Request for Feedback: Follow up on Changes of MRP Rules

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41

No, that doesn’t fix it.

I could, for instance, totally see a player who legitimately had no idea that wearing galoshes was anything other than a style choice finding some somewhere and wearing them.

“Surely by the time they’ve played enough to get command roles, though…” No, even still. Maybe they know but just forgot about it, or weren’t really thinking about it, or knew full well what the galoshes did but picked them up for the look and didn’t really think the mechanical impact would be a big deal.

Conversely, maybe the, er, nefarious powergamer grabs some galoshes and goes “look, there are puddles of blood and slime and all kinds of gross stuff all over the station. Why wouldn’t my character want to keep their feet clean?” Frankly, when you look at it that way, it’s weird that absolutely everyone doesn’t wear them. People on evac shuttles should be collecting all the pairs of shoes and throwing them out the airlock because they’re so disgusting. Shoe-stealing mothfolk should be ending up in medbay all the time for how sick they ought to be getting eating those gunk-caked shoes. Galoshes should be standard kit - that’s what a normal person would want, right?

“Normal” is subjective, and all the other problems with admins not being mind-readers still apply here too. You can’t distinguish between the player who wears galoshes for innocent reasons and the player who wears galoshes for mechanics-motivated reasons but can easily come up with an in-character justification for doing so, and this rule will either fail entirely to stop the latter, cause unreasonable trouble for the former, or both.

I don’t think there’s any rephrasing of this rule that’ll fix it.

If anyone reads this and still isn’t convinced, I’ll post my argument for why it’s the player throwing soap to slip someone, not the galoshes-wearer, who’s the real powergamer in this example.

(Really, examples don’t cut it. People can post examples ad nauseum of problems that this rule is supposed to fix, that are seemingly clear-cut cases of bad play. The fact that those examples exist does not address the problem with this rule.)

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42

I agree with SeaWyrm, powergameing is far too vague and it doesn’t solve the underlying issue which is balancing. if an item is way better than anything just by having a simple buff then its not an issue with rules or the player base it’s an issue with not having enough variety in items. why shouldn’t security have no slip shoes, your telling me after watching hundreds of junior scoffs slip and drop contra not a single RD thought of making a special security boot? if Jo Grow the botanist wants a welder incase they make a kudzu mess are they a power gamer? and say the AI starts bolting vault, comms their chamber during a green alert, doesn’t that make them a power gamer?
it’s such a vague rule that only takes away from player possibilities, if there’s a item or Strat that’s considered “overpowered” then it shouldn’t be removed or become a banable offense, it should be joined by other Strats that are even better at countering it.
one argument was that power gaming takes people out of the game (which it does don’t get me wrong) but getting bwonked for simply walking around the station as a doc during a quiet moment is far more disruptive.
I firmly believe that in an ideal world a round can run completely without admins(and without the threat of them), all issues handled IC, with sec and the heads working to hold everyone accountable, and while that’s impossible it should still be the goal when designing the game.
These decisions stifle creativity and encourage players to see the game not as a sort-of-sandbox story but as a balancing act of rules.

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43

Firstly; Botanists can use the clippers they start with to one shot kudzu, they can also get weed killer bottles from the vend they have that kills multiple tiles. botanists shouldn’t be using weilders for kudzu its a waste of ship resources.

but onto the meat of your post ; firstly Power gaming isn’t in the bannable offenses catagory the guidance for it is a Warning or a Strike first offensce, Strike or Dewhite list second offence and then a Dewhitelist third offence. even if you loaded the game as RD instantly moved your server to the middle of Sec for ninjas bolted every door but your front door incase of zombie infections you’d only lose access to MRP at worse.

Secondly we dont live in an ideal world and space station 14 has issues that can’t easily be solved by just handle it in character. Its not about items really, its about doing things that prevent others win-conditions entirely. For example, as captain you could move the nuke codes to singlo before its turned on and get engineering to erase your codes. or the example on the forum’s where an RD unancored the Sci server moved it to a random maints spot reancored it so the pin pointer updated to it then unancored it and moved it to sec where it remained unanored this made the ninjas pin pointer point to the maints and Sci’s sever to be basically unfindable. another example going off of the power gaming examples is bolting all maints doors other than a departments main access before a zombie outbreak, now you only have to botl one set of doors limting the chances of breech dramatically.

44

See, but this is a perfect example of why the rule is flawed: According to you, botanists having welders is powergaming. According to PetRock, it’s perfectly reasonable. Who’s right? There’s no objective answer - it boils down to a matter of opinion.

Worse still, if admins are expected to enforce this rule, then it boils down to a matter of their opinion, which is unpredictable. If I’m a botanist, I don’t know if having a welder breaks the rules or not until whatever admin happens to be online reveals their judgement - which, if they haven’t considered this particular situation before, even they might not know in advance. But at that point, I’ve already either broken the rule or I haven’t.

Fair enough, but then shouldn’t the rule be “don’t do things that prevent others’ win-conditions entirely”? Though that would have its own issues, if that were the whole rule - but it would at least address the real problem more directly.

45

No, acording to me its a waste of ship resources, if they want weilders its not power gaming to seek it out, just more so a waste of their time when they already kill kudzu just as fast with tools on them.

46

I’m saying a lot about what I think is broken wrt the powergaming rule, but maybe it’s more constructive if I say what I think would not be broken, so here’s how I’d write it if it were up to me:

On MRP servers, players are expected to make a general good-faith effort to stay in-character. Especially, it is discouraged for players to significantly break character for the sake of gaining mechanical advantages, or to prepare against threats that the character would not reasonably be expected to know about. (See the mindshield rules for examples.)

Since what does and does not constitute “in-character” behavior is ultimately up to the player to decide (given that they’re the one who defines what their character’s character actually is,) it will only be considered a rule violation if the player repeatedly take actions over an extended period of time that would seem to egregiously break character, and that have a strong and concrete negative impact on other players’ fun. In particular, this includes destroying another player’s ability to pursue their goals by taking unrealistic actions to protect those goals, based purely on out-of-character knowledge that those goals might need protection, and with a deliberate intent to prevent the other player from having any chance to succeed.

You might notice I haven’t actually used the word “powergaming” once. I think it’s more useful to avoid that term and its baggage entirely.

I also think that at least some of this, and maybe even all of it, is covered by existing rules already. Maybe? I haven’t looked carefully.

Anyway, that’s just my take. Maybe I’m not even covering what the rule was originally intended to prevent. (But if so, what exactly is that?)

47

Oh. Well, fair enough, then.

48

What is the REAL issue with powergaming? That people are too prepared for things? Or that they are hoarding resources?

Being too prepared IS an issue. And it is why captains are not allowed (at least upstream) to have sec huds. And also because it encroaches on other’s roles, when they aren’t even qualified to arrest people.

Hoarding resources is a glaring issue because powergaming is the least of the reasons. There’s like 10-15 tools of a given type in the public vendors round start, and servers have like 80 people. There’s just not enough to go around even if everyone only took ONE.
The solution is to either scale with pop or to implement a currency system so we don’t have to rely on “please leave some for others” swaying the average tider.

Another issue that is the closest reason as to why i tend to take stuff pre-emptively is unreliability.
I can go to medical, ask every doctor that is standing around talking or just idling and get ignored because they would rather rush to play with surgery or who knows what they are doing.
I can go to engi and ring all day but no one will answer half the time. Atmos specially rarely answers. And engis are busy enough as is.
And don’t even get me started on science. They are always too busy setting their contraband generators to even pay attention to someone in the desk.
The rest of departments may not even have people manning them at all, even in the 100 pop server.

I don’t even know how you’d fix this tbh. But i am simply not a fan of HOPING i get help within 20 minutes (which is usually half a round’s duration). So i take stuff to make sure i can service myself if need be.

49

Polls over.

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50

It does not surprise me that MRP players wanna have an excuse to validhunt and do Securitys job.

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51

MRP is a really weird kettle of fish.

yesterday I met a paramed who was fired for stealing the chaplins bible and was considering taking their own life. HoP had made them a chef as we lacked it and I was a bontaist (non-antag). I tried to talk them out of it, made them a cup of tea from fresh plants, and got them to open up and I felt really bad for them. So I spoke to the chaplin and convinced them to give them the spare as they was depressed and thinking of ending it all and it was a really good RP moment, even if I did green text a theif. its just the kinda MRP thing.

On the flip side I had a dragon stop attacking and chasing me after I slipped and dropped and broke the hot cocoa i made so I could scream “NO my Coco!” befor we resumed chasing

52

The rule of cool improves any RP

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53

I agree. Eg: a case like https://youtu.be/DKgIxx4gNbM would benefit from a “rule of cool” then again… putting admeme/testing items in the present pool is stupid.
(I have said everytime i seen this video. The only diffrence i would have done is ahelp’d a message like “God has smiled upon me and given me a weapon, please mark me kill and make a centcomm announcement to strike me down”)

54

The present pool was for an event. And because someone is given a weapon that instagibs does not mean they suddenly should ignore rules.
That simply means that when they play captain or secoff, the only thing stopping them from gunning people down is other’s abilities the fight back and win.
Someone that looses complete control and ignores all rules as soon as they get a powerful weapon is just not someone that should be playing with other people.

The only reason they should not have added the weapon is for the sake of other player’s experience. But that person deserved to be banned.

55

Issue with powergaming that it leads to escalation or destruction on fun roles. Which powersnoozers not too bright to notice since they live in a moment.

Examples from space station 13:
1.Allmost all ninjas will stunglove you and run off. People remove RD server.
Solutin: Ok cowabanga it is WARRENTED MURDERBONE TIME, i will copy pasta “Where is X?” While killing all of sci, all of cargo and all of engi. Maybe cutting off oxy while at it
Results from admins:Now ninja allmost always have Kill objective, since it devolved into murderboning anyway

2.Ashen on mining planet loved to do some diplomacy playing native. Powersnoozers started metagaming their spawn and killing them with entire sec if there was a word “Ashen” in chat
Solution: Ok cowabanga it is. Stealth ashen killing all cargo pretending to be miners. Move bodies and become a force that make nukies on warops look like nothing.
Results from admins:We buff miner equipment a bit, we are not nerfing ashen since you killed a fun gimmick screw you(based tbh)

3.Changling was also a fun role turned into full murderbone role by powersnoozers

In my mind they are worse then Graytide. Tiders at-lest do funny gimmicks like lobotomy clinic, contra shop, drag a welder tank and everytime they weld throw d20 and on 1 they welder bomb themselves.
And my favorite robusting all of sec and locking them up in perma. Taking guns and declaring anyone who is not drunk will be executed

What powersnoozers can do is play counterstike, not speak, not interact, eat paper because they cannot be bothered to visit kitchen. The most boring people ever. Basically they are League Of Legends players but in Space station 13\14

Edit. Another example is CMO throwing their tablet into space start of the round. And this one from SS14

56

I mean, with all due respect, that sounds like the SS13 admins didn’t give a shit.
Which is a big contrast with wizden, where if anything they may go overboard with the pre-emptive balancing at times.

  1. If there was no other effective counter to ninja than to hide the server, then the ninja needs a nerf or a rework. If there is, then they should use that counter and the people hiding it should get punished.
  2. Players should not start moving to their “known spawn point”, period. Anyone that hears ashen and starts legging it there without a clue of where should simply get punished when it is easily proven they just “guessed”.
  3. Changeling IS a murderbone role, it is built around round-removing as a bare necessity. That is just bad antag design. Nukies at least are only expected to kill those in their way. They get no benefits from wasting ammo on randos.

This can all be fixed by actually enforcing rules, and as wizden likes to do, mechanically to make them reliable.

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57

I think all of these problems are fundamentally caused by a mismatch between the game’s intent and the game’s actual mechanics.

If playing the game in a way that’s mechanically effective is at odds with playing the game in a way that matches the overall expectations of the players, that’s a game design problem, not a player behavior problem. Or at the very least, an expectation-setting problem. (Which is still really a game design problem, just a fuzzier one.)

It’s so tempting to just go “you idiots, just stop playing that bad way and play the good way instead and things will be better!” but that just… it just doesn’t work. “The good way” is not, like, a tangible and coherent thing that you can point at and get everyone to agree on, no matter how much it feels like it is - and even if you could point at it and have other people see it, it wouldn’t quite match their own “the good way” anyway, so you’re ultimately just saying “play the way I want, not the way you want!”

You can sometimes get a vague approximation that covers the cases that are extreme enough that practically everyone will genuinely agree that they’re bad or whatever. That’s the best anyone can hope for, and plenty of what gets called “powergaming” falls well, well within those distant margins.

Granted, I’m sure it’s hard or impossible to design a game as complex as this one so that it’s perfectly airtight and there are no broken strategies. I think there’s some extent to which you’ve gotta get the players to agree not to push too hard into the cracks that still haven’t been filled. That extremely low-granularity approximation is still useful and necessary. It just isn’t going to help with stuff at the same scale as the specific examples everyone’s posted here and in the rule text itself.

58

I disagree the overwhelming vote was to keep the power game rule as MRP rule so that shows its not a issue with the playerbase at large, as the majority dont want people power gaming and runing the fun for everyone else.
Its not a game design problem either as its not unquine to SS14 but a trait shared by alot of multiplayer roleplay experiances. In Table Top Roleplaying games it even has a term; Munchkin which you can read about on that link.

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59

Believe me, I’m an old hand at tabletop roleplay - that’s actually where I’m coming from mostly: See Chris Chinn’s classic article on “The Roots of the Big Problems.” You’ll notice that towards the end, the article explicitly mentions complaints about “power players” and “munchkins” as symptoms of the problems it’s describing.

So I say, it is too a game design problem, and it’s a game design problem that a lot of tabletop games have as well. In fact, I’d say they have it much worse overall; SS14 has got hard-enforced, non-negotiable mechanics that live in the software rather than peoples’ heads. It can’t help but be grounded in that at the end of the day.

Anyway.

As far as the vote goes, yes, the overwhelming vote was indeed to keep the rule. That doesn’t make it a good rule, though. I think you’re right that people were expressing that they don’t want anyone “powergaming” and ruining the fun for everyone else; but there’s a trap here.

The deception is that it’s easy for people to come up with a list of examples of things that are “clearly” bad and that “clearly” count as powergaming, point at their examples, and go “see? This rule bans all this stuff that I don’t like. Therefore, it’s good.” (I mean, heck, every third reply here on the subject of powergamng has its own list of examples of things that are powergaming and bad. Brains love doing that kind of thing. Pattern-matching is their specialty.)

But that ignores all the stuff that’s good but that runs afoul of this rule, and it assumes everyone’s judgements will consistently match each other for the most part, and it forgets that just because your own motivations for something are clear to you doesn’t mean they’re clear to anyone else. Nobody can really read your mind to say for sure if you’re doing things that are reasonable for your character to do - and yet that’s the only clear criteria for if something is powergaming or not.

It looks like a fine rule on the surface, and that’s what people are voting based on.

I wish I’d been paying enough attention to speak up wherever and whenever the rule was first proposed, so that maybe I could’ve gotten my points across in a way that would’ve made a difference. Alas, it wasn’t to be.

60

If people are so compelled to powergame over keeping up the RP. They are not there for the RP and should probably be playing something else.
It is only a problem if the player was not interested in RP to begin with. And this can be easily solved by enforcing the rule and punishing power players.

The game should not be redesigned to appease an audience it was not intended for. The game is built around having plenty of possibilities with a large variance of power, it all adds tot he chaos. Sacrificing that is just… no.

I see the same issue with the newest 5e books. They gutted character identities to bring them all as much in line in terms of power as possible, and did their darndest to solidify “you are the cleric, you heal”. Instead of leaving classes as just the origin of your power (RP focused) which you can then fit into any archetype.

I am not saying that it is bad, but it def. hurts the RP side and makes the game more boring.