First draft of roleplay-lore.md

[WizAntonioD]

Tries to explain how roleplaying can be designed for.

The document is opinionated about the general direction for how roleplaying can be improved in future content.

There is no working group for this, and since the scope is practically over the whole game, I'll leave this as a draft version for now. Feedback is welcome.

If there are conflicting opinions among maintainers, please be clear about how I should fix the document (or just do the corrections yourself. I've left the tick in the 'allow edits by maintainers' box). This is my first major contribution to this project after not playing SS13 for 10+ years. Cheers.

Oh and I ran the text through grammarly and learned about the Oxford comma.

[K-Dynamic]

I only skimmed through the document due to time constraints, so I apologize in advance if I make mistakes or miss points.

1. Roleplay is not clearly defined at the beginning of the document (it's about 43 lines down).
2. There is no mention about disasters being a part of the roleplay (this is a disaster simulator after all)
3. The section about round flow is strong but it and many other recommendations do not provide justification or reasoning behind them.

[WizAntonioD]

1. Roleplay is not clearly defined at the beginning of the document (it's about 43 lines down).

I wrote it with the expectation that readers would already know what roleplaying is. Maybe it should be given a short definition at the top.

2. There is no mention about disasters being a part of the roleplay (this is a disaster simulator after all)

There are many new features I don't know about, in that sense I wanted it to be at a "higher level" and content-agnostic. I'll have to think about where the specific tone and genre could be mentioned. Also, I tried to avoid repeating what is already said in core design & design principles.

3. The section about round flow is strong but it and many other recommendations do not provide justification or reasoning behind them.

The list format guides towards brevity. If there are specific points that need more justification, I can do footnotes.

[Mot2332]

Two remarks after reading this :

First, antagonists being a popular role might also come from the fact that you effectively get a character motivation for your role in the round, so everything that transpires gets more impact in the context of failing or succeeding at your character's goal, while also naturally aligning you against the station trough these goals. You effectively get a roleplay prompt.

A crew equivalent could be pretty fun, but it might need to be on the individual level instead of the station level, so your character has a personal goal for being on station, and all your actions get extra personal meaning from it.

Second, on the nature of death in the round, it should be considered that you can go in the SS13 direction of life being cheap, and death omnipresent, for example it is standard pratice for artifacts researchers to get a clone scan before working on artifacts, because some of them WILL just kill you, disintegrate you, or make you die horribly, but you can always pop out of the cloning vat and get back to work to die in a new horrible way !

[WizAntonioD]

A crew equivalent could be pretty fun, but it might need to be on the individual level instead of the station level, so your character has a personal goal for being on station, and all your actions get extra personal meaning from it.

That's funny, just minutes ago I wrote a crew role, it's called "Impostor":

You are an impostor. You shouldn't have gotten this job, but by some miracle, you did. You are incompetent and you know it.
Objective 1: Keep your job and collect your paycheck. Do not let anyone find out that you are an impostor.
Objective 2: Escape alive.

Then you would have a meta-game around people trying to guess if someone is an impostor or actually bad.

[K-Dynamic]

I do not wish to be rude but may I ask what this document is solving? Is it necessary to plan out roleplay? Do we have a problem cultivating roleplay with our content? If roleplay is not as complicated as we think, should it not be addressed in smaller design docs for new additions?

I'm a bit lost because it tries to cover virtually every player-facing part of SS14 like a review.

[WizAntonioD]

I cast wall of text.

You are absolutely right, the scope of it covers practically the whole game. All of those things in one way or another touch on roleplay, because it is both about game design but also a larger, cultural thing. I'll try to answer what purpose this document could serve, and why the draft is the way it is. I do agree that there are problems currently that I don't know how to edit away.

First, the current 'core design' and 'design principles' documents don't mention roleplaying once. It is implied by the content of them, everyone knows what genre we are in, but there seems to be a lack of... specificity in them about this topic. There was also a placeholder for a document called Roleplay/Lore, obviously something should go there, or the placeholder should be removed. I tried to imagine what that document should look like.

It's too vast a topic to easily cover as a technical design document. What I tried to do instead, was to cover it in such detail that it would be overwhelmingly clear that I had "done my homework".

What are the main points that I would like this document to communicate?

• Developers of the game are committed to supporting multiple playstyles, when it comes to roleplaying. These are the ways how we plan to do it.
• When it comes to roleplaying guidelines, we hope to keep a separation of concerns between developers and admins, while still working towards the same end.

And that's it, I think. I don't want to overwhelm with suggestions, I don't want to create a kind of document that is one-off in it's style and content. I'm all for cutting the line-count by 75%, or cutting the document entirely if it's out of line.

We have this space where we can put a document of some kind, and I don't know what kind of document should go in that space. But yeah, I'm open for suggestions.

[WizAntonioD]

If this is the wrong kind of document, I'm going to offer an alternative path:

• consider adding a section on roleplaying to core design/design principles, where it would most naturally fit.
• remove the placeholder for roleplaying/lore, possibly add a placeholder for just lore.
• split this into smaller and more focused documentation for the individual systems that most need it, maybe round structure and one for chat, emotes and actions.