Watering Holes - Why are they so dead?

[Benjamin]

Problems (for me) w/watering holes:

Mechanical: the threads are for interacting. Human interaction is a constant back-and-forth of short, quick actions. Say a sentence, receive a sentence. People overlap each other when they talk. Even mid-sentence, someone's body language can make you change up. Writing up your huge paragraph and then waiting for one back doesn't work. Too stilted, too unrealistic.

Bars: been touched upon. Only so much you can do in a bar. You can spout your spiel to someone, then you're pretty much out. There's nothing you can just 'be doing' except waiting for people to arrive. Especially as most of the bars seem like airport lounges, train station waiting rooms even. Just strangers passing through who need to kill time, quiet depressing little places with a trickle of souls 24/7.

Hard to jump in. In your head even if not in reality. Can't just leap in. Interjecting yourself in to someone else's chat is impolite. Writing 'benjamin walks into the bar, orders a drink and looks around' is lame, and you might just get ignored anyway.

Don't see why they're not whole bases. That way you can actually be getting on with stuff, your job, your life, and you can have more of an excuse/ability to write post-length posts. Would read more like a set of intertwind stories which sometimes overlap or intersect, rather than weird formal conversations which last minutes yet also weeks. Your trader is still chatting to that policewoman, even though you've done 6 trade routes through 39 systems since then.

Anyway yeah that's why I stayed out of it.

If someone made a thread for a base, and it was more a story of the station, written by many, re-using npcs, giving multiple perspectives and background to it, making whatever, cardiff mining facility, a living, breathing place, with characters, regular visitors, problems, quirks, plot arcs, then I'd be down with that.

But I don't want to walk into a bar and sit there and wait for someone to talk at me.

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