Nerf/Tone down security somewhat

[Ikea]

I think that even though sec balance matters far less on roleplay, I still think it matters.

Security has to deal with self antags on RP far more often than they deal with actual antagonists. Besides that, RP players are generally courteous enough to give antagonists multiple, and according to recent complaints too many chances. I genuinely do NOT see any problems with the amount of Security officers (on rp).

Self antags are a lot more complicated to deal with on roleplay then on classic (also this isnt directed to you cal I know you know this but for all the rp peeps reading this please ahelp antag behavior, even if you're not certain they're self antagging it takes two seconds for admins to check). I think you're also referring to security officers having to deal more with in character non griefing disputes on roleplay as well. These take more effort and more time to deal with on roleplay, however what they very rarely tend to need is lots of manpower. For the griefing kind, they are generally a one or two man deal, that take ten minutes at most to resolve. Not to mention, 3 security members or 11, at the end of the day, the final person dealing with them and the person that matters here is the admin that deals with them. Shoving security officers everywhere to deal with what is fundamentally an administrative issue seems like the wrong approach. For in character disputes, most of the time it just takes one or two people to go and talk it out for five minutes, occasionally it takes longer however most of the time its something stupid and can be dealt with quick. While both of these can add to the responsibilities to roleplay security officers, the scale of these responsibilities even paired with dealing with antags does not justify a 1 to 3 ratio of sec offs to crew when considering lowpop roleplay can easily be dealt with by 2-3 sec offs (We used to have goon roleplay servers with dedicated instead of sporadic low pop, and these servers were completely able to function fine with low security amounts, this isnt theory crafting, this is just how generally it is.)

The thing that makes me care about it is while the antag is at least still alive and on the station, it leads to roleplay being shifted in whatever way the security team desires, be it them being jailed, them having there way, or some mix of the two. If a security officer sees someone in danger, it is expected and good of them to save and help them. The issue arises when there's 11 of this person spread out across the whole station, each able and attentive enough to help out anywhere at any time. Large amounts of security inherently puts antags at a severe disadvantage for the battle, because it means that there are more security officers for them to deal with. Getting caught in maint by 3 security officers welding batons isn't often the end of the round for roleplay though. What this does do however, is forces the roleplay into the direction of whatever the security team want, which is most of the time dealing with being arrested and processed, being in jail, then let out to repeat the process all over again. 

I think roleplay being able to be forced in this direction is completely fine and good, the issue arises when due to a massive imbalance of force, how roleplay gets directed is no longer a tug of war. Inflated security counts leads to a scenario where security officers are perfectly able to shift the roleplay the direction they want through the sheer scale of force at disposal, while antags cant dedicate themselves to forcing the roleplay in the direction they want, at least not without some serious rampaging which isn't exactly roleplay friendly. Roleplay shouldn't just be a conversation in speech, it should be a conversation in mechanics as well, and allowing one side to freely shout while the other side is only allowed to whisper without having permission to speak louder by the shouter first doesn't seem fair. This of course goes in the opposite direction with antags being too powerful compared to security officers, however due to security officers having larger numbers then antags, and the only way of defeating these large numbers being careless rampaging leads to this not being really a problem in the scenario we are discussing.

While you can say that these officers should just be nicer to antags, I feel as if this is disingenuous and reduces a mechanical issue to a social one is harmful to security officers and the game as a whole. Id expect security officers to intervene in murders they see, try to save dying security officers, arrest crimers and so forth. These are all things good security officers do. I dont think we should demonize security officers who do these things just because other people picked security too which means that the station is now more monitored then north korea, nor do I think we should discourage security officers for playing a job they enjoy just because the pop is low. Not to mention, I don't think demonizing it would even lead to much of a decrease due to this just being the nature of this being what people primarily play security officer to do. Instead of doing an individualistic approach where the issue is the individual officers for doing what officers are expected to do, I feel as the most clear cut, and appropriate response is to fix the core issue at hand and change the mechanics to fix this issue instead of hoping and blaming officers for it not working itself out.