Don’t use OOC information or knowledge that your character would not reasonably be aware of just to give yourself an advantage.
In other words, don’t powergame or metagame. This mostly means things like rolling captain every round just so you can always do xenobio, or rushing into chemistry at the start of each round so you can make a suicide grenade just in case.
These rules sound great in theory, and are usually effective in most situations. However, there are certain situations were breaking these rules is in the best interests of other players and not necessarily yourself. There are two specific examples of this that I will talk about.Stay in your lane.
While you're capable of doing anything within the game mechanics, just let those who have selected the relevant job to attempt the task first. For example, breaking into medical and treating the burns you got from hacking the medical airlock would be a very strange real-life event if there are doctors literally standing there, and while a janitor mixing up some extra space cleaner is very much believable, if there are chemists working in chemistry you should consider asking them to make you your space-cleaner grenades.
1. Every fucking botanist ever
2. Paramedics and teleporters
Example 1: Botanists can do some pretty wack stuff with their job, but to DO wack stuff, they need unstable mutagen. The vast majority of botanists will simply go to tech storage and get themselves a chem dispenser board to make it with. No harm done, right? However, that breaks BOTH the above rules. It breaks the first rule because most botanists do not know molecular chemistry, and the second because that is technically the job of the chemists. But really, this doesn't negatively effect ANYONE and in the vast majority of situations only serves to better the station. (I'm not saying that bad things can't be done with mutated plants, but all in all being able to do the full extent of your job easily and readily is a good thing. This mainly serves to reinforce my second point.)
Example 2: Just recently, a paramedic player was given a week ban from medbay. Every round, he would go get the hand teleporter from the teleporter room, after asking permission from AI and/or command staff, and would use it to recover bodies that had teleporter beacons in them. This, again, is technically in violation of the above two rules. To put it bluntly, that's a hot pile of bullshit. This paramedic was banned from a job for a seven days (that's 168 hours, FYI) for doing something that made his job easier and improved the rounds of a large number of players, while having no negative effect on really, anyone at all. It's good to ban someone for powergaming if it's just to make their round better and break the immersion of the game. This paramedic was not doing either of those things, he was helping others recover from being a corpse so they could continue to enjoy the round. I would also argue that this doesn't really break immersion, either. I can't think of a reason why NT wouldn't want to use teleporting technology to aid in employee revival and care. Para was just the first guy to think of it, if anything he should be commended for that, not banned.
In short, these rules are a big pile of bullshit that are mostly effective but can lead to situations that make the game less fun for everyone. I put forward two things: either change these rules to take this into account, or ban every botanist main.
#PardonChewing2020