Social/Bar RP

[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.

[Gashlycrumb]

The worst thing about social RP is that tedious twit who responds to your channel-chat call-for-RP by paging you a lecture about how they don’t like social RP, implies that it’s your very favourite and that you’re an inferior player for liking it, and gives you a weird sort of ultimatum to the effect of ‘I will RP with you but only if you keep it at least seventy-five percent plot and less than twenty-five percent social or slice-of-life’ and then refuses to bring any plot-elements to the table. You want to say, “If I wanted lazy and demanding I’d set myself up as a dominatrix and be on FetLife, not MUs, go fuck yourself,” but you’d get banned.

[Warma Sheen]

@Gashlycrumb That’s too much negativity for your world.

I prefer a reply of “Thanks for the page. It really helps me save time and unnecessary headaches to know who I don’t want anything to do with without having to suffer through hours of dead-end RP because my rampant optimism tricked me into thinking something good might come from giving you a shot. Much appreciated.”

[Jennkryst]

@KarmaBum said in 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.

Yeah, Gala does not scream ‘bar rp’ to me. There is a specific event going on, people are there for a more tangible reason to just kill time and fill the silence. Even if there wasn’t a bomb, you have then inciting incident of what the Gala was for (fundraising, a celebration, whatever), along with people going there for a reason.

Sure, you ICly go to a bar to get drunk. But you don’t have to RP that by itself.

You go to the bedroom to sleep, you don’t RP out the sleeping. But when you go to the bedroom to FUCK, well… you DO RP that out. Because there’s actually interaction going on.

And it’s not just about having someone there. You don’t RP sleeping next to your IC spouse, either. You DO RP getting ready… if there is like. OOCly relevant stuff to cover.

This has gotten away from me, but I think it covers everything? I dunno.

[Gashlycrumb]

I recall ‘Dublin By Night’ where the most popular bar in Dublin exploded every few weeks and would be rebuilt in a week or so, the bartender bot unscathed. He was inexplicably named Cervantes and probably had a world’s record for surviving explosions unscathed.

[Jennkryst]

@Gashlycrumb said in Social/Bar RP:

… at least seventy-five percent plot and less than twenty-five percent social or slice-of-life

It can be slice of life. Lets go to the bar and compete in the axe-throwing contest, lets go and I can introduce you to work friends, lets go and just eat finger-foods while we work on term papers because somehow the crowd talking is ASMR and helps us focus. Any-fucking-thing other than

everyone sips beer and waits for the other person to make the first move and then try to justify starting up small talk

Someone just shoot me. At least then, something will be going on that makes me want to pay attention.

[Pavel]

@Gashlycrumb said in Social/Bar RP:

I recall ‘Dublin By Night’ where the most popular bar in Dublin exploded every few weeks and would be rebuilt in a week or so, the bartender bot unscathed. He was inexplicably named Cervantes and probably had a world’s record for surviving explosions unscathed.

More accurate for Belfast, but I don’t imagine most folk would know the difference.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Pavel It didn’t explode for the same reasons. The bar in Dublin exploded frequently for the mysterious and supernatural reason that it was often full of BaRPers and any PCs doing violence liked to run there and go Lookit ME!

[Aria]

@Gashlycrumb said in Social/Bar RP:

I recall ‘Dublin By Night’ where the most popular bar in Dublin exploded every few weeks and would be rebuilt in a week or so, the bartender bot unscathed. He was inexplicably named Cervantes and probably had a world’s record for surviving explosions unscathed.

We had this on the WoD chats on the official White Wolf servers in the late '90s/early '00s, too, except it was called The Drunken Scotsman and instead of blowing up, it burned down every few weeks.

Good times, good times.

[Evilgrayson]

@Pavel said in Social/Bar RP:

@Gashlycrumb said in Social/Bar RP:

I recall ‘Dublin By Night’ where the most popular bar in Dublin exploded every few weeks and would be rebuilt in a week or so, the bartender bot unscathed. He was inexplicably named Cervantes and probably had a world’s record for surviving explosions unscathed.

More accurate for Belfast, but I don’t imagine most folk would know the difference.

Don’t. I got an app once for an IRA Fianna Ahroun in Colorado, whose player obviously didn’t know the bloody difference. They then lost their shit on me for being English and/or saying ‘no’. I’m not sure which was the worst offence, but apparently I was supposed to let them play it after they’d unloaded both barrels, the grenade launcher, several magazines and a metric shedload of assorted high-octane vituperation in my direction.

It’d be really nice if people could at least do a teeny tiny little bit of research before showing their whole arse.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Evilgrayson

My absolute hate-favorite of a werewolf experience was playing a Get of Fenris who was unapproved by a new staffer after six months on the grid because they realized the character was black.

This was before the PB days so you had to, y’know, read descs and I very neutrally described him as such. I also made zero issue of it in RP.

Somebody thought this was un-thematic.

Decades later I’m still fucking mad.

[GF]

@SpaceKhomeini uhhhhhhh

Good of the staff to come out and openly say the Get are Nazis, I guess? You know where you stand with a declaration like that. Time for another War of Rage to get rid of the Get of Hitler.

[Gashlycrumb]

@GF My Get PC, so very long ago, was totally Minnesota Swedish. But he was a florist.

@SpaceKhomeini Once my faction suffered a staff-change and my new GM would just randomly page me to tell me how much he hated my character and would never ever have approved that. But at least it wasn’t racist, and staff changes happened so often there around then that I didn’t have to do much but shrug and wait.

[Tez]

Y’all WoD players had wild standards of what to expect from staff.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Tez Hey now. It’s been determined that having expectations of MU GMs is bad, and wrong, and ‘entitled.’

[Gasboy]

I have a character who runs a bar, and I agreed to it (three characters in total donated to get the place up and running) simply because it has a lot of potential to generate RP.

Yeah, it can get out of hand, and what do you do when everyone on grid tries to show up?

But so far, it’s been a positive experience.