Social/Bar RP

[TooManyCharacter]

Experiences vary, but for me BarRP has always been more recycled small talk and less “I’m funny, how?”, “Jabba put a price on your head…”, or “How do you like them apples?”.

I have had great scenes where the set was in a bar. I just had one not long ago. In my experience though, it’s best to facilitate what both characters can get out of the interaction. Something beyond what I’ve done a few hundred times before. I have limited time and if I’m logged into an MU I don’t want to feel like I’m going through the motions. It’s the difference between BarRP and RP in a bar.

[Jennkryst]

It’s been said before, but it deserves repeating. Bar RP for the sake of ‘I walk in and drink and just talk to anyone who shows up’… I hate it.

Bar RP where it’s ‘I came here with my friend and we are hanging out and doing stuff, and maybe interact with someone else’? That works for me.

… but also, the ‘hang out and doing stuff’ has to be more than just that, right? Like it depends on what. Are we networking with NPCs? Do we have a nefarious plot to use some subterfuge on a PC to convince them of something?

Otherwise, if nothing is happening, it can not happen off-screen. Like Sleeping. I don’t pose once an hour, every night, ‘:snores’. Cause shit is boring.

[Aria]

@SpaceKhomeini said in Social/Bar RP:

I guess part of what’s left me cold about it nowadays is like – I just have a hard time getting chunks of plot or really anything to latch onto that doesn’t just fall under the social umbrella.

I don’t know, I’m just not super-feeling it these days. If I had a good reason for this I’d explain it better. Just when someone is like, “want to go hang out and do laundry IC” or something of that sort I think about it.

And then I’m like. Nah. Problem’s probably me.

I feel this and I feel this hard, but it’s also because of one simple truth - I fucking hate small talk IRL, too.

While I can natter away non-stop either out of nerves or because I finally found someone I’m comfortable with, when it comes to small talk, I’m introverted enough and neurodivergent enough that I don’t care. I find endless hours of attempting to be witty and keep up a mask exhausting. Profoundly exhausting. Excruciating, even.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk to people. I do!

But I want to talk about the weird, strange, hilarious stories of your life. I want your take on death and religion. I want your anxieties about your kid and if you’re raising them right. I want the poetry that smacked you right in the soul when you were sixteen that you still carry around in the back of your brain.

That… that I can RP about, or talk about IRL, for hours. But the minutiae of your day, and your job, and your sports team, and “How’s your mom an’ them?” is mind-numbing.

No. Please no. Do not.

[Adora]

@Solstice said in Social/Bar RP:

And Paul Hollywood doesn’t understand

tacos and tortillas.

[SpaceKhomeini]

I have an addendum to this after an experience I had yesterday.

I like social RP when somebody blows up the building while the scene is going on.

[Ashkuri]

I feel like the gist here is “Social rp is fine if it doesn’t suck” which… I mean yeah, that’s true of any form of rp, isn’t it?

[SpaceKhomeini]

@imstillhere Yeah the better question is probably, “How can one make this engaging?” Etc, etc. There’s a lot of good ground that’s been covered, here.

[DrQuinn]

I love bar RP if only because I think it’s an easy entry for people who are anxious or unsure of how to otherwise get involved or meet people on a game. I’ve had very few scenes where it has been boring, but I love meeting new people so that might just be me.

In recent history I have rarely been involved in “Plot” on big games and social RP was pretty much the only thing I ever did. Mostly it was trying to get to know the other person and maybe pointing them towards other people that I thought they might have fun with/have good hooks to.

Like I never quite understood the plot of Gray Harbor enough to really get into it (not through lack of trying on @KarmaBum and @bear_necessities part!), it just never clicked for some reason, but I’d start up an open scene every day in the coffee shop just so people could get to know each other and have somewhere to go if they were anxiously looking at all the private scenes on the Ares list and wondering how to break into that.

[kalakh]

I think for me that bar RP is just fine in small to medium doses so long as I…have something to consider about my character other than the small talk. Which is to say, it’s alright if I’ve got non-bar RP that has happened recently enough that it’s influencing, if only just in my character’s head, something in the scene. Have they been in a fight, did they recently have something great/awful happen to them, are they worried about something, are they particularly happy about something, etc etc. I am not someone who does small talk well at all, I need a topic, and it bleeds a lot into RP preferences and activities.

[bear_necessities]

@SpaceKhomeini said in Social/Bar RP:

I have an addendum to this after an experience I had yesterday.

I like social RP when somebody blows up the building while the scene is going on.

VERY MUCH THIS! More explosions please.

[KarmaBum]

@SpaceKhomeini said in Social/Bar RP:

I like social RP when somebody blows up the building while the scene is going on.

I paged @bear_necessities at one point last night during that scene just SOCIAL RP with this thread in mind.

[Third Eye]

NGL a big event scene where a GM blows up a building does not seem like social RP to me.

I mean that scene sounds great and made me very interested in what LA 2043 is doing, but that shit as described and as I read it later clearly took a lot of effort and idk equating it with bar RP is weird to me.

ETA: This is the scene in question so I’m not just totally talking about something out of context: https://la2043.aresmush.com/scene/419 I know it’s tagged as social but this is an almost 20-person event that obviously required a lot of work to pull off.

[KarmaBum]

@Third-Eye HARD agree, this definitely is not the scene to hold up as an example of “social/bar RP”

The joke is that many (most? some?) of us had no idea that we were showing up to a bomb. As advertised, this scene was a gala.

That I thought I was showing up to play Barbies and it turned out to be GI Joe was awesome and just kind of exemplifies why “scenes that are about being social” are not necessarily “bar rp.”

[bear_necessities]

@Third-Eye I mean honestly I think it sets the bar to what social RP can be in the right circumstances? All the RP in the lead up WAS social/bar RP (in fact, there was a whole side scene IN THE BAR lol). And until that last hour or so, we were all just chatty and learning about one another and playing Barbie.

I’m not saying all bar RP has to lead to explosions but social RP with purpose is fucking awesome and I really think the people involved in pulling it off on LA2043 are amazing.

[KarmaBum]

@DrQuinn said in Social/Bar RP:

Like I never quite understood the plot of Gray Harbor enough to really get into it

peek behind the curtain: neither did we! \o/

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Third-Eye said in Social/Bar RP:

NGL a big event scene where a GM blows up a building does not seem like social RP to me.

I mean that scene sounds great and made me very interested in what LA 2043 is doing, but that shit as described and as I read it later clearly took a lot of effort and idk equating it with bar RP is weird to me.

ETA: This is the scene in question so I’m not just totally talking about something out of context: https://la2043.aresmush.com/scene/419 I know it’s tagged as social but this is an almost 20-person event that obviously required a lot of work to pull off.

Yeah, to be fair, it was a “social event.” But the bait-and-switch was interesting because people got to socialize AND something momentous happened.

[Third Eye]

@SpaceKhomeini
I think I’d still feel eh about comparing this to pick-up social/bar RP even if a GM hadn’t turned it into a bombing. This thing had 17 people and there was clearly a ton of planning involved by the player who set it up, even just the ‘get PCs out to socialize’ part of it.

That said I think I just have a different view of the energy it takes to make ‘social’ rp fulfilling and bristle a little when I feel that’s under-valued. This is tangential at this point.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Third-Eye Oh I totally get it and, laid out like that, I don’t disagree with you at all.

Don’t think I’m not injecting my own malaise into this.

I’m just currently trying to reverse-engineer the necessary machinery to turn that energy into fulfillment these days, which I think is something this entire thread is really evolving into a discussion of.

"How does this work for some people better than others and what’s at the root of it?

tl;dr: sometimes the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves etc etc

[Gashlycrumb]

@SpaceKhomeini

Social RP is fulfilling when it advances story. We meet Strider in the inn, he’s gonna be important to that whole ring plot. Or it advances interpersonal story; we come to see that Strider is noble and good but kinda dour, Strider and Frodo bond. If either of those things happen, it’s probably rewarding. If neither of those things happen this time but regularly do happen, we’ll tend to find it rewarding in a manner that’s akin to gambling. It’s fun to pull the arm on that slot machine. Until you find that the damn thing never pays out. It’s not just that you’re on a losing streak right now, it just doesn’t pay out, ever, or at least not near often enough to feel worth it. Then you cuss and kick it.

[Warma Sheen]

@imstillhere said in Social/Bar RP:

I feel like “bar rp” picks up a lot of smoke as a bad thing though.

Why’s it got such a terrible reputation?

“Bar RP” is a colloquialism that many people use in the community. It means boring, trite RP without purpose or consequence.

It isn’t meant to be literal. It doesn’t mean that all RP that takes place in a bar is bad. But many scenes where people reach out to random players for RP has taken place in bars, likely because that’s were players thought was the most likely place for their characters, who did not previously know each other, well or at all, to have met. That was usually followed by random small talk that neither party was actually interested in because one or both was hoping the other would bring something interesting to the table and that doesn’t happen. What follows is usually forced or painful or unfulfilling or some combination of all three until the scene finally ends.

That is “bar RP”. And that’s why the phrase has such a terrible reputation.

As many have pointed out, the location of a bar is not the problem. Neither is social RP. It is the content of the RP that is the issue, which some people can make happily interesting, even with characters who do not know each other, and others cannot.