Rule 12 Clarifications

[kinnebian]

Bottom post of the previous page:

Rule 12 is a confusing rule, that is so bad it has to be explained to admins when they are candidated.
The current rule 12 is as follows:

12. This is a sandbox roleplaying game
The purpose of the game is to have fun roleplaying. Play-to-win gameplay that ruins the purpose of the game at the expense of others is against the rules.

I have a few problems with this, mainly in the fact 'Play-to-win Gameplay" is inherently a very loose and non-defining term.
"What does it even mean?"
"I thought we were supposed to play to win?"
I know what youre thinking, that the rule is cleared up in the addendum.
And it is!

Playing-to-win is to focus exclusively on a competitive victory condition, such as killing all antagonists. It is not empowering yourself to achieve personal goals, or taking measures to survive the shift

But the rule doesnt mean anything without this addendum! Its just entirely pointless! Therefore, I propose we move the addendum to the main body of the rule, or at least find some way to replace or clarify the term "Play-to-win Gameplay" in the rule so it isnt completely useless.

[Higgin]

This ain't amogus or call of duty, this a round based MUD. If you wanna play SS13 competitively either play TGMC or make your competitive nature something that's funny to at least one person other than yourself.

The rules don't require making your play fun for the other side for antags. They should not require it of everyone else until they do for antags too.

Everyone should have meaningful choices about how to engage with the game.The game should be fun for everyone involved - even dying and losing - and the way you get to that is by making how you play have as great a possible impact over how you end up alive, or dead, or wherever you might end up relative to the goals you might set for yourself separately.

When the rule is that antags and random capricious bullshit can and will kill you freely to the exclusion of any goal you might've had, you have much less of a chance of any goal you choose besides killing/stopping the antags and gaming hard being something you can pursue with any question of success or satisfaction.

When this is the case, instead, it becomes increasingly meaningful - the only thing that matters at the end of the day - how well you can stand up to and compete with antags and random mechanical chaos across the round. How do you fight the war ops to win? How do you manage the three different kinds of antags running around besides the blob - do you shoot them on-sight before they can backstab you, or honor fighting alongside them until it's done? Do you go into a room alone with somebody or not?

In all cases, the freedom and posited goals of the other side may very well end up with you dead and out of the game until you're mercifully recycled into a midround or ghost role. If you don't play this game, you do so at your own peril. The choice about fundamentally WHAT you are doing shrinks massively relative to HOW you do it.

If the presumption is that what you do should not matter,
and the design is that how you fight back will not matter, there's no reason to keep your client open if you don't get antag.

At that point, just make all the nonantag crew into basic mobs.

Asymmetry is fine - lots of people enjoy asymmetrical slashers - but asking the vast majority of people in any round to play to lose to fluff the minority of the players in a competitive game is dogshit design, DMing, and philosophy.

Until there's something higher than a floor bar on what an antagonist is and what they can do, pointed at a game other than the one where they can practically treat everyone else as NPCs, tg SS13 - even on Manuel - is in no small part a competitive game.



e1: A good way to think about this in tabletop terms is if I'm DMing an orc warband that attacks the party, I can choose to do that and will, fully admitting the possibility that the orcs all die and things go badly for them, because I'm not playing against my players for the orcs to win - I'm playing the orcs for them to have fun.

If my players are tactical wargamers who are very into the mechanics, I will emphasize the fighting and fight a lot harder with those orcs - I'll make them a much more credible threat - in order to bring out that game for my players. I will kill their asses. Harsh competition is actually cooperative - if that's what they showed up for - and they'd be cheated if they felt like they were wading through a meaningless fight.

If they're more about narrative storytelling and chewing the scenery, I'm probably not going to sweat the orcs being an intense mechanical challenge as much as an effective and believable beat in the story, - a way to give the players a sense of danger, up the tension, establish a fact around which they'll orient their characters in the world, or pose some sort of interesting dilemma (orc babies, what do?) It's less important to emphasize the mechanical resolution of how the orcs die or there even being a question of their death than their overall effect in how those players' narrative choices are made to matter because they decided to take this quest, follow this path, give away their travel plans to the half-orc spy in the last town... etc.

In both cases, the orcs might die, and that's entirely fine by me, because I'm not personally playing against my players except to the extent that it makes it fun to play the game they showed up for. I'm the DM - that's my game. The orcs die and the game I'm playing with my friends goes on.

This would not be the case if I was just playing one orc and had to leave the room after it died. You can guess that I'd probably fight like Hell if I was playing that orc, and telling me "no you're just supposed to fall over and die, you get smited/another midround shows up/the changeling gets back up/the ERT shows up to shoot you dead before you can hijack and greentext" would have me asking you "why the Hell did I show up for this?

To bookend this: you need to have meaningful choices on both sides for the game to be fun. The one-sided application of rules and rulings about powergaming, validhunting, or even more nebulously "playing to win" makes player choice less meaningful and should be avoided, especially when all sides showed up to play the same game to begin with.

It's fucking cheap to roll the station on Manuel knowing that the people on the other side are being told to hold back and might not have shown up planning to fight like there's no more space in Noah's ark and it just started raining - but as far as I can tell, it is allowed.

[TheLoLSwat]

This ain't amogus or call of duty, this a round based MUD. If you wanna play SS13 competitively either play TGMC or make your competitive nature something that's funny to at least one person other than yourself.

The rules don't require making your play fun for the other side for antags. They should not require it of everyone else until they do for antags too.

Everyone should have meaningful choices about how to engage with the game.The game should be fun for everyone involved - even dying and losing - and the way you get to that is by making how you play have as great a possible impact over how you end up alive, or dead, or wherever you might end up relative to the goals you might set for yourself separately.

When the rule is that antags and random capricious bullshit can and will kill you freely to the exclusion of any goal you might've had, you have much less of a chance of any goal you choose besides killing/stopping the antags and gaming hard being something you can pursue with any question of success or satisfaction.

When this is the case, instead, it becomes increasingly meaningful - the only thing that matters at the end of the day - how well you can stand up to and compete with antags and random mechanical chaos across the round. How do you fight the war ops to win? How do you manage the three different kinds of antags running around besides the blob - do you shoot them on-sight before they can backstab you, or honor fighting alongside them until it's done? Do you go into a room alone with somebody or not?

In all cases, the freedom and posited goals of the other side may very well end up with you dead and out of the game until you're mercifully recycled into a midround or ghost role. If you don't play this game, you do so at your own peril. The choice about fundamentally WHAT you are doing shrinks massively relative to HOW you do it.

If the presumption is that what you do should not matter,
and the design is that how you fight back will not matter, there's no reason to keep your client open if you don't get antag.

At that point, just make all the nonantag crew into basic mobs.

Asymmetry is fine - lots of people enjoy asymmetrical slashers - but asking the vast majority of people in any round to play to lose to fluff the minority of the players in a competitive game is dogshit design, DMing, and philosophy.

Until there's something higher than a floor bar on what an antagonist is and what they can do, pointed at a game other than the one where they can practically treat everyone else as NPCs, tg SS13 - even on Manuel - is in no small part a competitive game.



e1: A good way to think about this in tabletop terms is if I'm DMing an orc warband that attacks the party, I can choose to do that and will, fully admitting the possibility that the orcs all die and things go badly for them, because I'm not playing against my players for the orcs to win - I'm playing the orcs for them to have fun.

If my players are tactical wargamers who are very into the mechanics, I will emphasize the fighting and fight a lot harder with those orcs - I'll make them a much more credible threat - in order to bring out that game for my players. I will kill their asses. Harsh competition is actually cooperative - if that's what they showed up for - and they'd be cheated if they felt like they were wading through a meaningless fight.

If they're more about narrative storytelling and chewing the scenery, I'm probably not going to sweat the orcs being an intense mechanical challenge as much as an effective and believable beat in the story, - a way to give the players a sense of danger, up the tension, establish a fact around which they'll orient their characters in the world, or pose some sort of interesting dilemma (orc babies, what do?) It's less important to emphasize the mechanical resolution of how the orcs die or there even being a question of their death than their overall effect in how those players' narrative choices are made to matter because they decided to take this quest, follow this path, give away their travel plans to the half-orc spy in the last town... etc.

In both cases, the orcs might die, and that's entirely fine by me, because I'm not personally playing against my players except to the extent that it makes it fun to play the game they showed up for. I'm the DM - that's my game. The orcs die and the game I'm playing with my friends goes on.

This would not be the case if I was just playing one orc and had to leave the room after it died. You can guess that I'd probably fight like Hell if I was playing that orc, and telling me "no you're just supposed to fall over and die, you get smited/another midround shows up/the changeling gets back up/the ERT shows up to shoot you dead before you can hijack and greentext" would have me asking you "why the Hell did I show up for this?

To bookend this: you need to have meaningful choices on both sides for the game to be fun. The one-sided application of rules and rulings about powergaming, validhunting, or even more nebulously "playing to win" makes player choice less meaningful and should be avoided, especially when all sides showed up to play the same game to begin with.

It's fucking cheap to roll the station on Manuel knowing that the people on the other side are being told to hold back and might not have shown up planning to fight like there's no more space in Noah's ark and it just started raining - but as far as I can tell, it is allowed.

This, fun is a two way street. Antags murderboning leads to people showing no mercy to antags, which leads to antags either playing very scared of going balls out figuring that they are dead if caught anyway.

[Vekter]

Wow, that's a lot of words.

E: For the record, I was mostly using this as a cheeky way to ask for a tl;dr.

[Higgin]

Wow, that's a lot of words.

tl;dr don't ask people to not play to win or powergame when the game is competitive, and if it's not going to be, set the expectation on both sides instead of skewing it against the people who didn't roll antag.

It's one thing to let people take turns with the spotlight and behave as prime movers if the understanding is that it's an opportunity to make a better experience or make something fun for everyone involved. It's another to prioritize those people - in any role - playing a fundamentally competitive game while expecting people on the other side to act like they're not or that they can't.

Under the current rules, even the RP ruleset, they can and do.


I am entirely with you in wanting basic RP expectations to be part of what, if anything, comes out of this. The floor just needs to be set fairly, and we should be clear about what games are valid here.

[Vekter]

Wow, that's a lot of words.

tl;dr don't ask people to not play to win or powergame when the game is competitive, and if it's not going to be, set the expectation on both sides instead of skewing it against the people who didn't roll antag.

It's one thing to let people take turns with the spotlight and behave as prime movers if the understanding is that it's an opportunity to make a better experience or make something fun for everyone involved. It's another to prioritize those people - in any role - playing a fundamentally competitive game while expecting people on the other side to act like they're not or that they can't.

Under the current rules, even the RP ruleset, they can and do.


I am entirely with you in wanting basic RP expectations to be part of what, if anything, comes out of this. The floor just needs to be set fairly, and we should be clear about what games are valid here.

The game is not competitive. I don't know where the idea that it is has come from, but it's not. This isn't Call of Modern Warfare Fortnite Battlegrounds Legends. The rules are going to be built around both making the game fun for everyone and supporting roleplay as the primary purpose of the game.

[Timberpoes]

To be clear, the RP rules were partially redrafted with balance of power between crew and antags in mind. Restricting the crew allows the space to restrict antags and maintain the same proportion of balance between them.

With the RP rules restricting the crew's ability to powergame and limiting antag validity to only the most serious of crimes, we gain some points that can also be put into limiting antags without impacting the overall balance.

This is compared to LRP, where antags are almost completely unrestricted and the crew are also almost completely unrestricted. (Yes, some restrictions do still apply. Antags can't lowpop murderbone, crew can't validhunt. Yadda yadda.)

There's merit in saying the LRP servers are more competitive (or indeed are competitive at all) due to the sweeping lack of restrictions between players and antags. Avoiding round removal with less restricted opponents breeds a more competitive mindset. Like playing high stakes poker.

I'd then say the MRP servers are less competitive in nature because everyone's a bit more restricted. Round removal is more tightly controlled, powergaming is more limited, etc. This usually means there's less on the line. Like playing low stakes poker.

It doesn't have to be, but that's how it do be. Whenever drafting rules or changing policy I always kept that fundamental balancing act in my mind. Being competitive and RP aren't mutually exclusive. We can have both.

To tie it all back, the one part of Rule 12 I liked is that it says "The purpose of the game is to have fun roleplaying". Rule 12 is phrased in a way that it doesn't make pursuit of competitive win conditions against the rules on their own, you have to be ruining the other players' roleplay fun at the same time. I like that nuance. Especially because it means if you're making more RP fun the process of trying to win then Rule 12 shouldn't apply at all. You're objectively advancing the purpose of the game - RP fun.

[Higgin]

To be clear, the RP rules were partially redrafted with balance of power between crew and antags in mind. Restricting the crew allows the space to restrict antags and maintain the same proportion of balance between them.

With the RP rules restricting the crew's ability to powergame and limiting antag validity to only the most serious of crimes, we gain some points that can also be put into limiting antags without impacting the overall balance.

I don't know how to say it other than that I think my feeling on this overlaps with my feeling about the rule 4/5 discussion about pre-gaming against possible antags: I think it's a cope.

Balancing competitive games by policy is what you do when you've got unaddressed design issues. Is it necessarily bad to do it if you can't address those issues because this is an open-source hobby project, not a job, and exists by the goodwill and voluntarism of people doing the best they can with what they've got? No, but it puts you in the bind of being a ref and throwing flags on plays where an automatic system, or a system designed to address those imbalances, would otherwise probably be fairer and a Hell of a lot less work - after climbing the mountain of figuring out what it should be and making it.

That only goes so far too. RP fun isn't something you can neatly measure, and it's not felt in aggregate - it's felt by people. I don't think there's a good way to make a system that judges or respects cooperative storytelling, gimmicks, or stuff that otherwise sits outside of the competitive game.

To tie it all back, the one part of Rule 12 I liked is that it says "The purpose of the game is to have fun roleplaying". Rule 12 is phrased in a way that it doesn't make pursuit of competitive win conditions against the rules on their own, you have to be ruining the other players' roleplay fun at the same time. I like that nuance. Especially because it means if you're making more RP fun the process of trying to win then Rule 12 shouldn't apply at all. You're objectively advancing the purpose of the game - RP fun.

I really do like the ideational part of it. If there's fun to be had by both sides in playing a TDM with high-octane war ops, and everyone's onboard with it, go to town.

I guess the problem I arrive at is, if we were to go back to the metaphor of the sandbox,

The game is not competitive. I don't know where the idea that it is has come from, but it's not. This isn't Call of Modern Warfare Fortnite Battlegrounds Legends. The rules are going to be built around both making the game fun for everyone and supporting roleplay as the primary purpose of the game.

Let's take two discrete games.
Godzilla, where there's Godzilla (the prime threat,) the city (the station,) the army/Ghidorah (the opposing crew and other threats.)
House, where there's a family or community (characters, crew) gathered in somebody's house (part of the station) doing some sort of tea party (character-driven melodrama/'casual' or 'bar rp.')

'fun for everyone' in a sandbox is not achieved by letting the person playing Godzilla go over to the people playing House and kick over their tea party. The fact that they still can has a chilling effect on folks' willingness to play House and at some level means that if you want to play House, you've got to either kill Godzilla when he shows up, avoid him, or hope to God and Godzilla's good graces that you're not on his list of things to destroy today.

Sometimes you can play in the sandbox with Godzilla. He might show up and decide to play House too. Other times, he might show up, and you might have a really good and cool fight, and that's great because you weren't doing anything more fun anyway or secretly hoped for Godzilla to appear so you could throw down.

A not-insignificant amount of the time, Godzilla shows up, kicks over your game of House, and it might just suck for both of you because Godzilla wanted you to fight back, and you might've preferred to keep playing House (and been perfectly happy to play House with Godzilla, even, just - it's not in the cards.)

Godzilla's freedom to act as a prime mover and make the game everyone plays into Godzilla is what makes this competitive. Your desire and inclination to play House doesn't really matter when Godzilla shows up. Even with restricted antags, there's nothing but their goodwill that says they have to respect the folks playing House if they're selected by objectives.

The round is a shared commons. Antags get priority in determining the roles everyone else gets to play. When war ops show up, they've made a commitment that everyone else will end up playing the roles of lukewarm meat. The only meaningful engagement with that can be through mechanical competition. To some degree or another, all antags have that license, and it doesn't necessarily care about whether or not the people on the other end showed up wanting to play House or Godzilla. The amount of threat in the round might condition your expectations about the number of threats in the round over time, but it tells you next to nothing fundamentally about which game they're going to show up willing and wanting to play, so people are pushed towards treating all threats like Godzilla and tragically into a self-fulfilling prophecy when they shoot what they thought was Godzilla just showing up with biscuits for tea.

How do you define 'roleplay' and 'the game' when you're called on to decide between competing claims over the sandbox?

[Vekter]

I'm culling your post because it's really long but I'm not dismissing any of it.

How do you define 'roleplay' and 'the game' when you're called on to decide between competing claims over the sandbox?

This is what makes a game like SS13 different than MUDs or RP experiences like Second Life or RP in MMOs, and even what makes /tg/ different from some higher RP SS13 servers like Shiptest or Paradise - Whereas those focus primarily on social interaction to drive things, we have the added danger that some asshole might explode you at any moment.

This doesn't make SS13 any less of a role-playing game. If anything, it enhances the experience for a lot of people. Some folks play SS13 just because that paranoia is exciting to them and drives interesting stories that are rarely the exact same twice. I'd say that this makes the game "competitive" in the sense that there are competing sides, ie "antagonists" and "regular crewmembers", but it's not "competitive" in the colloquial sense of gaming today (e-sports shooters, MOBAs, etc). There's two sides that act against each other, but the shared goals of everyone are actually kind of one in the same if you break it down:

1) Have fun.
2) Don't die.
3) Make interesting stories happen.

The issue is that this gets kinda muddy when you get players who try to treat the game like those aforementioned "competitive" games, in that their main goal is to kill as many people as possible and "win" at a game that, when you really break it down, doesn't actually have much of a win condition aside from greentext*. I think it's more appropriate to compare SS13 to games like TTT or Among Us, because they both have similar concepts involved (traitors, someone actively working to destabilize the game for others), but where they differ is where SS13 shines: I can't think of a single TTT round I have an interesting story about. Nobody sits around in TTT trying to do a job or work on something or do anything other than try and figure out who the traitor is. Even with Among Us having objectives, they're little more than pretense for forcing the traitors to act, lest they lose in a very slow and lame way.

In an attempt to keep this from getting too long, let me break down your metaphor a little: It doesn't work because Godzilla only really does two things: break shit and fight other giant monsters. Antags in SS13 can also play house, or do interesting things like kidnap people who are playing house and use them for ransom, or pick people off one at a time and drive more paranoia and threat in their game of house.

Do people often do these things? No, and I think that's partially a server culture issue and partially because we've kind of just let antags do whatever the fuck for long enough that people tend to use getting a traitor round as an excuse to just flip out and murder everyone, but I think if we tweak the rules in subtle ways, we can encourage people to do neat shit that isn't just "kill everyone".

So tl;dr It's not Godzilla vs. a tea party, it's a tea party with three potential serial killers and you don't know who's got a loaded gun in their backpack ready to blast you if you look at them wrong.

(*I've actually seen suggestions that we should remove greentext, and while I think that's a little extreme for me, us adding a way to customize your objective recently has really driven some interesting stuff from players, so I think we're going in a good direction.)

[oranges]

i will say as long as i'm a headcoder, the code will never bow to norp.

[sinfulbliss]

When the rule is that antags and random capricious bullshit can and will kill you freely to the exclusion of any goal you might've had, you have much less of a chance of any goal you choose besides killing/stopping the antags and gaming hard being something you can pursue with any question of success or satisfaction.

When this is the case, instead, it becomes increasingly meaningful - the only thing that matters at the end of the day - how well you can stand up to and compete with antags and random mechanical chaos across the round.

This is an EXTREMELY good point that I’ve been trying to express for a long time now but haven’t been able to quite get at directly. This is the #1 thing creating the communication barrier between MRP and LRP players/admins (sorry Misdoubtful but it’s a useful label in speaking).

Without exception, every single player or admin I’ve seen condemn this playstyle, not a single one of them consistently play LRP. Every single person that goes on tirades about roleplay standards, and how LRP players are distorting/missing “the point of the game,” you can check and find not a single one of them consistently play LRP. Why is this? It’s because their game philosophy is untenable for that environment and unfun to play. It’s incredibly frustrating because the people who are actually on the servers trying to enjoy them are being given directives from theoreticians who would probably sooner retire than subject themselves to a few rounds of highpop Terry a week. For the ones that get their feet wet, like a Harvard professor taking his suit and tie into Detroit to study the effects of poverty in the hood, they unsurprisingly leave their ideals at the forums and adapt to their environment just like everyone else—or go catatonic.

Go into a highpop LRP round with a grand goal in mind, some project or little gimmick you want to work on over a period of time, and you will more often than not become disappointed. The round is very, very rarely going to go your way, unless you tunnel vision and tune everyone else out, and even then you’re probably out of luck, especially if you’re not playing perfectly optimally. So people find other ways to enjoy themselves that are in-line with the mechanical chaos they are served — and the playerbase, being the adaptive, wonderful gremlins they are, always find a way, and that way is through going with the flow, not being attached to anything, including your own life, very much. Why do you think there are nonantag assistants killing each other in the halls every round? Just a bunch of TDM shitters that should fuck off to COD, right? No, it’s a completely sensible thing to do in that environment. It’s creating a little lighthearted fun for yourself that you can control, to the extent the other player is playing along. God forbid it’s not good enough for the “standards of roleplay” that The Great Roleplayer In The Sky has pronounced.

tl;dr: Before condemning a style of play and proposing an alternative, ensure that alternative is actually fun in the environment you’re proposing it. If you yourself don’t even enjoy that environment, and never play there, then more than likely your standards are out of sync.

[Higgin]

Dead-on agree and appreciate the very thorough answer. Same here on culling and hope I don't leave anything out unfairly.

...

Yeah, I guess the Godzilla metaphor isn't great. It certainly applies to some antags some of the time, and it describes an extreme of play that doesn't coexist well with House tea parties even while SS13 has a lot going for it as a sandbox where people can (and do) try to get up to all sorts of stuff. Maybe comparing a lot of our 'boning antags to the Hatred main character or Postal guy would be more apt.

The danger, paranoia, spontaneity, fragility, and uncertainty is part of the appeal. You have the mass-gathering courtroom trial or wedding or whatever knowing it might get bombed and, if you're approaching the game with an open mind, excited to see what happens.

My experience (informed by a fuckload too many hours on Skyrat, Bay, and other less open-ended environments) has been that it's a really hard thing to do to get people to lower their defenses and step back from the competitive game. You tell Godzilla to do something besides break shit and kill people, if Godzilla then gets treated like he's just going to do what he's always done, he tends to give up. You tell secmains who've been acculturated to black orbits and headbanging gamer antags to be more sensitive to context and gimmicks that might require a bit more patience/slack to go well, it'll be a hard and frustrating sell to encourage them to keep on that path when they run into Godzilla again.

An awful person said it, but it's true: trust is gained in drops and lost in buckets.

I think the addition of custom objectives is cool and salutary. I think it's going to run up against the wall as long as antags operate at the level you've described, but it tells people more 'it's okay to do something different, here's a way you can broadcast it to everyone else and let them connect the dots after the round.'

The dilemma I see with removing greentext was that in the places it's been done, with an increasing degree of scrutiny, it raises the threshold for people to antagonize in a way that lowers the action-level of the server for everyone unless you just apply no scrutiny with it, which begs the question: where does your antagonism come from? Who do you target? Who's it even fair to target, and how much can you do to them within the bounds of fair play? How much station disruption is fair for one antag to inflict, and under what circumstances?

Random stock mechanical objectives give people a star to point at and 'share the love' around possible targets rather than having antags just go after their friends/enemies or aimlessly grief.

By the same token, they're narratively thin and basically a joke after a point. They only really amount to as much as you choose to bring to them if you're not going for progtot final objectives or RRing folks - who the fuck wants to die over a silly jetpack? Who wants to take bets on how long before tech storage gets hit for the comms board? (we frequently had a pool about it during the early days of progtots)

You can find somebody who's in it for the smell of the game sometimes, but it's not reliable; and it's hard to say that it's even necessary for the people who get #1 and #3 primarily by slugging it out over #2 in their common goals.

I tend to think narrowing round-to-round expectations and telegraphing them more clearly might help, but as you say, the uncertainty is also part of the appeal.

What other changes would you consider possibly following here? What have you seen seem to work?

[dendydoom]

without getting into the weeds too much with my own essay because there is 10/10 discussion going on already,

the reason i don't play hrp is because like a lot of people i don't like the feeling of gatekeeping that can occur to the creative space. there is a social pressure to perform in a certain way which, imo, is poisonous to creativity.

this is not necessarily a bad thing. some people like more structure and they have a good time with it because it gives them more control to play their character. but everyone has a different tolerance and i suppose this is the core of my stance. lrp does not mean less rp. it's just different to mrp but it is still driven by a narrative. it's the scene in the movie where the big disaster happens. in mrp we see the character's reactions to the disaster as it happens and how it impacts them. on lrp we don't break from the action, we see how it affects the station as a whole. these are both cool. imo there is value in this "i don't want the pressure of respecting character driven roleplay, i want faster paced plot driven shifts" sentiment.

[Vekter]

-snip-

I don't have much else to add here. If I were to win headmin tomorrow* I would rework the "game master" role into more of a specific events-based thing where players could be encouraged to reach out to them to help them do cool, interesting stuff as an antag as opposed to it just kind of feeling like "admin but more so". It's kind of what I wanted to accomplish with my "banning TC trades" thing in that I want players to know that a lot of admins would be more than happy to help make a neat gimmick happen if it'd keep things fresh and interesting.

Additionally,

smell of the game

(*I'm not running for headmin; you can't make me.)

[TheBibleMelts]

what rule 12?

[kinnebian]

what rule 12?

fucking legend, thanks mate