Guarantee non-antag status for RP Captains?

[nefarious6th]

I'm back with another thread, yes, hello, hi.

After some chitter chatter here:
https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid=14444
https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid=15258
https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid=15551


And a very scientific and thorough spur-of-the-moment Discord poll revealed a 7:3 vote against antag captains, I wanted to re-test the waters and ask whether we think captains should be able to roll for antag on RP. I can have all the code works done for it by the new year, and I'm only happy to make this something for RP for now, but since it was a while since there was a formal thread on it, I wanted to get some thoughts in advance of doing anything with the code that would pose a change to gameplay balance.

[Kamades]

I'm generally in favor of captains not getting antag. It's always felt extremely weird to me that someone given that level of power is so often working against the good of the station.

So yea, bnasically, no antag captain, at least on RP thanks.

[Luxizzle]

I dont see a problem with this, thumbs up from me. Antag captains are almost never fun to deal with.

[cyberTripping]

I'm in favor of this. The captain being a known good guy can only be conducive to roleplay, since it would encourage more frequent listening to the chain of command, and allow the captain to manage the crew without (much, because of mindslave/ling impersonation) suspicion.

[Frank_Stein]

I think splitting it to RP only is a good idea. Right now I think I'd want to retain antag captains, but the RP space is a good place to test an idea like that.

It matches the tone better, it satisfies both sides of the issue, and provides data on how non-antag captains effect a round

[aft2001]

Plus, it lets people trust the Captain more and may encourage people to take the role more seriously. That and people who just powergame may choose to play Captain muuuch less since they can't be a fun antag anymore with it. I don't want the role to be HoS level of seriousness, but encouraging less powergaming/incompetence and more being an actual leader or effective manager is something I'd like to see.

[Varali]

I'm absolutely fine with other Command staff being Antag, but I feel there should be at least one non-HoS non-antag Command, and Captain is the clear fit. When there's chaos on the station, the Captain should be trusted enough to deal with it or lead the crew. Way too many people don't trust Captains or just see them as horrific powergamers, this will hopefully help redeem them a little in my eyes. This will hopefully lead to more fun interactions and less "urgh captain is a traitor and has subverted ai, opened armory and has twelve guns and its only 20m in"

[GORE]

Antag conspirator Captains are the perfect fit to initiate silly laws and announce the mandatory donut-eating contest in the bar; Discount Dan's drugs included of course.

Do not agree with the proposed change in my opinion.
The Syndicate installing a drone of their own inside the chain of command of a NanoTrasen station makes sense.

But I do not think that lore should be any reason for or against this.
There clearly is great RP potential for an antag Captain and folks going to murderbone will always murderbone in whatever role they seem to have gotten themselves into.
AA is by far not the most powerful tool to cause chaos and I think the ability to quickly and easily communicate messages of great importance or neglegent malicious intent to everybody is a great tool for RP in the hands of an antag willing to put some effort into their role.

[Bartimeus]

I play captain a lot. Being an antag captain just gives you access to everything ever and makes it very painful for sec to deal with you. Removing the captain's ability to be an antagonist would also allow the crew to have another person they can always trust other than the security crew.
On the other hand, its possible to have some interesting gimmicks as an antagonist captain, particularly in conspiracy rounds where the role lets you defend the conspirationist's objective which usually leads to interesting scenarios.

I stand neutral on this issue. While i enjoy being an antagonist from time to time, and have seen people do some really interesting gimmicks, i can understand why it can be frustrating to deal with.

[nefarious6th]

Antag conspirator Captains are the perfect fit to initiate silly laws and announce the mandatory donut-eating contest in the bar; Discount Dan's drugs included of course.

Do not agree with the proposed change in my opinion.
The Syndicate installing a drone of their own inside the chain of command of a NanoTrasen station makes sense.

But I do not think that lore should be any reason for or against this.
There clearly is great RP potential for an antag Captain and folks going to murderbone will always murderbone in whatever role they seem to have gotten themselves into.
AA is by far not the most powerful tool to cause chaos and I think the ability to quickly and easily communicate messages of great importance or neglegent malicious intent to everybody is a great tool for RP in the hands of an antag willing to put some effort into their role.

I play captain a lot. Being an antag captain just gives you access to everything ever and makes it very painful for sec to deal with you. Removing the captain's ability to be an antagonist would also allow the crew to have another person they can always trust other than the security crew.
On the other hand, its possible to have some interesting gimmicks as an antagonist captain, particularly in conspiracy rounds where the role lets you defend the conspirationist's objective which usually leads to interesting scenarios.

I stand neutral on this issue. While i enjoy being an antagonist from time to time, and have seen people do some really interesting gimmicks, i can understand why it can be frustrating to deal with.

I'm actually really glad you both pointed out the fun of conspiracy captains! Would it be tenable to remove antagonist status from captains but preserve the ability to roll conspirator versus outright removing all antagonist rolls? This would take me more time to do, but it was something I was looking into doing anyways because I don't see much problem with conspirator captains. I haven't crossposted that on to this thread yet (whoops!), but I was poking around the code on it to try and understand how I might disentangle normal traitor statuses from conspirator statuses.

For anyone/everyone: Would this be a preferable compromise?