(08-29-2015, 03:31 PM)Calliope Cloverbloom Wrote: Now then. Is your statement true, that Frank can't force Bob and Jane to react to him? Sure. But, are Bob and Jane's players being rude by playing out their scene in a public space and failing to acknowledge the existence of the public? Yes. For their behavior, other players in the area will probably conclude that Bob is godmoding by not acknowledging Frank, and a large portion of those players may decide to write off Bob and Jane as roleplayers due to their anti-social behavior.
More to the point, inability to force Bob and Jane to "play along" doesn't mean that refusal is polite or justifiable, nor does it magically mean they aren't in public. Many roleplayers play with a mind to the realism of the social environment, which means that unless a plausible reason ICly is presented for why Bob and Jane couldn't be interacted with, they're fair game.
Yes, they're being rude. We agree. But it's still their right to be rude, which is what is being argued.
The point about them being not in public means that the scene that they had planned will continue along the same lines as it would have if no one saw it; as a result, regardless of where they would have played it out, it would have stayed the same, blurring the lines of Public and Private from their standpoint and rendering them unnecessary.
Yes, they might be "fair game" in the mind of those interacting with them, but as far as actual interaction goes, they're not fair game, because nothing can be done to them. Therein lies the disconnect between what people's opinions of what should be fair game are, and what actually is fair game in practice.
Those players may write those people off, but unless this is something that the two players find undesirable, that doesn't actually make it a consequence. It's entirely possible that those two players won't care, or otherwise find it rude that everyone else is intruding; as a result, they might also desire to write the rest of those watching off as well. A Consequence, when referred to in the negative light, is squarely within the confines of subjectivity.
Again, just because someone is Being Rude by not interacting with someone, does not mean that they are not within their Rights to do whatever it is that they're doing. Personal Opinions are not Law; sometimes the two can intersect, or work in tandem with one another, but they are not the same.
Again, I would rather that people be available to interact with all the time in public, but that's not something that is always true, or something that I can enforce. I also personally believe that it's not worth writing people off because they decided that they want to do something on their own.
As an aside, it's important to note that the people in your scenario did not state that they were having a private scene when others attempted to intervene. Although it is a bit of a tangent from the actual argument, if they were to have stated something along the lines of, "sorry, this RP is off-limits, we're doing something on our own," then that could put the entire scenario in a very different light, even if everything else proceeds in the same way.
