The Role of Security and Antagonists on RP Servers

[jan.antilles]

TLDR:
Everyone treated at the same level respective to their role (You are RP'ing a job, dont do things you wouldn't do irl in that job)
Rule tweaks/enforcement
Repeated grey-area aggressors should be dealt with

I get why Sec is held to a higher standard than other jobs. Our entire role and kit is focused on interacting with other players in an interfering way, from handcuffs and TicketMaster to our loadouts. Other jobs like, for instance, Hydroponics don't have the same access to disruptive tools than we do, so they aren't given the same level of scrutiny and that's okay.

But I agree on the issue that all *players* should be held to a higher standard, since we've chosen to play on the roleplaying server. I know Bill in particular has stated and reiterated that "our RP expectation is 'please try'" and on the one hand I agree... I don't want to raise the barrier to entry for roleplaying. But on the other hand, some people have come over with the expectation that RP is "main with more talking" and that's not the culture that we've tried to create here.

I know that admins *do* deal with repeated-gray-area aggressors. I have seen it happen. I appreciate that the general attitude is to try to help people improve rather than giving them the boot. The problem right now is that the pressure on RPers, especially Sec RP, is coming from multiple angles and it's creating a difficult atmosphere for them to have fun doing their job.

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I think one of the biggest problems I see is that we maybe have some different groups of people "talking at different frequencies", if you will. Some people treat RP like it's LRP, some people treat it like it's MRP; maybe neither are right, but what you end up with are different groups of players with totally different expectations. Extended mode is boring for people who don't want to flesh out a character like MRP folks might. Getting the station bombed with a canbomb, or being yoinked into space by a teleport gun without an individual word to you by whoever's doing it might pass for LRP folks but frustrate others. I just want clarity, I guess, in really what RP is or isn't.

This is a really difficult sticking point, I think.

When I first started playing (in June, lol) RP was just getting to the point where having 27 people was high population, and there was no RP overflow. The tone, as I remember it, was much more patient and measured. Then the Tide happened, and it has been FANTASTIC for Goon RP. We have two servers now! TWO!! But the difficult part of that meteoric rise has been that the tone of RP has changed.

Over the past month or two, the general perception I've had was that RP1 was low-mid RP, and RPO was mid RP. People who wanted fast-paced rounds that still had RP structure and expectations and higher pop would go to RP1, and people who wanted the patient measured RP of the pre-Tide days would go to RPO. The problem is that this started a perception that the RP on RPO was "better" than RP1, and that RP1 was "Main but no wiz/nukies and please eat/drink." Neither of these was helpful, so we've mostly done away with them, but now that the Tide is starting to decline, RPO is getting to the point where it's... not even fair to call it "low pop" anymore; it's nearly dead. So now those of us who deeply love the patient environment are playing on RP1, and the culture shock is real.

This may seem off-topic, but I think it's an important piece of the problem: what do we want RP to look like on Goonstation? When we eventually condense down to one server (sniff, sob), what do we want that server to look/feel like in terms of pacing and expectation?

A lot of this is going to be player driven, obviously. We are the ones farting in space. But I think it's also a good idea to get some sort of information from the admins about what the expectation from The Powers That Be is for RP, so that we can at least all be working toward the same goals.