Junkers' Capital Ships?

[worldstrider]

Forgetting in-game politics (seriously), think "real life" for a minute--and you can't do that arguing game styles and preferences. Just put all that aside for a minute...

You live in Sirius.

You are part of a social group who is viewed critically or opportunistically by every other group and government and seen as one of the lowest tier groups socially and economically.

Members of your own society run the gambit from simple hard working folk to hardened criminals. You have no governance--just a tradition of loyalty and an acceptance that taking care of your own and getting by are all that matters and that any conceivable means of doing so--from piracy to drug smuggling to slavery--is acceptable.

Your entire social structure and "civilization" is confined to six space stations and a relatively new military-industrial complex in a hazardous undeveloped system with no habitable planets and few resources.

Additionally, your financial survival depends on working with criminals and their illegal goods, being scrutinized and bullied by authorities and corporations and being at risk from any ambitious power group that arises and desires what you have. You also have the most hazardous working conditions for some of the lowest pay in Sirius as your workforce's employment areas. Volatile gas and hazardous radiation fields. Areas overrun by pirates and psychopathic, alien possessed humans. Bounty hunter fleets in some of the most powerful ships known who may on a whim turn on any one of your fellows if the wind simply blows wrong. Your financial livelihood often requires you subsidize your work collecting cast off hazardous debris with illegal activities that can bring fines, imprisonment and death.

At any time, any of the vital trade partners you rely on can isolate or cut you off or expel you and you are powerless to prevent it if they choose to do so.

These have to be some of the potentially toughest and borderline hopeless people in Sirius.

So why would they "want a ship" or a 'fleet" or whatever? Security. For their children, their families, their future. A hope for looking for more than a hard working, dishonest and short life and a hope for more than constantly looking over your shoulder to see who is going to get you next.

If I were a Junker, I would be pissed. I would want to rage against the machine and stand up for myself and those like me. I would worry about the future of our families and how they were going to survive. I would resent the "virtual apartheid" system we were forced to live under and hate being beholden to smiling criminal cartels who told us to pony up our service to them or else. I would also not be intimidated by selfish members of my own community who were profiting from the status quo and didn't care about change.

You would want to do something--to break the cycle--to "tear down that wall".

Some people are content to be crack addicts and live homeless on the street. Others don't mind stealing all their lives and take pride in it. Some can handle working for generations in coal mines and dying young of black lung disease. But in all of these groups, there are always individuals who stand up and say, "No--this is not all there is and we are not going to lie down and just take it."

Genuinely deep role play would allow for these sorts of Junkers as well as the "CSV flying scrap whores" and short sighted not so bright wannabe crime bosses.

You can't take any faction--Outcasts, Corsairs, Hogosha, Kusari, Rheinlanders, Liberty or anyone else and say, "OOOOH! That will NEVER ever happen! IMPOSSIBLE!". If you do, role play squeezes down to a lot of personal story telling with no effect and narrow, set-piece scenarios

It is possible to role play a struggle for change in an in-game society without actually accomplishing the change--like the Harvesters search for the Alpha code initially. It can be the tableau for role play for many without doing away with the already pre-defined elements as well.

Not to be biased but look at the United States. Thirteen squabbling, greedy, self-interested infighting colonial governorships ruled by a foreign monarch of the most powerful nation on the earth.

A handful of radicals united them, overthrew this power and changed the world for centuries afterwards. Or was that "not their rp?"

Just my views on how role playing a faction is just as important as the character's individual role play. Who and what they are is a reflection of the time and place they are in.

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