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Thread: A Corporate Liaison not a CLown

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    Post A Corporate Liaison not a CLown




    Helpful Links {More will be added}


    What's the point?

    Lately we have had a large influx of players trying out the role of Liaison and unfortunately a large majority of those have been executing the role very poorly. So at the prodding from members of the discord I have decided to work on this guide, a system that could expand and change based on how the server evolves over time if any of the rumored CL changes come in. As it stands I feel the role is misleadingly labeled as medium difficulty, when in reality the role is almost entirely dependent on your ability to roleplay and write. While you technically have no responsibilities aboard the ship, your role can actually have a massive impact on how the round plays out from getting custom events made, having PMC spawned in to help or hinder you, Death Squads, and even turning the tide for the Marines.

    To this end I wanted to help those who were genuinely interested in learning to play Corporate Liaison and at least offer up a few rules to make it so your faxes will more likely be answered with information or support and less often with silence or a tactical missile blowing up your office.

    Rules of a CL

    I think the best place to start is to set some golden rules to follow as a CL.

    1. Never Ever Request Orders/PMC - This is perhaps the single biggest complaint against CL's within the entirety of CM. Just know if you ever make a direct request for orders, an assignment, assistance and especially PMC's, then you will likely be ignored at best if not outright hindered for your request. Weyland-Yutani is a business and much like a business that entrusted you to be out here on your own, they want to see some initiative. Don't request orders instead explain what your personal goals are for this operation and how you plan to accomplish it.
    2. Keep up quality even without responses - I was debating this or the next one to be more important but ultimately I feel this is the tougher ask for players. No matter what happens, if you put your blood, sweat and tears into faxes all the time and never get a response, never let the quality of your reports slip. This is rough for most players, and trust me I fully understand that it sucks when you never get a response, but what you will find is the deadchat, mentors and ooc will thank you for keeping the quality up and giving them something good to read. This will help build your reputation as a good CL within the community and make it more likely that mods/admins/devs will take time out of what they are doing to give you something special.
    3. Don't Shitpost in Faxes - This seems blatantly obvious but as you will soon see, it apparently isn't obvious enough. Weyland-Yutani is a business, the person on the other end of the fax machine is a corporate suit for the most powerful corporate entity in the lore of Aliens. Pissing the man or woman on the other end of the line is one easy way to get you, your career and your family dealt with permanently. Just imagine you are sending a fax to a dictator and act accordingly, after all you are supposed to be completely loyal to the Company.
    4. NDA's aren't required - While one of the tips offered on the wiki is to get command, marines or survivors to sign paperwork, in all reality you don't ever need to do this. If you want to try for these things then by all means give it a shot but most people find listening to the CL drone on about paperwork to be a nuisance at best. What I have personally found is you can completely ignore everything but Company Fax templates on the Guide to Paperwork and focus on interacting with people, writing faxes and doing investigations.
    5. The Tape Recorder and Camera are your best tools! - In keeping with the last point, these two items will be a godsend for keeping information straight in your head, understanding what you have been told so you can add more meat to your faxes and offer more interesting things to talk with marines, medical and most importantly the Company about. New xeno corpse brought in? Take a photo. Marines chatting about those damn lizards on the planet? Record it. Doctors performing an autopsy? Get pictures throughout and record the full procedure. This can really help if you get a hostile survivor trying to discredit or make wild claims against Weyland-Yutani. Recording that for character assassination purposes is very effective.
    6. Spelling and Grammar are crucial - As will soon become apparent, you really need a good grasp of English spelling and grammar. Ensuring that your faxes are legible and can actually be read easily is always preferred to one mass wall of text with no stops, no spacing, misspelled words and non-sequitur break offs from an initial thought. Don't spend a sentence talking about an egg you found, then switch to talking about the CO being a dick in the next, while then switching to your idea of deploying planetside all in the same paragraph. Keep it consistent and if a new thought or idea is being added, make it a new paragraph. {As a sidenote 'ALOT' is not a word... stop it.}
    7. FRESHLY ADDED - Obey Weyland-Yutani - I never thought this would actually need a rule posted here. I figured if you are getting faxes from Weyland-Yutani that everyone would know to follow their orders. Then 'the round' happened, so I am gonna say this simply and clearly. If Weyland-Yutani order something, you do it, you don't talk back, you don't try to dodge responsibility, and you don't then demand PMC's after failing to follow orders.


    Character Defines a CL

    The traits and personality of your character can highly influence how to be a successful Liaison. Using my character as an example, he is intelligent, an amateur researcher, observant and careful. While those all sound like positives, giving him an edge in doing basic research, taking detailed notes of observations, wearing latex gloves and a surgical mask before doing any work with human bodies or xenomorph corpses, and keeping faxes very technical, what he isn't is more interesting. He avoids taking his sidearm and vest as much as possible, will go out of his way to try and get people out of the Almayer in an evac, will do his best to not deploy as he finds it insanity since he is only moderately trained with his pistol, he can't mix chems or do much to help an ailing wounded other then dragging them to medics. Basically while I have a lot of positive traits, it is thinking logically about what I am as a CL that makes the limitations more interesting. Even when I am in command of a PMC unit, I am not deploying, I am not going planetside/stationside unless I have to, if the Almayer is boarded I don my armor and pistol because I am not suicidal, I try to ensure all the equipment I am lent from Weyland-Yutani makes it on the escape pod.

    Naturally this extends to your character, what are their hobbies or strengths. Do they suffer from claustrophobia? Well maybe they stay deployed planetside more and instead get as much first hand intel as possible to send back. Even little things like are they paranoid so keep their body armor and sidearm with them at all times? Are they a people person so spend much of their time talking to as many people as possible? All of that is plausible behavoir that doesn't need to devolve into smoke weed e'eryday, printing money out to toss around briefing or cigar cases, and doesn't involve trying to get research to make space lube.

    Being a CL doesn't mean you should act like a clown or mime. Much like there are hard restrictions like your loyalty to the company is absolute, there are just certain personality traits that do not gel with the role. Being a super asshole to everyone is not gonna endear you to the marines/civilian contractors and won't make the Company look good either. Remember the primary objective is furthering Weyland-Yutani's influence and there are myriad ways for you to accomplish this without griefing or becoming a stiff robot. If you play Liaison it is up to you to take the responsibility of that role and create memorable RP from it regardless of how you decide to do it. This naturally brings up one key aspect of being CL and that means the paperwork, so time to rip that band-aid off.



    Bad Fax Examples

    Spoiler Spoiler:


    What can we learn from these?

    Well first and foremost lets make it clear. These were posted as examples of bad faxes, not to specifically point out an individual to torment them, hence why everything has been censored. If one of these is yours, improve these and grow, if these aren't yours then take them as examples of what not to do. Now looking at these faxes what are some common shortcomings we see? In those that utilize the premade templates to make faxes look better, it seems that less effort is put into actually filling it out. Yet with all of them we see troubles with sentence structure, spelling, grammar and an inability to [sign] the paperwork.

    That is the key, this is paperwork not post-it notes you slap around the office to keep quick notes, and given your position as a representative for Weyland-Yutani, a corporation so massive it is literally referred to as THE Company/Corporation, comes a certain expectation for professionalism. Regardless of what your head canon is for the Almayer, you still need to present yourself as an entity of a major corporation so always think about what your boss would say if they were sitting at their desk and reading your fax to a board room of aides and suits. If you keep treating it like a shitposting form, don't then be surprised when a bomb goes off in your room, or that PMC team requests a 'chat' before gunning you down in the bathroom.



    Pretty Good Faxes

    Spoiler Spoiler:


    What can we learn from these

    The biggest issue I see with these that keeps them from being perfect is that they have the 'this is how I talk' problem. In written form you don't have stuttering or pauses or random musings. If you notice there is a lot of... pausing with plenty of... uh... ellipses which would be... weird... to read in a fax... like, really weird don't you think? Besides that issue the faxes are separated into easy to digest paragraphs so you don't have to worry about misplacing where you were, they keep consistent information in each paragraph and don't veer wildly back and forth between topics. If the talking in fax form is eliminated, and some grammar gets fixed, this would be a really solid set of faxes to read. I personally think the subjects are also too long but that is preference, I much prefer sticking to snappy subject titles.



    I can't think of what to fax and there is too much downtime

    Those that have spoken to me on discord will know one thing I say over and over again. When I play CL, I don't want hard coded antag objectives because I am already so busy throughout the round I don't think I could take time to think of anything else. Yet you may be wondering, "Wait how are you busy the whole round if it takes marines upwards of 25 minutes to deploy?" This is where anyone that has ever observed me from round start knows I employ a simple trick. I get up, grab my tape recorder and camera, get a pen and paper, make a fax template and stick it in the photocopier to make 8 copies. I then launch an inspection to judge the fitness of the Almayer to carry out its mission and weighing if they are a good investment for the Company. I hit the same beats, say nearly the same exact thing every round but that is because what I am saying and doing isn't important because my fax isn't about how efficient I am. I am constantly observing and listening to what everyone else is saying instead, what every room looks like and what people are prioritizing.

    When I go to command and say "Good morning command, I hope you all slept well/had a good rest/woke up from the coolers well rested" I am putting bait in the water to see if they respond, while at the same time walking over and printing out the crew manifest to get hard numbers on our initial strength in each department. If command is short staffed and doesn't respond, bam I have a section of my report ready about how command is struggling under the short staffing issue and ARES is being conservative with resources. If Command is fully staffed and doesn't respond but are going over the mission planning, bam I can write up command is focused on their duty first and foremost and while I am disappointed in the cool response I admire their professionalism to their duty. I am adding fluff and depth to my reports all from just saying hello and seeing if they respond or not.

    Just a simple thing of checking the crew manifest I got in command, talking to the staff in Medical, Reserach and Engineering, and seeing if things are going well can give you all the substance you need for your first big fax. Yet you may wonder why I don't ever talk to requisitions? The answer is pretty obvious, it is the unga bunga rush, they don't have time to be answering me on comms about how they are doing while trying to equip marines and praying they don't get req naded. Basically leave requisitions alone until later, they have enough on their plates as is and are likely to be more annoyed if you try and contact them during it.

    Now your first report is away, make sure you right click the paper with a pen and rename it to something other then 'paper', and you should be just in time to attend the briefing. You have already filled roughly 20 minutes of time for this round, and briefing is when you simply regurgitate what the command staff have planned and add your own personal take on it. Does the strategy sound plausible to you as an educated person? What would you do differently if it was you calling the shots? Here is your second fax away to Weyland-Yutani and though these faxes are close together what you are doing is advertising to any dev/admin/mod that you came to take this role seriously without putting out low effort content. This means from here on you are more likely to have your faxes read and taken seriously but keep in mind if you don't get a response, do not lose the quality you started with, your reputation is everything.

    This is your first downtime as marines transition to the planet and begin to make first contact. Feel free to plant those golden apple trees and get them nice and healthy. You won't have much downtime for long as the moment someone mentions hostile contacts/lizards/bug monsters, your investigation begins. That is where I leave how to proceed up to you, given what all I said you should be able to put two and two together, decide if you want to deploy or do research or whatever. This is where one of the best aspects of CL comes into play, the freedom to work for the benefit of Weyland-Yutani in a manner you see fit and my way is certainly not meant for everyone.

    Yet one thing to remember, no matter how logical you are, and how much you know military procedure or the setting's lore. You are in an uphill struggle so lets get into that can of worms.

    IC vs OOC



    Weyland-Yutani is a company so large, so powerful and with such deep roots in the USCM that the Almayer wouldn't even exist without Weyland-Yutani footing the bill and forcing a civilian medical center and research lab onto a military ship, that Marines and especially Command staff should fear a bad word from you. Stop laughing I am talking entirely IC here, and guess how much that won't happen on an actual CM round? The Doctors and Professor get their paychecks from Weyland-Yutani each month based on word from USCM that they are still working on the Almayer and without getting a blackmark from the Corporate Liaison or USCM Command. You have access to the isolation chambers, research lab shutters, medical armory, and isolation armory because you are the technical boss of civilian contract personnel aboard the Almayer. In essence your word should be above the CMO, but guess how much that is actually going to happen in practice? Part of this is ignorance about how the military handles civilian contract staff in reality, and most of it is that people just like the USCM better and prefer answering to command. Not helping matters is the professor is called the Chief Medical Officer, which adds an OOC bit of tomfoolery you don't get in actual civilian contractors.

    In essence, being shipside and with a direct and instantaneous line to Weyland-Yutani, who can easily destroy the lives of every marine, and ruin the careers of all the officers and doctors aboard the ship, you should be a force that is dreaded but that will never happen. You have to accept this fact, and while you can throw your weight around a little and make the threat, it is very unlikely this will convince anyone. Currently in CM meta, the CL is a paper tiger, looks fearsome and scary with all the power to be blown away by a light breeze. It is good to understand the logic and the canon of the situation, but just keep yourself grounded in the reality that this is a multiplayer game with a vast majority of people that don't care about the canon/lore/logic of the setting and just want to get in kick ass fights and be robust.

    Your ability to influence anyone will come down to your OOC reputation for being skilled at playing CL more then what any sort of canon states right now. Maybe this will change in the future, but this guide is for trying to succeed and leave your mark as CL in the system we have, not some hypothetical one from the future.

    Though I will do my best to keep you informed as the situation progresses.

    Building Better Worlds~

    Signature: Severus Drake
    Last edited by Dreskar; 02-12-2019 at 02:38 PM.

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    Reserved in case of significant changes needed in future updates

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    Whitelisted Predator
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    you forgot "never use the universal translator if you like playing CL ;L but nah this is pretty cool my dude well done making a guide for one of the undervalued roles

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    Just an aside: the universal recorder is cool for recording, but we have a long-standing policy against using it for translation -- at least between humans and xenos/Yautja. It's fine to use if (in an event round, maybe) you needed to use it to translate between Tradeband or Russian, since those are already established human languages. Pretty much all characters who can speak Tradeband or Russian can also speak English, though, so maybe it doesn't have much scope for translation use at all.

    I notice you didn't mention using it for translation anyway in the guide, but it always ends up being brought into research for translation purposes sooner or later so I'm gonna head it off at the pass, so to speak.

    In short, if you get a xeno in a containment cell, you need to find a synth to talk to it or figure out how to get creative with Me emotes.

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    Until Admins give a shit about CL or CL gets more mechanical features, nothing can convince me that the CL is not the clown role.

    Used to be given half the day by admins since rounds lasted 3 hours +, but thats no longer the case.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Omicega View Post
    Just an aside: the universal recorder is cool for recording, but we have a long-standing policy against using it for translation -- at least between humans and xenos/Yautja. It's fine to use if (in an event round, maybe) you needed to use it to translate between Tradeband or Russian, since those are already established human languages. Pretty much all characters who can speak Tradeband or Russian can also speak English, though, so maybe it doesn't have much scope for translation use at all.

    I notice you didn't mention using it for translation anyway in the guide, but it always ends up being brought into research for translation purposes sooner or later so I'm gonna head it off at the pass, so to speak.

    In short, if you get a xeno in a containment cell, you need to find a synth to talk to it or figure out how to get creative with Me emotes.
    I honestly had no idea it worked for translation, like it could even record them beyond the usual "H---- -- -a-- -- dr---"

    I should probably also add that the recorder will never pick up broadcast messages, so you can never actually record the briefing beyond an IC attempt.

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    CM-SS13 Host ThesoldierLLJK's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Swagile View Post
    Until Admins give a shit about CL or CL gets more mechanical features, nothing can convince me that the CL is not the clown role.

    Used to be given half the day by admins since rounds lasted 3 hours +, but thats no longer the case.
    If a CL gives me a generic or poorly written fax, I give a generic response.

    If a CL gives me a good fax that I can build on, I can talk with another admin about giving them something to do or an objective.

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    While I see paperwork as my forte, I've just never been good at playing CL. I tend to spend half the round overthinking because of what expectations there is on the faxes. (unlike my medical and research papers, which are pretty open) This is a really good guide, which clarifies some of the thoughts that keep looping in my head while I play. There's a few really good CLs out there and it's great someone has decided to make a proper guide on their work.

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    you know you are sad when you wish there were more paperwork options.

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    edit - looks like I need to learn to be more fourm savvy before I attempt adding spoilers and adding pictures with proper sizes, yikes.
    Last edited by prophetb1; 02-07-2019 at 10:59 PM. Reason: borked spoilering - no clue how to do that - borked sizes

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    Whitelisted Captain ExGame's Avatar
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    I just want to say that when it comes to it, a NDA or any other agreements signed between you and comman staff of the likes mentioned before will never get you out of trouble when either MPs or command decide turn on you or throw you into the brig. Atleast I've never seen WY or USCM send help when it came to CLs getting in trouble for trying to (ab)use their contracts. Quite the opposite, actually. Sometimes CLs get arrested for Sedition or similar charges, because they're only worth as much as the other side wants to RP it!

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