/tg/Station 13

In a nutshell:
Make the curator a mentor role that allows experienced players to help teach new players hows to play SS13.

Outside of a nutshell:
The curtor is an unpopular role, few players choose it, and many who do choose it just greytide like an assistant anyway. There is little to do if you do decide to play the role as the library is hardly visited, and nearly never visited for books; the newscaster is barley read either. Curators are only useful in admin launched devil rounds (which are very rare).
New players have a large barrier to entry, I know there are fantastic guides on the wiki, but not all players are willing to go through countless pages of wiki, and some don't know its there. We can all agree that rounds can be chaos, people can't often be trusted, heads can be absent or useless and that the whole experience can be intimidating.

It seems like it would be a good idea to give the curator the role of mentioning new players, showing them how to play, explain what is happening and being there for players of any experience to help with their questions. The curator will help new crew and generally make things easier for inexperienced players, a safe place for new players to learn.
This will lower the barrier of entry for new players, possibly bring more players to the game and increasing the quality of new or confused crew, while giving the curator a friendly new role and experienced players a way to give back and help the newbies.

The curator would need some licence from the admins to OOC IC, this is necessary to help new players from the ground up (But to an extent, no overdoing OOC IC but this will be up to the admin at the time to decide if its too far).
I don't see why the curator, should a player wish, be stopped from their other roles of journalist, librarian or satan slayer.
As for other changes, the wiki would have to be updated, and there would need to be a MOTD message telling players about this change.

Saying this as an admin not a maintainer but you can easily OOC in IC "legally" (by me at least) by prefixing your control assistance with "If this was a game".


IE If this was a game you'd 'click' the item while it's in your hand.

We're usually pretty lenient when the IC/OOC is meant to help a player learn controls.

Remember Librarian, and how it was an unpopular role, so it was changed to Curator? I remember suggesting changing him into Reporter instead. But I digress.

"hmm, librarian is too boring, people who don't want to rp pick the rp job and get mad. how can we make it more fun?"
"let's give it a cool name, like curator"
"good idea, but how do we make people who pick the rp role who didn't expect rp have fun?"
"hmmm, well, the chaplain has a weapon to defend themself from cults..."
"good idea! let's give the librarian a weapon, to defend himself from not being able to validhunt!"

I think this could be a nice responsibility to add to the curator job. This game has an incredibly steep learning curve and mentoring new players could help with retaining them.

OK this could be neat, and I see a way it could work really well... that would require massive amounts of efforts on the part of mappers and thus not likely to happen... but here goes.

What if... the holodeck and VR got merged with the library so that your mentor/curator guy could fire up different stuff on the holodeck to teach various things to new players, or have VR combat runs with them to show them combat and such, or have other VR programs to teach other aspects... and maybe only the curator gets access to load programs on the holodeck, or has the floppy disks with each program in his back room at least.

These are neat ideas, but I feel like the whole thing will fall apart when a traitor just bursts into the tutorial and guns everyone down. That would probably lead to more frustration than simply being killed while sitting in tool storage working out the inventory. Generally, "tutorials" are supposed to be mostly-safe learning areas where the actual deadly parts of the game don't show their heads. This is, of course, under the assumption that Curator is removed from being an antag themselves in the first place.

I still think a better system would be mentors and a "mentorhelp" button, where players who are mentors and also dead/observing could give advice or help out with something when asked.

DrunkenMatey wrote:OK this could be neat, and I see a way it could work really well... that would require massive amounts of efforts on the part of mappers and thus not likely to happen... but here goes.

What if... the holodeck and VR got merged with the library so that your mentor/curator guy could fire up different stuff on the holodeck to teach various things to new players, or have VR combat runs with them to show them combat and such, or have other VR programs to teach other aspects... and maybe only the curator gets access to load programs on the holodeck, or has the floppy disks with each program in his back room at least.

This seams neat, perhaps simply the curator has 3VR sleepers in the back and a console that just changes the VR program from the ones we already have/will have in the future.

zxaber wrote:These are neat ideas, but I feel like the whole thing will fall apart when a traitor just bursts into the tutorial and guns everyone down. That would probably lead to more frustration than simply being killed while sitting in tool storage working out the inventory. Generally, "tutorials" are supposed to be mostly-safe learning areas where the actual deadly parts of the game don't show their heads. This is, of course, under the assumption that Curator is removed from being an antag themselves in the first place.

I still think a better system would be mentors and a "mentorhelp" button, where players who are mentors and also dead/observing could give advice or help out with something when asked.

Perhaps, I hope that most crew aren't dickish enough to purposefully kill someone teaching a new person, especially if they know that is their role. This could be a small near instant change (basically changing the job description slightly and letting players know) that could work until a full mentor system is sorted?

confused rock wrote:"hmm, librarian is too boring, people who don't want to rp pick the rp job and get mad. how can we make it more fun?"
"let's give it a cool name, like curator"
"good idea, but how do we make people who pick the rp role who didn't expect rp have fun?"
"hmmm, well, the chaplain has a weapon to defend themself from cults..."
"good idea! let's give the librarian a weapon, to defend himself from not being able to validhunt!"

but... this isn't giving the curator weapons. Having the curator (a man of great learning and knowledge) teach new hires makes sense in a RP way. This wouldn't force players who play curator to be a mentor every round either.