(Proposal) Rule 4 & 5 changes

[TheBibleMelts]

Bottom post of the previous page:

hello, my name is thebiblemelts and i am a registered streamer. i want to use this title and affluence to change rule 4 and 5 to the following, with the intent to keep antagonist related policy to rule 4, and let rule 5 be the rule where we put crewbased standards of conduct. rule 4 itself won't be changing much at all with this proposal, but rule 5 will be changed pretty significantly with its intent and the standards it enforces on players who seek to be THE BOSS.

i'd like rule 4 to change to

4. Lone antagonists have freedom from (most) crewmember rules.
With the exception of metagaming/comms, bug/exploit abuse, erotic/creepy stuff, OOC in IC or IC in OOC, or spawn-camping arrivals, solo antagonists may pursue any goals they wish, in any way they wish. Crewmembers may similarly handle antagonists in any way they wish, but are not allowed to pre-emptively search for, hinder or otherwise seek conflict with antagonists without reasonable cause to do so. Team antagonists can do as they wish as per lone antagonists, but their actions should neither harm their teams efforts, nor willingly allow the goals of the team to be stopped through inaction. Emulating an antagonist by action or outfit puts you at risk of being treated as one.

with the new set of precedents listed being

Non-antagonists are allowed to assist antagonists with good IC reasoning, but assisting an antagonist doesn't mean you get a pass on acting like one. If in doubt, ask an admin if a particular action is okay. Depending on the level of assistance, sufficient IC reasoning could be simply treating everyone who goes into medbay regardless of them being a murderer or not, all the way to being threatened under pain of death by an antagonist to do something.

The relationship between xeno queen and xeno is treated the same as malf AI and borg, and are considered team antagonists for the purpose of main rule 4. Xenos should prioritize following the directions of their queen where possible.

Ghosting out mid-conversion, going AFK, suiciding, or logging off when converted to a team antagonist position can result in warnings from an admin; extending to bans for repeated behaviour. This extends to when Command/Security mindshield implants an individual to their side in said modes. Let an admin know if you cannot or do not want to play any of the above mentioned roles. Admins will attempt to transfer the role to someone else. Obviously, if an admin does so for a player, the player must not use knowledge of that antagonist position existing.

and then, for the real meat of this proposal, the great EnHeadening. rule 5 would be as follows.

5. Players in vital job roles require a minimum amount of effort.

As a Head of Staff, you should be a reliable worker for your department, and are expected to perform the minimum duties of that role to the best of your ability. As an upside, being THE BOSS allows you to dictate the workflow of your department as you like, so long as you are reasonable - and have the ability to demote staff who do not comply, with similar protections that security is afforded for valid arrests. Notify admins if you must leave near round start, and make an attempt to inform other players IC as well for Command or AI roles.

with the rule 5 precedents being changed as follows

that's right, i got rid of all the goddamn rule 5 precedents. they're baked into rule 4&5 now. less bloat and cross-reference for everybody.

head of staff players should have more unquestioned control and authority over their departments, they are THE GODDAMN BOSS, and as such should also probably be the one dude you should be able to rely on, and set an 'example' for their employees.

[Cheshify]

in a well-balanced competitive game

TGstation is neither well balanced nor competitive, and should remain that way. This is a roleplaying funny space game, and policy is how we broadly direct roleplay.

Our goal is to broadly direct Roleplay away from people thinking this is supposed to be well balanced and competitive.

[sinfulbliss]

The paternalistic mindset of “we know best,” and then following that up with forced rulesets to set in motion your selective view of the game, at the expense of literally everyone and anyone who disagrees with that view of the game, is a bad way to handle policy.

If you prefer MRP, then that’s fine, but deciding LRP doesn’t have enough roleplay as someone who prefers MRP is obviously operating in a biased manner. The opinions of LRP players and admins should matter more than the private goals of a couple people. That’s what the playervote is supposed to represent.

[Vekter]

The paternalistic mindset of “we know best,” and then following that up with forced rulesets to set in motion your selective view of the game, at the expense of literally everyone and anyone who disagrees with that view of the game, is a bad way to handle policy.

If you prefer MRP, then that’s fine, but deciding LRP doesn’t have enough roleplay as someone who prefers MRP is obviously operating in a biased manner. The opinions of LRP players and admins should matter more than the private goals of a couple people. That’s what the playervote is supposed to represent.

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but headmins get to dictate the way the rules are written, not you. Their decisions aren't automatically bad because you dislike them. The game has slowly slid away from players expecting RP whatsoever over the last few years and this term wants to shift it back towards the way things were. As long as you're not running around saying four lines a round and killing people randomly, you'll be fine.

One of the reasons headmins are elected is so that players have a say in how things are run by voting for people who represent their desires for the game in general. This is why they have the power to determine how policy is changed and updated during their terms. It is literally impossible to please everyone, and if a smaller subset of players who enjoy the game without RP are going to be upset by it, that's a sacrifice that'll have to happen. Any change is going to come at the expense of at least one person who thinks it's a bad idea. That person, unfortunately, is you.

[sinfulbliss]

As long as you're not running around saying four lines a round and killing people randomly, you'll be fine.

Or not helping your team as a cultist, or not arresting tiders as a seccie, or breaking into departments to empower yourself as a crewmember, or not following any of the new rules.

It is literally impossible to please everyone, and if a smaller subset of players who enjoy the game without RP are going to be upset by it, that's a sacrifice that'll have to happen. Any change is going to come at the expense of at least one person who thinks it's a bad idea. That person, unfortunately, is you.

Try 90% of the LRP community, or around 200 people.
I fail to understand why someone like yourself who has played zero rounds on LRP in the past several years, would be on a mission to fundamentally change the rules of the server and go to bat for the cause. A cause you will never actually feel the effects of. It feels like trying to micromanage people from the sidelines in some weirdly paternalistic way.

Of course making changes to policies involve some people being dissatisfied. That’s part of being a headmin, and it’s within their right. But if the overwhelming majority of a server, which you hardly play, is against it, that should be heard.

[Vekter]

As long as you're not running around saying four lines a round and killing people randomly, you'll be fine.

Or not helping your team as a cultist, or not arresting tiders as a seccie, or breaking into departments to empower yourself as a crewmember, or not following any of the new rules.

It is literally impossible to please everyone, and if a smaller subset of players who enjoy the game without RP are going to be upset by it, that's a sacrifice that'll have to happen. Any change is going to come at the expense of at least one person who thinks it's a bad idea. That person, unfortunately, is you.

Try 90% of the LRP community, or around 200 people.
I fail to understand why someone like yourself who has played zero rounds on LRP in the past several years, would be on a mission to fundamentally change the rules of the server and go to bat for the cause. A cause you will never actually feel the effects of. It feels like trying to micromanage people from the sidelines in some weirdly paternalistic way.

Of course making changes to policies involve some people being dissatisfied. That’s part of being a headmin, and it’s within their right. But if the overwhelming majority of a server, which you hardly play, is against it, that should be heard.

If 200 people disagreed with both Fikou and Chesh's platforms, they wouldn't have been elected.

[sinfulbliss]

If 200 people disagreed with both Fikou and Chesh's platforms, they wouldn't have been elected.

I’m obviously referring to the policies.

[Higgin]

in a well-balanced competitive game

TGstation is neither well balanced nor competitive, and should remain that way. This is a roleplaying funny space game, and policy is how we broadly direct roleplay.

Our goal is to broadly direct Roleplay away from people thinking this is supposed to be well balanced and competitive.

I get that it evokes an unpleasantly sweaty and bare conception of the experience to say that it's competitive, but it is.

The rules - the policy - and the 'rules of the road' set by dynamic create antags that do not care about narratives, persistence, or storytelling outside the narrow margins of the round. They create stories about how somebody kills somebody else, steals the supermatter shard, and survives the round as nuclear operatives/changelings/space carp come blasting through the hull. Most of this is mediated through mechanics and chaos. Policy proposes to limit some of that, but it's still the 'base' of what is assumed to be going on in any round, with an imperfect forecast set by the threat advisory.

Policy that says antags can basically do what they want with some limits and a great deal of grace around objectives (a far development from when we used to explicitly consider antag as rule 1 immunity and a license to grief) create the roles of antagonists, crew, heroes, villains, people who you aren't sure of, and spiteful, careless threats. They create challenges around whether or not you live or die or get caught out - 'how' you do the thing, not 'what' you do, because 'what' you can do is very limited in the short timeframe of the round that doesn't extend into some cross-round relationships or rely on cross-round trust to succeed.

The roleplaying game around these competitive dynamics needs to be fun, or the dynamic needs to be fundamentally less competitive.

If you're going to have a competitive game, it needs to be well-balanced, or have some semblance of balance, because people don't generally like to show up if they're only ever going to be guaranteed to play the role of Dead Body #17 at the hands of Antag #4.

If you're going to have a less competitive game, it needs to set some sort of correspondence between what your antags do (if you're even going to have them) and what your non-antags are there for. Some people find this between each other in character melodramas, gimmicks, projects, etc. - funnily enough, though, this is very seldom strictly dependent on antagonism. It usually happens in spite of antagonism. There has to be something there to answer to the fantasies of all the necessary parties.

When the fantasy for everything Dynamic spends threat on is, or might as well be, going sicko mode? If you want to sustain that, you've got to increasingly either let everyone go sicko mode (oops! all antags! on lowpop is a good example) or give the people on the other end some credible way to clap back - which basically means that you've got to balance it as a competitive game in order for it to be a healthy, well-functioning roleplaying game when the roles set out by your game design are functionally competitive.



I guess what this is to ask is: "what sort of roleplay are we after having here, and how do we square away situations where people frequently find themselves put in the role of trash mobs for people in the role of antagonists except by putting them in an environment where their competitive choices actually matter to that outcome?"

We're not selecting antagonists or threats based on the experience they offer to the other side. If we're not going to be competitive (which a lot of the playerbase is more fine with us being,) how do you move towards selecting fairly on cooperative fun instead?

[GPeckman]

As long as you're not running around saying four lines a round and killing people randomly, you'll be fine.

Or not helping your team as a cultist, or not arresting tiders as a seccie, or breaking into departments to empower yourself as a crewmember, or not following any of the new rules.

It is literally impossible to please everyone, and if a smaller subset of players who enjoy the game without RP are going to be upset by it, that's a sacrifice that'll have to happen. Any change is going to come at the expense of at least one person who thinks it's a bad idea. That person, unfortunately, is you.

Try 90% of the LRP community, or around 200 people.
I fail to understand why someone like yourself who has played zero rounds on LRP in the past several years, would be on a mission to fundamentally change the rules of the server and go to bat for the cause. A cause you will never actually feel the effects of. It feels like trying to micromanage people from the sidelines in some weirdly paternalistic way.

Of course making changes to policies involve some people being dissatisfied. That’s part of being a headmin, and it’s within their right. But if the overwhelming majority of a server, which you hardly play, is against it, that should be heard.

If 200 people disagreed with both Fikou and Chesh's platforms, they wouldn't have been elected.

In fairness, I don't see anything about changes to LRP rules on either of their platforms, so it doesn't follow that the people who voted for them wanted this change.

[CPTANT]

A botanist should not be getting bwoinked for simply growing holymelons and should not have to have any reason whatsoever. They are a botanist growing plants, that is your reason.

Up through (3) ought to be allowed, since they’re not yet being used to hinder any antags, and there is no powergaming rule on LRP. (4) should be allowed even with no sign of cult or heretics so long as it’s not done regularly. Beyond that IMO you’d need hard evidence of magic antags, although I could see even up to (6) being kosher if you don’t make it an every-round thing. Of course I’m not an admin and this is just how I think it ought to be treated

I know you think it's tantamount to torture under the Geneva Convention to be contacted by an admin, but most players are reasonable and understand that sometimes we might have questions about something that's going on in the round.

I would appreciate your patience in matters like this.

At the same time it is hard to tell the difference when being bwoinked between. "I am just asking a question." and "I went an essay on why your actions were justified or I will ban you right now". In general this makes getting bwoinked an unpleasant experience because you never know if you are being interrogated or not.

[TheLoLSwat]

A botanist should not be getting bwoinked for simply growing holymelons and should not have to have any reason whatsoever. They are a botanist growing plants, that is your reason.

Up through (3) ought to be allowed, since they’re not yet being used to hinder any antags, and there is no powergaming rule on LRP. (4) should be allowed even with no sign of cult or heretics so long as it’s not done regularly. Beyond that IMO you’d need hard evidence of magic antags, although I could see even up to (6) being kosher if you don’t make it an every-round thing. Of course I’m not an admin and this is just how I think it ought to be treated

I know you think it's tantamount to torture under the Geneva Convention to be contacted by an admin, but most players are reasonable and understand that sometimes we might have questions about something that's going on in the round.

I would appreciate your patience in matters like this.

At the same time it is hard to tell the difference when being bwoinked between. "I am just asking a question." and "I went an essay on why your actions were justified or I will ban you right now". In general this makes getting bwoinked an unpleasant experience because you never know if you are being interrogated or not.

This is real, you have to prepare a dissertation whenever you get bwoinked because you don’t know if you’ll need it or not

[TheBibleMelts]

thread's gone cold. if anybody wishes to raise an issue with this or continue the topic, let me know or make a new thread.