Remove Hygiene Motive from RP

[JOELED]

unlike the other two motives which mesh well with RP (hunger/thirst pushing you to go to the cafeteria and interact with your peers) and have a mechanical influence (you get debuffs) Hygiene pushes you to drop your project/rp and go shower in a room by yourself

it adds nothing but tedium and is not necessary for rooms to 'see use' (if there are no people showering in the bathrooms then antags will move back into them like nature intended)

also it meshes poorly with other game systems (if you mop around your feet as a janitor your hygiene plummets???!! you have boots on why)

all it mechanically does is Funny Stinkline (ok) and spam your chat with smellbased messages (just fart if you want that)

thank you for reading have a nice day

[Fuppy]

I don't see why not. all it's ever done is interrupt whatever I'm in the middle of so I go prevent annoying stink lines around my character. I do enjoy seeing the little status thing turn green, but there's always hunger and thirst.

[junori]

i'm pretty neutral on this to be honest. would be nice to not instantly go to zero hygiene for walking over a puddle of blood as a cow. but also, calling people out on their stink lines... priceless

[colossusqw]

I have to agree with that. Getting a snack or a cup of tea can be pretty nice for RP immersion, but hygiene just kinda.. gets in the way?
It's one of those things you can't really RP around, and while it's not really punishing in a mechanical sense, it is pretty meh to have your character be absolutely repulsive just because you didn't take time away from your RP or job to go stand under a shower for 3 seconds or wash your hands for half a minute with little RP potential to it.

[mintyphresh]

God dammit joeled I was just about to write a forum post on this

In short my thoughts are just that the natural decay should be removed. It makes sense to encourage people not to touch gross things but your average evil scientist isn't going to get dirty enough in a single shift that they start stinking up the whole room

Really I think the natural decay just exists to shame people for focusing on the game's mechanics (this happens a lot with new players) and I do NOT like that. 99% of times the RP you get from stinky people is just "everyone in this room is ignoring the stink" and 1% it's a civborg pointing at the Detective and going "you stink!" while they're in the middle of an investigation

---

I'm just gonna post the one I was drafting, actually.

Motives on the RP servers enhance roleplay by encouraging players for neglecting themselves. Sitting in your department all day playing with your toys destroys opportunity for RP and doesn't really do much to help you play a character. Players seeking to avoid the stamina and health debuffs applied by lack of food and water find themselves sitting next to their coworkers at the cafeteria, which makes it incredibly easy to just start chatting.

Hygiene is a little different from hunger and thirst: While it still punishes you for self-neglect, the debuff it applies is purely cosmetic (stink lines). It's a punishment for touching gross things-- makes perfect sense for a character to want to avoid being covered in blood, and those stink lines can be really embarrassing. However, because hygiene decays naturally, you'll likely have to do something to maintain it throughout the round regardless of whether you touch something gross or not.

Some mention that showering leaves you vulnerable to theft or murder-- This might be true but it's not significant. A trip to the shower takes no more than a minute or two at most, and the shower itself is only a couple of seconds. Someone wanting to catch a Security Officer with their ID on the floor would have to have very good timing to hit that ~6-second window, especially since the audio cue that indicates the shower's running plays the instant that the hygiene motive is restored.

[Silent Majority]

I think thr decay is the isdue. It wss lowrred. But i still need to dhower 6x in 90 minutes standing sill.

[Torchwick]

I'm all for removing this. The only time it ever comes into play in my experience is being mid-convo with someone and having them go "Oh shoot, need to shower" and abruptly leaving (or I am the one leaving to shower). This can still be used as an IC excuse to leave if people wanted it to be, but as a mechanic I just find it gets more in the way of RP than it does aid it.

[JOELED]

I honestly feel like even if the decay is lessened or removed it doesn't change the underlying fact that it's just not a fun mechanic to deal with. People will still shower even if there's no "hygiene motive" because they get blood or puke on them

[Tarmunora]

hehe stimnky

[mintyphresh]

They will click their clothing onto the sink

[Lord_earthfire]

What i found interestingly is that hygiene, in contrast to hunger and thirst, actually gets addressed by players.

So, just looking at this, it accomplishes more than those other motives. It forces you to move across the station for a shower. And on the way you encounter all kind of shenanigans.

If players run to the showers and not stay in their departments, that's all the motive should accomplish. This is why i think hygiene is the currently best working motive. This just speaks for how easy to ignore all the other are, sadly.

I would say keep it until hunger and thirst are reworked. They need some work first.

[JOELED]

They will click their clothing onto the sink

showering is faster for cleaning clothing because you dont have to take it off tho

[mintyphresh]

What i found interestingly is that hygiene, in contrast to hunger and thirst, actually gets addressed by players.

So, just looking at this, it accomplishes more than those other motives. It forces you to move across the station for a shower. And on the way you encounter all kind of shenanigans.

If players run to the showers and not stay in their departments, that's all the motive should accomplish. This is why i think hygiene is the currently best working motive. This just speaks for how easy to ignore all the other are, sadly.

I would say keep it until hunger and thirst are reworked. They need some work first.

Sure, you encounter "shenanigans," but you'll be shamed by your peers if you interact with them because you're stinky. Hunger and food are motives where restoring them, on the other hand, encourages roleplay. Hygiene actively interrupts it.

I'd also argue against your claim that thirst is ignored-- the stamina regen penalty is devastating.

[Lord_earthfire]

Sure, you encounter "shenanigans," but you'll be shamed by your peers if you interact with them because you're stinky. Hunger and food are motives where restoring them, on the other hand, encourages roleplay. Hygiene actively interrupts it.

People say it "interrupts RP", but in my experience it really doesn't. People beginning to smell mid-RP are mostly ignored until the conversation ends, at which point they then go to the showers.

And the "making fun of" part has so far, also from my experience, created RP rather than disrupted it. The one person that is too involved in their project being called out very often can be pulled in a conversation that way. Being called stinky does get people, and its a very easy way to hook them onto a conversation (after they took a shower).

The difference is that hygiene is a motive other people can see on you and react to. And this forces people to move out instead of ignoring it.

I'd also argue against your claim that thirst is ignored-- the stamina regen penalty is devastating.

Yeah, and on RP most people normally don't care for stamina if they are neither an antag nor security.

[Solenoid]

I'll try to keep it somewhat short, but TL;DR- Hygiene creates roleplay opportunities and is generally a good way to incentivize players to leave their department and meet new people. It shouldn't be removed.

To elaborate, hygiene creates forced moments of isolation from your department- assuming you don't decide to dump out some water on the ground and fall over onto it 50 times. I think these moments of walking from your department to the bathroom are important for creating RP in some circumstances, even if you don't think about them much. There've been a few times where on my walk from medbay to the showers, I see something cool happening in the bar or kitchen, or get clued into an arrest by security, or see a gadget an engineer is putting together. On the way back, I'll stop by for a drink, get some food, maybe talk with security, check out an engineering project, whatever! Getting told by the game to take a walk outside my bubble and interact with the crew is always a good reminder that there's more than just medbay, mining, or science!

What's important is that "forcing" players to leave their department and interact with the station creates these moments where you can see what's going on outside your department and roleplay with others. I think that stuff like hunger, thirst, and hygiene are all only as "roleplay conducive" as you make them. I should also say that hunger and thirst do not encourage roleplay any more than hygiene does, coming from someone with many hours on chef and bartender. You can easily go to a snack machine and buy yourself two candy bars and a water bottle and your motives will be satiated, just as you can run to a shower, shower for three seconds, and run straight back to what you were doing. If you treat showering as a chore, eating food as a chore, or getting drinks as a chore, you will think they are obnoxious and pointless instead of using them to create RP. I think it's vital to look at every motive as exactly what they're called- a motive. It should be a source of motivation to seek out roleplay opportunities. No, hygiene doesn't tell you "go look at that project that engineering's been talking about all shift", and no, hygiene doesn't tell you "walk around and see what's going on", but it creates moments to do those things if you seek them out.

Ultimately, you can talk about the decay problems, the annoyance of the smell lines, the spam of stink-related chat messages, the tendency of players to leave mid-conversation, etcetera, but the reality is that as Lord_earthfire pointed out: Hygiene is the only motive that actually compels players to leave their departments and engage with other players. I think removing it because it's considered "annoying" or "disruptive" by some players would be a grave mistake because it's the only motive that actually compels you to go out and roleplay- no matter how indirectly that is. We should instead look into fixing the grievances expressed in this thread to make hygiene a more compelling and immersive motive to roleplay around.

Sorry for the (accidentally) long post, but I feel really passionate about maintaining these systems which make players leave their departments and interact with random people. RP already has a problem with people isolating themselves from the crew and forming their little groups amongst one another in their departments, removing hygiene would only make it easier to do that.