@faraday said:
@Arkandel said:
But it is. I mean it's still considerate to ask before joining but if you're in an actual public place - I'm not talking the back room of a bookstore but a busy restaurant or something - then being annoyed if someone walks in is unreasonable.
Being annoyed is unreasonable, but so is being annoyed if you ask to join and they tell you 'no'.
If you're having a nice private conversation at a bar table in a public room and someone else walks into the bar, I don't feel that you're obligated to include them. It's nice if you can, but sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes your character is crying in their beer or talking about Something Serious or Something Secret and it just doesn't make sense for them to start chatting up some random person who walked in. I don't feel it appropriate to tell the original people: "go find someplace other than the bar to RP your bar scene".
Now if that happened, I would politely and apologetically explain to the newcomer why I can't work them in, and do my best to make it up to them next time.
Yeah. As much as I like being inclusive (and I do - I try to make it a policy to play with lots of different people, because I enjoy the variety in interactions), sometimes a scene - not necessarily intentionally - has turned to something where it's very awkward to shoehorn another person in. And you can't necessarily predict what that scene is at the beginning.
I can remember once scene, in a public room, I was in where it started as a standard sort of 'run into you' scene between my character and another. It grew tense and confrontational, although not obviously antagonistic in a way that would draw public attention. A new character entered, posed walking up to the two and just saying hi. My character's next pose only acknowledged that in a terse nod, because most of his attention was focused on this very tense interaction. The player then had their character walk off in a huff because they weren't instantly included.
There was just no way to DO that in that moment that matched both the scene and the personalities involved. And 'take it to RP rooms' doesn't really help when the scene wasn't planned to be tense or private, but just...turned that way.