More Canon Rounds and GM Team

[Zundy]

Copied from another thread:

Less (and I mean alot less) non canon antag rounds.

More canon rounds with shit going on. If need be create a staff team who's sole purpose is to run events IG. Call them GM's maybe?

Use those GM's to also create links between characters who may not already interact E.G. oh shit your dad's a widower Urist McSpess? Well he's now banging SenpaiMcDucks mom and he works on this station. Guess you're like brothers now huh?

Fix all your problems fam(s).

To my mind they'd have a Head GM who either fall jointly under the Lore Head and the Head DO to make sure everything is above board. Then the GMs would play out events as often as possible per week (preferable more often then non canon rounds).

[DatBerry]

A family system would be great, a lot of things can be done when your cousin is working cargo, a GM doesnt seem like a great idea, mainly because most events end in salt, especially antag ones, its hard to appease everyone

[Mofo1995]

I think this would be extremely difficult to do, but seeing your post in the thread this came from, I loved it. If this is able to be done, I think it would really bring some vitality into the server.

[Carver]

I like the idea (Except for one part which I'll detail below). People will focus moreso on keeping themselves alive at all costs, and behaving themselves.

 

Use those GM's to also create links between characters who may not already interact E.G. oh shit your dad's a widower Urist McSpess? Well he's now banging SenpaiMcDucks mom and he works on this station. Guess you're like brothers now huh?

I disagree with this though on the basis of doing any forced background changes without the explicit permission of the players who own the characters (And by extension, any of their relatives and non-station associates assuming it isn't one of the multi-player families where they loan out characters [in which case it would have to require explicit permission from all directly affected, or the manager of the family's background lore] ) is an absolute fucking scumbag move.

[Zundy]

I like the idea (Except for one part which I'll detail below). People will focus moreso on keeping themselves alive at all costs, and behaving themselves.

 

Use those GM's to also create links between characters who may not already interact E.G. oh shit your dad's a widower Urist McSpess? Well he's now banging SenpaiMcDucks mom and he works on this station. Guess you're like brothers now huh?

I disagree with this though on the basis of doing any forced background changes without the explicit permission of the players who own the characters (And by extension, any of their relatives and non-station associates assuming it isn't one of the multi-player families where they loan out characters [in which case it would have to require explicit permission from all directly affected, or the manager of the family's background lore] ) is an absolute fucking scumbag move.

 

I would expect a GM to actually talk to the players first before hand to find out if they're ok with this.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

I've always wanted to turn the lore team into an event team. My original goal was once that the lore was "finished" (all the basics are covered and we have our general, solid foundation for players to build on) that the lore team would focus on events. We have been doing that. By nature of being "canon" and thus having to take place in a workplace we all need to return to the bodycount for the events needs to be low, which can lead to annoyance from some subset of players. A lot of the canonized events revolve around guests from X visiting the station, which is showcasing Y, or hosting a Z, because the Aurora is cutting edge and everyone wants the prestige boost of having an event catered to them on it.

One of my favorite canon events was a group of ~5 tourists boarding the station, with one of them being a Syndicate spy. The station had to figure out which one was the spy and detain them, and a news story would be broadcasted over it. They ended up succeeding and detained the spy, but because their evidence was circumstantial they were released after round-end and NT suffered a little finger waggling for it.

The last big event I did was having the station work together to build a tesla engine on the outpost. Members of the event team found it boring once the tesla was actually up and running and worked to release it to maim the spectators without my approval. That made me a bit salty, and I haven't really hosted another major one since aside from VIP visits.

We don't need a specific GM staff - the lore team and administration and anyone else on staff can work on hosting an event. We just seem to have a rather sporadically active admin team, and they're the only ones with the necessary perms. Adding more staff would be a bit more complicated, I think, than asking what could probably be a more fruitful question:

Should we be more liberal with giving out perms to staff?

[Skull132]

Gamemodes, GMs, admins, and events.

Regarding new staff teams. I am very much against that idea. The amount of people already overseeing the round in one capacity or another (admins, mods, and DOs) requires more organization than I am capable of mustering. Having yet another team would require iron discipline. And I do not have the will for that, never have had with Aurora. There's also my personal belief that a light staff model is best for SS13. The more you concentrate control to a small group of individuals, the easier it is to keep that group in check and in line. The more pawns you have in play, the more of your attention is needed to make sure all of their moves are valid. And I've operated on the light staff principle since the getgo for myself and YeahChris. And I'd much rather make do with not enough nice things, instead of having to call to order a bunch of chipmunks who I haven't personally vetted, had a chat with, and who somehow broke enough shit for complaints to overflow from their line leader onto myself.

Next. Admins and Loresters. To be blunt and 100% self-critical, the admin staff hasn't had its shit together for the past half year. And the reason for that is ultimately simple: the people that should be making admin right about now are no longer here. This leaves the admin staff strained (no, I do not trust lore team members to run events without a supervising administrator present), and the mod staff rebuilding. It takes time to rebuild a core team; it took a very long time to build the core team of Prims, who lifted every other mod and admin up during my stay as Head Developer, and we're having to repeat this process. While Jackboot did suggest to me that I speed up the process, it literally goes against my conscience to do so and causes warning lights at every single step of the way.

Of course, it's not all over forever and ever.

My present plan is to find a second Head Admin over the next two months. With that, the administrators will hopefully be gaining momentum and will be less reliant on me when undertaking initiatives. (Which this falls under.) By that time, we should have new admins as well, and hopefully new mods too.

There are also a few fun plans to be executed in that time span that resemble new game modes. Though, I'll leave the unveiling of that to Kekboot, if he wants to yet or not.

Do what you can, with the resources that you have, hooyah? Hooyah.

Also, did I mention that I am a very liberal person when it comes to canon? Meaning, you can literally make your antag antics canon, as long as you keep them reasonable afterwards. So no super soldiers, please. But a syndicate operative who quietly recruits people, steals shit, and whatever else without getting spotted and with good roleplay involved is great.

[Zundy]

Well fine, if the game plan is for the Lore Team to do this that's great.

But can we have this more often please? As in, every day? If this isn't possible then it might be worth recruiting some folks to make this possible? I've played on many many HRP servers where daily events do happen, with major ones happening at the weekends. The weekend ones tended to tie into an overarching story where as the daily ones tended to be on shots that tied into the background lore, but generally were very light.

People will get salty (they get salty now) but meh, what you gonna do? They can make complaints if they want and be dealt with that way. It might just seperate the wheat from the chaff with regards to poor RP-snowflakes and also act as a learning experience for people in regards to the fact this is a HRP server, not Second Life Part Deux: Nuzzle Me Gently - The Nightmare Years.

Thoughts? Kekers this is also directed at you I guess since it'd be your team getting gud doing the do.

[Carver]

Second Life Part Deux: Nuzzle Me Gently - The Nightmare Years

I've never seen a more adequate description in my life.

[Dreamix]

Well, everything's fine and dandy...

...But what events? Will Miranda Trasen visit the station everyday? Will everyone turn into hardassed space war veterans, because of the weekly canon heists? Maybe it's just that my creativity has stopped existing.

[Zundy]

Well, everything's fine and dandy...

...But what events? Will Miranda Trasen visit the station everyday? Will everyone turn into hardassed space war veterans, because of the weekly canon heists? Maybe it's just that my creativity has stopped existing.

 

-Xeno researching an actual new spess xeno.

-R&D make a new weapon.

-R&D actually do some research which lasts post round.

-Security have to track and arrest a spy.

-Exec's come on station for a meeting.

-Tourists come on station.

-Air systems break.

-A small meteor hits the station.

-A spess craft needs to be built and then be towed away.

-A new station needs to be built and then towed away.

-A passing NT ship must be repaired.

-A passing NT ship must be repaired but HOLY SHIT WE DEAD SPACE NOW.

-A VIP tours the station.

-A cure for a virus needs to be developed for off station.

-A new virus needs to be developed for off station.

-A new spess canon needs to be built.

-A thunderdome game is hosted on station.

-A medical emergancy is diverted to the station.

-The station has a slow collision with an asteroid, has to be reapired and dislodged.

-A strange artificat is found and needs researching.

-Large amounts of food/guns/materials needs to be made and shipped off station.

-Sec' Cadets tour the station.

-Some spess pests infest the station.

The list goes on and on and on.

[Skull132]

Those. Aren't events. At least not by the old definition. What. Okay. A third of these can all be accomplished without any administrative involvement.

So this kinda brings me to a question. Why not do some of this stuff of your own initiative? What is stopping you?

As the CE one round, I want to rip the engine apart and completely rework it. It'll probably take up two hours allotted, will most likely keep every engineer busy, and maybe give the antags a chance to do something similar. And I can execute that plan as a player, and have done so in the past (back when I was a wee pubbie). A long ass time ago. 2 years, by now, I imagine. An old Head Admin and myself had a conversation about a similar topic. And we came to the understanding that, having the playerbase simply sit there and expect stuff to happen is not where we want to be. I will speak to the admins and will try to ensure that they are there to help you, yes. But if only one side is being driving force, then that side is going to end up burnt out and ejected in an amount of time faster than you can imagine.

What's a neat compromise, do you think?

EDIT: the topkek comes from the fact that I can accomplish almost every task you presented in that list through coded solutions v.v

At which point, why also not review the possibility of having a random event system which picks players and assigns them special roles. If your pool of events is large enough, and your selection randomized enough, then it should operate just fine.

[vtipoman]

Well, everything's fine and dandy...

...But what events? Will Miranda Trasen visit the station everyday? Will everyone turn into hardassed space war veterans, because of the weekly canon heists? Maybe it's just that my creativity has stopped existing.

 

-Xeno researching an actual new spess xeno.

-R&D make a new weapon.

-R&D actually do some research which lasts post round.

-Security have to track and arrest a spy.

-Exec's come on station for a meeting.

-Tourists come on station.

-Air systems break.

-A small meteor hits the station.

-A spess craft needs to be built and then be towed away.

-A new station needs to be built and then towed away.

-A passing NT ship must be repaired.

-A passing NT ship must be repaired but HOLY SHIT WE DEAD SPACE NOW.

-A VIP tours the station.

-A cure for a virus needs to be developed for off station.

-A new virus needs to be developed for off station.

-A new spess canon needs to be built.

-A thunderdome game is hosted on station.

-A medical emergancy is diverted to the station.

-The station has a slow collision with an asteroid, has to be reapired and dislodged.

-A strange artificat is found and needs researching.

-Large amounts of food/guns/materials needs to be made and shipped off station.

-Sec' Cadets tour the station.

-Some spess pests infest the station.

The list goes on and on and on.

All of these sound awesome

[The Stryker]

Large amounts of food/guns/materials needs to be made and shipped off station.

Smells like corruption.

I want.

The events shouldn't be too subversive or major (unless the lore masters want to get evil) because then everyone will be affected.

(Unless it's IPC HOPs, that can be canon)

[Guest]

@Skull

Do you remember those little request things I used to make when I was running that one story line event? Probably 2 years ago now I think. You could probably make those an in-game random event which gives a task for the crew to do. Obviously there should be a possibility of things going wrong. You know... like some local pirates somehow knowing that the station is going to be producing a lot of goods now so they'd want to raid it. Or possibly a saboteur shows up.