(08-29-2015, 01:17 PM)Calliope Cloverbloom Wrote: The main rebuttal to that, "but what if they don't have anywhere private they could go" is moot - nothing prevents them from setting up Skype, using email, or even private messages here on this forum. I know lots of people over various MMOs that I've played who do that for scenes where they really want privacy...
...It's like the real world - if two people want to have a heated argument, and they do it in their home, then they're probably fine to have that argument. If they do it at a shopping mall, there's a chance that a passer-by may interject their opinion, or a possibility someone may misunderstand the context of the argument or the hostility level and things could get taken an unanticipated direction.
tl;dr - My opinion is that there's no need to ever specify you're open to walk-up RP. If you're IC in public, you're open to it. A polite OOC request for privacy should be respected, but privacy-in-public shouldn't be considered a default condition.
This is not the main rebuttal.
The main rebuttal is that you can't make them acknowledge you. And you can't. There's nothing that anyone can do to make an RP public unless the other party is willing to play along. All RP is about playing along.
Again, I agree that if you're in public, you should be in public. But when it's down to the line, you're only in public if you decide to acknowledge other people coming up to you. If you don't, then you might as well not be.
In the real world, you can ignore people that come up to you and offer their piece. It's the same thing in RP, where it is in fact even easier to ignore someone. Someone can punch you in meatspace, but in RP, that punch isn't happening unless you want it to. If a party doesn't acknowledge anything happening around them, then functionally, they're not public at all, and there's no way to force them to be public either.
