Metashield "Previous Rounds" needs more Clarification

[Fiddlebug]

Under the new Metashield stuff, there’s an entry that says “Events from Previous Rounds”. This would mean that you cannot remember things from previous rounds at all such as important events for your character’s lore, character relationships, interesting stories, etc. At first, i was very concerned about this, but an admin in the discord directly told me the rule isn’t like that and that it’s basically the same as the old “No metagrudging” rule.

If that is true, then the way the “Events from previous rounds” entry is presented is incredibly misleading in what it actually entails. I suggest you have a second look at it to clarify what it actually affects, since as it stands it sounds way worse than it actually is. That is all. Thanks!

[aquif]

From my read it is basically the same as the old metagrudging rule, but I think that the old metagrudging rule also blocked this (it just was never enforced). If their intent is just to block people from metagrudging I think that should be explicitly stated rather than left up to interpretation. I would propose that it is fine to remember character interactions from previous rounds as long as they were not antagonistic or all of the players involved consent to it.

[Chief_Engineer]

This is both a response to what @TsjipTsjip posted in #admin-questions on discord at Discord and to the things brought up in this thread.

Also I didn’t read over this after writing it out because I’m kind of time crunched for stuff this weekend. Sorry if anything is written confusingly or repetitive or something.

TLDR

This is essentially what the rules said prior and it’s the least bad option I can think of. I don’t know how to improve it but specific suggestions are welcome.

History of the rule

In the past version of the rules, this appeared as something along the lines of “rounds exist independently of one another”. In some cases when people have been bringing up feedback about this rewrite, they’re giving feedback about rules that have existed for a long time on Wizard’s Den, but they sometimes do it in a way that I’m unsure if they realize that the rule has always existed. One of the goals of the rewrite was to make the rules a lot clearer, and from what I’ve heard so far overall it has done that. As a side effect I think people think certain things are new, when in reality the rules just didn’t used to communicate it well enough.

It’s hard for players to tell what is actually new and what is just communicated better, because some things did actually change and there’s not a list of intentional changes anywhere. Too much happened to be able to make one, including clarifying massive grey areas.

I don’t know for sure that this is being mistaken for a new rule rather than a rewriting of an existing one, and it doesn’t matter at all for the argument of whether or not it is a good rule to have. I just want to point this out for people who are concerned about any immediate changes to enforcement around this.

“The rule” is maybe plural

I’m referring to this as “the rule” a lot. I don’t know if that’s the best way to refer to it because it’s a combination of various shields that try to come together to form a very clear definition. I don’t know if people consider each shield a rule or the metashield itself as one rule, it all technically only has one rule number.

The rule’s goals

This is about the goals of this specific rule, not the rule overall.

To my knowledge, the rule has three primary goals, and a closely connected fourth goal which is arguably just an expansion of the other two. I don’t think these goals are the issue that anyone has with the rule, I’m just putting them out here because it’s important to understand them when deciding on the rules.

Protect immersion

This is pretty simple, you don’t want someone saying “ya I died last shift when the station exploded” or things like that. Even if they don’t use any OOC terms or anything like that, it can still break immersion. “I can’t believe all of us died last shift.”

There are some lore ways to work around this, but you’d kind of have to be jumping through hoops with lore to get it to make sense. I’m sure some people would be entirely ok with it, but there are probably at least just as many who don’t want that.

Prevent metafriending

Metafriending is when you give someone an advantage in-game because of who they are OOC. It doesn’t matter what that advantage is, it could be addition access or items, or it could be just being less suspicious of them. Some player shouldn’t have an easy time doing whatever they want because they happen to have a friend, or multiple, in a command/sec/whatever position that round.

Prevent metagruding

Metagruding is the opposite of metafriending, a disadvantage in-game because of who someone is OOC. The fact that someone doesn’t personally like the person who is playing the character shouldn’t negatively affected them, in a lot of cases that happening could be described as bullying. Urist McClown shouldn’t have to worry about avoiding negative interactions with SecMain2000 just because SecMain2000 happens to play captain or security most of the time that Urist McClown is playing and could cause them issues without technically breaking something like escalation rules.

Avoid clique formation

In a situation where people can freely discriminate against or favor another player for OOC reasons, it’s possible for cliques to form. This can take many shapes, but some examples would be:

• A group of close friends play security at the same time. They prioritize each other over anyone else in security and shun or are rude IC to anyone who is not a member of their group in the department. This would likely have the effect of making security an incredibly unwelcoming department for new players.
• A subcommunity forms on a sever, or across multiple servers. They regularly choose members from their own subcommunity for promotions, and they trust them more when people have to be picked to be given things like weapons or important items. This would obviously give members of that subcommunity an advantage over other players, but it could also starve the wider community if the exclusion is severe enough to keep out and eventually drive away too many new players.

This is an issue that Salamander had for quite a while, though I’m not entirely sure if it manifested as metagrudging/metafriending. To my knowledge, it significantly improved a while ago.

Things that aren’t the rules goals

There are certain things which break the rule as written, but are almost entirely, if not entirely non-harmful to player experiences.

Saying “I once set the PA too high. It almost destroyed the station so the CE had me demoted, and that’s why I’m a bartender now.” is technically against the rule if that happened in a prior round, despite the fact that it’s not hurting anyone. In fact, it’s arguably doing the opposite, it’s a backstory and is arguably increasing the level of RP.

Acting as if you’ve worked with everyone in your department before is potentially against the rule. If you haven’t ever worked with them, and you’re just acting like you have then that’s good RP and not against the rules, but if you have with even a single one of then you are arguably remembering a past round and that’d be against the rules. This obviously doesn’t make sense to enforce like this. I hope no one enforces this rule like this, but this is arguably what the rules say right now.

I can’t imagine a single way that either of these things could be harmful, they’re in fact both better roleplay in my opinion than the alternative. I can however imagine adjacent things that are potentially problematic.

Grey areas

These aren’t grey in terms of if they’re allowed or not, at least not by the current version of the rules. The current rules don’t allow you to do any of this. These are grey in terms of it being arguable whether or not being able to do these things is desirable or harmful to the overall game and community.

• You know someone has been disruptively tiding for the last 4 rounds, so this round, only when legal under Space Law, you give them the harshest sentences allowed.
• You have to promote someone to chief engineer. You have two options, one is a person who you know just unlocked the station engineer role, the other is a person who regularly plays chief engineer extremely well so you promote them.

I don’t know what the opinions of the admin team or community are as to whether these two examples, and countless others, are desirable or not. At first glance, personally I want to say that these things should be fine, but I feel like small details can make the difference. What if the tider was actually, unknown to you, an antag the last 4 rounds, now they’re being punished for playing their role. Doesn’t automatically favoring the experienced player impede the other’s ability to get experience to some degree? At the same time, if it does, is it enough that it matters?

The rules don’t have to be free of grey areas, but we should try to minimize them where reasonable and at a minimum we should be aware that they exist.

So why have the rule as is?

The only easy to communicate options that I see for this rule are to either not have it at all or to have it in a form very close to what it is. Both are bad options.

I personally think that having it rather than not is a less bad option because we can choose to enforce it more reasonably than it is written, whereas I don’t think it’s reasonable to do the reverse. I prefer this approach with most rules, erring on the stricter side because I think it leads to a better experience for players when they can follow the rules as written without getting in trouble. The alternative is to have essentially unwritten rules.

The problem is that I only think it’s a well written rule when what is written is very close to what is enforced. In this case, it’s not as close as I’d like, but I don’t know how to get it closer without causing issues. Maybe it’d be a good balance to remove the “events from past rounds” shield while keeping the metagruding/friending restrictions, but that’d muddy the rules a bit and still wouldn’t technically allow stuff like going beyond saying another character is your friend IC and actually treating them like it because that would be metafriending.

I can’t guarantee that they’d be made, but I’d welcome any suggested changes to this part of the rules.

[Pikasatupu75]

I think you should keep the rules but with an asterisk and put the two examples you gave in the “Things that aren’t the rules goals” as allowed in the rules page. I think it is what the most of the community is worried about (at least I hope so) and it is the kind of RP I like and like to do.

What I mean by two examples is:

1. The backstory RP
2. Fake comradeship with other players.

Also, It should probably be clarified somewhere that “events from previous rounds” rule is not meant to erase your character’s imaginary memories but to make you act like you have your memories from previous rounds erased as a player while playing.

If I had to make only a small change. It would be replacing the rule with “Real events from previous rounds.” This change would have the unwanted side effect of making it impossible or against the rules to use real events from previous rounds as “imaginary” backstories for characters. So even if you do this change, you would need to make an exemption out of this rule with an example.

The reason I use “Real” in “Real events from previous rounds.” is to indicate an event that actually happened in-game and not something that didn’t actually happen but can happen in-game. Maybe a better word can be chosen, but I don’t know what that would be. Maybe “Past”?

Also, I am actually wary of using real events from previous rounds as backstories for characters. Overtime, it could lead to complex characters that are written by events from previous rounds with a friend/enemy list. For example, if the bartender names the CE that fired them in the previous round, it could give a justification to the bartender to “metagrudge” in-character. This could be prevented by not naming the CE at all and acting like that CE was in another station. But still, the risk is there. And I think it is better to prohibit using real events from previous rounds as backstories to remove this risk.

TLDR
Change “Events from previous rounds.” with “Real events from previous rounds.”

[Pikasatupu75]

Related to this rule, I think “Events you experienced as a different character.” rule is confusing and hard to understand as it is written right now. And if you do actually implement the “Real events from previous rounds.” rule amend I proposed above, it could cause confusion as then both rules would overlap. I would highly suggest changing “Events you experienced as a different character.” with “Events you experienced as a different character in a round.”

If it is not clear, the reason I think “Events you experienced as a different character.” is confusing and hard to understand is because it seemingly implies an event you experienced as a different character in a previous round. When it is supposed to indicate that you can’t remember your memories from a previous character if you play a new character in the same round. “Events you experienced as a different character in a round.” still has the possibility of being interpreted as “Events you experienced as a different character in a (previous) round”, but if that happens I think further amendments can be made. For example, “Events you experienced as a different character in a current round.”

Another possible change can be making it “Events you experienced as another character in a current round.”

I think this particular rule is hard to convey because people generally think of a round as playing a single specific character.

TLDR
Change “Events you experienced as a different character.” with “Events you experienced as a different character in a current round.”

[Pikasatupu75]

Oops, I forgot to make my suggestions as a reply to your post. I hope you got a notification now.

[Chief_Engineer]

I’m going to let this sit a bit before making any changes to give other people a chance to express their opinions. I’m also going to highlight this thread for game admins to look at in case they’d like to share any of their own.

Thank you for everyone who has given feedback on this so far, including people who have been reacting to posts to show their agreement with them

[Fiddlebug]

It’s definetly complicated, i can tell that much. I’m not sure i can muster a solution that can make it all perfect either, it’s not never that easy.

To be frank, i like remembering memorable shifts as part of my character’s history in working with NT and having IC relationships, and being unable to have consistent relations to other characters or recall stories and having to go back to zero every shift would be exhaustive and frustrating, so that’s my main concern with this; Wich just makes it rather surprising to hear that this was apparently always outruled and just apparently not very enforced (probably cuz of how stressful and annoying it would be). I do recall hearing directly from an admin that metafriending in particular wasn’t really enforced unless it was egregious, once. I do always try to at most just be on good terms with people my character has had good history with, and not actively give them advantages beyond just being talked to fondly, but i recognize that not everyone is like this and some would actively abuse it if the rules allowed.

Personally i’d allow people to recall past events in the shift if it’s not immersion breaking and doesn’t result in significant round shaping friending/grudges, at the admin’s discretion. (you’d have to use common sense i’m afraid)

Two people having history and being pals/rivals wouldnt really affect the grand scheme of things if they kept it toned down well enough and focus when things get hectic; It’s just a thing to have fun with during calm times until antags send the station into chaos. Yknow, inviting them to some minor shenanigans or playing a silly prank on someone you’ve beef with; Certainly better than giving your friend guns for no reason as sec or constantly harassing someone you dont like for no mid-round reason the entire shift. Those would definetly be problematic and the thing this rule should definetly prevent. I’m no admin though so i’m unsure how hard it would be to enforce such a proposition.

I think thats all i have to say, really. Regardless of what the end result is i’l keep watch on the rules and adjust my behavior accordingly. Thanks for listening!

[Epic_Null]

If I might call it out, most of the goals are not about remembering events from previous rounds, but about remembering people. There is a bit about breaking immersion in there, but I feel that could be split off from not remembering things to create two clear rules Rather than one muddy one?

[Chief_Engineer]

What would those two rules be?

[Epic_Null]

Not great at the wording and it is way too late right now, but here it goes.

“Respect immersion” with a description like "don’t call out things that break immersion, such as everyone dying during the last round. Most shifts are green shifts.

Okay: telling someone about a weird experience you had as a cadet while in character while playing a sec officer

Not okay: telling someone about your experience as a Nukie while playing as a sec officer"

“Don’t track relationships” with a description like "Relationships should tend to start fresh at the beginning of each round. Remember that the roles your characters are playing change each round, so a person you recognize as a player should not necessarily be recognized as a character.

Okay: using out of character knowledge when having in character discussions about who makes which chem

Not okay: refusing to make mutagin for Bot because the character created killer tomatoes on a prior shift.
"

[Coyote]

People are going to have relationships between characters in game. A lot of the most poignant stories in game end up being stuff about how a character who your character is good friends with ended up betraying them or worked with them for some goal.

I don’t think destroying the concept of character relationships is particularly good for the community. One of the biggest preventers of shitter behavior can be the fact that there are people who you don’t want your character to disappoint in a round. Once you try to destroy that social fabric and all of a sudden, we are all just people with no relation to each other, who will in fact be banned if we try to form any lasting friendship, that social incentive to not cause trouble disappears entirely, and for a lot of players, its that social incentive rather than any hard set rule that is preventing them from being a pest to both other players, and to the mods who have to deal with bad behavior.

Like, there is a difference between round altering favoritism between characters, and characters who have some kind of social bond with one another, and there shouldn’t be equivalency between the two. Beyond that though, eliminating social bonds between characters isn’t even something that is within the power of the mods to prevent. There are going to be characters that queue up as the same job together and work with one another shift after shift. There are going to be characters that prefer each other’s company. Trying to police that would absolutely consume every mod’s time. The only real way to eliminate that is to make every character completely randomized from shift start, which most players would consider a decision that would get them to stop playing the game entirely.

I think the most important thing the rules need to enforce here is that you can’t break the rules of your role for the sake of your friends. That’s in essence what metafriending really is. You can’t say, “I’m a nukie and I’m going to destroy the station, but I’m also going to devote a lot of my round to making sure my pal the janitor escapes on the nukie ship because I don’t want to kill him”, and you can’t say, “Well, I’m the head of security and supposed to prevent crime, but my pal the syndicate is allowed to commit crime”. The problem here isn’t that the person has a friend that exists from prior rounds, its that this fact is taking precedence over their role, which it never should. The rule then should be something like, “You cannot allow the personal relationship considerations of your character existing from previous rounds override the responsibilities of your role at any time”,

[Waterplant]

I’ve seen a couple people posting stories from MRP have their characters lore and relationships build up over several rounds, and the admins seem to be if not encouraging then at least allowing it. The problem, I think, is that it’s difficult to square the circle of “it enhances RP when our characters have lives, memories, and relationships beyond their current shift” and the fact that your characters best friend Sarah McCalloway may be, in your and their lore, a bartender but the actual in-game character could just as well be a bartender, chief medical officer, or salvager on any given round.

How do you RP that your good friends with a bartender when in the current shift that bartender is the head of engineering? How does your in-character relationship with this character impact your interactions when they aren’t in, for lack of a better word, their ‘canon’ role to your and theirs lore and past interactions?