I hope I'm not coming across as validating the labels. I think we fall into them in no small part because people have wildly different, internally varying, and 'fuzzy set' ideas about what they expect with each of the different servers.
At least right now, I think the RP ruleset, which does exist in policy, is trying to carve out a space where Manuel is friendlier to dialogue, gimmicks, social play, cooperation, and structured rounds that give some protection to different games. I haven't played enough between them to give you a between-unit breakdown of Terry, Sibyl, and Bagil, my impression is that they've got cultural differences of their own, but they're all subject to the same more-limited ruleset by contrast to Manuel and Campbell.
That's what I'm getting at when I use 'MRP' and 'LRP' here, but you're entirely right that the labels are not, by-in-large, analytically useful.
dendydoom wrote: ↑Tue Nov 14, 2023 9:13 am
so really we're dealing with 2 axis here: plot driven vs character driven, and high improv (chaos) vs low improv (structured).
i wrote about this a few years ago in discord of all places:
here's a fucking horrendously bad mock-up i made to illustrate this point about 3 years ago:
i know this is sort of a tangent but i promise i'm trying to go somewhere with this: this is not a battle between "less rp" and "more rp" or how imbibing more of the roleplay juice will turn us all from knuckle dragging cave dwellers into broadway thespians. the argument is simply that lrp creates a different sort of plot-driven roleplay that's more energetic and less compatible with the character-driven narratives of mrp. if we can recognize this truth then we can take steps to nurture it in a way that's conducive to better rp environments on lrp, like sinful proposed, and try to quell this endless battle between the "right" and "wrong" way to instead focus on what the expectations of these cultures truly are.
I'm not sure Sibyl, Basil, or Terry want or need the change - I'm not well-qualified to comment there, but I take sinful's words and the responses from the ruleset merger thread as supporting evidence - and I'm opposed to any 'civilizing mission' towards them if they work for the people there to have a good time.
I agree with pretty much all of what you propose about how to think about this though, and I'd say the framework you offered there is a Hell of a lot more useful than any label.
One of the reasons I think Manuel seems to get higher consistent pops, I suspect, is that it offers a bigger tent in terms of the expectations it nominally and practically serves with a server like Terry. You still can have an action-packed round with chaos and trouble. You can also have slower, more deliberate stuff, at least some of the time, as a function of policy protection, server culture, and the conditions on the ground. It potentially serves a lot more interests, but because the way those interests interact with each other at least some of the time - i.e., with a person playing one game, usually the mechanical/antag-driven game, or in the 'station is a rapidly-degenerating shithole beset by a congaline of disruptive mechanical mishaps' sequence of events built to provide mechanical content and variety for that mechanical/antag-driven game - you get places of friction where those games on different parts of the range of expectations do not play nicely together.
an abomination edit/update of the mockup trying to illustrate what I see
Because everybody has different individual expectations, here, what this is to say is that you're fundamentally dealing with a fuzzy set rather than a crisp set, and people can show up with different day-to-day expectations. Hell, for some people, not knowing what they're going to get in any given day is part of the expectation. What I've tried to map out above is that there are places where the expectations probably overlap between the different servers and other areas where they don't. In the case of two servers like Manuel and Terry, however, people playing according to the expectations in the Terry space on the Manuel space might be entirely within the rules but entirely out of synch with the expectations of others who do not go to Terry.
fuzzy sets vs. crisp sets
By contrast, I suspect, the expectations are much more crisp and basically well-defined on servers to which the RP ruleset does not apply. You play them, you know what you're going to get. It's appealing to be able to be everything on Manuel, but it also means that you'll less be able to be any one thing reliably.
That's sort of your bind here, and it works out that way because the more mechanical, antag/plot/'competitive' games played on Terry are totalizing: they can force the issue over people who show up to play less competitive games. This is as much true for gamer sec jumping somebody doing a bit as it is for an unrestricted antag walking into the library and shooting dead somebody who's been working on a painting/book all round. In both cases, though, there's an added bind where it might be entirely legit for them to do so from an IC perspective: a xeno doesn't care about your painting, we might imagine, and an officer probably shouldn't let somebody else get criminally abused or the station made more insecure 'because it's funny.'
A lot of the time people will act in favor of their gentler natures and not wild out on others playing a different, less-competitive game even when it might not jive with their characters, at least on Manuel, in my experience, but Manuel under the RP ruleset, as a big-tent, still allows for those competitive games, and they're still totalizing when people choose to play them over the preferences of others.
That's the most difficult situation to reach on Manuel right now: when somebody chooses to force the game to basically treat everyone else on the server as an NPC in their game, in a lot of cases, they're still protected never mind what other people on the server are doing or there for at any given moment. If the starting assumption is that we're all going to do that to others if we get the opportunity, nobody's expectations are going to be violated when somebody goes on a murderbone spree - we'll just shrug, accept the schadenfreude, maybe credit the person on the other side for their skill, and wait for our turn with a plan how to kick their teeth in next time.
That is a much less satisfying way to cope when you might've gone to play DnD in the library or have some sort of character-centric scene in the bar or build a dumb project rather than rushing for mechanical advantage at roundstart.
I think one of the ways to minimize this sort of incongruity between expectations is to require escalation or some sort of reliable telegraphing in a round about what kinds of games are going to be valid to play there. Threat levels are unreliable as fuck for this even if admins don't press buttons to 'spice things up.' War Ops is a great example of telegraphing done right because when it gets called, everybody is presented with a stark choice about whether to engage or not, and a clear picture of the game with which they're engaging. War Ops rounds ime involve a lot less salt as long as it isn't three or four in a row - you know what you're going to get.
It's harder to do this when part of the games people are playing sometimes - the social deduction game, the 'paranoid survival sim' game, whatever - are premised on you not knowing what you're going to have to deal with - but I think it can be better handled by setting time aside for more guaranteed, quieter rounds, at least some of the time, and giving people a say when their expectations are going to be subverted (that is to say: if you're going to spice up a greenshift where all the headbanger gamers committed suicide and left as soon as it was announced, run a vote or read the room first. It doesn't have to be specific, even just 'y'all feeling like big buffalos or little bitty babies today?')
I tried to do this and proposed to do it manually over on Bubberstation in the past, but it was roundly rejected at the time because it 1. relied on a massive amount of manual admin DMing/lifting for which there was no trust or buy-in and 2. because it proposed to compromise on the mechanical, antag-centric game, at least some of the time, even at the much more limited extent to which the rules allowed it at the time I proposed to change the system.
You can read the abortive planning doc about how I was going to do this, and basically how I ran things in-game behind the scenes, here - the 'Mild-Medium-Wild' system.
I think we're in a similar dilemma here. The place that powergaming/play-to-win behavior fits in the servers and rulesets is inextricably tied to the sorts of games we want to validate and foster.
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𝒯𝒶𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒶 𝓈𝒶𝒷𝒶𝓉𝒾𝒸𝒶𝓁. 
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