The Clown Paradigm

[BaneOfGiygas]

I'm not trying to encourage beating random people senseless, but you need to know what to expect. that colorful suit makes you a walking bullseye, and clowns are supposed to be obnoxious to the crew, enough that some might want to get revenge. if you want to do wacky gimmicks with less savage beatings, be a borg or assistant

The overall point I'm trying to make is that clowns should not spend every waking moment of their shift in fear that someone is going to murder them, beat them up, steal their stuff, or whatever else for no other reason than because they decided to give clowning a try. And why should the staff assistant or the cyborg get a better treatment than the clown, simply because they're not clowns?

I know that the line between permissible shenanigans and being a douchenozzle is very thin and very blurry in these instancez, but quite a few players don't even seem to acknowledge the line at all. Hell, someone even explicitly told me that being a clown means getting a free pass for griefing, which is sure as hell not true and is, in fact, specifically stated as not true in the wiki. I really like the job of the clown and I want to try it out more whenever possible, but if unwarranted assault, theft, and murder is what I consistently find, I'll be too intimidated to dare go another round. That's the scenario I foresee happening, and while there are definitely souls braver than I, this will lead to clowns becoming a rapidly dying race.

And a space station without a clown is a sad space station.