It wasn’t born as one, but there has been an active push towards the RP direction these last few years.
Wouldn’t it make sense for basic RP tools to be introduced? Flavor text, better character customization, exploitable info and l***?
I know that there have been some PRs that tried to introduce some of these tools, but were ultimately rejected.
Adding flavor text wouldn’t force everyone to write one.
More clothes added to the character customization would be great, no downsides to that (and character dependent, right now all characters have the same loadout which isn’t great).
Exploitable info could help antags come up with gimmicks or with new ways to interact with the crew.
I know that people have been trying to develop a l*** for beestation for a while, but nothing came out of it.
I just feel like we are roleplaying in a vacuum which contains only the station and nothing else.
Establishing even the most basic l*** behind the galaxy our characters inhabit would add another whole dimension of depth to our character.
If done correctly it could give life to new character conflict.
Yea, we need more world building. We could have ship docking in the station belong to: pre-FTL space explores, adventures, space miners, salespeople, space Russians, clowns or even a lost Nanotransen executive.
I should have posted this somewhere else ha.
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough, sorry. I made the dumb joke of writing “lore” as “l***”.
What I meant to say is that we could use a written lore that can be found on the wiki.
Wouldn’t call it vital, but I personally believe that a lore can really help create interesting characters, and give more depth to their actions by contextualizing them in a “real” universe.
I wouldn’t mind a wide degree of silliness in the lore, that’s a big part of what makes SS13 so charming to me.
It’s more of a way to further customise a character.
If one of my characters has a missing eye, sure i could roleplay it only when it comes up, but having it written is much better.
That’s not a roleplay tool, it’s only ever used to describe how quirky and snowflaky your character is with multicolored eyes, above average height and smell of 5 decade old dandruff. Usually accompanied with a link to a commissioned furry portrait.
That has not been my experience.
Some are rather dull, but flavor text could be used to flesh out the appearance of your character (which right now is limited to the four pixels of your sprite).
Have any of you actually went on a good roleplay server with flavour text?
you rarely ever see anything like this, most people write a sentence or two and only rarely do you ever see anything longer than a paragraph and bullshit that people use as a point against flavourtext is seen only on shitty meme characters
No, yes, the hell is exploitable info, and no-ish.
Outside of being a nightmare to moderate on larger servers, flavor text is rarely ever:
A.) Used correctly
B.) Tasteful
C.) Actually useful
D.) Additive to the overall experience
Don’t get me wrong, it can be all of these things. But I have yet to see any evidence in my many-many years within SS13 that it will be any of those. Even when it is used in a general sense, it’s rarely additive to the overall experience in a way that justifies the admin overhead.
Character customization is cool. Go for it.
Like what?
Ah the lore argument. We already have lore. We have the common lore between most modern SS13 forks. I fully believe that is all we need. Whenever people try and talk about lore or whenever people try and draft up new lore for Bee it’s always hyper fixated on the minutia. Smaller details that’d really only be relevant to our tiny corner of space and nothing else. In my humble opinion, I think this is a terrible approach and hurts the experience more than it helps.
Having lore that actually focuses on the grander scale of everything and focuses purely on the setting more than the every-day minutia does WAY more for the game than anything else.
This is our lore, and it’s open for everyone to contribute towards. I don’t personally see a need to divert from the common lore.
Lmao, I do love that my off-hand joke is the most commonly cited example for not having flavor text.
Edit: Should also be added that it’s almost never cited as a serious example (I hope, if you are stop). Pointing at only this and saying, “everyone against flavor text has no legs to stand on” is about as reductive as the people pointing to the one copy-pasta as the main reason to not have it. It really doesn’t make you any better
Flavor text is a good addition if you can trust the community with it. I do not think we can, for now.
More clothes/costomization
You are correct. There are no downsides. This is good.
Exploitable Info
Believe it or not, this is already in the game, at least if I remember correctly. Choosing a contractor kit will list off all crimes commited by a person. That these crimes are listed nowhere else and unknown by even the person is another story. I think this could be a good addition but may be difficult to balance, such as randomly choosing when people have this info, or choosing the info from a pool which could be good or bad.
It’s not a purely rp thing either, as having hidden crimes that the syndicate can potentially reveal could get you jail time with security, If the syndicate has the means to make these crimes listed, blackmail becomes a real threat and a cool scenario for both gameplay and rp.
Lore
Even as a fan of lore I have to say that less lore is objectively the correct choice. Why? Because you get to fill in the gaps. The more lore exists the less control you have over your character’s backstory and whatever you can come up with. Respectfully, I do not see how adding lore will make rounds any different or offer any positive impact, even on our greatest roleplayers, as using lore amounts to simply citing things, and anything you derive from the lore can already be written now as a purely original dea, with the advantage of potentially having different lore/backstories per round (that’s right, your character, even as a static, can be a different person each shift).
Since you have so much more experience than me here I will trust your decision, but I do disagree with the other points you have raised.
As soon as I manage to figure out how to add small things I’ll do it, this is more of a WYCI situation for me.
I hope it’s not a problem if the few things I’ll add will be cheap, as I would like them to be widely accessible.
Except it’s not really referenced in our wiki, at all, only a handful of people here have read this.
Would it be an issue if I were to add a lore page on the wiki? Just to copy and paste all this.
I believe every traitor should get to read the exploitable info of all crewmembers.
What could go wrong if we gave access to this information to all traitors? Exploitable info exists to more easily involve the crew in your shenanigans.
It’s not just crimes, this is a small excerpt from bay’s wiki:
certain other antagonists and could contain information on things such as your family, debts, past misdeeds or other things that could give someone a mental or emotional advantage over you. As with the records, filling this information out is optional.
The problems arise when there are JUST gaps imo, a fair amount of restrictions are good for creativity.
I get what you mean, but I have to disagree completely. It’s not at all about having names to reference.
If I tell someone that I worked in the army of the planet Gurk, right now their only response will be “uh, cool, i guess”.
But!
If the planet Gurk were established to be an imperialist power that recently has conquered the planet Bork via ruthless means, I will have a completely different reaction that will be dependent on the story of the character you are talking to.
This wouldn’t be just flavor, but it would directly create somewhat intelligent character conflicts.
let’s hope i didn’t fuck up the formatting
EDIT:
Since more concerns about exploitable info have been brought to my attention I will explain why I think they are good for the game down here.
Imagine you are an uninspired traitor on the station. You really struggle to think of a gimmick.
You can: do objectives (boring), kill security (how interesting), or do nothing.
If this feature were to be added, the traitor could just browse the page on their PDA and engage with the crew in otherwise impossible ways.
i enjoy making up random events and forcing people to pretend they knew it happened the entire time. I think I’ve mourned at least 3 different space 9/11s
