In the wake of Scherezad's miniature story event, it got me thinking...
First, that organizing IC reasons to go fighting other corps or specific people in corps besides "We hate them! FIRE!" is extremely awesome.
Second, holy crap a reason to get roleplayers to do roleplaying in space.
And third, how can we have this happen more often?
As a disclaimer I recognize that it may be that some folks actually do quite a lot or close to all of their roleplay in space. Its simply that from my perspective, most roleplay is done through chat windows among corp members, rather than out in space against or in tandem with other corps. If I'm wrong I'd be happy to be corrected, but the following thoughts are from the assumption that this is all largely true, if not entirely.
After chatting a bit with Scherezad and Norrin Ellis we came to the conclusion that this should be rectified, but that there are several things that keep it from happening more often.
During Scherezad's Rescue there were five people organized to form the "opposition" to the rescue. Apparently, none of them showed up. I don't know what their actual reasons for not being there are, but assuming it was a deliberate choice and not because of inconvenience or so on, I think I have some ideas for why.
In my time on particular RP worlds, it was not uncommon for the players playing various flavors of villians to feel outnumbered, outgunned, and at times deliberately set up to fail by the DMs organizing or overseeing events. And it is very demoralizing, as you may have guessed, particularly for those players that tried their darndest to play nuanced, realistic, and intelligent villains rather than a run-of-the-mill mook. Granted this was in a fantasy setting, where Good and Bad are often much more established and it is Understood that Good Triumphs Over Evil. But EVE is none of those things. It is morally ambiguous and the closest thing we have to any concrete 'sides' are Lawful versus Chaos or Unlawful.
The only idea we've come up with so far is Scherezad's, and the idea is basically this: Have the involved parties agree OOC beforehand to reimburse one another's ship costs. I don't know how well that might work. I cannot even begin to fathom the possible complications or problems that might involve. But its a start.
[Edit: See below for very good reasons why not.]
Frankly I just want to see more corps getting into tussles for IC reasons besides disagreeing with each other. I want to see IC conflict happen in more places and in more ways than in little chat channels while we spin our ships.** And I want very much for IC conflict to have consequences, but I just don't know how far it can or should go.
Some other things:
When initiating or setting up a story arc, it may be good to establish some other player as a mediator for disputes, that has no stake in the outcome of the story arc itself. The 'power' this mediator has can only be enforced by the players involved.
When trying to roleplay in-person combat, it can often be nerve-wracking for both sides as we all fear our opponent will in some way or another, in some varying degree, godmode and completely invalidate anything we try to do. In large part I avoid this problem simply by only engaging in this form of roleplay with players I trust to be reasonable and discuss with me about how the scene may or may not play out, based on things our characters will not or may not know, but we do. This of course requires that the players have a very strong sense of IC/OOC divide, to avoid metagaming as much as possible. I suggested perhaps using browser-based RNG, but I don't know how well such a thing might work in the EVE IG browser. There's also the simple fact that there is very little to go on to figure out what decides success or failure and what skills might apply to various things and by how much.
*Player Initiated Story Arc. If you have a suggestion for a better term, I'd love to hear it
**Sometimes its ship spinning, sometimes its doing any number of things In Space while we pretend to be sipping tea in-person on a planet or station on the other side of the cluster. Its immersion breaking, but maybe only if anybody else notices.
