Feedback Clearer Rules regarding pacifist Antagonists would be appreciated

[Gomp]

The rules clearly state that "You are not required to be evil, but you do have a broad toolset to push the round forward and make things exciting." , this would make me think antagonist have no requirement to grief or other sorts of chaos.

This may all only apply to rp, I do not play classic.

However this contradicts how admins and most of the community in general seem to perceive antagonist, who are not doing anything they would not be allowed to do as a normal crewmember, as counterproductive to a fun game and actively discourage them.

I get this impression mainly from the discord but I have reason to believe it is the "official" admin team opinion since antagonist have been removed, because as far as I can tell they where not perceived as threatening. This would only make sense to me if antagonist where required to be threatening, which strongly implies the use of the special priviledges they have.

So in the rules antagonist are free to behave as they like, but in practise they are discouraged from not causing chaos and griefing.
I believe that if the admin team does not want antagonist to behave a certain way this should be made clear in the rules.

I have tried to word the above section mostly impersonal but from this point it is just my opnion:
As someone who mostly plays security I am usually on the other side of pacifist antagonist and they are usually extremely hard to deal with, because I know that security is mainly supposed to fight antagonist, so I am either forced to find some source of conflict between security and the antagonist, which mostly makes me very uncomfortable because it tends to distill down to "I don't like the look of you", besides that I can also hardly imagine the antagonist having any fun when I do that, or I can accept how the other player want to use their time as antagonist, but this is not easy because most players will not do this and even if I am lucky enough to have a security team with the same approach I will still need to deal with all the random people trying to start a fight with the antagonist, for similar reasons as the first option I assume, I disike those people.

I remember that I chose to be a pacifist in my first wizard round, because I was not very robust and I did not just want to get killed. I also remember someone walking up to me and trying to fight me and me needing to be strangely careful about defending myself. However it was a very fun round on my side, the captain had me escorted by security and the role-playing was very good.

[LeahTheTech]

Afaik we've never removed antagonist roles from people for being passive, except if they have explicitly requested it via ahelp.
Personally I do think passive antags usually contribute negatively to a round, but the issue with enforcing it via rules would be asking the admin to determine whether someone is actually being passive or just working up to or plotting something, which can be very hard to figure out via the logs.
Totally passive antags are a relatively rare issue nowadays and I wouldn't want people to feel pressured to do something quickly or be forced to justify how they've been playing on the spot.
(Also it's much more fun as an admin to just throw more antags at the round until things start happening :P)

[Frank_Stein]

The rules clearly state that "You are not required to be evil, but you do have a broad toolset to push the round forward and make things exciting." , this would make me think antagonist have no requirement to grief or other sorts of chaos.

This may all only apply to rp, I do not play classic.

However this contradicts how admins and most of the community in general seem to perceive antagonist, who are not doing anything they would not be allowed to do as a normal crewmember, as counterproductive to a fun game and actively discourage them.

I get this impression mainly from the discord but I have reason to believe it is the "official" admin team opinion since antagonist have been removed, because as far as I can tell they where not perceived as threatening. This would only make sense to me if antagonist where required to be threatening, which strongly implies the use of the special priviledges they have.

So in the rules antagonist are free to behave as they like, but in practise they are discouraged from not causing chaos and griefing.
I believe that if the admin team does not want antagonist to behave a certain way this should be made clear in the rules.

My interpretation is this: As an antagonist, you're there to cause problems for other people to overcome. Roles like Changeling or Traitor are there to help with tools and theming, but you have the room to be creative on your interpretation of "antagonistic"

An antag Captain that outlaws drinking on station, going so far as to jettison all existing alcohol onboard and draining the cargo budget to prevent the purchase of more. You've not hurt anyone and are hardly threatening, but you're creating something for them to fight against and you can control how much you let it escalate.

[Gomp]

Afaik we've never removed antagonist roles from people for being passive, except if they have explicitly requested it via ahelp.
Personally I do think passive antags usually contribute negatively to a round, but the issue with enforcing it via rules would be asking the admin to determine whether someone is actually being passive or just working up to or plotting something, which can be very hard to figure out via the logs.
Totally passive antags are a relatively rare issue nowadays and I wouldn't want people to feel pressured to do something quickly or be forced to justify how they've been playing on the spot.
(Also it's much more fun as an admin to just throw more antags at the round until things start happening :P)

Thank you for responding, your insight into how a rule against passive antags could make people feel under pressure makes it a lot easier to understand why there hasn't been a rule against it. I do think that editing the rules page to not encourage passifism would help players understand what is expected of antagonists better.
Adding more antags to a round is definetly a solution to a passive antagonist but that requires an admin to be present on the server.
When I mentioned antagonist getting removed I was specifically thinking of werewolves, which as far as I can tell where removed because they where treated as "cute" and not a threat to the station. I have also seen someone mention the removal of the space phoenix for "player behaviour" which might fall into that same lane.

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My interpretation is this: As an antagonist, you're there to cause problems for other people to overcome. Roles like Changeling or Traitor are there to help with tools and theming, but you have the room to be creative on your interpretation of "antagonistic"

An antag Captain that outlaws drinking on station, going so far as to jettison all existing alcohol onboard and draining the cargo budget to prevent the purchase of more. You've not hurt anyone and are hardly threatening, but you're creating something for them to fight against and you can control how much you let it escalate.

That is great antagging from the captain in your example, but I would not consider it passive. I think it is also worth mentioning that your interpretation lines up with every admin I have seen comment on this topic.

[Katzen]

Afaik we've never removed antagonist roles from people for being passive, except if they have explicitly requested it via ahelp.

Echoing this part. I'm not aware of us removing antag status or warning players that they need to be active as antags except for mindhacks or thralls where other players rely on them being active.

Team antags like head revs or conspirators might also sometimes have gotten prodded to keep the round moving?

[jan.antilles]

When I mentioned antagonist getting removed I was specifically thinking of werewolves, which as far as I can tell where removed because they where treated as "cute" and not a threat to the station. I have also seen someone mention the removal of the space phoenix for "player behaviour" which might fall into that same lane.

To clarify, these weren't removed because "whoever gets them plays them too passively," they were removed because the overall server culture was split between treating them like an antagonist and treating them like an innocent animal, and it would cause constant IC/OOC conflicts that had nothing to do with how the player who rolled antag actually behaved.