In that one I somehow rose near the top in stats - not exactly sure how that happened, in retrospect.
Regarding cooperation in general, we’ve always had apparently-undue cooperation and though we scratch our heads and wonder about it as if it were holding us back… is it really?
It’s certainly unrealistic, considering the wide breadth of character personalities. Even when the stakes are incredibly low, people working as a group tend to have sometimes-serious personality clashes, and there are endless slightly-exaggerated examples of that in the kinds of fiction most of us rip stuff off from.
Though there is plenty of political, cultural, and personality diversity here, If you put all of us all together in real life to solve a problem… I strongly suspect it’d be a lot like these games (including the humor), and there would be little trouble cooperating. And we’d laugh at and/or ignore anyone who acted like a drill sergeant… just like in this game, which I thought was hilarious.
So one possibility is to design the games more explicitly around cooperation. This puts a lot of narrative pressure on the DM (Dragon Master), but there could just be more clear prompts instead. One thing I noticed in this game that was different (and which @messana noted) is that we didn’t really explore all of the possibilities that were prompted to the same extent we have in the past (there are general reasons for this as others have noted). At a couple points I had intended to try to do some of this - for one thing, I thought it would be fun to describe the ship’s interiors more thoroughly, which would maybe help others to write their narratives within a more fully-described setting (I sort of did this with my illustration backgrounds, but I wanted to do some writing too) - but for the most part I just didn’t have time to participate (naturally, I do have time right now to write this long post…)
And yet, in any case, we do all seem to think that PvP of some sort is an asset, if nothing else to add some drama and narrative possibilities we otherwise wouldn’t have. Although, the pleasure from this kind of drama in fiction is often in one of the parties being proved spectacularly wrong - so they’re set up that way (you’re supposed to dislike them), which is harder to accomplish in this kind of fairly unpredictable game setting.
One thing that is clear is that incentives that might work in real life (fortune and glory, power) are really not an incentive here.
So, first option - force it. The conflict in BSD 1 worked because we were forced into it, and it was right at the end so it didn’t really matter. I think that might not always work that well, so it’s a tough one.
Second option - make cooperation a liability. The obvious ways to do this basically equal forcing it, but in a slightly different way - like in the movies where the villain forces friends to fight each other to the death or both will die. There are hopefully non-obvious ways to do this too but I don’t know. I could have sworn I had another idea but now I don’t remember.
Third option - simply reduce or eliminate the ability to cooperate. This could mean making mission orders etc. private. With the current way the rounds are set up, and what the narrative prompts are, this would be difficult - but things could be reorganized.
Fourth option - new game mechanics. Maybe one where after everyone chooses their missions as normal (cooperating), there’s a day or two after the deadline where the mission is actually in-progress - and you have to make big, potentially life-or-death decision(s) as they come up in the mission, in PM - with limited information, and without input or discussion from everyone else. These decisions may mean throwing others under the bus - of course everyone would choose to sacrifice themselves instead, so it has to be a Sophie’s choice. This would be incorporated into the story by the DM the next round - making it clear that we’re supposed to choose sides. Not the same as forcing, but clear enough to the players that they can figure out how to steer their characters. Basically everyone’s still cooperating… except cooperating to add drama to the narrative instead of the characters literally cooperating.
Also, I’d like to point out that these and other relevant concerns have, I’m 100% sure, been extensively discussed in the endless role-playing message boards across the internet. I suppose we should be proud that instead we’ve forged forward from scratch (more or less) on our own - and as I’m sure everyone else in other forums say, I think we have something uniquely great.