Preface: None of these words are meant to convey, express, show in any way moods, emotions, or feelings of judgments, condemnation, displeasure, or contemptment. This is exclusively and specifically a request for consideration upon the round start Prisoner role and the opinions herein are collections from several players who wish themselves to be anonymous.
Being a round start prisoner sounds fun at first.
All of the options for roleplay bits and stunts seem to be available to you.
Maybe you’re a crewmate that made some bad decisions.
Maybe you’re a syndicate agent who got caught after all your tasks were completed.
Maybe you’re a Nukie who got abandoned by your team after a botched attempt.
Maybe you’re just an unaffiliated person who is getting transported to centcoms max security prison.
In fact, if the rules are considered to be limits to what could be lore accurate space station shifts, being sentenced to perma without being a true antagonist would get you banned.
Escaping perma as a non-antagonist would also get you banned.
So that being said, unfortunately, being a round start prisoner only has two options to roleplay.
You can roleplay as someone being rehabilitated and joining the crew to serve the station, which is basically just passenger with extra steps, or you could roleplay as someone who is in perma to transport to centcom.
This is a problem because player controlled characters shouldn’t be micro-managed into feeling like glorified npcs when playing sandbox mmorpg’s.
Evidence for this claim.
Sandbox - dynamic environment manipulation permissions are eliminated when your a non-antagonist round start perma resident by punishing those who may desire to do something besides brown nosing warden or dead end closed loop version of botany all round
Massively Multiplayer Online - players interacting with each others being limited to rehabilitation or being a person locked in a room till after evac all the way to centcom
RPG - roleplay is far too limited if Saw 1 the movie isn’t possible to recreate in that room even if the only bannable rule was “round start prisoner cannot leave perma” — i know that’s not the rule but it is more or less the only other roleplay option if you choose not to play the “rehabilitation” bit
I suggest three options of making this role less railroad repetitive (limited in player creativity based roleplay) and more sandbox unique (dynamic in player creativity based roleplay)
First option, considering a round start prisoner as a neutral role locked behind hours played in overall, security and head of personnel roles would greatly reduce meta-abuse of this role being chosen as an easy antagonist roll. Additionally, making a round start prisoner have a decision box in their action bar that when selected tells them to select alignment within 20minutes from round start before it defaults to crew-aligned. Whichever antagonist alignment they choose would assign them their tasks to achieve a green-text. This in my opinion is the best case scenario fix because new antag introductions would be simple to add to this if implemented but needs a bigger rework to achieve.
Second option, make round start prisoner a neutral role and leave it up to the player to freely decide their allignment. This would require rule changes to allow more freedom to round start prisoners so as to ensure a clear distinction between them and a non-round start perma resident.
Third option, eliminate round start prisoner as a role. This would greatly reduce the amount of people banned for misunderstanding how limited a round start prisoner really is roleplay wise. It’s not hard to be compassionate towards people who think that round starting into a role that a non-antag would immediately be banned for being sentenced into would make sense to them that they must clearly be an antagonist. Especially since their only non-bannable escape from that requires they have to be rehabilitated.
It just seems unfair to punish someone for trying to excape from perma as a round start prisoner saying, “your not an antagonist unless clearly stated” then tell them the only way out is to be rehabilitated.
If they are a non-antagonist then why is their only option to leave perma rehabilitation. How can someone roleplay a journey of growth from something they clearly cannot express having history of.
If they are an antagonist with the option of rehabilitation they why would they be punished for doing what a antagonist who doesn’t want to be rehabilitated do (excape)
The whole serve life for something you did or didn’t do but you can’t break out of jail without being banned and whether you did the crime or not the only way out is to roleplay rehabilitation as someone who did do the crime that put you in perma is absurd at best and micromanaging at worst.
Overall, can we please rework/rerule round-start prisoner into more than just passenger with extra steps or botany without any gameplay loop. Thank you
Sincerely, many anonymous Spessman