My thought why people hate gimmick is that they have no where to play RP actually.
VIP: they’re fine actually (I think)
Stage Magician: They’re usually being shit at most times, but they have a good potential for RP.
Psychiatrist: that they have their room in maints is BAD. nobody will come to a room in maints for mental counseling.
Barber: same above. This gimmick job is seriously bad.
Debtor: They’re removed already, but they’re really not good for RP, yeah.
so, the main issue I see is that they have no place to interact people at most times. I think that’s the reason why people don’t like playing gimmicks. (especially barber)
and another reason is that their job isn’t reliably rolled. Rolling for every gimmick job as ‘gimmick’ category isn’t good as well.
so, my thought for why gimmicks are bad is these two.
In my personal opinion, Psychiatrist is an inherently bad job no matter where you play it. I’ve tried it on Bee; you get nothing done and nobody tries to talk to you so you can do your actual job.
I’ve even tried it on Skyrat; you get nothing done and nobody tries to talk to you so you can do your actual job.
The job itself doesn’t work because nobody thinks hard enough about their character to go ‘Damn, they probably need therapy.’ The only time I got someone to RP with me as a Psychiatrist was when I was acting as a marriage counsellor for two people, it was great but I never got anything else after that.
If you’re lucky, you’ll get people that think of their character in that regard, or someone else in Sec/Command/AI that looks at a criminal and instead of brigging them for 15 minutes or flat out killing them because ‘le valid’ and tries to get them rehabilitated instead.
Biggest issue is the random intents BS. Becomes impossible to interact with people at all. Phobias also made them annoying to play depending on the situation.
The whole conspiracy theorist/schizo gimmick is fun to play though.
There’s a lot of problems with the current state of gimmick roles.
I can’t count the amount of times I had a really good VIP or Psychiatrist gimmick but get barber or magician instead and just end up feeling dismotivated to roleplay (same goes the other way around too).
Same goes for the awful placement of these gimmick role’s offices being randomly placed in maints. I see no reason why the Pyschiatrist office can’t be in medbay, or the barber shop be in the server halls, etc.
Though with the opinion of these roles being “bad for roleplay” I have to disagree, it’s all in the matter of how you present the job and if it’s accessabile for people to want to do these gimmicks.
Personally from my own experinece it’s often very quiet for these types of roles, even bartenders I see tend to have very few people actually coming to the bar (other than sec getting their fix) but with a little effort it is possible to get a lot out of these roles which I think is an issue that frankly isn’t the gimmick roles fault completely.
Ideally the gimmick role should be removed and replaced with each role being it’s own separte job that people can select with each of their workplaces being visable and accessible for anyone that might want to use their services/roleplay with them.
The latter may be more difficult to do due to it meaning every station would have to be redesigned slightly while the former would at least be a good start. Anything would be better than another section of roleplay focus jobs being removed forever.
Also we should bring back that debtor role but nerf it because it would be so much better and awesome since it was one of the more unique roles we had
The randomness of “gimick” is what kills it the most.
If you think most people who want to try it can pull of even close to all of them going into that round blind, then you are delusional or want an extremely niche type of player, in which case just whitelist it.
Splitting them up and making them actual roles instead of maint hobo’s that no one trusts would be the best bet.
Barber and psych has already been done and elevated into full jobs elsewhere. Those 2 are free
In its current state Barber feels like it was designed just to be an antagonist… FFS you gave them a chainsaw.
Psych isn’t much better. Looks like a horror game in there.
I know that letting antags win is part of the game… but to ignore that many red flags is just unreasonable
As for debtor… yeah just remove the drug fueled berserker aspect and its fine… Conspiracy/phobia was fine enough as is without giving them a random chance to 1 shot a sec officer or antag
Magi is fine if a little unbalanced sometimes, Just another mime/clown
I’d be disposed to offer psychiatrists an office somewhere in the medbay and respected them more if most actually acted like professional and ethical workers and requested things nicely from me as opposed to, as most cases seem to be, act stoned and literally become happiness dealers who prey on getting medbay patients addicted to happiness.
I agree with the rest of the comments here, psychiatrist and maybe VIP need to escape gimmick limbo and become proper jobs already. They have proven themselves to be roles that people actively look out for to play. On the other spectrum we have b*rber, which is fucking horrible and should just be removed entirely.
I still the concept of gimmicks isn’t too bad. Mailman should be merged, and I’m sure the community can think of something cool for one or two more jobs.
I think the main problem is that the gimmicks just aren’t interesting at all and have very little options for playing them in an interesting way. Gimmick jobs shouldnt be set-in-stone jobs where you can only do one thing and one thing only, otherwise its not a gimmick and needs an actual good mechanical foundation to stand on
A gimmick role without extra allowance towards slight self-antag, that locks you into a very specific archetype, preventing you from choosing what actual gimmick you go through -
That’s a full on job without an office nor any real motivation for the crew to interact with.
At this point, if you want do a gimmick, you shouldn’t pick a gimmick role and instead pick assistant & ask HoP for ID change/authorization.
IMO Barbers are kind of useless right now, even if they become a full job and even get their own barbershop in all maps, it’s unlikely that they’ll even get any clients considering that most of the players are already happy with their characters’ hairstyle, if we want to make them any decent and have something to do they’ll need better tools and give players some incentive to bother, as of now a mirror literally makes them irrelevant, and the hair dye itself is just a RNG mess, giving you no control to change the dye’s color at all.
TBH gimmicks are just flavoured assistants and therefore will inevitably rely on whoever is playing them; removing them will encourage people to play assistant, though, if that’s what you guys are looking for.
