... IC Consequences and Tolerance

I have encountered a lot of troubles regarding IC Consequences", as observer or as someone involved. A number of the troubles involving them seems to come from a lack of tolerance, a desire to force one's own view of what consequences should be taken on others by mixing IC and OOC, and a lack of flexibility.

In many cases I wonder why people get so hung up on consequences. Say some pirate attacks a freighter convoy and in the following battle 2 escorting fighters and one pirate YT-1300 are blown up, with the freighter arriving safely at the destination.

Now, what IC consequences should there be? My answer is: The main IC consequence already happened: Pirates got beaten, freighter delivered cargo. That's it, as far as I am concerned. Anything else - how to deal with the destruction and such - is not as much the concern of the one who dealt the damage, but mainly that of the one who took damage. This is where tolerance comes in.

Why should I care about how the pirates or escorts repair/replace their ships? That's none of my business. People have different preferences (and in some cases ooc obligations), different playing times and schedules, and different views of what's fun to roleplay out.

If the pirates jury-rig their ship, barely make it back to their base on Lok, and then RP out repairing their ship for an hour, that's fine and dandy. If they skip roleplaying that out, and are (from an ooc POV) instantly ready for their raid on a cruise ship, that's ok too. If they spend a real time week travelling through the jungles of Yavin IV, trying to make it to an outpost on foot, then spend 1 real time month stealing and outfitting a new ship - if it's fun for them, where is the bloody problem?

Just because the pirates take one hour to recover doesn't mean the escorts have to do the same. One escort can take 1 minute to repair, and the other escort one week to slowly drink himself into a stupor over the permaloss of his fighter, and all ways work out just fine. Given different playing times and schedules two pilots could each spend 3 hours dealing with the loss of a ship, and for me it might appear as if one instarepaired (because I was logged out during that time) while the other took ages (because I was waiting for him to fly me back IC).

There is no standard period one has to spend "without a ship" in game after getting blown up in space. And there should not be. Not everyone likes to roleplay repairing a ship out. Some like to skip that, some like to detail gathering parts, some like to spend 1 hour moping in a bar while NPCs repair their ship.

But the important part is: The IC consequence happened IC. They lost a battle, they took damage, they had to repair it or find a new ship. The character did suffer IC consequences. Whether or not those IC consequences were played out in game, and how, doesn't matter IC - or should not, unless you're mixing OOC and IC.

If you expect a player to spend an hour in game, emoting how he has his ship repaired, or consider him to avoid ic consequences, then you are mixing ic and ooc - you are, in short, metagaming. And you'll be hard pressed to explain how you are perfectly fine with your character being alive despite not playing out toilet visits regularily in game, but refuse to let others have things happen "off screen".

Because no matter how logical you may think your own personal "minimum period of recovery after loss" is, you can bet that somewhere someone is feeling that anything less than her own "minimum period of recover after a loss", which is ten times yours, is "stupid god-modding to avoid IC consequences".

Of course there's the potential for abuse. If someone loses a ship, then the next day has some new bio entry about having stolen a brand-new freighter, that may be questionable for some people - but then, would it be any better if that theft was acted out in game in a short scripted plot, with a few NPCs and a "guest corpse" played by a friend? Same effect.

Some flexibility helps a lot here - as long as you desire to roleplay with someone, and not consider his or her character a mere prop for yourself. If you beat one thug within an inch of his life in a fight, then decided to indulge yourself and carved your initials in his back, then that doesn't mean you get to control the player's reaction to that, and force him or her to rp with a crooked "A" on the character's back for any length of time. If the player decides that he got the back fully repaired with bacta, nanobots, force healing, or cosmetic surgery, that's his right. As is your right to state "If you don't remain scarred I won't rp with you", but that's seriously at the very least straying into bullying.

Of course you're not required to go along with everything either, or go along with everything right now. If you've sent someone to the bacta tanks and 5 seconds later the character returns to take revenge, you're perfectly right to refuse RP. But if the character returns "after spending an hour getting patched up, since I have this meeting today and have to log soon", and doesn't engage you in rp, but simply rps with someone else, then show some tolerance and don't start the usual OOC bitchfest about how bad a roleplayer he is for not waiting an actual hour doing nothing in a med center.