Corporate vs Mix play
Discussing the differences

I said I found most corporate play to be social oriented and I've generally seen staff back that sentiment, saying corporates are meant to drive and create these plots that boil down into the mix, where they take place. The important distinction is that you're creating these plots, but your part in them is... A managerial one. This is why I originally said I would only recommend corporate play to players who are very sure they want to almost exclusively play the social/political game.

Let's use some examples.

Let's say I want a colleague's position in my corporation. Almost every means for me to achieve this is going to be social, or going to require hiring a third party (the people who actually do the non-social part) to do it, because taking any direct action topside is a quick ticket to being demoted and/or getting fired. I'm going to frame the person and try and get them fired, or have them killed, or turn their friends against them, or create a problem they should be able to fix and then fix it myself, or blackmail them... The common link in all these is, they're social, or require a third party.

Let's say I want to crash a topside event, for whatever reason. I could spread misinformation (social), have the place bombed (third party), sabotage it by paying/blackmailing/threatening one of the organizers (social/third party)... You get the picture.

My point is, topside, by it's very nature, encourages people to not take risks directly and instead shove your jobs to someone else. Someone in the mix been talking smack about your candy, do you go down there yourself and kill them/ruin their own business? Of course not. You hire someone. If you don't and you get caught, you're probably going to die AND be fired. If you DO go down there and get away with it, you still risked your entire livelihood for a single feud.

Losing a corporate spot is a LOT more painful than losing a mix job. You now have to move home. You are now unlikely to be hired by other corps, you now have a much smaller income if any, since topside hustles are more limited. Oh, and you reset your entire career's progress too, which can now take years for you to climb back up. There is almost no situation in which you'd risk doing the crime yourself. So you're going to have those shady meetings, and political games, which is the topside style of play.

If you disagree, I'd like to hear some examples of say... A thievery-centric corporate character directly using that skill in a way that makes sense. Or even just a combat corporate character. 99% of the time, you're just not going to use your character's abilities, even in corpsec. People should be aware of that.

Also my experience. Fellow corporates were often too afraid/averse to get involved in crime, even when trying to drag them into crime that'd be perfect for their character concept. Most mixers didn't want to cooperate, to the point where continuing to try felt futile.

What was most surprising was that higher-ups also seemed to discourage involvement in cloak-and-dagger stuff, despite it benefiting the company. Something I've seen posted here about corp life is that 'you are not your job', but in my experience, your corp does want you to be your job and not be involved in other activities, or at least, they don't want to hear about it.

Now, I'm sure that other corporate players get up to lots of mischief and plots and moonlighting. I'm sure some people reading the above are saying, 'hey, Geigerbunny, that isn't my experience at all.' And maybe staff who have much more information than I do are seeing that corpies get up to this stuff all day, every day. I'm glad, but it wasn't my experience.

I'll say that there IS plenty of opportunity to be involved in mischief as a corpie, if you do it without expectation of reward beyond personal fun. That is...your corp won't want to know about it, your peers may not want to join you in the risk, it will probably be a money sink, but it can be fun. You can choose to throw your character into these situations, OOCly choosing fun, and find fun. But it likely won't make much sense ICly for your character to do it, other than to satisfy pride, revenge, hatred and other feelings you manufacture as justifications.

@batko

This is related to batko's post. 'You can take the OOC initiative to push on despite the risks, but realistically, there's a point where even the most grizzled will just say no, that's not worth it.' Batko's talking about mixers, but it applies to my experience of corpie cloak-and-dagger.

I think it goes back to the corporations being siloed into their own industries. If you're in NLM film production, do you really care if some VS characters are shit-talking your movie? ICly, that's one or two people out of millions. Realistically, your character wouldn't take notice, unless they were a very proud, vengeful type.

How about if VS characters started paying mixers to bomb your movie's viewing parties? Now we're talking. This is a real reason for your NLM character to respond, to find out who's ordering this and why, and get them back. But why would the VS characters go to that trouble and expense? Your movie's success is meaningless to them; if BADLANDS BRUISER 9: A FISTFUL OF MARCY is a big hit or a total failure, it won't change the rollout of VS's next biomod.

Maybe the individual VS character cares about making BADLANDS BRUISER 9 a failure. Maybe that NLM baka spilled hollandaise on their shoes at the last CPI brunch. But at that point, it's the VS character's player inventing reasons to have fun (which is great, don't get me wrong!), not the gameworld incentivizing conflict in a realistic way. Ideally, we'd have both motivations: the character personality conflicts, and the gameworld incentives.

Imagine if VS had a production division to make commercials about their newest biomod. Imagine if NLM had a biochem division to make cosmetics for their stars (and why wouldn't they? Why trust VS to know what's best for the entertainment/celebrity market?). Now we're talking. Sabotage and spycraft are immediately encouraged.

This all feels a bit moot, because after XX years of Sindome's corps being siloed, there is likely great resistance to change. But I think de-siloing the corps would help a lot with providing real motivation to get your hands dirty as a corpie.

Just my 0.02 chyen.

Player A, a Mixer, and B, a Corpie, both do something shady and are caught.

Player A:

Might get a beat down depending on how shady the thing was. They could even be vatted over it. They will lose some chy and gear. They will likely keep their job, their home and their friends. Their RP will likely be the same. They would have likely gotten a modest chy reward for not being caught.

Player B:

Might get vatted for treason depending on how shady the thing was. They will likely lose their job. They will lose substantial chy from fall taxes and gear. They will likely lose their home and a majority of the people they RPed with. They would have likely gotten a modest chy reward for not being caught.

So for doing a shady thing for a little Chy, the mixer usually looks at a modest Chy loss and perhaps a vatting and minor resource loss. The Corpie looks at losing all their RP, Ongoing Plots, Friends, Home, and a large part of their Resources.

I think this in a large part dictates why Topside players are far more cautious. Now let's look at motivations.

Player A:

Probably has one or more people/factions asking them to do shady stuff. Expectations are that everyone is doing something. Their boss, friends, and partners are likely encouraging them to do things. Their factions are likely funding them to do shady things.

Player B:

Might have one or more people/factions asking them to do shady stuff. Expectations is that everyone is just doing their job. Their boss, friends and partners are likely telling them to NOT do things and likely are warning them of the consequences above if they do. Their factions are not providing them resources to do shady things.

So you have a situation where the risks for doing minor stuff at least SEEMS to be incredibly high and the rewards for doing so low. Simple game design tells you that people will in general avoid doing those types of activities.

With that said, there seem to be changes to raise the rewards and lower some of the risk. Paydata seems to be a great addition to the game and I've seen people demoted instead of fired. However, I'm not sure how long it will take to change opinions until NPC's start encouraging, acknowledging, and blessing certain shady types of actions.

What are you saving that chy up for anyway? Are you hoping something will change if you just get 500 more UE? What are you waiting for?

Now my personal take on corporate RP isn't like that at all, I would urge every single corporate character to try to engage with mixers and use some of their saved stacks to create plots and make the game more entertaining for others, even if its probably at their own detriment. Oh and backstab and frame your co-workers to move ahead, steal and embezzle from your corporation.

Also watch the show 'Incorporated', it was cancelled by sfyfy (big surprise) but you can probably find it somewhere on the internet and it gives you a good idea of what corporate RP could be like in a cyberpunk text-book fashion.

I was always pretty lukewarm on embezzlements; since on reimbursements it was effectively taking money away from the rest of the players in a department for plots just to pad a bank account.

It was thematic but seemed pretty tacky and counter-productive to me at the time. But I always found white collar crime to be pretty boring in general as a gameplay avenue.