First draft of roleplay-lore.md

[WizAntonioD]

Tries to explain how roleplaying can be designed for.

The document is opinionated about the general direction for how roleplaying can be improved in future content.

There is no working group for this, and since the scope is practically over the whole game, I'll leave this as a draft version for now. Feedback is welcome.

If there are conflicting opinions among maintainers, please be clear about how I should fix the document (or just do the corrections yourself. I've left the tick in the 'allow edits by maintainers' box). This is my first major contribution to this project after not playing SS13 for 10+ years. Cheers.

Oh and I ran the text through grammarly and learned about the Oxford comma.

[K-Dynamic]

I only skimmed through the document due to time constraints, so I apologize in advance if I make mistakes or miss points.

1. Roleplay is not clearly defined at the beginning of the document (it's about 43 lines down).
2. There is no mention about disasters being a part of the roleplay (this is a disaster simulator after all)
3. The section about round flow is strong but it and many other recommendations do not provide justification or reasoning behind them.

[WizAntonioD]

1. Roleplay is not clearly defined at the beginning of the document (it's about 43 lines down).

I wrote it with the expectation that readers would already know what roleplaying is. Maybe it should be given a short definition at the top.

2. There is no mention about disasters being a part of the roleplay (this is a disaster simulator after all)

There are many new features I don't know about, in that sense I wanted it to be at a "higher level" and content-agnostic. I'll have to think about where the specific tone and genre could be mentioned. Also, I tried to avoid repeating what is already said in core design & design principles.

3. The section about round flow is strong but it and many other recommendations do not provide justification or reasoning behind them.

The list format guides towards brevity. If there are specific points that need more justification, I can do footnotes.

[Mot2332]

Two remarks after reading this :

First, antagonists being a popular role might also come from the fact that you effectively get a character motivation for your role in the round, so everything that transpires gets more impact in the context of failing or succeeding at your character's goal, while also naturally aligning you against the station trough these goals. You effectively get a roleplay prompt.

A crew equivalent could be pretty fun, but it might need to be on the individual level instead of the station level, so your character has a personal goal for being on station, and all your actions get extra personal meaning from it.

Second, on the nature of death in the round, it should be considered that you can go in the SS13 direction of life being cheap, and death omnipresent, for example it is standard pratice for artifacts researchers to get a clone scan before working on artifacts, because some of them WILL just kill you, disintegrate you, or make you die horribly, but you can always pop out of the cloning vat and get back to work to die in a new horrible way !

[WizAntonioD]

A crew equivalent could be pretty fun, but it might need to be on the individual level instead of the station level, so your character has a personal goal for being on station, and all your actions get extra personal meaning from it.

That's funny, just minutes ago I wrote a crew role, it's called "Impostor":

You are an impostor. You shouldn't have gotten this job, but by some miracle, you did. You are incompetent and you know it.
Objective 1: Keep your job and collect your paycheck. Do not let anyone find out that you are an impostor.
Objective 2: Escape alive.

Then you would have a meta-game around people trying to guess if someone is an impostor or actually bad.