Botulism
Really Corrupt
CIVIL PROTECTION BEHAVIOR GUIDE
HOW TO ROLEPLAY A CONVINCING, REALISTIC, EVEN TERRIFYING DEPICTION OF A TYRANT.
Written By Botulism
Intended for both routine Civil Protection players and aspiring ones.
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION
I am writing this guide because I feel like many Civil Protection players have a fundamental misunderstanding of how real tyranny feels, looks, or acts. Many players have not consumed enough media or seen only poor depictions of what tyranny is really like, so they're either too afraid to go all the way or go too far in what I'd consider a stupid direction. Some players aspire not to push for tyranny at all, and make their Civil Protection characters openly lax or apathetical. While this is completely allowed within the ruleset of Willards that prioritizes role-player freedom and choice, I do not believe it fits the setting we want to convey and I also don't believe it helps in character and setting development.
Your first priorities in playing a Civil Protection Officer should involve creating a realistic and believable oppressor, while riding a muddied line between realism and fun for all, given it results in sensical RP.
Try to have it be fun and entertaining to read, put constant effort into what you write, treat every player as if you're personally roleplaying for them while also not giving any mercy to their characters. If you're going to execute a guy? Make it flowery, detailed, and fun and grim as hell to read, while paying some service to their character.
I've found the years-old cliches of Civil Protection guides are frankly just made to stifle new players' ambitions, and to keep them from pushing the setting to its' maximum potential. They contain cliches like recruits having to be citizens in suits that are startled by everything that goes on around them. The people who wrote these guides considered it 'human' to act this way, while I disagree. They wrote the guides this way to do a hard-turn away from the robocops that they had to deal with in the first few years of HL2RP's existence, not feeling a thing and using the "<:: Haha. ::>" emoji whenever they beat up citizens at random.
Neither of these outcomes are preferable. Neither of these characters accurately convey the kind of person that would join Civil Protection. These are both parodies.
At this point in time of your character's enlistment in Civil Protection, they've been through sixteen years of the most violent, disgusting occupation in human history. They've seen massacres, public executions, beatings, skirmishes and riots and conflict and mental breakdowns and famines and mass-arson and EVERYTHING you could think of that would go on in a complete breakdown of social order like this.
Now, you ask yourself: "Would my character join Civil Protection out of genuine care for the people, OR genuine love for the Combine?"
No. You're a man from the age of twenty to sixty who joined for a variety of reasons, not including any of those.
Maybe you're a cynic who just needs the extra cash, and beating up a bunch of innocent people with your stun-baton doesn't bother you none. Maybe you're a genuine sociopath who will make this job his religion, and the suffering of others your way of prayer. Maybe you're a biting opportunist who hated getting beat-down, and now enjoys the advancements his position of authority has.
Whatever you are, you're a pathetic, mundane, power-tripping fascist of a human being who knew going in that you'd become a stun-baton brandishing life extinguisher and species-traitor.
The next part will establish some ground rules of the Civil Protection mindset, and will be primarily OOC-based, save for the first few lines.
PART TWO: THE MINDSET AND GROUND RULES OF TYRANTS
GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT.
THE LAW MEANS NOTHING. IT IS AN EXCUSE. YOU ARE THE JUDGE, JURY AND EXECUTIONER.
YOU DO NOT RULE BY LOVE, YOU RULE BY FEAR.
THERE ARE NO LIMITS UNTIL YOU GET SHOT AND KILLED.
ARRESTING, TORTURING, BEATING AND EXECUTING THE INNOCENT IS YOUR JOB.
NOT JUST THE GUILTY.
YOU ARE NOT A COP IN A CITY.
YOU ARE BUT A GUARD IN AN OPEN-AIR PRISON.
Even regular, normal cops in dystopian societies kept meticulous amounts of paperwork. North Korean, Soviet and Nazi policemen wrote tickets, citations for citizens to see, and had a bureaucratic system to keep track of what they were doing.
You have none of that. At most, you keep records of what people have done in your PDA system. The cities in Half Life 2 are cruel parodies of actual real life cities with functioning economic systems and real, working politics. At most, you have a puppet Ministry that every Civil Protection Officer would massacre if they made a decision that none of them liked.
You're not here to protect citizens, and if you do any protecting, it's more akin to a slave-master's foreman protecting his employer's property than anything out of actual care.
So what are you here for?
You're here to keep the 'peace' until mankind dies. Heresy and being against the Combine is a crime worse than death. Citizens are in essence pure slaves of the Combine and you should treat them as such. The primordial gameplay loop of HL2RP was to keep your head down until you were pushed into rebellion or killed, and not enough characters are being pushed to the brink. Several citizen characters play along, actually having trust in the Combine system, believing that a bunch of alien tyrants will save their lives because the admins out-of-character wouldn't allow them to die otherwise. What greater betrayal against the roleplaying setting is that?
There are many times when I'd let my citizen character get willingly arrested because I thought "This is Willards, there's no way they'll publicly execute, stalkerize, etc. my character like in an old-fashioned server. They'll just arrest me, give me a beating, and let me go." When that was what I believed my character should've been given in a dystopian setting.
And they did just that!
I think I would've appreciated a good death in at least one of those scenarios.
We must ALL embrace the PK, and anyone who whines about that should remember the gamemode they chose to voluntarily play on.
In that essence, we need to fulfill roleplayers expectations of what a dystopian system acts, feels, and thinks like. Civil Protection doesn't give a damn about citizens and even it's own boys if they fuck up. I remember a hostage-taking scenario a few months ago where the Captain actually tried to negotiate with the rebels instead of just sending all his men in and killing the rebels at the potential cost of losing a few of his own, including the two cops taken hostage. Russian Communists during the war with Nazi Germany weren't even that nice. If you were captured by the enemy? Whether you lived or died, there was no real care. You were to be punished, imprisoned, executed, and in rare cases rehabilitated, all for your cowardice.
BEFORE I GO TO PART 3, I will include a small writer's note here:
While I believe that historical inspiration from the horrors of Nazi Germany is good for creating an oppressive character, I've chosen to take imagery mostly featured from historical atrocities committed by Communist nations like the Soviet Union. I've heard that a few goody-two-shoe 'ed combine mains are keen to claim the Combine are Communistic in nature and thus believe that makes them somehow 'better', but I wanted to directly dispel this in my writing by showing that all authoritarian, totalitarian, etc. Regimes are disgusting in nature. People say you shouldn't take this so seriously since it's just a game, but it's a serious roleplaying game where we're supposed to portray real people with real hopes and dreams, and you should always work to improve your writing no matter what it's for.
PART THREE: YOU LOVE YOUR JOB
You do NOT get paid for standing around.
While in-game, no matter what, you get 20 credits with every ration. Realistically, why would you get paid for just standing around and beating up a few people every now and then? While flagged, you should ALWAYS be doing something that contributes to the oppressive environment. You're here to assist in citizen player's character development while also forwarding your own. If their character doesn't fit the environment, do not be afraid to kill them, as this will assist in the development of other characters.
If there's a workshift, why stand around on the streets? Go to that workshift and beat up anyone who doesn't conform. When I was doing my last cop, a Civil Worker was causing a tiny bit of a ruckus, so my cop beat him continuously; this worker was practically running away from my cop while he was just trailing him slowly throughout the building. Eventually, my cop put him in bleed-out, and the Civil Workers were pleading him to stop; he did, since it amused him to watch the Civil Workers rush the guy away to the CMRU while being rather distressed. This was memorable, tyrannical, and no doubt very dystopian. This event definitely happened somewhere at a real life labor camp in a dystopian country.
Until the CMRU changes and surgeries actually start failing, the stakes are already low, so why not up them even more?
Your character should ideally love his job. As of right now, Civil Protection has no real direction save for continuously patrolling, so why not create direction for your own patrol-team? Decide to sweep an apartment, perform a mass-search, force citizens to gather people for watching a mass execution, and engage in corrupt, realistic acts. Hoard alcohol and drugs for your own personal use, execute members of the Ministry and disloyal units (publicly, even, for effect) who think they can stop you, make deals with the Black Market, and more.
Why bother with one-man assassinations that single you out? If you get your whole patrol-team together, tie up and de-uniform a Unit you don't like, and make every citizen watch as you blow the fucker's brains out, doesn't that legitimize the whole thing? So what if your boss doesn't like it, can he really fight you all?
PART FOUR: CAMARADERIE
ALONE, YOU CAN DO LITTLE.
WITH A GROUP? THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS.
Never let yourself get singled out, by either your own superiors or rebel forces. Cops in real life stick together. When one of them commits a wrong and an outside force attempts to judge them for it? They quickly turn from law-enforcement to thugs and attempt to intimidate or force that outside force to submit. In a dog-eat-dog environment like Half Life 2, I doubt Civil Protection would stop at that, they'd go straight for eliminating that force.
The more Civil Protection Officers YOU have by your side, the more things you can do together as a faction. As the saying goes, three men make a tiger. If enough of you are together, you can effectively push the fabric of the City to favor your way and your desires, after all, outside of Overwatch, you're the only ones allowed to possess weapons. Like the in-real-life French Foreign Legion and dystopian police forces, organizations quickly break way into clique-like systems and cadres all fighting for their own piece of the pie. If your clique is so brave, they can even go political and hire groups of citizens to terrorize and kill loyalists or civil workers, all in the name of the Combine!
The possibilities are endless!
Will this provoke citizen and civil worker players to rebel? YES.
Is this a good thing? ALSO YES.
OOCly, you are meant to inspire characters to rebel or keep their head down in a permanent bow. Once you realize your potential, you can really make people interested in rioting against you.
PART FIVE: GET CREATIVE
SUGGESTED MOVIES TO WATCH:
The Shawshank Redemption
Schindler's List
The Way Back (2010)
Come And See
1984 (Movie)
SUGGESTED BOOKS TO READ:
1984
The Gulag Archipelago
The Black Book of Communism
Night (Elie Wiesel)
SUGGESTED HISTORICAL INSPIRATION:
Totalitarian Governments and their Law Enforcement all around the world.
The Great Purge of 1937-1938, the NKVD/KGB and their internal affairs in the Soviet Union.
The Holodomor (The artificial famine created by Communists in Soviet Ukraine) and the Holocaust
PART FIVE: FIND YOUR NICHE
What does your Civil Protection Officer act like? Could it be improved in a realistic way to where he is still human, yet very dedicated to making the lives of those around him worse?
What are their distinct mannerisms? Could some of these be changed? Could they have real emotions, real fear, and a lot of likeability while also being horrible people?
Do they have an archetype? Do they have an arc? Keep in mind that you don't need either of these to have a successful character, but considering whether or not you should have them is a good idea.
All-in-all, find your niche in roleplaying a Civil Protection Officer and exercise it to perfection -- your goal should be finding your niche while also making sure it makes sense with what you're trying to roleplay; a cruel human being.
Make your character fun to go up against, and not in a way that requires you to be a pussy and give mercy to your foes. If your cop didn't commit evil acts on a regular while remaining a relatively normal person deep-down, they would cease to be believable. A true Civil Protection character isn't a scaredy-cat good cop or a no-emotion evil cop, it's somewhere in the middle.
Still horribly evil nonetheless, but with a human face under all that evil.
PART SIX: CONCLUSION
To have 'humanity' is neither a good or a bad thing.
Jesus Christ was a human, and so was Pol Pot.
Your Civil Protection character can be a human while also being a disgustingly evil person, and that is a good thing.
It is UP TO US to make the dystopian roleplaying experience what it is, and I'd love you guys to join me in furthering that atmosphere.
The essence of dystopia is getting punished for a crime you never committed.
That's all, I'm probably going to edit this a fair bit. Any suggestions or notes you may leave in the comments. Thanks for reading!
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