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.
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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
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I think flavor text is a bad idea because of this strawman I found.
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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
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Ehhh its just mildly disheartening to see people use it as an actual argument.
Flavor Text
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).
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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.
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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
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Other than flavor text, it would also be nice to see pixel shifting and Kapu’s say revamp merged, they’re minor stuff but they’re really handy for RP.
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When I read the mention of flavor text I imagined tweak to chat that would allow us to merge ‘say’ and ‘me’ in fluid way so we could send messages like
Did you do it? He asked calmly but then waved his hand Never mind, it doesn’t matter
I remember playing text base via www RPGs years ago and this is exactly how role playing in tavern etc looked like. It was quite enjoyable system and enriched the experience greatly while being friendly even to complete newbie and I actually wouldn’t mind having something like that implemented on Bee.
But from what I gather from this thread by flavor text you mean a character profile.
How is it roleplaying friendly?
It seems to have the opposite effect of what people who propose it suggest.
Show, don’t tell. Let me get to know your character by your actions and conversations instead of announcing to me in very OOC way who they are, where they came from, what’s their story is and what type of personality they have
The only way it could be implemented would require available text space to be limited to basically no letters, so it would fit basically one short sentence and would have to be policed to contain only visual characteristics.
Mentioning anything other than visuals kills its purpose and is straight up against role playings since it doesn’t add details that you could reasonably notice (like a scar under eye), same goes for too long descriptions cause nobody will ever read them, even if you are chatting with someone for longer period.
And that’s just so it would fulfill its proposed purpose, I’m not even touching on issues noticed by others-how it would be used by more edgier members of community
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wtf?, roleplaying tools? more like literal erp, what next erp mechanics?, sexcurity?, head of sex?, when will you stop trying to take our basedness smh.
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Head of Sexcurity.
wtf, cringe???
(me on my way to kill clown and be cool)
I mean… if you want to 
No bro, we should add clown utilization mechanics
Yet you provided no counter argument and cited no sources.
That… Doesn’t really change anything? You’re advocating for lore to be created, I’m just pointing out that it exists. Advertising is potentially a problem, sure, and we can have a link on the wiki to direct people there… But people didn’t even know we had a lore page on the wiki; at some point it stops being a problem we can solve.
I think I’ve seen like four people use this and then maybe one person actually respond to it. Could have just been the times I was on bay, but that was my experience.
Edit: Of the suggestions, this one I’m probably more open to. But I think it falls into pretty much all of the same traps flavor text falls into (given that it’s just flavor test but in a different spot)
Edit 2: I feel like this came off a bit more agro than I intended. Not my intention, I’m open to actual discussion
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Oh i’m glad i can finally stop wondering what’s canon lore and what’s not, that document is quite useful and getting an official 
from Crossed makes me at ease, i completely agree with their tatement.
Something that would be a nice roleplaying tool + QoL would be porting over existing stuff that TG has such as their antagonist panel they’re very newplayer friendly and it also adds the flavor of containing the allegiances of the antagonist which leaves options for the traitor on how to proceed and who to trust/murder/avoid/etcetera, it’s a nice mix of overall lore + QoL + can help an antag around and might help to create some RP situations.
If anyone knows more stuff like that from TG or others servers please share em!
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We can’t really provide sources other than our own experience here, there is no peer reviewed study about flavor text. Our experiences just differ and that’s ok, I understand.
If you say that this would be too hard to moderate, then there is no reason to argue any further, i trust your decision <3
If no one knows about the lore, it’s as if it didn’t exist.
It’s not something that just needs to be referenced once and then its work is done.
It serves the purpose of providing context to the lives and choices of our characters.
Do we? I couldn’t find it by typing lore in the search bar.
We should advertise its existence (at the very least on the main page of the wiki, like most HRP servers), it would work better than never mentioning it.
dw <3