From the “Environment Settings” section of the Roles editor screen:
Content level permissions only apply to the master environment and will not have an effect in non-master environments
I took this to mean that the content permissions above this section (e.g. “Users with this role can: Publish/Unpublish”) only apply to the master environment, which seems to imply that these content permissions do not apply to non-master environments.
However, when I disallow the publishing permission in this “Content” section, it prevents users in this role from publishing in both master AND non-master environments.
I would like to be able to manage role permissions differently per environment, or at least differently between master & non-master environments, as this text description seems to suggest.
At a minimum, I recommend that this documentation be updated (or simply removed, as it is misleading). If this is the intent of how content permissions are supposed to work, then maybe there is a bug.