Destiny & RP on Goonstation

[Haine]

The cross-server bans thing sounds scarier than it is, I think. We don't ban people 24/7 for their first rule infractions, we ban people who show a solid background of breaking the rules over and over and with no intent or ability to change, or if they're clearly just there to fuck around and grief. It'll be no different on Destiny.

[Psyentific]

Point 1: The worst thing anyone can do is take the game too seriously. This can manifest in a number of different ways (ex. play to win, antag hunt/vigilante, rules lawyering, playstyle police)
Point 2: As long as people are having fun, everything is okay. If some person is detrimental to the fun, they will be removed.
Point 3: Roleplaying is good. It adds depth and emotional investment and tends to increase net fun.
Point 4: Activities that disrupt lighthearted roleplay tend to be the ones that are disruptive overall, and can be handled through conventional administration. See point 1.
>Corollary 4: A lighthearted roleplaying environment requires no unusual rules or administration, and trying to encourage them this way is iffy at best. Codifying 'good' and 'bad' RP is difficult and imposing playstyles on players is a terrible thing to do.
Point 5: Scenarios that disrupt serious roleplay tend to be the ones that exemplify Space Station 13 (ex. Clown has a bomb).
>Corollary 5: Space Station 13 is a terrible place for serious roleplaying.

Banning people for bad roleplay is a very slippery slope; what constitutes good and bad roleplay is entirely subjective, even if agreed upon by a significant portion of the community. Removing people from the server because some group of people doesn't like them is something that belongs on reality TV, not 2d spacemen. We have the rules, they are adequate. Pretending to be a silly spaceman requires no additional consideration in the rules. If it really comes down to it, it would probably be best to discourage bad players through informal channels - Prodding people onto the other servers, as it were.

[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.

[BaneOfGiygas]

The thing is, there's a difference between flat-out just not roleplaying well and being a colossal douchelord and messing with the entire flow of the game for absolutely zero adequate reason. The former is unlikely to be bred from malice and is instead just the reuslt of someone without much experience in a thing trying to do a thing. The latter has no such justification, and should be what gets a smack with the ban.

Basically, people who just don't really know what they're doing shouldn't get smacked with a ban right away; they should instead be talked to, given an explanation of the rules/guidelines and why the thing they did wasn't the right thing to do, and sent on their merry way. If they continue to do bad things and it's made explicitly clear that they are fully aware of their actions and still don't give a shit, that's when the bans should start being handed out.

Furthermore, speaking as someone who's RP'd in multiple different scenarios for a few years now, the single most important thing that needs to be established for this to work is admin consistency and transparency on the standards of good roleplaying. As stated before, yes, such matters are inherently subjective and prone to alteration by way of personal opinion and experience, but the rules on that front need to be clearly laid out and need to be acted upon as a single, cohesive whole. The Goonstation adminbase is, as per its reputation, diverse to a quite astounding degree in terms of general playstyle, opinion on certain things, the ratio of shenanigans to business, and so on. If that trend continues into Destiny, it'll no doubt absolutely murder the enjoyability of the experience, as the rules in such a game cannot afford to be wildly changed depending on which admin's poking their head in that day.

[UrsulaMejor]

I've never seen someone banned on a first offense unless they were completely incorrigible. Why would the RP server be any different?

If you are a repeated shitlord on one server, you're going to be a repeated shitlord on every server.

[Psyentific]

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.

Some kind of ad-lib, template or random roll chart would definitely be helpful in making roleplay accessible. Even if it's something as simple as a list of adjectives (ex. friendly, incompetent) and instructions to pick three, it'd giving newer roleplayers something to go off of and experienced roleplayers a starting point.

The Goonstation adminbase is, as per its reputation, diverse to a quite astounding degree in terms of general playstyle, opinion on certain things, the ratio of shenanigans to business, and so on. If that trend continues into Destiny, it'll no doubt absolutely murder the enjoyability of the experience, as the rules in such a game cannot afford to be wildly changed depending on which admin's poking their head in that day.

The simple solution would be to seperate roleplay from rules. So long as it doesn't violate the community-wide rules I don't think it should be the admins (or anyone else's) business to police what people pretend to be. Down that road lies madness.

[Mageziya]

I mainly brought up the cross-server ban issued because, based off of the rules and incidents I've seen from other servers, I'm used to RP servers being draconian shit-holes that put immersion above fun and will ban you over improper role-play. That's the impression I got from the brief time I examined RP servers and it's left me bitter ever since.

Goon always had valued fun over most other things, and seeing that ideology carry over to the RP server is comforting. Honestly this server is sounding like less of a RP server and more of just a Goon server with the chaos turned way down, which is a good thing for some people. I personally love the chaos and discord, because I've be dealing with 2-D spessmen long enough that the variance in said chaos is what keeps me interested.

This will be interesting to see happen.

[Psyentific]

I mainly brought up the cross-server ban issued because, based off of the rules and incidents I've seen from other servers, I'm used to RP servers being draconian shit-holes that put immersion above fun and will ban you over improper role-play. That's the impression I got from the brief time I examined RP servers and it's left me bitter ever since.

The greatest tragedy of SS13 is these servers; For people to discover this wonderful game we've got, but completely miss the point of it all.

[Fishanchips]

If you can't read rules you can't read rules, if you can't follow rules you can't follow rules. That's the bottom line. You aren't gonna be asked much on the RP server, A lot of stuff is going to be player moderated and nudged by guidelines. Nobody is going to get banned for being Stilty McGenericman, Nobody is going to get banned for acting like a total spaz. The goal here is to promote people doing jobs and interacting more colorfully. On a departmental AND personal basis. it's about trying to eradicate this whole notion of "winning"; going supercop vigilante on motherfuckers with a bunch of pilfered gear and spacing everyone with a suspicious PDA. It's about clearing up all this player apathy that's so popular on the main server. There is no RPing incorrectly, there's just being a fun destroying asshole. While #4 finds it's fun in blowing up the station and killing everyone and everything as efficiently as possible in a glorious spray of blood, piss, and bile, Destiny is for people who find fun in interacting with each other without being afraid of being toolboxed to death if they open their speak window, it's about putting peoples creative gimmicks on a pedestal and rewarding them for their inventiveness, not their sick frags and KDR, bro. Doesn't matter the gimmick, it could be Princess Floppy Gumball from Unicorn Island trying to sell glasses full of piss to people to fund their bath salt addiction, they got a home on Destiny.

Just remember #4 will always be there, we just wanna try something new as well, and we really hope you'll stop by and give it a try!

Dear gravy... its... its beautiful.

RP always makes me wary but if this counts as RP then I need to change servers to Destiny.

[Spy_Guy]

It bears mentioning that we will be doing a lot of playtesting before going live with this as well, not just of the map itself but also of the rules.

This is new ground for us and it's important to remember that this is a community thing, first and foremost. As such we will be starting out with fairly lenient rules and seeing what works and what doesn't. Then we take feedback based on the testing and tweak things to see how it works.

Frankly, I'm extremely excited to see this through. I have a really good feeling that we have everything we need to make this great.

[DocSalient]

My only real concern is splitting the playerbase across two servers. One thing I think we can all agree on as players is that a server with fifteen people is better than five, thirty is better than fifteen, and usually forty-five is better than thirty. One of the things I like most about the main Goon server is that at peak hours it's almost guaranteed to have 25+ players, and with the new split I'm worried that we might not be seeing more than that on either server. Nothing kills a server faster than not having a good number of players on it; SS13 is all about interactions, and when I've played on smaller servers I don't see nearly enough of it.

[DocSalient]

Also, I'd like to add that I just played a round on 5 (the RP one, right?), and I couldn't tell the difference from regular Goonstation gameplay.

[Haine]

It bears mentioning that we will be doing a lot of playtesting before going live with this as well, not just of the map itself but also of the rules.

Well, we WERE going to. Now it's just up all the time.

Also, I'd like to add that I just played a round on 5 (the RP one, right?), and I couldn't tell the difference from regular Goonstation gameplay.

Yes because we have so far had like three RP rounds, in total, since the server went up. It's very very new. People are still adjusting.

[Cogwerks]

Cross-server bans seem like a useful tool to keep the G4 crowd from just fuckin' shit up there whenever they're bored.

[atamusvaleo]

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Harsh, Ed. I have to lean in Dions direction here. More often than not one sees people running past corpses or ignoring someone crawling toward medbay and gasping for help. I think it's situations like this Dions is referring to (please correct me if I'm wrong in my interpretation).

With the "in it to win it" mentality people get wrapped up in whatever goal they have in front of them and ignore everything else that isn't in their way. There is next to no station-wide camaraderie; where upon seeing a person falling down and bleeding, one would think, "hey that's a fellow crew member in danger and I should stop to help him/her."

That being said, it could just be that we are different people who have entirely separate reactions in situations such as these. I took an osteopathic oath and it's part of who I am. For me that means helping whenever I am needed (even if it's just 2d spesspersons who took one too many fireballs to the face)