The myth of consensual RP, isn't there an admin you forgot to ask?

[CABAL]

I'll put my two cents as Senior Moderator and as Semi-active player of Paradise station.

You people forgot that Colonial Marines is a history of a Marine Battalion fighting Xenomorphs. On the lore, there is nothing regarding rituals (except predators), There is nothing regarding marines slashing each other or playing dodgeball with machetes because of "fun". US Army wouldn't allow a dodgeball game with knives, Brazilian Army dosen't allow those and i don't think there is a army on the world that would allow that. This is why we are MRP, we are keeping the things Realistic but allow the little gimmicks to happen, but if you're trying to pull something type of different RP that dosen't match the very basic of military roleplay which are marines vs. Xenos, Sorry, you're on the wrong server. Go play cult member on paradise or some other server that has secret gamemodes, you have the freedom of choice to do that, but that dosen't have a slot or room on the server.

Every time i want to do something silly, i go to another server like paradise and go be silly there.

Its hard to belive when 90% of events are always some supernatural shit and every major holiday we get some stupid hats instead of helmets.
Hard to keep something realistic, when those who are here to enforce it can't came up with anything bound to this realism.
Try to remember few last events you saw, or made yourself. How much of them didn't involved monkey squads, pizza men, HEFA order, CO predator, etc. Shit that had no right to happen in any military given the concept of better technology and space.

Ammount of such bound to CM reality events in 2019 could be probably counted on fingers of bobatnight's right feet.

[Frozentsbgg]

It feels weird to come and give my two cents on this, but what the hell!
CM's staffing team has always had a problem with consistency when it comes to rule enforcement and RP. That's just the nature of having many differing opinions on rules and the core 'game ideas'. For some, this is a server which is 'Military RP', with all the positive bells and whistles that come along with it. For others, it's an 'Electric Boogaloo' set in the alien's universe, with the military background coming to the back a bit. For a lot of the staff, it's somewhere in between.

I believe that SS13's strongest facest of enjoyment and memories comes from that emergent creative gameplay and roleplay. I agree with Dreven here. I think that the random spontaneous moments between players define their experience just as much (and sometimes more) than admin events. Admin events usually aren't typically memorable because of their premise, Admin events are the canvas for the players to build their own stories and interactions inside the world of CM.
Everyone remembers zombie rounds, because of the crazy ways players react to the Outbreak. Everyone remembers Ship v Ship events, because of the RP and comradery that comes from it. Events don't make player enjoyment, they just allow for players to explore a new situation, and find ways to RP.

I've been apart of the staff team for a long time now. I've been a part of most of the 'ages' of CM, and it's RP. A lot could be said about the old way of CM events, both positive and negative. But CM had the same 'admin problems' back then. There have always been many different styles of enforcement.

I fully stand by my belief, that player enjoyment comes first. The best admin events, in my opinion, are the little ones that simply accentuate and build on Player's RP. In essence, spicing up a situation that has already been developed in character.

Also, on the topic of Midi's. Midi's should be applied the same way, a little bit of music to accentuate the player experience. Not just for the sake of playing a song.

Players shouldn't be being bwoinked for saying Unga.
CM Has its own culture and lore, which should be embraced and built upon. Not shut down. Servers with unique worlds and ideas only survive when the community embraces and builds on them.

Admins typically aren't the ones doing rule enforcement on issues like this. It's typically the responsibility of the Moderators on duty. It's not a question of Rule-0ing player's roleplaying to allow them to do it. It's the enforcement of the rules. That enforcement needs to be made consistent and it needs to take into account player enjoyment more.

Having fun and Roleplaying isn't breaking the rules. We shouldn't be punishing people for trying to have gimmick's or roleplaying. But, at the same time though, there is a line between roleplaying and mingery. Staff need to be able to determine the difference between the two, often before the bwoinks come out and ruin the emerging event.

The question staff need to ask themselves is; Are players enjoying themselves? and at what cost to the round and others?

[Just L]

It's nice to see an admin that understands things. SS13 has always been player/community-driven above all else.

I think the vast majority of these issues could be resolved if staff would stop intentionally leaving things vague and define what they mean by LRP/MRP/HRP, and then deciding what is actually acceptable on that spectrum of roleplay quality.

[Dreven]

It feels weird to come and give my two cents on this, but what the hell!
CM's staffing team has always had a problem with consistency when it comes to rule enforcement and RP. That's just the nature of having many differing opinions on rules and the core 'game ideas'. For some, this is a server which is 'Military RP', with all the positive bells and whistles that come along with it. For others, it's an 'Electric Boogaloo' set in the alien's universe, with the military background coming to the back a bit. For a lot of the staff, it's somewhere in between.

I believe that SS13's strongest facest of enjoyment and memories comes from that emergent creative gameplay and roleplay. I agree with Dreven here. I think that the random spontaneous moments between players define their experience just as much (and sometimes more) than admin events. Admin events usually aren't typically memorable because of their premise, Admin events are the canvas for the players to build their own stories and interactions inside the world of CM.
Everyone remembers zombie rounds, because of the crazy ways players react to the Outbreak. Everyone remembers Ship v Ship events, because of the RP and comradery that comes from it. Events don't make player enjoyment, they just allow for players to explore a new situation, and find ways to RP.

I've been apart of the staff team for a long time now. I've been a part of most of the 'ages' of CM, and it's RP. A lot could be said about the old way of CM events, both positive and negative. But CM had the same 'admin problems' back then. There have always been many different styles of enforcement.

I fully stand by my belief, that player enjoyment comes first. The best admin events, in my opinion, are the little ones that simply accentuate and build on Player's RP. In essence, spicing up a situation that has already been developed in character.

Also, on the topic of Midi's. Midi's should be applied the same way, a little bit of music to accentuate the player experience. Not just for the sake of playing a song.

Players shouldn't be being bwoinked for saying Unga.
CM Has its own culture and lore, which should be embraced and built upon. Not shut down. Servers with unique worlds and ideas only survive when the community embraces and builds on them.

Admins typically aren't the ones doing rule enforcement on issues like this. It's typically the responsibility of the Moderators on duty. It's not a question of Rule-0ing player's roleplaying to allow them to do it. It's the enforcement of the rules. That enforcement needs to be made consistent and it needs to take into account player enjoyment more.

Having fun and Roleplaying isn't breaking the rules. We shouldn't be punishing people for trying to have gimmick's or roleplaying. But, at the same time though, there is a line between roleplaying and mingery. Staff need to be able to determine the difference between the two, often before the bwoinks come out and ruin the emerging event.

The question staff need to ask themselves is; Are players enjoying themselves? and at what cost to the round and others?

100% I wish the other admins shared your attitude and we'd have a much more fun game. My personal favorite event was the shore leave one where the marines got to make their own fun at the planet, it was simple and resulted in lots of emergent roleplay with everyone having their own crazy version of events. Maybe we'd have more "realistic" RP if the admins actually lead by example and did grounded events that aren't just "WELL WHAT IF WE SPAWNED IN HEFA SWORDS AND A HUNDRED RAVENGERS, THATD BE EPIC".

Embracing CM culture will allow it to flourish and will lead to players trying out new things and overall increasing the enjoyment of the game, which should be what its all about. Right now they seem obsessed with maintaining this awkward status quo of being halfway military RP and a greyzone of "you can have fun here, but have fun in the wrong way and we'll ban you", and then we wonder why so many marine players don't even talk on comms and lets not even start on charlie squad.

[Novacti]

What Frozen's on about is absolutely supported by me. I get that there are moments where the community may view staff to be not the best people, and sometimes it's the opposite way around for staff too.

The staff mostly try to do their job fairly and justly. However, different people hold different opinions. Which is why rule 0.1 exists. Some staff believe in a higher level of RP and are thus stricter than other members of staff.

The staff are people too, people are subject to fatigue, bias and emotions. We try to avoid those when moderating. But what's most important is that staff make mistakes too. Maybe their intent was good but the outcome was bad. Now, I'm not denying that there have been and most likely will still be some bad apples within the staff team, but please don't hate the staff team as a whole for someone taking an action that you may not find desirable. There are people that have been trusted with the judgement responsibility to help shape the staff team, put your faith in them.

I support player creativity and player created anomalies, as they are a good way to break away from the monotony of every round, so it's not just: grab gear, deploy, maybe build cades, shoot xenos, either die or live to EORG. Things like this are what gives CM its replayability; every round is different in one way or another. However, there's a limit to what I can accept, some things are just too unrealistic for the current situation that it takes place in, I get to decide that unless someone overrules me. At the same time, some staff members may be a bit more forgiving and lenient than I am.

Admin events also help with the replayability and randomness of rounds, I know there has been some events that can be considered LRP, maybe even more so than some of the things players do, however, the authority to host such events was earned through hard work and dedication. Despite this, I've seen quite a few RP events that fit in with the universe very well and helps the playerbase dream about the alien universe they are in.

I believe the staff are here to serve the players, to help them and fulfil the vision the majority of the playerbase has of this game and to help punish those who try to ruin it.
It's ultimately the players that define this game, the staff are just here to help the players define it.

[Snooper44]

I believe there are two issues addressed in this thread. So I will begin with the first, the problem of how much RP we should embrace. I will make it very clear and I feel like the mods share a similar viewpoint. Anything equal to and above Staff Sergeant should be acting appropriately These are the ranks that matter, they are supposed to be veterans, not young adult 18 year olds that are new conscripts and still probably have the mentality of children which many marines play off pretty well and is fine. PFCs and Corporals are not in a position of power or have any real duty that affects those around them or the direction of the RP. The Staff Sergeants and above do however, most notably the Captain. The criteria should include such:

1. No childish behavior (at least at a frequent level, jokes are fine here and there) embedded in your characters. They should be willing to perform their duties and assuming they are NCOs and Officers they have been with the USCM and have likely trained or have been educated to perform in their field. They should always be projecting a military vibe as they are battle-hardened soldiers. Aside from maybe a small card game of uno or game of basketball for recreation, they should be encouraging roleplay and not saying memes. Act appropriately

2. Obeying Command. I have seen frequently Staff Sergeants that openly discourage disloyalty, the same with some Staff Officers that purposely incite their squad or their superiors. They are meant to being stepping out of cryo with full loyalty to the USCM having fought many battles to attain their rank underneath the banner of the United States. Until they reach a point where they realize the CO is purposely letting them die in the field and thus have a reason to mutiny they should be serving as examples and encouraging loyalty. The same is said for every other individual equal to or above the rank of Staff Sergeant.

3. Gimmicks are fine, just do not break the previous rules. I have seen all sorts of gimmicks, I recall one Bravo marine who RPs as Elvis Presley. It's unique but he still maintains himself as a soldier, When you are in a position of power especially as Captain you should not be encouraging LRP behavior of any kind. It will exist, but you should not nurture it to grow. Also, personally as long as you have a set quirk on your character with purpose for the way they act then as long as they are not acting like teenagers in the body of a 30+ year old Captain then there is no problem. Windhealer has extensive history on his character so I see no issue with him at all.

I believe these three rules set a firm standard on what we should permit as MRP. Childish actions (LRP behavior) including essentially anything that the actual military would never do.

Second then comes to the issue of roleplay itself. You are right, there is so much that some admin events bring to the table. The last CO event that we had skyrocketed the creativity in COs. An entire doc was made about each of our vessels along with the fleet we were all apart of and we sat around a table discussing the political and military maneuvers we would have to take to challenge an ever-growing political climate without stretching our forces too thin and leaving us exposed to attack by the communists or CLF. In the end the COs divided into doves who wanted to avoid military conflict on colonies such as Mars and preferred a peaceful approach with humanitarian aid compared to the Hawks who advocated for disabling all communication on the colonies and instead enforcing harsh martial law to stomp out oppression. We should do more events like this and publicize results then have events based on the decisions made (rather then having them end in a suicide bombing, which was pretty fun I won't lie)

Marines grow unlikely to RP because at the end of the day we never advance in our timeline, we are in an endless loop and the standard soldier gets little taste as to what is outside the vessel. (Also because frankly most of the shipside roles have nothing that encourages RP other then their mechanical uses after deployment). The lore on our world is just stagnant, nobody really knows anything outside of MARINES VS XENOS and to be honest admins don't always reply to faxes. I have at most seen 2 admins that have done events and replied to faxes which made things relatively exciting and new. I really desire to one day see a lore team even if it's unofficial or a lore channel on the CM discord. I made a personal lore discord just so I could inspire discussion which has been happening, and I hope to see it grow. To be honest we should even have an IC section on the forum which could foster a 'news source' which posts regular information about ongoing events in the world, like how other RP servers do on their forums just for a change in atmosphere, with certain major events possibly affecting an Almayer mission.

RP is what we make of it, we don't need to follow ALIEN lore to be frank, we could take pieces of it and do our own thing. Nothing is stopping us.

[starmute]

Somewhat dissenting opinion here. I'm being polite so others please be polite too.

But if a group of players willingly volunteer to play a game of basketball with a machete, knowing the rules of the game and then proceed to have an extremely fun match that the audience of marines also enjoys, why should that be punished? Its player made emergent gameplay, which is THE strongest part of SS13 and how alot of players find fun in it. Right now the current stance seems to be "admins can do funny stuff in events, NO ONE ELSE IS", which lets face it was the funnest CM round you ever had that one where some admin spawned 30 abominations and a game lagging midi, or was it the one where you and your squad pals had that epic adventure only surviving by the skin of your teeth then playing off against eachover with a knife catching competition on the Almayer. The stories that players make with eachover are what makes this game special, and right now admins feel they have a right to edit out parts of the story they don't personally like.

Regarding this: You were not punished for scalpball. I stated that... it seemed pretty LRP to me but I would allow the event due to it being a "fun event". A cm event by my understanding (not sure if this is the official version) is a supervised thing that is out of the ordinary.

If I as a admin see a bunch of players having fun I'll PM the CO, make sure that everyone is on board and then see if I can make it a official event. I don't want the MPs bursting in guns blazing or a Deltard shooting a bravo over a bad basket (leading to bravo shooting a alpha, alpha shooting himself and then Charlie deploying to the planet to run away). You have to monitor this stuff.


Here's what I put down in the logbook.

Let a random event run even though it would be against the flow of the game usually. Windhealer made a game of scalpball and I decided to let it run even though it would usually be too LRP. Gave him a vv'd energy axe.

Was fun to watch

That's what "events" are for. They're fun things out of the ordinary. They can be a little more LRP because they are moderated and we can make sure that they don't go out of hand.


Two people were killed in that scalp-ball session but I made sure that if they did not get any medical care then I would a-heal them. As far as the clarification you told me it wasn't LRP. I understand you are passionate about it and that's fine but.. it just goes against common sense. This doesn't seem something that a commanding officer would/should do. If that's the case I think that it has to be supervised or at least approved as a event.

When I asked if Scalpball wasn't LRP as a clarification.... here's the response

"No. Scalpball is just LRP as shit. Would you imagine a Captain of a Navy warship authorising his men to throw machetes at each other? He'd be discharged in a second. I know he likes his tribal gimmick and that he likes to use that in his rounds, but that does not mean he gets to go around LRP rules. Just no."

The big thing that...is that without some higher up to look over this sometimes it can spiral out of control really fast. A example would be that one time you did a rage cage on LV (was it LV or big red?). Regardless the CMP came and tried to arrest a bunch of people doing the rage cage. Somehow it got to the point where squads were trying to hunt down MPs. A few people got jobbanned, and outright banned over that situation. It could be better.. or would have been better... if that was a actual event.


I have no opinion on the "Unga" and "Dunga" buisness. Really that's up to grimcad and the rest of the management how I'm supposed to enforce it. Most of the time I just go ehhhh and ignore it. If they tell me to do something then I generally do it. Currently I haven't heard much on that. In theory I remember something about whitelisters being high roleplay. That might be a violation but until I'm told to enforce something on that I'm not going to do anything.

That being said I have seen people use Unga and Dunga used as far as a slippery slope argument. IE "We have Unga and Dunga why can't ays have CBT". That's kinda annoy as all get out.


We're here to help you and if you want to run a gimick then usually we won't mind.

[CABAL]

... We're here to help you and if you want to run a gimick then usually we won't mind.

But then when somebody wants some gimmick, its mostly immediately shut down.

Your gimmick contains being transhumanist, considering flesh to be weak? You went to get roundstart surgery to get supposedly inferior limbs? LRP, YOU CAN'T DO THAT! No sane marine would want their fleshy limbs to be replaced with cybernetics. Even if you went trought the trouble of chatting with doctors and asking them, bringing medical staff some RP, then was directed to CMO, chatting and asking him, being directed to CO for approval, trying to reach CO on the radio, failing, then RPing further into lying that CO approved to researcher, who finally agreed to do it. But when you are finally on the surgery table, waiting to get operation, then spending a round as RoboRine, you get LOOC message its illegal, its LRP and then teleport back to DS.

Some RP enforcements is HRP and some is LRP. For damn sure it doesn't make MRP. Its just inconsistent LRP.

[Casada_Radio]

We're here to help you and if you want to run a gimick then usually we won't mind.

While I appreciate this, I would like to counter argue that not all the staff share this sentiments. I got bwoinked for trying a gimmick. I had to get a vouch from Overlord that it was ok since I enquired a few staff members on creating gimmick XOs. It was really fortunate that I enquire about creating my gimmick characters with staff that I was allowed to do what I did and I got away with it. I was really close to being punished for LRP and racism even though I mentioned no racial slurs nor ridicule specific culture-sets apart from playing race specific characters.

While I am not aiming to point fingers, I think it is really still is an issue ironing out consistently otherwise confused innocents will just get punished without notice like TakeTheShot. Remember he OBed the LZ and was somehow not aware it was against the rule at that time?

Apologies on scalpball part but if you have a working advanced medbay that can revive people on all accounts of injuries being cured, wouldn't that be considered okay? Since all are literally revivable and humans by nature will abuse anything if they so dont die? But this is just a opinion, I am not sticking really hard to this question, just an enquiry.

[Just L]

Once again, the issue is that there is no definition for LRP/MRP/HRP, and it almost feels like it is left intentionally vague so staff can do whatever they want with it.