Bottom post of the previous page:
I made a thread about this last headmin term and never received a strict answer as it faded into autolock territory, and current experience makes me believe it's still a point worth pursuing so here we go again.I believe it would be overall beneficial for the MRP servers at least for the station heads of staff roles to be protected (I.E incompatible with rolling any antagonists except obsessed). Mothblocks likes to remind me that many things beneficial to MRP also apply to LRP, but I'm not confident enough to say that for sure here, and in fact I personally disagree that it would be good for LRP servers the way I believe it would be good for MRP. So for LRP I'll leave it to others to decide if my points apply to all servers or just the Manuel and Campbell.
1. Heads of staff as antagonists tend towards much simpler and less interesting styles of antag play - Heads of staff are empowered with significantly increased access to both station locations and equipment from roundstart, as well as a greatly increased degree of soft power in terms of their authority under the chain of command. This leads towards heads of staff antagonists having a significantly easier time completing their objectives by simply ignoring interaction with the rest of the round in favour of quickly and easily acquiring completed objectives to even further empower themselves.
2. The MRP rules attempt to bolster the oftentimes questionable authority of the heads of staff, with an aim towards improving immersion and having the chain of command carry some IC meaning beyond "big doctor/scientist/engineer with more stuff". The existence of heads of staff antagonists undermines this intent - it's oftentimes very hard to stay in your lane and trust your boss when there's a decent chance they're out to sabotage the station, murder you or steal from you or others. Telling your boss to shove off because they're incompetent is a sacred right, but less conflict between OOC metaknowledge and the IC starting expectation that you want to keep your job would be nice.
3. Acting captain antagonists are terrible to play with, and there exists no current mechanism to dynamically protect head roles based on their position in the captain hierarchy when rounds lack a captain and auto promote a head. This has been the case for as long as I've been playing at least, but has become a significantly greater issue with the advent of the autopromotion announcement often making antagonists into round acknowledged "basically the captain". In the absence of any current method to stop that from happening, and for the other reasons above, I believe it would be an overall benefit to protect head roles and exclude them from antagonists on MRP.
Since I've seen this argument float around before and a couple of counterarguments have already been made, I'll include some pre-rebuttal to the more common counterarguments I see.
Paranoia is an important part of the game and adding more roles to the protected list harms this pillar
In my experience, there is a finite amount of paranoia you can cram into a round before people begin to simply automatically exclude trusting others as a workable option and choose to simply prepare themselves to be able to meet every possible challenge solo as no one else can ever be trusted. That kind of gameplay style runs directly counter to the interaction focused experience we aim for on MRP (to varying degrees of success, sadly), and as such I do not believe that cutting down on this particular source of personal paranoia would be a net negative for the game as a whole, especially given the increased story value of having personal pillars exist to be torn down - rounds where individual heads of staff are trustworthy and competent and then are suddenly disappeared by enemies of the corporation are already potent story generators, shifting increased value onto the chain of command thus further enhances RPR 3 by making heads of staff an increasingly inherently worthwhile target for traitors and other antagonists looking to disrupt the station.
It's hard enough to get people to play heads of staff already why would you want to disincentivise their play further by limiting antag opportunities?
Roundstart job rolling is done in a tiered system where higher priority rolls complete first and after they are assigned lower priority rolls take place. Currently to the best of my knowledge this system rolls Antagonists -> Heads of Staff -> Normal Jobs. As such if head roles were added to the protected list their players would not disadvantage themselves when it comes to standard rolls for antagonist - If they rolled an antag they'd be shunted off to another role other than a head, they would not lose the antag roll.