Policy/Rules

Administration

Global Policy | Server Rules | Silicon Policy | Administrative Precedents
Standard Operating Procedures | Corporate Regulations

The Rules

Important

These rules are enforced in addition to Global Policy. Read both, please. While global policy refers to general community guidelines, these are the actual rules for the server. As such, we will try to keep this relatively simple.

Summary

Keep IC / OOC separate, adhere to minimal standards for IC chatter. Do not talk about the events of an ongoing round in OOC channels (discord, OOC verb, voice calls, etc) until it ends.
Stay in character. Try not to break character to 'win'. You should not be entirely unafraid of all death / pain / discomfort.
Make a well-rounded character. Your character should have pseudo-realistic limitations on what they are skilled at. Do not make Mary Sue's. Being a troublemaker is allowed as long as it is believable and not straying into the territory of griefing.
Rounds are canon, with caveats; remembering prior rounds is fine, instigating is not. Avoid giving your friends unreasonable boons in IC without an in character reason to do so.
Escalate conflicts reasonably. Consider what a conflict will do to your character / another's character; have justifiable and proportional IC reason if causing collateral damage or when inflicting mortal wounds.
Avoid wordless ganking, even as an antagonist. An 'antagonist' is someone given a pass to otherwise ignore certain administrative precedents (e.g. making a believable and hire-able character); you are still here to portray a character and tell a tale.
Do not exploit OOC factors for an advantage. Do not abuse bugs. Do not multikey (log on with two different accounts for the same round). Do not intentionally abuse OOC factors to ruin someone's day (waiting for someone to go AFK and then ganking them, type-baiting, etc).
Punishments may be IC or OOC. You open yourself to IC but not OOC punishments by crew / admins acting as higher authorities if you cause trouble IC but not break OOC rules on roleplaying.
Staff are still players. Staff characters get no special treatment.
Adminhelp if you have a grievance or question. Do not lie in admin tickets. Do not attempt to enforce OOC rules via IC other than in cases of clear griefing. Do not assume that someone else getting away with something means it is allowed/not enforced - always ask if you have a question.
Erotic content must be consented to by all parties. Erotic content receives grief protections but no world / IC protections. Keep extreme content off the server and do not go out of your way to harass people in regards to this content whether for or against.

Elastic Clause

Citadel RP is a roleplay-oriented server. No ruleset will possibly cover all cases, and as general as our rules are, there are cases that fall outside of them still. As such, administrators may intervene in rounds and grievances as they see fit.

Obviously, staff that choose to invoke this clause are held responsible for their actions.

These rules are worded for a roleplaying environment. We, however, are roleplaying in Space Station 13. We are not here to take all the fun out of the game; reasonable amounts of ‘fun’ will be tolerated, for the game would become not much more than a job simulator without it.

We’re all here to have fun, not fight and argue with assholes. Don’t intentionally ruin the game for everyone else on an OOC level, and use common sense. More times than not, we care more about what you are doing than what rule you broke. Acting in good faith can excuse a lot of missteps, while intentionally making others miserable will be punished regardless of rules being broken verbatim.

Immersion

Keep IC and OOC separate. If there is an issue, contact staff. Breaking the fourth wall to get even with something is not okay.
Netspeak: Adhere to minimal standards for IC chatter; do not use “netspeak” e.g. emojis, “lol”, “wtf”, “4head” in IC chat. Language, after all, is spoken.
- IC text messaging like PDA/communicators is exempt from this.
- Semantically digital languages like the AI/cyborg binary channel, and EAL are exempt from this. Other players, however, can and will make fun of you if you choose to talk like this.
Metacommunications: Do not share round information in OOC manners of communication. This is unfair to everyone else playing in the round.
External Information: Do not use round information gained from OOC communications in round unless explicitly stated to by staff.
- Do not use information from adminhelps IC unless told otherwise. We do’nt want to have to tip toe to not “leak” round information to you; please don’t ruin it for everyone.
Deadchat: Deadchat is considered OOC.
(L)OOC: In game OOC channels are generally for clearing up OOC/mechanical confusion, e.g. having to afk for a moment, typos, misclicks, etc.
- They are not for arguing about an IC case. Security can and should disregard someone claiming innocence in LOOC, as an example. If there’s a major issue, you/they can adminhelp. Abuse of the channel will result in a mute.
- For urgent issues, using ((Hey this is a heads up.)) double parentheses notation is an acceptable thing to do in say/me/IC channels.
Do not use AI-generated text content in game. Reference images in your flavortext is fine. Writing your flavortext or RPing with LLM's or similar AI generators in game is not. As a rule of thumb, if we can tell it's AI, it's probably too AI for a RP community.

Roleplay

Stay in character: Try to stay in character at all times. Don’t do ridiculous things that your character wouldn’t.
- Light amounts of messing about is allowed and encouraged, as we are still a video game. Just because your character is here to work doesn’t mean they can’t have a little fun while doing it. We’re not here to roleplay rigid military rank, and your character isn’t a robot.
On powergaming: Powergaming is defined, loosely, as ‘playing to win’. If you are trying to complete round objectives, kill the antagonists, or ‘win’, at all costs with no regards to roleplaying, you may be better off somewhere else. This may include but is not limited to:
- Having your character unafraid of any and all death or pain and resistant to any torture
- Having your character always willing to battle alone against a crowd of opponents
- Rushing gun wielders unarmed with no regards to your own preservation
- Having guns, medicine, and other powerful items every round with no real IC reason to do so
On character knowledge: Departmental knowledge is outlined in “Characters”. This more refers to general guidelines; keep in mind what your character does/doesn’t know. The average spacer probably doesn’t know where to find, say, an agent’s uplink, or have exact coordinates of specific pieces of loot memorized to teleport at a whim.
On cloning/revival: Cloning and revival technologies are in flux on the server out of necessity. Death and pain should not be ignored due to their presence; they are only so lax at current time for the benefit of our community and culture.
On Leaving the Round: While it's unreasonable to try to force people to play what they don't want to play, please avoid leaving the round to dodge IC punishment for your character's actions. It's not fair to the other people who went out of their way to handle whatever you did.
- Avoid ghosting out of your character unless absolutely necessary. There's already systems in place to allow you to leave the round properly.
- While we do not mechanically restrict leaving and coming back on the same character, it should not be used to do things like swap jobs, heal yourself, and similar IC actions. Please see Administrative Precedents for more information.

Characters

Make well rounded characters: Your characters should have strengths and weaknesses. Take what species you’re playing as into consideration. Avoid “Mary Sue”s, aka characters that are inexplicably/unreasonably perfect at everything with no flaws.
Keep your characters separate: It is unfair to others if you were allowed to play a whole “cast” of characters fit for everything, and share knowledge/grudges amongst themselves in an attempt to bypass our rules on escalation/grudges/knowledge. Here are some examples;
- Playing siblings is okay.
- Playing characters who know each other is okay.
- Leaving mid-round to bring in another character to handle a situation in your character's favor by overruling conflicts is not okay; an example of such is joining as a security character to clear another one of your character's name.
  - Switching characters to respond to an ongoing crisis, such as swapping from a medical character to an engineer character to handle a Code Orange, is allowed.
- Having all of your characters automatically grant someone favors, or grudge someone as a group is not okay, and will usually be considered as metagrudging.
(Departmental) Knowledge: Keep knowledge reasonable. A twenty-five year old wouldn’t be some genius with multiple PhDs. Many things are harder to do in character than they actually are to do in the game, e.g. things like surgery isn’t ICly clicking a button ten times. Avoid characters that know everything.
- This is usually relaxed and not overly enforced when there’s not a lot of people around. We don’t want skeleton crew hours to be unplayable.
- While many species exist that can live well past normal human lifespans, we still require those characters adhere to reasonable knowledge guidelines; No 'my character is 300 years old' perfect do-it-alls.
- As rounds are canon, characters should not be a permanent Head of Staff for more than one department at a time. Swaps are possible, but should be done in a reasonable manner.
- For the purposes of these rulings, the Captain/Facility Director and the Head of Personnel are in the same department: Command. Playing both frequently is allowed.
- The general guideline is that a character should have at most proficiency in two unrelated fields. Most people wouldn’t be heads of multiple departments, or able to do every job on the station.
Miscreants, troublemakers, and criminals: Characters with “unfavorable” (from the PoV of authority) backstories are allowed and encouraged. Getting caught IC still incurs penalties as always.
- You still need to get hired. Your employer wouldn’t hire someone who wouldn’t be able/willing to work. No “my character is insane” antics.
- Backstory cannot justify escalation alone. No characters that attack security for the fun of it, or “evil” characters that join to break things.
Flavor Text: Your flavortext represents what can be visually observed by looking at your character. Try not to dump backstory, and keep it (relatively) reasonable.
On backstory and species: Character customization and creativity is one of our environment’s features. You may design custom species/genemodded characters with unique planets/backstory within reason. Some specific caveats are as follows;
- Major species already have lore. No going against what the agreed upon narrative is; adding to it in reasonable manners (like saying there’s some outpost somewhere that you came from, etc.) is usually allowed.
- Whitelisted species have specific requirements for lore. Make sure you’re in adherence with them.
- Custom species may either be 1. a genetic modification of a major species 2. a minor race of your own creation with no more than a few systems. The galaxy’s major species are already set; there won’t be any Mary Sue races popping up out of nowhere without prior agreement.
- Lore submissions: We encourage lore submissions if you wish to expand upon our universe. This is one way to “canonize” your minor race.
- On Important Characters: Characters integral to the lore, e.g. leaders of major species factions, CCOs, any kind of royalty, and generally any in-universe celebrity would find little reason to be working on the station. They may not be used as 'daily driver' characters.
- Heads of Staff: Heads of Staff must have written and complete security / medical / employment records.
Naming policy: We are very lax on naming policy. Here are some general guidelines;
- It is recommended to stick to your species’s standard naming style (firstname lastname for humans, etc). Try to have a reason if you choose otherwise.
- Character names may not contain nicknames. (e.g. Jason “Jay” Brooks)
- Character names may not contain hierarchal, gender-based, or job related titles, like Duke, Lord, Dr., Mr., Capt., etc.
- Try to initial middle names. (Kara Mary Snyder --> Kara M. Snyder)
- Human names may not be a mononame. (e.g. “Jack”).
- Clowns, mimes, theatrical roles, and gimmicky event roles are usually exempt from naming policy. Keep it tasteful.
- You may not name your character after real life celebrities, politicians, or other famous person(s) from popular culture/video games.
- Avoid cartoony names like Firstname ColorFur and similar; it breaks suspension of disbelief.

Continuity

This is a section undergoing trial. Continuity is hard to get right, and we may adjust this as necessary. Keep it tasteful and avoid going out of your way to ruin somebody’s day.

Citadel RP has round continuity. This means that events of previous rounds are canon in-universe unless stated otherwise. This comes with a few minor caveats:

Instigating: Avoid instigating conflict cross round in a way that heavily disrupts another person’s round. You should not be leaping for someone’s throat the moment they arrived or trying to bait them into a fistfight. Keep it reasonable.
Favors: Avoid giving your friends, in character or out, overly powerful benefits without sufficient IC reason to do so. Whether or not this is persecuted in-character depends on what your reasoning was and whether it was plausibly in character.
Grudges: Avoid acting on grudges in a way that ruins someone’s rounds. We do not want to see Pathfinders kicking someone off the team over a personal dislike alone, nor do we want to see cargo-techs denying departmental gear for no good reason.
Relationships: Character relationships are going to happen, especially given the nature of the server. The rules above apply regardless; expect higher scrutiny from Central Command if you main a head or security role.
Violations: Violations of the above may be persecuted IC or OOC depending on severity and reasoning. Keep extra care to not overdo it as a head of staff.
- By necessity, administration will generally side against instigation of needless cross-round drama if faxed, especially when involving positions of power.

Conflict

Conflicts, including physical ones, may be started by characters if there is sufficient IC reason to do so. Keep in mind the limits of your character; most characters are likely working for an employer, and someone overly violent/destructive would not be employed for long.

Escalate conflicts reasonably: You should be using reasonable force and consider what your character would do in response to a scenario (or what they would be willing to do when instigating).
On lethal conflict: Avoid lethality/maiming where possible. Murder is a serious crime in character, regardless of revival technologies. Your character would not be killing their coworkers over the average disagreement!
Have a reason for collateral: Avoid causing collateral damage to uninvolved and to critical infrastructure for the same reasons as above.
Keep IC and OOC separate: Your characters’ feelings and your own feelings should stay separate. The same should apply to everyone around you. Do not OOCly harass other players for their IC actions, and do not metagrudge by acting on your OOC dislike of someone using your IC character.
- Targeted IC harassment over OOC grudges (and vice versa) is taken very seriously. Just don’t. If you think someone is doing it, adminhelp; do not fight fire with fire.

Antagonism

Antagonists: ‘Antagonists’ refer to anyone given a pass to act as a special, and usually opposing role. This can include pirates, shapeshifters, cultists, or even a malicious diplomat.
Roleplaying an antagonist: Antagonists are not exempt from the rules. Your role gives you a reason to act beyond what an ordinary crewmember would, or in some cases, could. While you often have laxed escalation and de-facto motives to cause problems, it is not a free pass to kill and destroy anything you please.
Avoid ganking or playing hero: The point of antagonism is not to “win” by killing either side. Wordlessly killing anyone in your way, or wordlessly charging perceived antagonists to kill/subdue them without good IC reason is not a good idea.

Mechanics

Bug abuse: Bug abuse is defined as knowingly using unintended behavior. This is punishable by staff depending on severity and intent.
- We’ve all done something funny with broken game mechanics before. Staff are generally going to be lenient in relatively harmless abuses of bugs.
- Open source projects rely on players to find bugs. You will not be punished for finding a bug alone. You are encouraged to find and report bugs.
- Do not abuse bugs to gain an upper hand in IC conflict, especially mechanical conflict/combat. This is the one case which will be persecuted severely, as it erodes trust and ruins it for all parties involved.
Multikeying: Do not multikey without admin permission. This means not playing multiple characters at once, not logging in with multiple accounts as once, so on and so forth.
Griefing: Do not intentionally and knowingly abuse OOC inconveniences to gain an upper hand in IC, or perform IC actions with the express intent of causing OOC upset.
- Try not to grief those experiencing said inconveniences, like stealing from someone whose connection suddenly dropped. Pressing IC reason may alleviate this.
- This is relaxed in some cases where enforcing this makes less sense than not enforcing it. Act in good faith.
Fourth Wall: Just because something is possible in the code, does not necessarily mean it makes sense in IC or that you should do it. Due to how open-ended this rule is by nature, we will list all commonly enforced tidbits as follows:
- Item naming: The loadout system as well as many in-game systems allow you to rename and 'refluff' item names and descriptions. Much like flavortext, this should be what an arbitrary person can glean from inspecting the item. Do not infer information, feelings, or thoughts onto the reader that the reader should not know factually by looking at the item. An example of a violation would be "Bob Joe's duster jacket" as an item name.

Punishments

We seek to handle issues with IC intervention over OOC punishments like bans.

IC punishments: These are directed at a player's characters. Punishments carried out IC include administration faxing to assert a certain directive sanctioning a given character. Character-specific jobbans or sanctions are also considered an IC punishment.
OOC punishments: These are directed at the player. They involve less faxes and roleplay and more admin-tickets. OOC punishments are handed out more for server rule breaches than IC regulation breaches. Keep this distinction in mind.

Administrative Interference

Staff are still players: Characters played by administrators, developers, event staff, etc, are part of the game world. They receive no special treatment in regards to IC conflict.
- Staffmembers are not allowed to adopt world-critical characters as their regular, everyday characters.
Keep character: In round staff interference, such as item spawning, does not receive automatic immunity from IC reactions.
- e.g. if someone has an adminspawned weapon, security is allowed to act as usual. We would have given them a permit/faxed a directive if immunity was intended.

Grievances / Adminhelps

If you see a rulebreak, admin-help it. Act in character while in character; do not attempt to backseat administrate or enforce OOC rules IC other than in cases of clear grief.

Adminhelp if an issue arises. Do not wait until the end of the round. Staff are here to assist.
Fax. IC problems like requesting assistance/directives should be faxed where possible.
Pings: If admins are unavailable, whether for adminhelps or faxes, pinging @RP Staff on the Discord is allowed
Discord tickets: Issues should be brought up in a Discord ticket if the round in question is already over.
Old grievances: There is no set statute of limitations for taking a problem to administration. That said, it’s worth considering whether something is still worth bringing up after too long of a time has transpired. Staff have the right to disregard very old cases if they find little reason to press the issue.
On truthfulness: Lying in an adminhelp is a terrible idea. It tells us we cannot trust you, which makes whatever you did magnitudes worse because now we have to second guess your stated intent.
- Lying is obviously allowed in character. It may result in consequences for you if found, but isn’t the same as lying in an OOC adminhelp. If we want straight answers out of someone, we’ll use an admin ticket. Faxes are IC.
- Forcing admins to drag out information piece by piece or otherwise intentionally misrepresenting situations is equivalent to lying.

Sexual Content / ERP

ERP (Erotic roleplaying) is allowed on Citadel RP, with these caveats. Anything considered too indecent to do in public of a normal, urban area, falls under this clause.

ERP is not required. If you are here to play and have no interest in it, say as such in your OOC notes. You will not be harassed or otherwise discriminated against; we are a server with ERP, not a server explicitly for ERP.
OOC consent is required. Do not harass those who do not want ERP for ERP, and do not be excessively creepy. We take this very seriously. Seriously, just don’t.
‘Extreme’ content should be isolated. Keep things like OOCly agreed upon non-consensual scenes, as well as kinks considered graphic (filth, gore, etc) or extreme private.
- It is required to use the anti-ghost subtle verb in these cases as well.
- Realize that if taken at face value, a character doing these things (especially fully non-consensual scenes) would be swiftly expelled from the station. We only allow these scenes to happen on server at all for convenience / not requiring people to take it to Discord, not because it is ICly allowed. Intentionally dragging these scenes to public eye for the sake of drama is punishable by character removals or server bans.
ERP with creatures that cannot consent is not allowed. Outside of two players engaging in consensual non-con content, ERPing feral creatures (ie; animals or other simple mobs that are unable to consent) is not allowed.
- Player controlled simplemobs are able to consent, and are not affected by this rule. However, this content is generally considered 'Extreme', and falls under the provisions of that rule.
ERP receives no world protections. People are allowed to interrupt you given a good IC reason, such as you being on duty and needed, or security enforcing public indecency regulations. Your scene is not central to the in-game world.
ERP does receive protection from grief. Interrupting ERP for no good IC reason is grounds for admin action. This especially applies to private roleplay. Do not attempt to grief ERPers for no / flimsy reasoning.
Do not intentionally abuse ERP mechanics for gameplay. This means no size-shifting to try to step on people mid combat (this likely breaks character rules as well, most of the time), no abusing vore to round-remove or heal people in conflict. This is generally enforced by the code team through balancing and design, but is a rule nonetheless. We have some mechanics that are only really useful for ERP; Don’t ruin it for everyone.
- We reserve the right to ask anyone using sub-standard sizes to avoid causing mechanical problems / engaging in mechanical conflict. It doesn't make sense for 16 pixel tall humans to run around beating people with batons, and the coders shouldn't need to spend their limited time dealing with it. You are allowed to partake in the game, but you are not allowed to make others miserable with your small size.

Footnotes

Some of our rules may seem arbitrary. Here’s a short collection of “why”s.

On code balance, development direction, and roleplay

Many things, like some of the issues listed below, stem from the server’s code maintainers progressing code direction in a specific way to better cater to our overall goal.

Things like player death may be avoided, as a design choice. Medical systems are not as realistic as they are in real life. Science is going to be a constant work in project, and you’ll often have to shoot a simple mob human that to you, a player, you know as being a NPC, but in character, they’re still another human.

Should you take everything in the code 100% seriously? No. You aren’t required to mourn IC for the next few days because you shot a simplemob cultist spawned by a careless deprecated event that we (developers) have yet to change. You aren’t required to write out in a /me cutting each wire of a door. In some cases, you should take the enjoyment of the code-base we build for you (as well as the enjoyment of your fellow players) over a roleplay technicality.

But neither should you completely ignore the ramifications of a scenario or action simply because it’s glitzed over for the ease of use of players. Your character should not be seeking to kill hundreds of mercenary simplemobs; they are still human. Science takes a button to operate, and brain surgery is as simple as ten clicks, because this is a roleplaying game. In character, however, they are not nearly as simple as that, and you should reflect that in your actions.

The developers have a third of the burden of responsibility of encouraging IC behavior. The playerbase and the administration have the other two thirds. Not one of the three groups can do it alone.

On cloning, revival, the medical system, and taking IC death seriously

Revival, cloning, and mirror technology in character is absurd. We have yet to change it. We may never change it, for the simple reason that we are a server with a lot of slice of life roleplayers.

Sitting out in deadchat is unfun, and dying from a single lucky stab of a knife in five minutes isn’t what the game should be about. We design the codebase with a mixture of realism, but also playability. It should suck to get injured, yes, but this is a video game above all.

Try not to act like death and pain is meaningless in character, though. Simply because we make it less brutal than it would be in real life doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem for your character. Do not abuse playability to powergame. It ruins the game for everyone.

On powerful world characters, heroes, antagonists, and their restrictions

Everyone wants to be the center of the story, and that is fine. For many, it is fun to play someone of importance, and to be the driving force behind a story.

However, the fact of the matter is that not everyone can be the key to the story. Not everyone can star in every event, and it’s unfair for us to wantonly allow someone to play an important world character, like a faction leader, a central command officer, and similar.

Powerful world characters are restricted to staff discretion and events for this reason. Usage and authorization of them by staff are reviewed by other staff where available, and perceived abuse should be brought up for discussion. </div

On the limits of allowable erotic roleplay

Administrating a server with ERP is not fun. You get a lot of complaints about what should and shouldn’t be acceptable.

We are not here to police your kinks. That would be unreasonable, unfair, and soul-crushing for our staff beyond measure.

We, however, ask that you keep anything considered extreme or undesirable for the majority to ghost-invisible emotes, and in extreme cases, may even ask you to take it to Discord.

This clause has not had to be exercised many times over our server’s journey, but we have to consider the majority of our playerbase, not just one or a small group of people.

Furthermore, erotic roleplay does not halt the game’s world. While we do not allow griefing ERPers on purpose, the show must go on; your character doesn’t get an exception simply because they’re getting into private business. If you don’t wish to be interrupted, consider taking your scene off server. It is frankly not physically possible for another player or for an event to interrupt you then.

On powerful species, mechanics, items, and their lore

The premise of this is basically the same as the footnote “On development direction”. Some species are far more powerful in lore than we would allow in code. Some species are far more powerful in code than we would allow in lore.

We ask you take things with a reasonable grain of salt. Simply because a thing is not possible in code does not mean it is not possible in character. Simply because a thing is possible in code doesn’t mean it’s a good idea in character.