Destiny & RP on Goonstation

[Frank_Stein]

Traits are probably pretty good, but whole motivations make me suspicious. Giving people prompts doesn't always give them a lot of room for their schtick to evolve, and it makes it really easy to stick to the comfortable guideline material, which isn't fun. I also think it's a bad idea to put too much force of law behind them because that means people will be super reluctant to get out of their comfort zone. This is a thing that worries me about RP servers in general.

This is my perspective and you shouldn't trust it. A lot of SS13's humor is about coming up with twisted deviations on stock characters and stock plots. You don't really want to fall into the trap of just having stock characters and stock plots, which is what happens when your humor is completely formulaic. A gag has a setup and a punchline and SS13 makes it really hard to engineer the setup for a gag (hence stock plot). So if you feed people punchlines and there isn't any setup (or the setup is stock characterization and a stock plot) you're basically guaranteeing you get meme-level humor.

Example: most of the things I like (e.g. borg laws, miscreant traits) are setup tools, while punchlines like bees, robobutts, bible farts and poo all turned into unfunny memes really fast. There are probably funny things people could have done with those things but if you're going for a specific punchline things are way too frenetic to set things up for it in a funny way. (being impatient and worried things won't go your way is why Portal fans have always been so unfunny) Stimulating gag setup so people can come up with their own punchlines when it's time will probably result in funnier spacemen.

Nah, I definitely wouldn't want people to feel pigeonholed, so it's definitely something that should be open ended and optional. I'm just a guy that roleplays better with a bit of structure. So a randomized adjective "Sloppy" or "Patient" would help give me some direction when I don't feel like inventing a unique gimmick while still being open to interpretation between different players.