to department, killing people for no reason. Because he isn't exactly adding much RP, but is sure taking away from it.

[Constellado]

this should be in policy discussion so it can actually be acted on.

To me, the second half of the rule makes sense, especially if you read the whole rules and see the restricted antag section at the bottom. however I can easily see where that can be missed. It's basically: can you murderbone with this antag? yes or no?

But it might be hard for ESL people or people that dont scroll down much. I wouldn't mind a rewrite or having a link to the restricted antag list there.

[Timberpoes]

The RP rules are a bit of a misnomer, because they're not really anything to do with RP.

They're a set of restrictions on player freedoms, with a goal to increase the number of interactions players have. All in the hopes that even RP can bloom on a battlefield.

Our players are still generally free to play as they do on LRP as long as they keep within those restrictions.

Manuel has really been more about that. Being forced to interact with others in the hope that giving the monkeys computers with autocorrect instead of typewriters will increase the chance of whem writing some classic Shakespeare smut.

[iwishforducks]

first and foremost, the best way to understand these “roleplay” rules is that the average tg round was someone murderboning. turn back the hands of time and it was all just murderboning. it’s the reason for traitor rep as well. these roleplay rules were pretty much made to be anti-murderboning rules.

i remember when i played on manuel, it was to get away from round after round of murderboning. pretty much a good chunk of the server population was just trying to get away from it. so people were always really quick to call any kind of “unfair” kill murderboning. call it what you want but i’ll call you what it was: a damn hugbox. cultures HAVE shifted- but I haven’t played in a while- but this sort of culture has definitely subsided for the most part. people still mald or whatever, but the manuel “you’re a murderboner” salt was mountains of it.

the shift happened when timber started letting up on antagonists on manuel. i can pinpoint the day where someone bombed the shuttle and everyone was PISSED (including i) until timber explained to us all in dchat that what the antagonist did was okay because they were going after their target. then after a month of letting antagonists say “fuck” timber brought up their sabotage policy, which pretty much collected dust and was never implemented.

rp rule 5 is a relic of a bygone culture. nobody knows what the fuck a murderbone is. i wish we’d just remove it at this point. it removes pretty much all free will of antagonists, and scares them to their skeletal core to do ANYTHING. it’s pretty shitty that if you do anything more than look at someone that’s not part of your objectives you’re liable for a bwoinking.

“stay in your lane” and “deal with criminals in proportion to their crimes” were afterthoughts. the former being enacted because of Those Damn Validhunters, and the latter after Melbert had popularized the idea of letting antagonists go after removing all their gear. which, btw, this was made in a time where you could remove heretics’ gear and cuck them that way, and also when there were no Biddles/progression traitors. people regularly complain about how awful that rule is on the current codebase.

though i see these days this has been entirely repackaged into “IC reasoning” by the old guard of manuel. let’s be clear here, especially with dendy’s example, it really is just giving your friends higher status. because guess what? the most prominent antagonist figures on old guard manuel were melbert and… oh shit im forgetting their name. but my point is they were both admins. they literally could not be banned. they had no reason to fear the bwoink. IC reasoning my fucking ass cheeks.

[Jacquerel]

What seemed like good analysis veering straight off a cliff at the last turn

[iwishforducks]

What seemed like good analysis veering straight off a cliff at the last turn

sorry im just really pissed off by all the ic reasoning shit i keep seeing. it makes me scream into the nearest well just so i can hear the echo of the scream and i pretend it’s someone else being angry with me

[kinnebian]

the most prominent antagonist figures on old guard manuel were melbert and… oh shit im forgetting their name. but my point is they were both admins

wow this is the wrongest youve been in a good while

[iwishforducks]

the most prominent antagonist figures on old guard manuel were melbert and… oh shit im forgetting their name. but my point is they were both admins

wow this is the wrongest youve been in a good while

how am i wrong

[kinnebian]

the most prominent antagonist figures on old guard manuel were melbert and… oh shit im forgetting their name. but my point is they were both admins

wow this is the wrongest youve been in a good while

how am i wrong

melbert was not an admin for the majority of when they were a prominent static on manny and hates/Hari cross (who i think youre referring to) almost stopped playing after they got adminned and stick to observing

[Critawakets]

There's a simple, but unfortunate explanation for why the murderbone rules are still in place. It's because people are fucking boring. Play a changeling round on Manuel after they got unrestricted and you'll see what I mean. I've only seen one out of several dozen changelings go for environmental kills or something interesting instead of simply using baton > laser. I've only seen ONE changeling actively try to sabotage engineering, specifically the supermatter in that case, with no atmos sabotages to speak of. Murderbone would be interesting if people were actually fun about it.

[dendydoom]

(respectable essaypost)

out of genuine curiosity, if you were up for it: what do you genuinely see the solution to this supposed problem as being? it seems that in the first part of your post there is a valid reason for manuel existing: a sizeable portion of players who were not satisfied with the experience they were getting from the game as it currently stood, so manuel was born. but then each point from then on seems to devolve more and more into your personal experiences to the point that you don't seem to think it should really exist? i know you ran on a platform like this, but is that what you truly believe? to smash the servers back together and just let the manuellites cope when they go back to recognizing the same problems as before? is it the lesser of two evils in your eyes?

and, i want to ask this but i'm not sure how to phrase it without sounding rude, so i really hope you'll take my word that i'm not trying to be unkind to you: how much of this do you think is in your own head? you haven't played manuel in a long time by your own admission. it's the players who make a server, however hard we may try as admins to curate that experience. if a player wants to have a tantrum because they got killed, then no amount of policy and rules will stop them from feeling like that. likewise if they roll with the punches and take defeat in their stride.

[Itseasytosee2me]

Originally, these were explicitly defined as "anti-murderboning" rules. But it seems to me that that has never really been the case throughout the lifecycle of the rule. Murderboning, by all traditional definitions is walking from department to department and wordlessly killing everyone you come across. But the entire lifecycle of rule 5 has been about preventing restricted antagonists from preforming a singular "bad kill."
While it is true that these rules do prevent murderboning, they also prevent alot of other stuff, and add alot of hesitancy and OOC stress to playing an antagonist, which would presumably hurt the antagonist's ability to roleplay.

To the people who say "Murderboning is bad, and RP R5 is good because it prevents murderboning," could there not be a a better rule from the issue? A rule like
"Walking around the station wordlessly slaughtering everyone you come across isn't playing a coherent and believable character, you should put some personality behind your villainous actions"

Seems like it would also curb the same kind of murderboning, while also being much more simple to understand, and much less restrictive.

It would also make sense with our current restriction restricted antagonists. It would not be within the character a agent saboteur, thief, and assassin to wordlessly and overtly attempt to kill everyone, they are supposed to be a secret agent, not a commando. However, this kind of action would make sense for a nuke-op, or an evil unknowable space alien like a changeling.

[dendydoom]

ironically this is why I use the "IC reasoning" angle. to throw a rule in a player's face oftentimes makes them frustrated because they will say that you're ignoring the nuance of a situation to apply a broad rule to it. in that case, tell me the nuance! i want to know!

if i could post my ahelp ticket history in this thread i would. i'd let you all dissect my methods and best practices. in my experience, asking a player "what was the IC reason you did X?" produces much better outcomes. i'm not looking for an essay. "i killed john because he's friends with mary who's my target. they're always together and this was a moment they were apart so i took the opportunity to get rid of him to make it easier to get mary later."

a month or so ago i had an ahelp from people who were mad that someone had stunned them and thrown 4 people out of an escape pod. it was a traitor. none of them were objectives. i asked. "because earlier they were suspicious of me and i thought they might try to overwhelm me. i wanted to have the first move." excellent. resolved.

[Itseasytosee2me]

They're a set of restrictions on player freedoms, with a goal to increase the number of interactions players have. All in the hopes that even RP can bloom on a battlefield.

I appreciate your well rounded input timber.
I would agree that there are definitely actions an antagonist can take which very much detract from the roleplay potential that they hold. But I also would tend to believe that the latter half of rule 5 restricts many freedoms that could otherwise lead to good roleplay scenarios, and has the added affect of creating a very stressful environment for antagonist.

If you would allow me to dip into anecdotal evidence, when playing on Manuel as an antagonist, I feel like I have to think through every action I take in order to make sure I'm not violating any rules, which prevents me from really getting into that short of "in character" flow. I don't feel like I can react as a believable an coherent traitor might, either because I have to think through every potential rule 5 break that I might accidently do, or that rule 5 prevents what I think a coherent and believable traitor would do in that circumstance.

I ask you, is rule 5 the best way to increase the number of interactions between players, and does whatever roleplay it does generate outweigh the roleplay it takes away?

[Itseasytosee2me]

ironically this is why I use the "IC reasoning" angle. to throw a rule in a player's face oftentimes makes them frustrated because they will say that you're ignoring the nuance of a situation to apply a broad rule to it. in that case, tell me the nuance! i want to know!

if i could post my ahelp ticket history in this thread i would. i'd let you all disseminate my methods and best practices. in my experience, asking a player "what was the IC reason you did X?" produces much better outcomes. i'm not looking for an essay. "i killed john because he's friends with mary who's my target. they're always together and this was a moment they were apart so i took the opportunity to get rid of him to make it easier to get mary later."

a month or so ago i had an ahelp from people who were mad that someone had stunned them and thrown 4 people out of an escape pod. it was a traitor. none of them were objectives. i asked. "because earlier they were suspicious of me and i thought they might try to overwhelm me. i wanted to have the first move." excellent. resolved.

I apricate this admining style, but I wish the rules better reflected it.

[Armhulen]

From a coder's perspective, the game works best when naturally (through antag rolls) people end up passing around the baton of having power and agency. It's fun to feel a challenge, it's fun to get a rare antag roll, etc. When people find a way to be consistently powerful and constistently a core part of each round, it is the product of someone taking a sandbox environment and optimizing the best way to play since the game incentivizes surviving and greentexting/stopping antags. But the best way to play isn't fun for others, and after enough time isn't even that much more fun for the person who does it every round. I see rule 5 and really most of the rules even on LRP as administrative moves to keep people away from optimizing fun out of the round for themselves and others.

[Armhulen]

When full blown antagonist murderboning was more commonplace the #1 kind of tell someone was burned out and just kinda done with the game were the round to round antag rolling server wipers. They were pretty much just going through the motions since murderboning every antag roll for a month basically obliterates enjoyment you can pull from the game that isn't murderboning and even the murderboning just becomes doing the motions with an esword and ebow combo

(All of these thoughts are why I am a varietymaxxing unexpectedcel. I want rounds to be unpredictable. I want people to go in, and not even KNOW what the map looks like. Spessmen are too beholden to knowing what the fuck is going on and we gotta normalize the opposite. Lethal company, the game in my pfp, is the most fun and most spooky when you're fresh and you have no idea what the sounds are, the monsters, you're just going in blind and if you make it you make it.)

[Higgin]

the reason the "IC reasons" part is so important is that other players pick up on this and it creates a narrative that becomes more than just clicking on sprites and getting the "you're winner" greentext. people who enjoy RP often remember the narratives and stories more than the mechanical outcomes.

I struggle with this a great deal when the end of the IC reason - the overall guide of the narrative - is "steal the reflectir trenchcoat" or "kill this person you've never seen before in your life."

Maybe we're just not satisfied with the same sort of narratives these days, I don't know - but I feel like there's a lot that I could be doing because it makes IC sense that wouldn't be fun, and there's a lot that I'm asked or expected to do that only barely makes IC sense but is still structured in large part by this utterly contentless thing:

Kill a dog. Blow up a lathe. Bring darkness to them all. Hell, save the station - loss and entropy are foregone conclusions, even if it's just because people get bored on a greenshift (which well they might.) Maybe I'm just out of touch.

I'd love to read your ticket logs because I have no doubt you probably make the relaxed escalation into a sane and constructive conversation. It is absolutely better than thoughtless murderbone.

By the same token, if the Syndicate would send a team of Ops to blow the place to smithereens, why would they restrict any of their other assets (who might end up blowing it up anyway? today it's dark matteor, back in the day it was singuloose.)

I guess part of my pain is that after 12 years of this I'd like to see it matter a bit more "what" we're doing than "how." RPR 5 might create some room in the margins for more of a "what," but I still despair of it and wish we'd either can a lot of the RP ruleset or raise the standards of "what" people are doing, maybe even make it so there's "something" to do with limited persistence.

edit: I know how much that impulse runs contrary to making the game accessible to everyone and easy to pick up/set down. I think there are probably design and DMing ways to do it better, but I also know any form of lasting consequence would be most folks' worst nightmare

[Timberpoes]

When we talk about IC reasons, admins like dendy and myself don't look for objectively good reasons.

Part of what I appreciate about the various restrictions on the RP servers (like RPRs 4, 5 and 6) is that they pull players away from quoting the rules in ahelps as a justification for why they did a thing. That's the kind of thing we're talking about when we say IC reasons.

Execute an antag on LRP and the reason is usually "Rule 4 says they're valid".
Execute an antag on MRP and the reason has to be that it was proportionate to their crimes. So you're drawn out of the rules to and into IC reasons to explain why you did this.

Randomly kill someone on LRP as an antag and the reason is usually "Rule 4 says I can".
Randomly kill someone on MRP as an antag and you have to draw it to either antagonistic escalation or pursuit of one of your objectives. Again, it draws your back out of the rules and makes you look IC - was it part of completing an antag objective? Did they sass you earlier in the shift and now they're paying the price?

Other than anything else said, think of RPR 4, 5, 6 and 7 as all working together.

MRP antags can't kill and especially round remove for no reason/a reason so bad it may as well have been no reason. The crew can't just round remove antags merely for being antags. Validhunting more limited. Powergaming more limited. It sort of forcefully resolves a piece of the "prisoner's dilemma" that LRP has in the attitude of kill or be killed, and allows for options that aren't kill in return for treatment that isn't be killed.

There is also a hope that these restrictions modify the antag calculus a little - that there's less overall risk to trying something that isn't another shift of Max Murderhobo or Superstealth McGee. That MRP should be the home of antag gimmicks while LRP is the home of antag mechanics.

This doesn't always play out perfectly in practice because our MRP players can still be massive pissbaby powergamer tryhards that don't actually want to be a participant in a good shift of SS13, they want to be the main character in a shitty shift of SS13. And all it takes is one out of 60 people to be a main character pissbaby powergamer tryhard that genuinely ruins the RP experience for everyone else - both on the antag side and on the crew side.

But that's the real crux of it all. By removing crew freedom to execute freely, you earn antag freedom to be less gamer since the stakes for being caught are lower, and hopefully get more gimmicks and fun stuff involving antagonism out of it. By removing the ability for antags to kill FNR, you buy space to restrict the crew from killing them just because they can and hopefully end up with a bit more RP and interaction between everyone.

[Itseasytosee2me]

Execute an antag on LRP and the reason is usually "Rule 4 says they're valid".
Execute an antag on MRP and the reason has to be that it was proportionate to their crimes. So you're drawn out of the rules to and into IC reasons to explain why you did this.

This isn't really fair to LRP players. If you ever bwoinked an LRP player and asked them to defend why they killed an antagonist. They would say that they are protected by rule 4, because its true. They may have had good in character reasons for killing the antagonist. They didn't have to think about any rules when they decided they should kill the antagonist, and they weren't thinking about any restrictions that their character was under when they did it.

Contrary, on MRP, I would argue you are dragged deeper into the rules in order to justify the killing of an antagonist. The frame of reference is not "My character would do X to antagonist because of XYZ" its "The rules will allow me to do X to an antagonist because I can justify it with XYZ." You have to consider if a punishment is "proportionate to the crime" (which is an arbirary metric unless you want to quote space law), the only guidance being that murder and grand sabotage can be met with execution. Security officers (and anyone else who fights an antagonist as per rule 4) will often do things that make absolutely zero sense from a roleplaying perspective because of this rule.

The rule itself seems to go against the spirt of roleplay in order to, as you said earlier, slow down the game to increase the amounts of interactions between players. Not to enforce a higher standard of roleplay.

I can understand that these rules may not be enforced at face value by the administration, but they are certainly read at face value by the player base. And if that's the case, the rules should be changed to reflect the enforcement that is best for the server.

When we talk about IC reasons, admins like dendy and myself don't look for objectively good reasons.

The rules should be updated to reflect this.

[Higgin]

This doesn't always play out perfectly in practice because our MRP players can still be massive pissbaby powergamer tryhards that don't actually want to be a participant in a good shift of SS13, they want to be the main character in a shitty shift of SS13. And all it takes is one out of 60 people to be a main character pissbaby powergamer tryhard that genuinely ruins the RP experience for everyone else - both on the antag side and on the crew side.

But that's the real crux of it all. By removing crew freedom to execute freely, you earn antag freedom to be less gamer since the stakes for being caught are lower, and hopefully get more gimmicks and fun stuff involving antagonism out of it. By removing the ability for antags to kill FNR, you buy space to restrict the crew from killing them just because they can and hopefully end up with a bit more RP and interaction between everyone.

How sure are you that normal antags even belong on MRP or under the RP ruleset? What would you think about chucking objectives or greentext out on MRP for a lark?

The problem I see is that even with nominal restrictions, the existence of antags which are not clearly defined as mechanics-first threats but otherwise have a license to act as such in the pursuit of their objectives sort of damns gimmicks.

Either because people shoot too quick, or the mechanics antags set the pace of the round (gimmicks often take time and setup,) or because even if you start with or gesture towards a limit, antag is a broad license to change your mind about that on the fly (even with "IC reason" - I'm not convinced there isn't a lot of room to stretch that.)

If the point is more gimmicks, what is the place of regular antagonism on MRP?

[Itseasytosee2me]

MRP antags can't kill and especially round remove for no reason/a reason so bad it may as well have been no reason. The crew can't just round remove antags merely for being antags. Validhunting more limited. Powergaming more limited. It sort of forcefully resolves a piece of the "prisoner's dilemma" that LRP has in the attitude of kill or be killed, and allows for options that aren't kill in return for treatment that isn't be killed.

In one Dendy's anecdotes, they mentioned that a player round removed four non-objecitve targets for an in character reason. Do you then think the player should have been punished?
The policy reads:

They have no obligation to treat their victims but escalating over minor issues should not result in the antagonist taking steps to permanently round-remove the other player unless escalation policy would otherwise permit it.

In this scenario, escalation policy would not permit round removal, and in fact, no where in current escalation policy does it outline any criteria in which round removal is acceptable.

I think what the antagonist did should be allowed, but the rules have clear indication otherwise. If you agree that Dendy's ruling was good, then where is the flaw in the rules?

[britgrenadier1]

Words

But that's the real crux of it all. By removing crew freedom to execute freely, you earn antag freedom to be less gamer since the stakes for being caught are lower, and hopefully get more gimmicks and fun stuff involving antagonism out of it. By removing the ability for antags to kill FNR, you buy space to restrict the crew from killing them just because they can and hopefully end up with a bit more RP and interaction between everyone.

This is really awesome sounding. None of it is true in practice. In reality antags use these rules as a shield to get their gamer gear (Tot bonus objectives & heretic knowledge) without fearing death or real punishment when caught. These rules rarely if ever encourage people to use their gear to engage in gimmicks and instead serve as rule knowledge checks for security to tick off as they get closer and closer to RR'ing people. IMHO, set the people free, let them self police. Antags are NEVER less gamer on manny. On the contrary I think that people game harder there than they do on Sybil. When I took a vacation from manny to play on Sybil for a bit I found myself engaging with the round's antagonists and crew more as sec because I knew that if things got overwhelming later on I could zap a traitor instead of having to do the mental calculus of if their actions and the state of the station warranted death.

PS: Antag restrictions are practically never enforced, and you will never, ever get away with "It's what my no nonsense sec officer character would do to this member of a known terrorist organization/cult"

[Higgin]

"I'm tired, boss."

I don't think this is necessarily true, but I think your perception is true and revealing (and painful to read, man. Join me on lavaland and forget the world of heretics and shuttles for a bit.)

People play harder at a higher mechanical level on Sibyl and Terry from my experience. Antags do hold back on Manny from at least the most egregious shit by comparison.

It sucks less to be on the receiving end of it on Sibyl and Terry because you expect it though. It's fun, even, because like you said - you can play back into it.

Flipside: it sucks so much worse when you feel like you were being held back in service of something that just doesn't materialize in practice. Being able to do your gimmick, or have a more chill round playing your DnD, not getting wordlessly RR'D FNR -

On LRP, you can check all but a narrow range of expectations at the door. On MRP, there's a much wider range of expectations and a lot more to lose on your time if those expectations fall through.

Expected gains lost are felt the same as actual losses - and people will fight harder or be more risk averse in the domain of losses than in the domain of gains.

On LRP, if you're gonna die anyway and don't expect shit, you're only set to gain off gimmicks and other shit. That's part of why it's probably easier to do.

Antags having priority damns a lot of folks' expectations on MRP, including their own, except for the ones that go as hard as they can.

Edit: another way to put this is that the more you try to create a safe place for competing expectations, paradoxically, the more dangerous they become to each other. This is why Skyrat ends up with like five different ghost roles and a whole-ass ghost cafe if you don't want to fuck in Dorms 4 on the off-chance something on-station might bump into you in Dorms 4.
And then still have hard limits on the antags, level of threat, and RoE around Dorms 4 on-station! Because it only takes me thirty minutes to greentext on Sibyl, but it might take the people in Dorms 4 a good 1.5-2hrs to bust, and now we're competing over the fucking round timer even if we never even see each other.

[Timberpoes]

Execute an antag on LRP and the reason is usually "Rule 4 says they're valid".
Execute an antag on MRP and the reason has to be that it was proportionate to their crimes. So you're drawn out of the rules to and into IC reasons to explain why you did this.

This isn't really fair to LRP players. If you ever bwoinked an LRP player and asked them to defend why they killed an antagonist. They would say that they are protected by rule 4, because its true. They may have had good in character reasons for killing the antagonist. They didn't have to think about any rules when they decided they should kill the antagonist, and they weren't thinking about any restrictions that their character was under when they did it.

Contrary, on MRP, I would argue you are dragged deeper into the rules in order to justify the killing of an antagonist. The frame of reference is not "My character would do X to antagonist because of XYZ" its "The rules will allow me to do X to an antagonist because I can justify it with XYZ." You have to consider if a punishment is "proportionate to the crime" (which is an arbirary metric unless you want to quote space law), the only guidance being that murder and grand sabotage can be met with execution. Security officers (and anyone else who fights an antagonist as per rule 4) will often do things that make absolutely zero sense from a roleplaying perspective because of this rule.

The rule itself seems to go against the spirt of roleplay in order to, as you said earlier, slow down the game to increase the amounts of interactions between players. Not to enforce a higher standard of roleplay.

I can understand that these rules may not be enforced at face value by the administration, but they are certainly read at face value by the player base. And if that's the case, the rules should be changed to reflect the enforcement that is best for the server.

When we talk about IC reasons, admins like dendy and myself don't look for objectively good reasons.

The rules should be updated to reflect this.

I wasn't talking talking about bwoinks, but about the reasons players do things if you were to ask them. LRP players usually justify why they do things with reference to the rules. Either "the rules say I can do X" or "the rules don't say I'm not allowed to do X". And that's usually acceptable outside of edge cases like escalation where we may ask for more IC reasoning (and doing so generally pisses off select LRP players that aren't used to having to have a reason for their actions).

On MRP in order to rely on the rules you need to rely on IC reasoning for your actions. The rules alone don't allow you execute an antag, you have to have gained some sort of knowledge or evidence IC that the player has committed crimes worthy of execution.

The distinction may seem pretty pointless to you since in both instances the players are like "RULES RULES RULES" but in one instance it's "I need to reference more IC events to explain why I did this thing else I've broken the rules" and in the other it's "I don't need an IC reason, the rules just say I can/don't say I can't".

As for IC reasons, I failed to imply that the key word was objectively - We look for subjectively good reasons. There's no checklist for good reasoning. We make sure that the player's reasoning made sense within the scope of their own experiences that shift and we'll ask questions to try and find out more about that.

[Timberpoes]

This doesn't always play out perfectly in practice because our MRP players can still be massive pissbaby powergamer tryhards that don't actually want to be a participant in a good shift of SS13, they want to be the main character in a shitty shift of SS13. And all it takes is one out of 60 people to be a main character pissbaby powergamer tryhard that genuinely ruins the RP experience for everyone else - both on the antag side and on the crew side.

But that's the real crux of it all. By removing crew freedom to execute freely, you earn antag freedom to be less gamer since the stakes for being caught are lower, and hopefully get more gimmicks and fun stuff involving antagonism out of it. By removing the ability for antags to kill FNR, you buy space to restrict the crew from killing them just because they can and hopefully end up with a bit more RP and interaction between everyone.

How sure are you that normal antags even belong on MRP or under the RP ruleset? What would you think about chucking objectives or greentext out on MRP for a lark?

The problem I see is that even with nominal restrictions, the existence of antags which are not clearly defined as mechanics-first threats but otherwise have a license to act as such in the pursuit of their objectives sort of damns gimmicks.

Either because people shoot too quick, or the mechanics antags set the pace of the round (gimmicks often take time and setup,) or because even if you start with or gesture towards a limit, antag is a broad license to change your mind about that on the fly (even with "IC reason" - I'm not convinced there isn't a lot of room to stretch that.)

If the point is more gimmicks, what is the place of regular antagonism on MRP?

I dislike progression antags because they overly gamify antags with Numbers Go Up gameplay loops. I don't believe this makes for better SS13 or really even good SS13. Similar to when Chefs and Bartenders got those dumb fucking bots, they started ignoring other players because they could complete a bounty and get credits from actual NPCs. I think antags got up to more interesting gimmicks when they weren't focusing on a constant drip-feed of objectives.

I don't think an overabundance of genuinely round-ending antags are good for any RP environment. It unbalanced the Prisoner's Dilemma on MRP - Now if you don't execute the antag they will probably force-end the shift when they get bored. What round ending antags we have should be very straightforward. Revs, cult and nukies are all very unambiguous antag types with dedicated factions where it's proportionate to crack them down at first sign.

Antags need to still pose a tangible threat on an individual level to justify their existance, but posing an existential threat to the crew or the station as a whole is best reserved for select antags on MRP where the crew is allowed to actively seek out and destroy them. In my opinion.

[britgrenadier1]

I dislike progression antags because they overly gamify antags with Numbers Go Up gameplay loops. I don't believe this makes for better SS13 or really even good SS13. Similar to when Chefs and Bartenders got those dumb fucking bots, they started ignoring other players because they could complete a bounty and get credits from actual NPCs. I think antags got up to more interesting gimmicks when they weren't focusing on a constant drip-feed of objectives.

I don't think an overabundance of genuinely round-ending antags are good for any RP environment. It unbalanced the Prisoner's Dilemma on MRP - Now if you don't execute the antag they will probably force-end the shift when they get bored. What round ending antags we have should be very straightforward. Revs, cult and nukies are all very unambiguous antag types with dedicated factions where it's proportionate to crack them down at first sign.

Antags need to still pose a tangible threat on an individual level to justify their existance, but posing an existential threat to the crew or the station as a whole is best reserved for select antags on MRP where the crew is allowed to actively seek out and destroy them. In my opinion.

I agree, and whenever this gets brought up people say "Code issue" and ignore the administrative action that can be taken of either giving sec protections or removing them from antags and letting the problem sort itself out. I think that we can have a world where prog antags and mrp can co-exist.

[Timberpoes]

Words

But that's the real crux of it all. By removing crew freedom to execute freely, you earn antag freedom to be less gamer since the stakes for being caught are lower, and hopefully get more gimmicks and fun stuff involving antagonism out of it. By removing the ability for antags to kill FNR, you buy space to restrict the crew from killing them just because they can and hopefully end up with a bit more RP and interaction between everyone.

This is really awesome sounding. None of it is true in practice. In reality antags use these rules as a shield to get their gamer gear (Tot bonus objectives & heretic knowledge) without fearing death or real punishment when caught. These rules rarely if ever encourage people to use their gear to engage in gimmicks and instead serve as rule knowledge checks for security to tick off as they get closer and closer to RR'ing people. IMHO, set the people free, let them self police. Antags are NEVER less gamer on manny. On the contrary I think that people game harder there than they do on Sybil. When I took a vacation from manny to play on Sybil for a bit I found myself engaging with the round's antagonists and crew more as sec because I knew that if things got overwhelming later on I could zap a traitor instead of having to do the mental calculus of if their actions and the state of the station warranted death.

PS: Antag restrictions are practically never enforced, and you will never, ever get away with "It's what my no nonsense sec officer character would do to this member of a known terrorist organization/cult"

Generally speaking the effect of overly enforcing antag restrictions is... Antags don't do anything.

This was the reality prior to the RP murderbone rule rewrite I did in the past. We had antags being banned for a bodycount of 1 with a reason of anti-murderboning rules before that.

And yeah, there's some very frustrating edge cases where RP server antags gamer far too hard. But I still believe that mental calculus you're talking about is you exerting effort to meet some of the minimum requirements that make up the RP server expectations of players. Not everyone enjoys it, which is fine cuz we have other servers where you don't have to think about that sort of roleplay - you just know antag = valid and at any point you can kill them for any reason or indeed no reason at all. It frees up your brain cells for different tasks or alternative types of roleplay.

[britgrenadier1]

I understand, but no offense my ticket and note history seems to suggest otherwise. Sometimes admins don't think your calculus is good enough and then bwoink.

[Higgin]

I dislike progression antags because they overly gamify antags with Numbers Go Up gameplay loops. I don't believe this makes for better SS13 or really even good SS13. Similar to when Chefs and Bartenders got those dumb fucking bots, they started ignoring other players because they could complete a bounty and get credits from actual NPCs. I think antags got up to more interesting gimmicks when they weren't focusing on a constant drip-feed of objectives.

I don't think an overabundance of genuinely round-ending antags are good for any RP environment. It unbalanced the Prisoner's Dilemma on MRP - Now if you don't execute the antag they will probably force-end the shift when they get bored. What round ending antags we have should be very straightforward. Revs, cult and nukies are all very unambiguous antag types with dedicated factions where it's proportionate to crack them down at first sign.

Antags need to still pose a tangible threat on an individual level to justify their existance, but posing an existential threat to the crew or the station as a whole is best reserved for select antags on MRP where the crew is allowed to actively seek out and destroy them. In my opinion.

Do regular objectives have a place in the non-existential-threat antags? Like stealing a jetpack or killing Joe Schmoe?

I can kinda see an argument for objectives as a way to 'share the love' - I try to use assassination targets and even secondaries sometimes as prompts to talk to somebody I wouldn't have otherwise engaged with in a typical round. Sometimes it's beautiful and makes a lasting impression, sometimes there's really no 'there' there and I shrug. Dynamic makes sure shit blows up regardless.

Even outside of progression antags, the problem I see with the non-existential ones is that they're pretty narratively bare, though. If you were going to do a gimmick or come up with something whole cloth, having the two primaries doesn't necessarily matter to it. Having people playing to those primaries might fuck it up, because if you get clocked as an antag alongside those people playing to the competitive condition, you're going to be in for a bad time.

I'm not sure I'd want to limit regular antags to not being existential threats, though I agree with everything you've said about the consequences of progression antags and their scaling. Being told you can't continue a conflict even when it would be natural to escalate it, potentially to the point of the station tipping over, sucks -

But as long as it's on the table that you can be an existential threat, or even an existential threat to one person, it's also very hard to protect you from people treating you like it.

Does this mean more limits on antags that aren't the ones you mentioned? Or canning antags that aren't round-ending? Or just accepting that gimmicks are probably always going to be at a disadvantage, but they have to be limited to a certain select of people each round who may or may not want to do them, because having everyone trying to do gimmicks and potentially start conflict (antag or non-antag) is a recipe for messy chaos where nobody gets to have their moment? Or what?

[Timberpoes]

I dislike progression antags because they overly gamify antags with Numbers Go Up gameplay loops. I don't believe this makes for better SS13 or really even good SS13. Similar to when Chefs and Bartenders got those dumb fucking bots, they started ignoring other players because they could complete a bounty and get credits from actual NPCs. I think antags got up to more interesting gimmicks when they weren't focusing on a constant drip-feed of objectives.

I don't think an overabundance of genuinely round-ending antags are good for any RP environment. It unbalanced the Prisoner's Dilemma on MRP - Now if you don't execute the antag they will probably force-end the shift when they get bored. What round ending antags we have should be very straightforward. Revs, cult and nukies are all very unambiguous antag types with dedicated factions where it's proportionate to crack them down at first sign.

Antags need to still pose a tangible threat on an individual level to justify their existance, but posing an existential threat to the crew or the station as a whole is best reserved for select antags on MRP where the crew is allowed to actively seek out and destroy them. In my opinion.

I agree, and whenever this gets brought up people say "Code issue" and ignore the administrative action that can be taken of either giving sec protections or removing them from antags and letting the problem sort itself out. I think that we can have a world where prog antags and mrp can co-exist.

I actually tried to address this with some of the lower-tier progtot objectives. I added a minute-zero assault objective that required you to go punch a random crew member a few times and some minute-zero find-and-destroy objectives for items with more sentimental value to players like station plushies or donut boxes as early incentives to get antags out doing stuff that impacts the game.

Progtot objectives are just incredibly basic. I mean, they have to be quantifiable so we can give out a reward so we can't actually have more esoteric objectives like bribing a sec officer with a briefcase of cash or framing someone for a crime you committed.

What I found pre-progtot was that players made up their own objectives for their own amusement once they completed their greentext and those objectives were more creative and more freeform because the only person judging success was the player themselves. We'd often have to tell stories about it after the shift because those hidden antics weren't on the end of round popup without admin intervention with custom objectives.

[Timberpoes]

Do regular objectives have a place in the non-existential-threat antags? Like stealing a jetpack or killing Joe Schmoe?

I can kinda see an argument for objectives as a way to 'share the love' - I try to use assassination targets and even secondaries sometimes as prompts to talk to somebody I wouldn't have otherwise engaged with in a typical round. Sometimes it's beautiful and makes a lasting impression, sometimes there's really no 'there' there and I shrug. Dynamic makes sure shit blows up regardless.

Even outside of progression antags, the problem I see with the non-existential ones is that they're pretty narratively bare, though. If you were going to do a gimmick or come up with something whole cloth, having the two primaries doesn't necessarily matter to it. Having people playing to those primaries might fuck it up, because if you get clocked as an antag alongside those people playing to the competitive condition, you're going to be in for a bad time.

I'm not sure I'd want to limit regular antags to not being existential threats, though I agree with everything you've said about the consequences of progression antags and their scaling. Being told you can't continue a conflict even when it would be natural to escalate it, potentially to the point of the station tipping over, sucks -

But as long as it's on the table that you can be an existential threat, or even an existential threat to one person, it's also very hard to protect you from people treating you like it.

Does this mean more limits on antags that aren't the ones you mentioned? Or canning antags that aren't round-ending? Or just accepting that gimmicks are probably always going to be at a disadvantage, but they have to be limited to a certain select of people each round who may or may not want to do them, because having everyone trying to do gimmicks and potentially start conflict (antag or non-antag) is a recipe for messy chaos where nobody gets to have their moment? Or what?

I covered it a little in my other post, but regular objectives are kinda like the foundation of your shift as an antag. They give you some tasks to complete that, across an entire shift of all antags, will end up with a classic shift of SS13. Some people are being killed, valuable items items are stolen, you get the idea.

And to clarify further, when I say existential threats I do want to say that a normal antag can post an existential threat. There used to be players robust enough to single-handedly depopulate the station on 20TC without final objectives that called in force-round-ending threats to make it easy for them.

But it actually required the player to Git Gud and in many respects is forbidden as a playstyle on MRP. Before both Heretic or Progtot, we didn't have any vanilla antags that if left alone would scale up and be handed a round-ending game state initiator. It wasn't the antag that was the existential threat, it was the person playing the antag. And many people came to MRP because genuine murderbone station depopulation exterminatus was a forbidden playstyle for basic bitch antags. But MRP still had regular existential threats. Blob, nukies, cult, revs, wizard, malf AI.

When you become an existential threat by being left alone instead of just by being a better player, on our MRP servers it fucks everything up. The gameplay trends towards LRP's ruleset. Kill or be killed. Revs has this. Cult has this. You can't leave either alone because with time they scale to end the round. So you HAVE to go after them, and things can get very bloody in the process.

And the admins find it very difficult to argue with that logic, cuz the players are right.

Roleplay Rule 5 stops applying where seemingly every antag has an objective plus is given a tool to force-end the shift if left alive long enough.

[Itseasytosee2me]

Generally speaking the effect of overly enforcing antag restrictions is... Antags don't do anything.

This is one of the reasons I made this thread.

[GPeckman]

snip

All of that sounds lovely on paper, but in practice it seems to lead to security players being forced to explain perfect reasonable executions on the forums to the admin who noted them for it.

[Timberpoes]

I do feel that procedurally the RP rules exist as a median fallback for admins, rather than as a gold standard.

RPR5 as-written allows for dealing with the kinda antag playstyles that people migrated from the LRP servers to avoid. And RPR10 allows the admin team as an abstract collective in agreement to go "cut this shit out, it's causing anti-RP-server issues". RPR5 and its past iterations probably contribution more reasons for why people play our MRP than any other.

But it also offers wonderful freedom for antags to really fuck shit up. I was happy to include the current clause allowing mass station sabotage. Antagonistic escalation allows killing players for honestly what I'd classify as very flimsy IC justification, but doesn't permit round removal where escalation also wouldn't permit it. MRP players tend to dislike round removal, but can tolerate a period of recoverable death. And being killed by an antag and still surviving until the end of the shift is regularly a great story to tell.

MRP antags can be genuinely dangerous. They can end the shift. They can cause a lot of shit to go bad. But I prefer it when it's because the players are doing it rather than because their generated objectives are doing.

[Timberpoes]

snip

All of that sounds lovely on paper, but in practice it seems to lead to security players being forced to explain perfect reasonable executions on the forums to the admin who noted them for it.

We're making the mother of all omelettes here, Jack. Can't fret over every egg.

I believe that ban appeal was an anomaly in that it wasn't an issue with the rules, but with TBM. And I say that with the utmost respect to the guy since I host voted him in. There was a lot of admin pressure in the backchannels asking him to revisit his decision to note.

Sometimes admins made bad calls. It wasn't the first ever MRP-based note that the admin removed on appeal for being a bit over-zealous in application. I dare say it won't be the last either.

[Itseasytosee2me]

Antagonistic escalation allows killing players for honestly what I'd classify as very flimsy IC justification, but doesn't permit round removal where escalation also wouldn't permit it.

You might have missed my previous post, but current escalation policy does not outline any circumstances in which round removal is allowed.

[TheBibleMelts]

snip

All of that sounds lovely on paper, but in practice it seems to lead to security players being forced to explain perfect reasonable executions on the forums to the admin who noted them for it.

We're making the mother of all omelettes here, Jack. Can't fret over every egg.

I believe that ban appeal was an anomaly in that it wasn't an issue with the rules, but with TBM. And I say that with the utmost respect to the guy since I host voted him in. There was a lot of admin pressure in the backchannels asking him to revisit his decision to note.

Sometimes admins made bad calls. It wasn't the first ever MRP-based note that the admin removed on appeal for being a bit over-zealous in application. I dare say it won't be the last either.

my feelings are so hurt right now

(i was wrong on the noting of this one, but saw what looked like a field execution when detainment was possible, and had the pressure of the round ending/having the player agree with me at the time to hasten my resolution)

[Timberpoes]

Antagonistic escalation allows killing players for honestly what I'd classify as very flimsy IC justification, but doesn't permit round removal where escalation also wouldn't permit it.

You might have missed my previous post, but current escalation policy does not outline any circumstances in which round removal is allowed.

Ya, I know. It used to but the recent rewrite took that away.

That's fine and by design. As values for what non-antags globally can do changes, so too antagonistic escalation will change alongside it. I intended for those two to be tied together. By tying it to whatever baseline is set for non-antags being able to round remove eachother, it keeps the entire thing balanced around it.

Raw escalation policy exists to allow two non-antags to get into a conflict with each other. Tying antagonistic escalation to the core escalation rules anchored antags to equivalent standards of conduct especially with respect to round removal since I didn't want antag escalation to become a bypass to the ordinary antag restrictions. I wanted it to complement those restrictions.

[Timberpoes]

my feelings are so hurt right now

(i was wrong on the noting of this one, but saw what looked like a field execution when detainment was possible, and had the pressure of the round ending/having the player agree with me at the time to hasten my resolution)

We all do iffy calls from time to time.

The appeal being accepted by the banning admin is the system working as intended.

I take way more issue with appeals that the headmins overturn since that means the admin genuinely fucked up even when given the chance to revisit the matter and dragged the case out needlessly or - in some rare cases - appeals where the headmins uphold it even though I feel they absolutely should not. The latter is a total procedural fuck up that MASSIVELY impacts confidence in the admin team and the ability for admins to moderate the game via consent of the players.

To quickly edit to a more on topic response, it was less an issue with the RP rules as written and more just one of those one-time lapses of judgement that you may occasionaly see on a team of 100+ admins who are all empowered to use their discretion to make the game the best SS13 it can be.

[Jacquerel]

we got any more questions for the timberpoes ama?

[TheBibleMelts]

my feelings are so hurt right now

(i was wrong on the noting of this one, but saw what looked like a field execution when detainment was possible, and had the pressure of the round ending/having the player agree with me at the time to hasten my resolution)

We all do iffy calls from time to time.

The appeal being accepted by the banning admin is the system working as intended.

I take way more issue with appeals that the headmins overturn since that means the admin genuinely fucked up even when given the chance to revisit the matter and dragged the case out needlessly or - in some rare cases - appeals where the headmins uphold it even though I feel they absolutely should not. The latter is a total procedural fuck up that MASSIVELY impacts confidence in the admin team and the ability for admins to moderate the game via consent of the players.

To quickly edit to a more on topic response, it was less an issue with the RP rules as written and more just one of those one-time lapses of judgement that you may occasionaly see on a team of 100+ admins who are all empowered to use their discretion to make the game the best SS13 it can be.

absolutely, that's not the only call i've made which was bad in hindsight, and it's likely not going to be the last. MRP rulings have some fun layers to them not too dissimilar to the silicon policy onion.

when i first started playing again, seeing restricted antagonists confused me pretty greatly - it felt like the crew had more freedoms than the antagonists themselves to achieve the goal of having a fun round of ss13. later, as an administrator, it felt weird to apply any manner of punishments to antagonists at all short of getting them to not indiscriminately murder everybody on the server without a spoken word.

part of it is that i still don't view manuel too differently from how i view sybil, so i tended/tend to lean more on the wording of the RPR's to set my needle for when something should be actioned against, like field executions. i think as both a player and an administrator, a few things in the text have felt a little strange to work into an ideal standard to shoot for.

[GPeckman]

my feelings are so hurt right now

(i was wrong on the noting of this one, but saw what looked like a field execution when detainment was possible, and had the pressure of the round ending/having the player agree with me at the time to hasten my resolution)

I think the bolded part is the issue. Its easy to say that detainment is possible when you have the benefit of hindsight, with essentially perfect information available in the logs. But at the time, the security player had good reason to think that stuns wouldn't work, and good reason to think that the heretic was trying to kill them and their partner.

We all do iffy calls from time to time.

The appeal being accepted by the banning admin is the system working as intended.

I take way more issue with appeals that the headmins overturn since that means the admin genuinely fucked up even when given the chance to revisit the matter and dragged the case out needlessly or - in some rare cases - appeals where the headmins uphold it even though I feel they absolutely should not. The latter is a total procedural fuck up that MASSIVELY impacts confidence in the admin team and the ability for admins to moderate the game via consent of the players.

To quickly edit to a more on topic response, it was less an issue with the RP rules as written and more just one of those one-time lapses of judgement that you may occasionaly see on a team of 100+ admins who are all empowered to use their discretion to make the game the best SS13 it can be.

That note may look like a one-time fluke to you, but it doesn't look like that to me, and I don't it looks like that to other security players either. I can find a lot of bad notes (all of them since lifted, thankfully) from the past few months that appear to hold security players to unreasonable standards:

• Warden got a week long security jobban for using lethals on a group of 4 prisoners trying to stage a breakout.

• Security player got a 3 day sec jobban for executing a blood brother, when they had good reason to believe that the borgs were subverted and actively trying to break the blood brother out.

• Security player arrests assistant after allegations of assault with a surgical saw. Finds bloody surgical saw in assistant's bag, gives them five minutes. Noted for "serving punishments harsher than warranted"

Do you now see why it doesn't just look like a one off occurrence?

[Redrover1760]

I dislike progression antags because they overly gamify antags with Numbers Go Up gameplay loops. I don't believe this makes for better SS13 or really even good SS13. Similar to when Chefs and Bartenders got those dumb fucking bots, they started ignoring other players because they could complete a bounty and get credits from actual NPCs. I think antags got up to more interesting gimmicks when they weren't focusing on a constant drip-feed of objectives.

I don't think an overabundance of genuinely round-ending antags are good for any RP environment. It unbalanced the Prisoner's Dilemma on MRP - Now if you don't execute the antag they will probably force-end the shift when they get bored. What round ending antags we have should be very straightforward. Revs, cult and nukies are all very unambiguous antag types with dedicated factions where it's proportionate to crack them down at first sign.

Antags need to still pose a tangible threat on an individual level to justify their existance, but posing an existential threat to the crew or the station as a whole is best reserved for select antags on MRP where the crew is allowed to actively seek out and destroy them. In my opinion.

I don't even think its MRP exclusive problem. There was a lot more antag mercy, a lot less gaming, a lot more gimmicks and fun on LRP before progression antags. It's, essentially just murderboning as you say but for objectives. Boring, roleplayless checklisting. The beauty of old traitor is that its simple objectives let you plan your round around them. It encouraged it, there's no rush, or need to do other random shit in order to get your tools. Theres less odds you'll get bullied as hard as the rules will let you, like getting Pacified and Perma'd after getting caught without having killed anyone or done absurd sabotages on MRP (happened to me, I hate you, certain MRP HoS. You are the reason I quit MRP entirely again and instead ditched tg as that was the only tg server I was having fun roleplaying on.) combination an effective soft round removal considering the barely any roleplay whatsoever to be had between sec and antags as they have another 8 potentially round ending antags to deal with. Prog tot has helped kill roleplay on LRP. Which, despite everything, there was some, at least.

Ever since prog tot merged, I have been firmly against its existence. Even now, it's so absurdly flawed and the fact that removing final objectives have been blocked is another failure in that regard. You are encouraged to participate as your tools are locked out and if you dont do minor sabotages instead of what you want to do you will get outpaced by those that do. Its addictive, and boring. And it encourages players to follow its path of small tc gains to do it over and over again. Yeah, its gotten better, but it doesnt change the fact it turns traitor into a mobile game.

So honestly with how low roleplay prog tot and thus sec's time pressured response is, it is its not really surprising IC reasoning is more of an excuse than justification.

Also, MRP sec do more thorough searches than LRP security. They abuse the rule that lets them know everything hard as fuck, checking every possible little location you could possibly have any antagonistic gear. Even to random tiders that get arrested, although the lack of a tider screen for antags definitely encouraged this.

One form of powergaming replaced with another and just as unfun.

[Jacquerel]

I'm coming around to "we should not have progression on traitor and we should heavily cull it on heretic" myself but Watermelon has some plans and i want to let him cook first before I try and push the issue

[dendydoom]

i think heretic could work if we can accept that there are just 1 gimmick heavily mechanical antags and not expect much deviation from them. i would like traitor to be the og "here's a toybox of funny bullshit go wild" freeform gimmick machine again, at the moment it's the only antag i have enabled personally but sometimes i just sigh when i get it because it's work to set shit up. maybe this is just me because i'm fucking lazy who knows...