More Specialty Security Jobs

[DyssalC]

To be perfectly fair - and without having read four pages of replies - I believe this has come up before and was shot down with a good reason. It is not actually productive to introduce specialized roles into the regular jobs for the non-RP server. If someone would like to do a security centered gimmick where officers have roles and civilians may take up the mantle of a hall officer, be our guest, but otherwise most people would snap to the nearest general equivalent (ie. would play any of these roles as a normal officer). This especially applies to the warden - since we don't enforce people to do their jobs with the exception of officers, regulars would hate being locked to a single area for the entire round (see also: head of personnel), and the other specialty roles would lose their value.

I would say that none of these roles actually require any sort of moderation to not be played as normal security. This would be handled by the fact that they would be restricted in the same way Detective is by not giving them access to standard sec equipment. That said it's not really an issue even if they did play like normal sec as a specialty role, they'd just be worse at it. And even if the Captain/HoP gives them access to the equipment or an officer passes them gear or whatever that's pretty much the same situation as the Detective requesting standard gear when they don't have access, rude and annoying, and generally frowned upon by the player-base to the point where it'd be taboo enough that it'd deter most from doing so, with the occasional incident, similarly to how it is with Detectives.
The Warden also wouldn't have to be moderated, as they'd have two things keeping them in sec: Their ability to operate as a considerably powerful force via the Control Room, and the fact that their ID is valuable enough to have them mugged for it.

In essence it all comes down to this: Pubbie Joe connects and looks at the available late-join jobs. Pubbie Joe likes playing security, but that is not available, so he picks Hall Monitor. Pubbie Joe then proceeds to play Hall Monitor as if they were an actual proper officer. On the non-RP server, he is allowed to do this and would not be punished for playing his role improperly. Hall Monitor essentially becomes another word for powergaming security officer within 1 month and someone posts a suggestion thread about reducing the amount of special security roles because it's not fun to play against 8 security officers.

I see the idea of "somebody seeing Sec is empty and taking the specialty job to play normal sec" as a bit of a moot point. Consider how frequently that sec fills up, then think of the fact that some people will instead of taking standard sec will take a specialty role to actually play the specialty role. That seems like an incredibly unlikely scenario that, not to mention that if Sec WAS full all the standard equipment would be missing probably and the lesser sec roles like Hall Monitor wouldn't really be able to get any higher-grade sec gear and still wouldn't have brig access. They could TRY to play it like normal sec, but they really wouldn't be able to achieve much.

More realistically, somebody will pick a specialty role at round start with the intention of asking somebody for sec equipment or rushing the sec locker room to steal equipment from somebody opening a locker. I foresee that ending the same way as if a Detective did the same thing, a thorough yelling at and possible conflict between the two, resulting quite possibly in hilarity.

Also, I find people complaining about there being too many sec officers better than people complaining about there not being enough sec officers, because it's fairly easy to make a popular job less popular, but it's difficult to make an unpopular job more popular, which is the point of this idea. I've observed sec being empty/full of brain dead people quite frequently, and I've talked to others who have seen the same thing, and when I played fairly regularly I also recall experiencing the exact same thing constantly, while traitors went on quiet rampages for 60 minutes until they eventually called the shuttle because they were the only one left.

One might argue Detective is in there. The detective almost never does his assigned job, forensics is and has always been sort of a joke, and when he is not actually passing out from being drunk at his desk or in the bar, he is played as if he was security proper. Let's face it, the only reason he's kept around is *monologue and the fact that someone does a pretty good noir impression once every 6 months.

One might also argue forensics is definitely not a joke. I've seen/done a lot of good Detective work with the Forensics scanner, and it's fun to track people down with it. Also, the difference between the specialty roles (besides Hall Monitor) and the Detective that you bring up here is that the Detective isn't actually sec according to so many things that have been said, and Detective's that play as sec are frequently complained about because of this, so much so that it actually deters most people from doing this.

Besides this all, I don't think it's productive to introduce any kind of hierarchy into the publicly available security roles. It is already bad enough when a new player plays captain and decides he is the all-powerful ruler of security, now imagine that except with two other powertripping people taking the higher hierarchy roles and no HoS being present. It's chaotic and not in a good way.

I would assume the Hierarchy idea comes from the Warden. That's fair I suppose. The simple fix is of course to not give the Warden riot access and take away his equipment access. It'd be reasonably clear then that the Warden isn't meant to be a leader position but instead a support position, and it'd get the idea across that they aren't meant to be an out-and-about officer, but they'd still be well armed with a riot shotgun and a single reload, more than capable of defending himself in the event of an attack on security.