(Could we tone down the amount of personal insults and attacks? If people want to disagree then by all means feel free, but we can at the very least try to be civilized about it.)
TheTerbs wrote:The main point of the game is fucking paranoia
Space Station 13 is not just a simple mafia game where the point is to figure out who's "dat fukken traiter". It's an important aspect of it, but not it's sole defining feature; It's also a roleplaying game, a simulation game, and has tons of other characteristics beyond "mafia on a space station".
Even if it
was purely a mafia game where you're supposed to be paranoid,
this does not exclude the possibility of having trustworthy roles. There are plenty of examples of mafia games that have roles you can trust, or are "antagproof" as we call it. A recent example would be Mush, who has one crew member that is guaranteed to not be infected and cannot at all be converted by the game's antagonists; She is always on the crew's side, no matter what. Antagproof roles like this work out because of one reason: Trust is a two-way street, and just because you have a person that you can trust completely, doesn't neccessarily mean that that person can trust you
back.
While people can trust security (at least as far as not being antags, even if they might be shitcurity), security cannot themselves trust anyone. Who's to say that that assistant being attacked by the guy with the esword isn't actually the traitor and just had his esword disarmed and taken by the guy he was trying to attack? Adding antagproof roles to a game like this doesn't automatically remove all the paranoia forever, especially since the antagproof players themselves generally find that they have to be more paranoid than anyone else.
And finally, yes, there
is such a thing as too much paranoia. A very, very important aspect of the game is player interaction. Making people sufficiently paranoid is just going to make them stop interacting with other people, which is the
opposite of what we want.