Social/Bar RP

[bear_necessities]

I don’t mind social fluff scenes if they come with a purpose, I guess? Like if I’m just ‘Bear_Necessities sips beer and laughs’ over and over, it’s going to get real boring real fast. I like to keep a scene moving, add in some humor or hijinks, and have a good time. Bonus points if I get to talk about plot or if the social fluff somehow manages to move plot along!

My PROBLEM comes when that’s all you can do on a game. Just social fluff scenes over and over and over and over and over.

[Pavel]

@imstillhere said in Social/Bar RP:

Why’s it got such a terrible reputation?

In and of itself there’s nothing wrong with social RP, it is the backbone of many other forms of RP. However, if all a game or a person offers is bar RP then it’s sort of like living a life where hanging out at a coffee shop is all you do, with no work or family or narrative to your life.

[Gashlycrumb]

Oddly (or not) people tend to find BaRP more satisfying if you take it out of bars some.

Players are usually some degree of exhausted though, and literally bar-sitting becomes a sort of default.

The effort-to-value of scheduling little regular social events or crowdsourcing them seems to be pretty good. People often get a lot of mileage out of stuff like:

Here in the Old West town of Dry Hump, people do their laundry at the stream on Wednesdays, and chat.

It’s late June and raspberries are ripening on the mountains to the east of Dry Hump! Go berry picking with your friends. Anybody who wants to can PrP an encounter with a bear.

On Sundays (nnnn time RL) Reverend Custard is preachin’ up a storm at the Dry Hump Church of the Rolling Hole, and there’s a pot-luck lunch after.

And so on.

[Third Eye]

@tsar said in Social/Bar RP:

fuckit i love some good social/bar rp

without bar rp, i’d have never met @Third-Eye

That glorious, glorious scene where we randomly posed somewhat incorrect things about our roster backgrounds because we only knew theme spottily, but were very happy to see another character over 30 on the grid.

Which actually is kinda the point to me, random social RP is where I meet new RPers a lot of the time. And sometimes it’s stilted and banal because it’s not someone you play off of well, other times it’s just fine or really surprisingly fun. It’s what I bring to it, to me, but I also just leave scenes I’m not engaged with pretty quickly. A just fine 1.5 hour scene easily becomes a banal 3 hour scene, but idk nobody’s holding me hostage in a MU bar.

[GF]

@imstillhere said in Social/Bar RP:

Why’s it got such a terrible reputation?

Like I’ve said elsewhere, I hate bar RP because it’s always small talk with people who don’t know how to do small talk and therefore give off every vibe that they want you to go away.

Edited to add: What other kind of rp are people encouraged to offer if not social and nobody can GM a combat/storyline at that time? Is social with friends different from social with strangers?

Social is fine. Just have a goal in mind instead of defaulting to wallflower mode.

[KarmaBum]

I still feel like I did here:

https://brandmuday.mythicus.net/topic/53/mu-peeves-thread/1576?_=1679150982770

I don’t want to RP the same thing over and over, even “being social.” It hits the same nerve as sex scenes for the sake of sex scenes or hyper-detailed combat: this takes too long and is doing nothing to enhance the story, let’s FTB.

We need to be exploring something - whether that’s an action, a character aspect, or just something we haven’t RPed 10,000 times before - or I’m not interested and will wander off, bye~!

[Snackness]

@KarmaBum Yeah, you said it so well in that post but I was too lazy to link it.

[Polk]

I think social RP got a reputation because of the sandboxy games where a lot of people only ever had social RP to do.

But taken for what it is, as a way to develop bonds between PCs for team building in later plot, it’s great.

Just have to do it with a purpose, and not just for its own sake.

Think of yourself as a TV show writer. Why is this scene happening? How can I use it?

Be proactive, even in the midnight Tommy’s run.

[icanbeyourmuse]

@Polk Not everyone wants a goal/purpose for their social scene. Social scenes can be a destressor after a big plot thing and they just want to do something that is light with no goal beyond chatting. I would more say check what the people in the scene want. Do they want some purpose for the scene besides something light with no end goal? Do they want to use it as a means to get involved in plot or to learn about going ons related to plots? Going in a social scene with a goal/purpose can feel like you’re just using the person for the stuff they can give.

[Polk]

@icanbeyourmuse Let me clarify. The goal can be for yourself, developing your character.

It’s very easy, as a plot-oriented person, to forget about what your character might do in downtime. Social scenes can help you expose that, which can help you expand and nuance how your entire character plays.

And the more you do that it’s easier to roll out of bed and do a destressor scene.

[Roadspike]

@icanbeyourmuse said in Social/Bar RP:

@Polk Not everyone wants a goal/purpose for their social scene. Social scenes can be a destressor after a big plot thing and they just want to do something that is light with no goal beyond chatting.

“De-stressing after a big plot thing by chatting” can absolutely be a goal. You’re trying to lessen the stress your character is feeling or the stress between characters. “Having two (or more) characters meet who might make good plot later” can be a goal worthy of a scene. Even “finding out more about each others’ characters” can be a goal worthy of a scene. But “spending a couple of hours RPing about nothing in particular” usually isn’t worth a scene, in my opinion.

[SpaceKhomeini]

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.

[icanbeyourmuse]

@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 try to drop at least plot details in social when I GM on Atharia. Whether I’m on my NPCs or PCs. LEss so on my PCs, since they are PCs. I /think/ my players know that if I’m on an NPC I will give something related to the plots going on. Or that the social scene will lead to plot things.

Because my brain didn’t get all the thoughts out and thought it did but didn’t: I mentioned this because I am aware some people want something out of social scenes. I let players decide if they want an NPC or PC. NPC plot (be it details or something that moves the story forward) is likely to come, PC it can be hit or miss to whether plot is involved or not.

So, I’m for checking if someone is looking to get anything from the scene for plot or if they are just out and about seeking RP or whatever.

[Gashlycrumb]

@SpaceKhomeini Oh, I’d guess you have an excellent, even nigh irresistible reason – that’s just how behavior works. Social RP is supposed (to you, anyway, and me too) to lead to the plottier stuff you like. At some point this stopped happening for you. If social RP was fun to you at one time there was probably a period when it stopped being fun but you kept trying, tried it a lot and tried hard to make it interesting and got a little weird and wound up about it – an “extinction burst.”

[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?