09-15-2023, 04:37 PM
(09-15-2023, 03:02 PM)Paai Wrote:Quote: It gives me the opportunity to roleplay with someone who is usually just rolling away at lightspeed unless I need to be silently automendered and beeped at.I don't think that's really a fair justification for arbitrarily restricting something-- in my experience, forced interaction in that way (something that will need to be done at least once a round, every round, and is arbitrary for one player but physically impossible for the asker) never ever gives good roleplay or interaction.
This is something I'd like to highlight again as well. I have briefly discussed this when arguing in favor for clothing booths being inoperatable by cyborgs (which I think is astronomically silly), to which the response was "just ask a human to do it" as well. It's honestly a really, genuinely bad choice to force people to have to roleplay something routinely. Because they won't, ever.
Is it cute to have to ask someone to help you out with someone, every once a while, through emergent gameplay? Such as an Engineer for repairs, or a Scientist for chems? Absolutely. Is it fun to have to do this every round, oftentimes at the same time, with the same people? No. It gets monotonous really quickly. Oh, hey, here's a borg dragging a box behind them, I wonder if they'll ask me to remove an item from it so they can put on their clothes to actually start their RP properly.
What usually turns into a cool roleplay session with someone, is now reduced to a mindless activity, of where everybody doesn't even bother talking, because people kind of know already what everyone wants. Even the idea behind "You have to roleplay with your roboticist to change parts" has been reduced to "Alright, you know the drill, everybody print your parts and form your piles". And this isn't a knock on the people, mind you, like I said, everyone's trying their best to make due with what you have to put up with.
People will roleplay when they want to, god knows the game has enough opportunities for this. I genuinely don't think we need to arbitrarily increase the amount of forced interaction, especially on minute, low-effort tasks like this. The cyborg design philosophy may have started as "cyborgs need humans for everything", but if a lot of cyborg players, as in, the people actually consistently having to put up with these decisions don't like it, I don't understand why they can't be tossed a bone.
When humans have to deal with a weird, annoying feature, someone makes a new tool/machine or patches it in a way where everyone's glad that we have streamlined it, but for some reason when it comes to cyborgs, this is often treated as gospel to leave it as an inconvenience.