First contact and the Yautja whitelist.

[Cabal]

@Harrysno

The RP doesn’t disappear because of the specific name that was used, that’s a separate issue. It disappears because you’re using a gamey name or term to identify a character that you’d know nothing about. Using the term “Jamaican” isn’t you being HRP or even RPing at all, you use it because other players know what it means in the exact same way that people would know what you mean when you say “T3 around the corner.” It’s gamey, it’s cringe, and it’s (from what I’ve seen) near universally disliked by Pred players.

What? It was stated countless times that “Jamaican” isn’t a “gamey” term. A tall humanoid with dreadlocks, in a hypotetical scenario of a player who has 0 knowledge about any pred media, if he hears about “Jamaicans” and sees a pred with dreadlocks, 9 out of 10 times they will recognise that it is the fabled “Jamaican”. Do a test, ask your sister, girlfriend, or whoever, get few pictures of different aliens, from Mass Effect, Halo and preds themself, then ask them to point a “Jamaican”.

“Maicer” is a gamey name, not “Jamaican”. Saying basically just “I see not a xeno”, or “I see a humanoid” already gives everyone tip that it is about preds, like come on.

T3 might be a bit gamey, but it is informative about a particular extraordinary danger and you don’t need much hoops of logic to justify it IC. All the xeno names and their caste structure is described trough human input. There is no such thing as T3 for xenos, it is simply an evolution of previous xeno that is more powerfull. But for the sake of keeping everything organised, both xenos and marines use technical/“scientific”/nickname terms to describe xenomorphs.

That is why first contact rule with xenos failed. Some dumbass thought that “Runner” is some strictly classified term that marines are not allowed to know, when in fact it is a nickname given by humans who encountered it in “the wild”. Both xenos and marines call “runner” a “runner”, there is no HRP in that, but there is no LRP in that either.

@Harrysno

And no, nicknames like “Jamaican,” “Dreadlock Lizards,” and “Spooks” (the last one being actually flat out banned last I heard) aren’t acceptable, they’re LRP and gamey. Your character isn’t going to see a 9 foot tall, heavily armored alien that just ripped a marine’s head off and go “Command we’ve got Jamaicans down here!” It’s baffling how ridiculous of a take that is. What you’d be most likely to do is open fire and scream about massive aliens murdering people. When you call a pred one of these terms you’re doing it purely because that’s what people have called them in the past on an OOC level.

Then what fucking term is acceptable? “GIANT MURDERING HUMANOID HEAD-RIPPING HEAVILY ARMORED ALIENS”?
We NEED a fairly short, easy and simple term to describe preds.
By your stupid logic EVERY term is “gamey”. Demons?

Your character isn’t going to see a 9 foot tall, heavily armored alien that just ripped a marine’s head off and go “Command we’ve got Demons down here!” It’s baffling how ridiculous of a take that is. What you’d be most likely to do is open fire and scream about massive aliens murdering people.

Cloakers?

Your character isn’t going to see a 9 foot tall, heavily armored alien that just ripped a marine’s head off and go “Command we’ve got Cloakers down here!” It’s baffling how ridiculous of a take that is. What you’d be most likely to do is open fire and scream about massive aliens murdering people.

I feel that no term would be satisfying for you. Not predators, not demons, not cloakers, not jamaicans, nothing. What title do we have to bestow upon preds each time we dare to mention them?
Is “humanoid alien” a “gamey” term for you too?

@Harrysno

Predators aren’t xenomorphs either, and drawing a parallel between the hyper advanced alien civilization based in a level of secrecy that kidnaps human beings to hunt for fun and the hyper-malicious alien hivemind that exists only to grow and consume is dishonest at best. Part of the mystique of Preds is that they’re a secondary antagonist that exists to augment the roleplay of a round, by proposing that the general public and entire USCM is aware of their existence you’re just turning them into Xenos 2.0 and removing a large aspect of what makes them unique to interact with in a round. You remove the opportunity given to players to actually RP out the fear of finding a 9 foot tall invisible demon in the jungle and make the only option a simple “Hey Command we got preds, should we worry about their plasma guns and invisibility cloaks?”

That is just insane. Just because it is written somewhere that some shmuck as a marine has rudimentary knowledge that preds exist does not remove any opportunity give to players to actually RP out the fear of finding a 9 foot tall invisible demon (gamey term) in the jungle.

No matter what you do, people played and observed countless pred rounds and that is simply not possible. You can’t enforce that. Everyone is sick and tired of pretending that preds are the big mistery, they fucking aren’t. This shit works during events, when it is actually rare and a mystery.

Oh no, it is operation penis-guacamole, the 2137th pred round this year. What’s that I can see written in rules page? As a marine I KNOW that preds exist and even there is an “official” term to describe them? I guess I WON’T RP fearing them now. You know, thanks to that knowledge from rumors about them murdering entire squads, skinning them and doing all of that scary shit, there is simply nothing to RP fear about. But if that wasn’t written in rule page and we still had to pretend that preds are a big mystery, now I can properly PR fearing them, because if I know something is deadly, I do not fear it, but If I don’t know what it is and never heard of it ICly, then I do fear it.

@Harrysno

“Hey Command we got preds, should we worry about their plasma guns and invisibility cloaks?”

People who are here to play and not RP will always do that. No matter how hard you will enforce that, if they are not interested in RP, they won’t. No matter how hard you will want to crack down on marine to pred LRP, you won’t be able to ban somebody for seeing a pred, stating on comms they see “weird humanoid” and then fucking off to front.

@Harrysno

My opinion, keep first contact rules and clamp down on the LRP and gamey terms used to describe preds to make it more achievable.

Delussional. Propose your non-gamey term and make it official. Everyone will use it. Will it become gamey then? Come on, speak up, present us with “non-gamey” term, I beg of you.