I realized after looking at Errant’s placeholder text PR that new players who are Crew-Aligned could also use some easily referenceable boilerplate text apart from the round-start message in the chat window to tell what they are meant to do at a basic level each round.
Nothing job specific or anything fancy, just a “Do your job and enjoy the station.” or alike would be sufficient and broad enough as to let the player do what they feel is important to them while not abandoning their role.
3 Likes
Also since this seems like a simple enough change to make, I could 
this myself but I’d also like to see what maintainers have to say about this from a core design perspective. Alternative messages are also welcome.
All the Role Types were meant to have mouseover tooltips that show the relevant explanation from the Rules, or tell the player to click on it for more info, and then open the relevant Rules page. Afaik the latter was not possible, and I just ended up never doing the former, either
The other option (which also comes up semi-frequently, just no one did it yet) would be to add more roles, including regular crew, “objectives”, even if some of them were just generic guidelines that aren’t/can’t exactly be quantified or completed. Like
Objective: Do your job.
Clown: “Annoy security and entertain the masses. Do not get bwoinked.”
I feel like really all it needs to be is just “do your job” and “survive”. There’s nothing that specifically needs doing besides things like power, atmos, medical and cargo. Security could have a “keep the peace objective” and get objectives to defeat antag’s when they become overt (seeing an antag, dragon’s crystals spawning message, syndicate war declarator being used, nuke being activated, etc.), but I wouldn’t know how to go about coding that myself.
I think this route would just be overall more worthwhile than a simple Rules/Guidebook excerpt. Assistant roles already get a guidebook round start and having something apart from the guide in your character window feels more interesting.
Just realized if we were to go down this route a sick blanket objective for Security could be “Bring Order to Chaos” as a reference to Ready Or Not 
Since it was brought up, I am going to specifically point out that the widespread idea that it is the clown’s job to annoy security is one of those “widely accepted problems” that we should really not encourage in any way. The clown’s purpose is to be funny. Maybe sometimes getting on the case of security can be funny, but it has become it’s own purpose, and this is not okay
1 Like
make clown/mime free agents 
JK
I promise I’m joking when I say that. At worst, I will break into command for the sole purpose of taking the auric autoflusher then let myself get beaten into a jail cell for a few minutes.