Cindy
*sigh* ud know this if u read the silmarillion...
- Joined
- Feb 28, 2018
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- Nebulae
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Initially, I had hesitated to finish this for reasons I articulated on my profile, but I came to the decision to finally roll this out as I feel it could benefit the coming server more than it could harm it.
Enjoy.
To state that HL2RP is on its way out would be an incredible understatement. Having gone on with roots going as far back as 2004 pre-dating its arrival to Garry's Mod by several years, the genre has undergone a significant metamorphosis since the days of roleplaying on Half-Life 2 Deathmatch or TacoNBanana's City 8 Cyberpunk extravaganza of 2010. But with each new server or experience in the last decade, we've begun to see the long-term diminishing returns of a setting that has, largely, suffered from being unable to break from its mold, and the continued failure of roleplay servers to solve this problem has led to dwindling interest over the last several years.
The haphazard thesis I am prepared to present to you is informed by my own experiences that have varied from me being a player, admin, member of headstaff and owner/manager of my own communities, as well as extensive research into roleplayer psyche and how the average player engages with systems in roleplaying mediums for the sake of adjusting my approach to designing roleplay settings in these mediums. I have been seriously roleplaying as far back as 2008 across at least six different kinds of mediums including Garry's Mod, and my hours in Garry's Mod alone exceed 25,000. While I accept that I am not infallible to bias, limited perspective and human err, I would not post a thread like this if I were not wholly confident in my statements and claims in the interest of my passion for storytelling and using the insight that my passion has absorbed over the years to positively benefit the roleplaying community on Gmod.
This piece will also focus explicitly on HL2 city roleplay as opposed to other alternatives within the bounds of the setting, because while servers in other variants of the setting do exist, they stray from the core element that defines Half-Life 2's new world under the Combine, and therein becomes its own structurally unique setting separate from city roleplay. In other words, I do not believe non-city HL2RP has a chance for a long-term future, where I believe city HL2RP does, despite constant failures among roleplay communities to successfully and sustainably deliver it in the present day. However, it is not without saying that these principles cannot be translated to other locales (such as the Outlands), perhaps even other settings if adapted effectively.
Buckle up, this is due to be a long one.
Half-Life is, far beyond anything else, my favourite fictional setting. I remember fondly of sitting in the lap of my father playing Half-Life 2 at age 4 in his office as we'd take turns- I'd do the shooting and he'd handle the physics puzzles that were far too complex for my toddler self to grasp. Roleplaying HL2RP made up the majority of my free time as a teenager in a household riddled with trauma as I, a closeted transwoman who could not be themselves as a consequence of an abusive mother, was given a medium of escapism to construct my wildest character fantasies in a dystopic sandbox. And above all else, roleplaying HL2RP revealed to me my passion for writing and storytelling, which would both define my future ambitions as an adult as well as provide me the chance to get closer to my father, a published author, and eventually come out of the closet to him through my writing at the end of 2021 and to finally introduce myself as the truest, most authentic iteration of me yet.
As a result, the Half-Life game series carries a significant wealth of sentimental importance to me, far beyond simply being enriched by the contents of the games themselves. I explain this to you, reader, because I want you to understand just in full how passionate I am for this setting, and how devoted I am in ensuring that Half-Life 2 RP has a future beyond the limited constraints of Garry's Mod.
I think in order to truly assess HL2RP as it has existed in Garry's Mod and to encapsulate the extensive variety of interpretations of its world and implementations of its roleplay systems across countless servers, the setting must first be broken down piecemeal to therein be analyzed.
For the sake of the purpose of this thread, let us pretend that you have never played Half-Life 2 at any point, and the concept of its setting is completely alien to you. Disengage from your predetermined opinions on the structure of how HL2RP should work in your head, set aside your own personal interpretations of the setting, and dive.
Half-Life 2 begins many years after the conclusion of the first game, where the consequences of its conclusion are illustrated with the presence of a totalitarian, alien surveillance state enforced by the enigmatic Combine who have established their dominion across Earth. Utilizing humans themselves to enforce its regime, citizens are coerced to enlist within Civil Protection to receive further benefits and improved state of living in the new world's dystopia. Meanwhile, other citizens have chosen to take matters into their own hands by resisting the Combine in subtle or overt ways. Where some keep their heads down to fight another day, others lash out in desperation for survival.
In the blurb above, HL2RP's three most important factions are outlined: Citizens, Civil Protection and the Resistance. Any other factions are explicitly nonessential, in that their inclusion is an overall added benefit in enhancing and augmenting the setting's experience (City Administration, Overwatch, Vortigaunts, etc.) but is ultimately not crucial to its function.
This is a diagram that, in some form or another, I've made a couple of times to express the concept of HL2RP's faction wheel. This thread will go through the full digest of each step of this wheel to best understand the setting.
Through the existence of these three factions, the wheel of HL2RP begins to turn as a result of these factions interacting, colliding or even blending together. Like a well-oiled machine, each piece must perform its duty lest the entire engine come to abrupt stop. To create a fulfilling HL2RP experience, each of these factions must be appropriately tuned to seek roleplay with its adjacent parts, as well as receive roleplay from them.
This diagram covers six kinds of roleplay interactions:
• Citizen ---> CP interaction, or (C->CP)
• Citizen ---> Resistance interaction, or (C->R)
• CP ---> Citizen interaction, or (CP->C)
• CP ---> Resistance interaction, or (CP->R)
• Resistance ---> Citizen interaction, or (R->C)
• Resistance ---> CP interaction, or (R->CP)
The reason there are implied directions with these six interaction types instead of three interactions for each permutation of the three faction combinations is because the first faction is the initiator in a given scenario, with the second faction being the receiver. A citizen who reports suspicious activity to a Civil Protection officer is a scenario in which a citizen initiates a scenario with Civil Protection, whereas Civil Protection conducting a block inspection is a scenario where Civil Protection initiates a scenario with citizens.
The reason for this level of specificity for these roleplay interactions is because of the desires of a roleplayer or the faction they are in. A faction will have a specific role or purpose to fulfill, and a player will have their own individual desires to fulfill in the interest of their engagement with the setting. The key difference between the two is understanding that a faction's role is a mechanical purpose that serves the greater setting, like providing a danger to overcome for rebels, while the player's desire is an individual fantasy that said player is searching for, such as playing out the tragic resistance hero trope through one's character. These desires will vary greatly depending on the faction and player, but it is nonetheless important to recognize and understand these desires when understanding the shape of the setting and is an especially important to factor in later when it comes to OOC communication on organizing roleplay.
This structure of classifying roleplay scenarios allows for us to ask the following:
• What kind of experience is the initiator having when they enter this scenario?
• What kind of experience is the receiver having when they enter this scenario?
• Does this interaction fulfill either faction's purpose or role in the setting?
• Does this interaction fulfill either side's individual fantasy? Did they have a positive experience?
Assessing these scenarios and asking these questions allows for us to look closer at the everyday interactions of the setting and make appropriate adjustments when needed. An ideal, healthy HL2RP environment will provide ample opportunities for all permutations of roleplay scenarios to occur, where the conclusion of these scenarios will provide a mutually enjoyable experience for all participating parties. While this is easier said than done, the end-goal of adjusting the systems of your setting should be to this very end. I highly encourage you to revisit past scenarios and attempt to classify those instances through the tools above.
To best identify and play into player desires and individual fantasies in your setting, I highly recommend taking a look at another thread I wrote sometime last year that went into detail on the subject of GNS Theory, which is a model that classifies the different types of roleplayers, and what they seek to derive from a roleplaying experience.https://nebulous.cloud/threads/gns-theory-how-roleplay-works.55599/
Citizens: "The Wild Cards"
Citizens are the bedrock of HL2RP. They're what you start as, have infinite potential in what they could become in the dystopic hellscape of the Combine-occupied cities, and they could be anyone. The tragedy is that most servers severely mishandle the Citizen faction and turn it into a jumping pad to access the server's other more exciting factions, when the reality is that, regardless of what faction your character joins, they should still be a citizen. Your character joins Civil Protection? The ability to allow Civil Protection to go off-duty in your server and intermingle with the rest of the populace will make your character still a citizen, and will open up a whole new avenue of opportunities as far as how your character handles their secret life as a dystopian beatcop in relation to the rest of their life, and if they'll pursue their duties even out of uniform. It also provides a passive deterrence of danger to incognito rebels in the midst of citizens, who like Civil Protection, must live with a dual life while co-existing with the rest of the citizen populace. Joining a labor/work faction (CWU, Engineer Core, "Ministry of Labor", etc.)? This faction should be treated as a job that your character has and, at the end of the day, is still a citizen.
The secret truth is that "true citizen" roleplayers are very rare. To combat this and provide ample meat for your setting's citizen populace, your other factions should not remove characters from this pool as a part of joining them. This also has the added bonus of allowing you to create experiences that target or involve the Citizen faction and thereby involve a vast majority of your server's playerbase as a result.
At the end of the day, the Citizen is less of a faction of a single defined type of character but rather an amalgamation of several factions blended together, indiscernable to the untrained eye. Some citizens could be off-duty cops who've traded away their morality for better living conditions, or rebel sympathizers who practice frequent malcompliance, or even an outright rebel in deep-cover, blending in with the rest of the denim blue sea in a crowd of other citizens. The ambiguity of the citizen presents a danger to Civil Protection and Resistance alike, requiring their function and roles toward the setting to thereby create roleplay scenarios where these characters must now navigate carefully.
Civil Protection: "The Cops"
I cannot think of a more iconic depiction of the HL2RP experience than that of Civil Protection standing menacingly from afar as a gaggle of stunstick-wielding thugs looking for a reason to start swinging. Whether they're desperate citizens looking to fill an empty stomach, or simply wanting to take advantage of the power provided by the position, Civil Protection are the foremost antagonists players should be facing in the city. They represent the assimilation of humanity into the Combine's bosom as they become weaponized against their very neighbors.
I already went into the importance of allowing Civil Protection to go off-duty and intermingle with the citizen populace above, and while that is still just as crucial to securing a healthy Citizen faction, I want to go more into something more Civil Protection specific in how the faction handles consequence in the HL2RP setting. When your citizen, rebel or otherwise is apprehended, you, the initiator in this scenario, are now fully in control of the fate of this character. Gmod has solidified a massive anti-metagame culture that, while deterring blatant metagaming issues, has also bled over into nullifying important instances of OOC communication between roleplayers.
You may not be aware of this, but the concept of "evading roleplay" being something that's punishable through server rules is a uniquely Garry's Mod phenomenon. In World of Warcraft, Project Zomboid, Final Fantasy 14, text RPs and so on, if you, the roleplayer do not consent to the roleplay presented to you, you are under zero obligation to participate in it, and it is an accepted part of those medium's RP cultures to respect that decision. The reason it exists in Garry's Mod is as a result of the unique nature of servers being isolated microcosms that vastly differ from one another, and how said servers are self-contained worlds that, should you do something in said server, its consequences will ripple through the environment and begin to affect other adjacent players, factions and so on.
As a result, it is understandable why Garry's Mod would establish this kind of etiquette as a result of how one interaction can affect the entire server. But in a medium where we are all participating for one another's enjoyment and fulfillment, it is important to still exercise consent despite maintaining the interconnectedness of the setting. Civil Protection capturing, interrogating or questioning other characters should open an OOC dialogue that explores the options, opportunities and interests of all parties involved to allow a mutually accepted outcome to occur rather than fixate on an arbitrary desire to exact “consequences” on characters (and by extension, the player behind those characters) for simply fulfilling what is both their faction’s role and fantasy. Civil Protection's connection to the Combine allows them to maneuver with great amounts of jurisdiction over other roleplayers in the setting, and it's important for such jurisdiction to be handled responsibly and considerately when participating in a mutual roleplaying medium such as our own.
At the end of the day, we are all here to participate in the fun, and when you are in a position of great power over other characters, disregarding the experience of others to fulfill either your own fantasy or adhere to your own interpretation of Half-Life 2's loose lore concepts is an irresponsible handling of the faction's role in the setting.
Resistance: "The Robbers"
And finally, the rebels. These are your fire-starters. Your problem-causers and your havoc-wreakers. I think the biggest err that I see frequently among HL2RP servers is separating the Resistance away from the citizen populace. Typically, rebels become isolated in their bases, their sewers, or even out-of-city outposts and fortifications in broad daylight that ultimately remove them from what should be their biggest focus: Subverting more citizens to their cause, aiding the needy and assisting those under the Combine's heel. I think having the Resistance be fully integrated within the Citizen faction is equally if not even more important than allowing Civil Protection to go off-duty and step away from their uniforms, as it now requires Civil Protection to address the fact that any citizen could have malicious intent when they're in uniform. Even unaligned citizens become swept into the category of being a possible threat, and are thus subsumed into those experiences in roleplay.
A resistance that has the ability to exist within the rank and file of the average Joe citizens will ultimately assist in making citizens more directly involved in the Resistance vs. Civil Protection tug of war. And at the end of the day, every citizen must either choose a side or choose inaction from the warring factions beside them.
As this text went over at the beginning, HL2RP goes all the way back to as far as 2004 on modded Half-Life 2 Deathmatch servers. You can imagine that quite a lot of change has transpired within the genre since then as new scripts are released, our understanding of the medium grows and our perception of issues within these settings sharpen. However, I think the greatest enemy to fresh, new ideas in the genre has been nostalgia. There is a strong adversity to change or shakeups within HL2RP's communities, servers and players, and I believe this has, above all else, been what has glued HL2RP to the mold it has been stuck in for so long.
If something is to improve, people need to unwind themselves from their attachment to the past and let go. I'm not here to say you need to blindly accept every new idea, but understand that if the setting isn't working, and the interest in the server is plummeting, something has to change and you can't stick to your guns out of longing for nostalgia or the comfort of what you know if you're going to deliver a lasting experience. Civil dialogue and introspection into the setting's systems should be just as frequent as discussions on communicating roleplay direction. I wouldn't be dedicating this much effort into formulating this document if I didn't want there to be discussions and insights into the proposals made above. This isn't a construction manual how to make the perfect Half-Life 2 roleplaying server, but rather a thinkpiece to spark conversation on how to revitalize what is, in a convoluted and roundabout way, a dying artform.
Remind yourself of the passages above in regard to individual fantasy and mechanical purpose. How can you sculpt your factions in a way that their mechanical purposes will innately cause one another to interact and cultivate roleplay scenarios, while also allowing room to indulge personal, individual fantasies for roleplayers and their characters?
Handling "Consequence"
When a rebel gets caught out by the Combine, or a Civil Protection officer is cornered by a band of unruly citizens, we often go to consequences as a means of deterring missteps and thus facilitating a game-like back-and-forth between these two factions. However, the act of pursuing consequences in roleplay in such broad strokes can, ironically, emerge consequences of their own. We want our resistance to feel encouraged to fulfill its mechanical role of resisting, but the threat of elimination of character- something that ultimately should lie in the hands of the roleplayer behind said character (unless acting in extreme negligence)- is far too discouraging to the faction's purpose in the overall setting.
Character death is something we all handle differently. Some people are capable of forging new characters on a whim, while others take meticulous care to develop one over long periods of time. When we begin to accept that HL2RP is equally a game as it is a narrative medium that we all participate in, we can begin to deconstruct the habits of old and start establishing new habits that benefit the health of the server.
IC vs. OOC
If roleplaying is to be met with a new era of communication-based enjoyment, the idea that roleplaying is exclusively an in-character experience must also die.
I'm sure this comes as a radical statement to some of you as this fundemental principle has existed to extinguish attempts at metagaming and using OOC information to an advantage, but as a community dedicated to one another's enjoyment of the same medium, discussing our goals, be it narrative interests in the setting overall or our own character's developmental arc, it becomes important to make strides towards communicating with one another to meet those goalposts. This is as simple as telling someone in GOOC where all the roleplay is instead of allowing them to wander aimlessly (or an admin teleporting them to the current roleplay spot for the day) and as complex as sitting down with a roleplayer whose character has been taken into Combine custody and discussing possible ways forward to serve the experience of both the captive and the captors. We can't please everyone, but we can craft an environment that attempts to accomodate the roleplayer experience rather than abide by archaic notions of forcing character death where it is unneeded and unbeneficial.
This is not to say that metagame should not still be scrutinized. In my experience, metagaming is probably one of the worst things to transpire in roleplay, as it can sabotage entire plotlines and unravel the entire player experience through one person's attempt to gain an advantage. But if we remove the things that make people fear consequence and push them to make drastic decisions in hopes of savoring their character's longevity, what purpose would there be to metagame aside from the occasional misbehaving outlier?
Enjoy.
State of Decay
An Autopsy of the Half-Life 2 City RP Setting in Garry's Mod
An Autopsy of the Half-Life 2 City RP Setting in Garry's Mod
To state that HL2RP is on its way out would be an incredible understatement. Having gone on with roots going as far back as 2004 pre-dating its arrival to Garry's Mod by several years, the genre has undergone a significant metamorphosis since the days of roleplaying on Half-Life 2 Deathmatch or TacoNBanana's City 8 Cyberpunk extravaganza of 2010. But with each new server or experience in the last decade, we've begun to see the long-term diminishing returns of a setting that has, largely, suffered from being unable to break from its mold, and the continued failure of roleplay servers to solve this problem has led to dwindling interest over the last several years.
The haphazard thesis I am prepared to present to you is informed by my own experiences that have varied from me being a player, admin, member of headstaff and owner/manager of my own communities, as well as extensive research into roleplayer psyche and how the average player engages with systems in roleplaying mediums for the sake of adjusting my approach to designing roleplay settings in these mediums. I have been seriously roleplaying as far back as 2008 across at least six different kinds of mediums including Garry's Mod, and my hours in Garry's Mod alone exceed 25,000. While I accept that I am not infallible to bias, limited perspective and human err, I would not post a thread like this if I were not wholly confident in my statements and claims in the interest of my passion for storytelling and using the insight that my passion has absorbed over the years to positively benefit the roleplaying community on Gmod.
This piece will also focus explicitly on HL2 city roleplay as opposed to other alternatives within the bounds of the setting, because while servers in other variants of the setting do exist, they stray from the core element that defines Half-Life 2's new world under the Combine, and therein becomes its own structurally unique setting separate from city roleplay. In other words, I do not believe non-city HL2RP has a chance for a long-term future, where I believe city HL2RP does, despite constant failures among roleplay communities to successfully and sustainably deliver it in the present day. However, it is not without saying that these principles cannot be translated to other locales (such as the Outlands), perhaps even other settings if adapted effectively.
Buckle up, this is due to be a long one.
Preamble: My History with Half-Life
Half-Life is, far beyond anything else, my favourite fictional setting. I remember fondly of sitting in the lap of my father playing Half-Life 2 at age 4 in his office as we'd take turns- I'd do the shooting and he'd handle the physics puzzles that were far too complex for my toddler self to grasp. Roleplaying HL2RP made up the majority of my free time as a teenager in a household riddled with trauma as I, a closeted transwoman who could not be themselves as a consequence of an abusive mother, was given a medium of escapism to construct my wildest character fantasies in a dystopic sandbox. And above all else, roleplaying HL2RP revealed to me my passion for writing and storytelling, which would both define my future ambitions as an adult as well as provide me the chance to get closer to my father, a published author, and eventually come out of the closet to him through my writing at the end of 2021 and to finally introduce myself as the truest, most authentic iteration of me yet.
As a result, the Half-Life game series carries a significant wealth of sentimental importance to me, far beyond simply being enriched by the contents of the games themselves. I explain this to you, reader, because I want you to understand just in full how passionate I am for this setting, and how devoted I am in ensuring that Half-Life 2 RP has a future beyond the limited constraints of Garry's Mod.
Deconstructing the Setting
I think in order to truly assess HL2RP as it has existed in Garry's Mod and to encapsulate the extensive variety of interpretations of its world and implementations of its roleplay systems across countless servers, the setting must first be broken down piecemeal to therein be analyzed.
For the sake of the purpose of this thread, let us pretend that you have never played Half-Life 2 at any point, and the concept of its setting is completely alien to you. Disengage from your predetermined opinions on the structure of how HL2RP should work in your head, set aside your own personal interpretations of the setting, and dive.
Half-Life 2 begins many years after the conclusion of the first game, where the consequences of its conclusion are illustrated with the presence of a totalitarian, alien surveillance state enforced by the enigmatic Combine who have established their dominion across Earth. Utilizing humans themselves to enforce its regime, citizens are coerced to enlist within Civil Protection to receive further benefits and improved state of living in the new world's dystopia. Meanwhile, other citizens have chosen to take matters into their own hands by resisting the Combine in subtle or overt ways. Where some keep their heads down to fight another day, others lash out in desperation for survival.
In the blurb above, HL2RP's three most important factions are outlined: Citizens, Civil Protection and the Resistance. Any other factions are explicitly nonessential, in that their inclusion is an overall added benefit in enhancing and augmenting the setting's experience (City Administration, Overwatch, Vortigaunts, etc.) but is ultimately not crucial to its function.
This is a diagram that, in some form or another, I've made a couple of times to express the concept of HL2RP's faction wheel. This thread will go through the full digest of each step of this wheel to best understand the setting.
Through the existence of these three factions, the wheel of HL2RP begins to turn as a result of these factions interacting, colliding or even blending together. Like a well-oiled machine, each piece must perform its duty lest the entire engine come to abrupt stop. To create a fulfilling HL2RP experience, each of these factions must be appropriately tuned to seek roleplay with its adjacent parts, as well as receive roleplay from them.
This diagram covers six kinds of roleplay interactions:
• Citizen ---> CP interaction, or (C->CP)
• Citizen ---> Resistance interaction, or (C->R)
• CP ---> Citizen interaction, or (CP->C)
• CP ---> Resistance interaction, or (CP->R)
• Resistance ---> Citizen interaction, or (R->C)
• Resistance ---> CP interaction, or (R->CP)
The reason there are implied directions with these six interaction types instead of three interactions for each permutation of the three faction combinations is because the first faction is the initiator in a given scenario, with the second faction being the receiver. A citizen who reports suspicious activity to a Civil Protection officer is a scenario in which a citizen initiates a scenario with Civil Protection, whereas Civil Protection conducting a block inspection is a scenario where Civil Protection initiates a scenario with citizens.
The reason for this level of specificity for these roleplay interactions is because of the desires of a roleplayer or the faction they are in. A faction will have a specific role or purpose to fulfill, and a player will have their own individual desires to fulfill in the interest of their engagement with the setting. The key difference between the two is understanding that a faction's role is a mechanical purpose that serves the greater setting, like providing a danger to overcome for rebels, while the player's desire is an individual fantasy that said player is searching for, such as playing out the tragic resistance hero trope through one's character. These desires will vary greatly depending on the faction and player, but it is nonetheless important to recognize and understand these desires when understanding the shape of the setting and is an especially important to factor in later when it comes to OOC communication on organizing roleplay.
This structure of classifying roleplay scenarios allows for us to ask the following:
• What kind of experience is the initiator having when they enter this scenario?
• What kind of experience is the receiver having when they enter this scenario?
• Does this interaction fulfill either faction's purpose or role in the setting?
• Does this interaction fulfill either side's individual fantasy? Did they have a positive experience?
Assessing these scenarios and asking these questions allows for us to look closer at the everyday interactions of the setting and make appropriate adjustments when needed. An ideal, healthy HL2RP environment will provide ample opportunities for all permutations of roleplay scenarios to occur, where the conclusion of these scenarios will provide a mutually enjoyable experience for all participating parties. While this is easier said than done, the end-goal of adjusting the systems of your setting should be to this very end. I highly encourage you to revisit past scenarios and attempt to classify those instances through the tools above.
To best identify and play into player desires and individual fantasies in your setting, I highly recommend taking a look at another thread I wrote sometime last year that went into detail on the subject of GNS Theory, which is a model that classifies the different types of roleplayers, and what they seek to derive from a roleplaying experience.https://nebulous.cloud/threads/gns-theory-how-roleplay-works.55599/
Citizens: "The Wild Cards"
Citizens are the bedrock of HL2RP. They're what you start as, have infinite potential in what they could become in the dystopic hellscape of the Combine-occupied cities, and they could be anyone. The tragedy is that most servers severely mishandle the Citizen faction and turn it into a jumping pad to access the server's other more exciting factions, when the reality is that, regardless of what faction your character joins, they should still be a citizen. Your character joins Civil Protection? The ability to allow Civil Protection to go off-duty in your server and intermingle with the rest of the populace will make your character still a citizen, and will open up a whole new avenue of opportunities as far as how your character handles their secret life as a dystopian beatcop in relation to the rest of their life, and if they'll pursue their duties even out of uniform. It also provides a passive deterrence of danger to incognito rebels in the midst of citizens, who like Civil Protection, must live with a dual life while co-existing with the rest of the citizen populace. Joining a labor/work faction (CWU, Engineer Core, "Ministry of Labor", etc.)? This faction should be treated as a job that your character has and, at the end of the day, is still a citizen.
The secret truth is that "true citizen" roleplayers are very rare. To combat this and provide ample meat for your setting's citizen populace, your other factions should not remove characters from this pool as a part of joining them. This also has the added bonus of allowing you to create experiences that target or involve the Citizen faction and thereby involve a vast majority of your server's playerbase as a result.
At the end of the day, the Citizen is less of a faction of a single defined type of character but rather an amalgamation of several factions blended together, indiscernable to the untrained eye. Some citizens could be off-duty cops who've traded away their morality for better living conditions, or rebel sympathizers who practice frequent malcompliance, or even an outright rebel in deep-cover, blending in with the rest of the denim blue sea in a crowd of other citizens. The ambiguity of the citizen presents a danger to Civil Protection and Resistance alike, requiring their function and roles toward the setting to thereby create roleplay scenarios where these characters must now navigate carefully.
Civil Protection: "The Cops"
I cannot think of a more iconic depiction of the HL2RP experience than that of Civil Protection standing menacingly from afar as a gaggle of stunstick-wielding thugs looking for a reason to start swinging. Whether they're desperate citizens looking to fill an empty stomach, or simply wanting to take advantage of the power provided by the position, Civil Protection are the foremost antagonists players should be facing in the city. They represent the assimilation of humanity into the Combine's bosom as they become weaponized against their very neighbors.
I already went into the importance of allowing Civil Protection to go off-duty and intermingle with the citizen populace above, and while that is still just as crucial to securing a healthy Citizen faction, I want to go more into something more Civil Protection specific in how the faction handles consequence in the HL2RP setting. When your citizen, rebel or otherwise is apprehended, you, the initiator in this scenario, are now fully in control of the fate of this character. Gmod has solidified a massive anti-metagame culture that, while deterring blatant metagaming issues, has also bled over into nullifying important instances of OOC communication between roleplayers.
You may not be aware of this, but the concept of "evading roleplay" being something that's punishable through server rules is a uniquely Garry's Mod phenomenon. In World of Warcraft, Project Zomboid, Final Fantasy 14, text RPs and so on, if you, the roleplayer do not consent to the roleplay presented to you, you are under zero obligation to participate in it, and it is an accepted part of those medium's RP cultures to respect that decision. The reason it exists in Garry's Mod is as a result of the unique nature of servers being isolated microcosms that vastly differ from one another, and how said servers are self-contained worlds that, should you do something in said server, its consequences will ripple through the environment and begin to affect other adjacent players, factions and so on.
As a result, it is understandable why Garry's Mod would establish this kind of etiquette as a result of how one interaction can affect the entire server. But in a medium where we are all participating for one another's enjoyment and fulfillment, it is important to still exercise consent despite maintaining the interconnectedness of the setting. Civil Protection capturing, interrogating or questioning other characters should open an OOC dialogue that explores the options, opportunities and interests of all parties involved to allow a mutually accepted outcome to occur rather than fixate on an arbitrary desire to exact “consequences” on characters (and by extension, the player behind those characters) for simply fulfilling what is both their faction’s role and fantasy. Civil Protection's connection to the Combine allows them to maneuver with great amounts of jurisdiction over other roleplayers in the setting, and it's important for such jurisdiction to be handled responsibly and considerately when participating in a mutual roleplaying medium such as our own.
At the end of the day, we are all here to participate in the fun, and when you are in a position of great power over other characters, disregarding the experience of others to fulfill either your own fantasy or adhere to your own interpretation of Half-Life 2's loose lore concepts is an irresponsible handling of the faction's role in the setting.
Resistance: "The Robbers"
And finally, the rebels. These are your fire-starters. Your problem-causers and your havoc-wreakers. I think the biggest err that I see frequently among HL2RP servers is separating the Resistance away from the citizen populace. Typically, rebels become isolated in their bases, their sewers, or even out-of-city outposts and fortifications in broad daylight that ultimately remove them from what should be their biggest focus: Subverting more citizens to their cause, aiding the needy and assisting those under the Combine's heel. I think having the Resistance be fully integrated within the Citizen faction is equally if not even more important than allowing Civil Protection to go off-duty and step away from their uniforms, as it now requires Civil Protection to address the fact that any citizen could have malicious intent when they're in uniform. Even unaligned citizens become swept into the category of being a possible threat, and are thus subsumed into those experiences in roleplay.
A resistance that has the ability to exist within the rank and file of the average Joe citizens will ultimately assist in making citizens more directly involved in the Resistance vs. Civil Protection tug of war. And at the end of the day, every citizen must either choose a side or choose inaction from the warring factions beside them.
The Ghosts of HL2RP Past: What Went Wrong
As this text went over at the beginning, HL2RP goes all the way back to as far as 2004 on modded Half-Life 2 Deathmatch servers. You can imagine that quite a lot of change has transpired within the genre since then as new scripts are released, our understanding of the medium grows and our perception of issues within these settings sharpen. However, I think the greatest enemy to fresh, new ideas in the genre has been nostalgia. There is a strong adversity to change or shakeups within HL2RP's communities, servers and players, and I believe this has, above all else, been what has glued HL2RP to the mold it has been stuck in for so long.
If something is to improve, people need to unwind themselves from their attachment to the past and let go. I'm not here to say you need to blindly accept every new idea, but understand that if the setting isn't working, and the interest in the server is plummeting, something has to change and you can't stick to your guns out of longing for nostalgia or the comfort of what you know if you're going to deliver a lasting experience. Civil dialogue and introspection into the setting's systems should be just as frequent as discussions on communicating roleplay direction. I wouldn't be dedicating this much effort into formulating this document if I didn't want there to be discussions and insights into the proposals made above. This isn't a construction manual how to make the perfect Half-Life 2 roleplaying server, but rather a thinkpiece to spark conversation on how to revitalize what is, in a convoluted and roundabout way, a dying artform.
Remind yourself of the passages above in regard to individual fantasy and mechanical purpose. How can you sculpt your factions in a way that their mechanical purposes will innately cause one another to interact and cultivate roleplay scenarios, while also allowing room to indulge personal, individual fantasies for roleplayers and their characters?
Handling "Consequence"
When a rebel gets caught out by the Combine, or a Civil Protection officer is cornered by a band of unruly citizens, we often go to consequences as a means of deterring missteps and thus facilitating a game-like back-and-forth between these two factions. However, the act of pursuing consequences in roleplay in such broad strokes can, ironically, emerge consequences of their own. We want our resistance to feel encouraged to fulfill its mechanical role of resisting, but the threat of elimination of character- something that ultimately should lie in the hands of the roleplayer behind said character (unless acting in extreme negligence)- is far too discouraging to the faction's purpose in the overall setting.
Character death is something we all handle differently. Some people are capable of forging new characters on a whim, while others take meticulous care to develop one over long periods of time. When we begin to accept that HL2RP is equally a game as it is a narrative medium that we all participate in, we can begin to deconstruct the habits of old and start establishing new habits that benefit the health of the server.
IC vs. OOC
If roleplaying is to be met with a new era of communication-based enjoyment, the idea that roleplaying is exclusively an in-character experience must also die.
I'm sure this comes as a radical statement to some of you as this fundemental principle has existed to extinguish attempts at metagaming and using OOC information to an advantage, but as a community dedicated to one another's enjoyment of the same medium, discussing our goals, be it narrative interests in the setting overall or our own character's developmental arc, it becomes important to make strides towards communicating with one another to meet those goalposts. This is as simple as telling someone in GOOC where all the roleplay is instead of allowing them to wander aimlessly (or an admin teleporting them to the current roleplay spot for the day) and as complex as sitting down with a roleplayer whose character has been taken into Combine custody and discussing possible ways forward to serve the experience of both the captive and the captors. We can't please everyone, but we can craft an environment that attempts to accomodate the roleplayer experience rather than abide by archaic notions of forcing character death where it is unneeded and unbeneficial.
This is not to say that metagame should not still be scrutinized. In my experience, metagaming is probably one of the worst things to transpire in roleplay, as it can sabotage entire plotlines and unravel the entire player experience through one person's attempt to gain an advantage. But if we remove the things that make people fear consequence and push them to make drastic decisions in hopes of savoring their character's longevity, what purpose would there be to metagame aside from the occasional misbehaving outlier?
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