When this happen, I always feign interest, go the whole ten yards, ask about what sort of jobs they offer, benefits, wages, dress code, try and hype up my interest and then when they seem lulled into the false sense of security that they secured another joiner, I just straight up go “Actually… I just remembered that I left my stove on, lemme go burn down a orphanage real quick” or some other excuse and leave them hanging, most of them get REALLY offended, and take it to ooc whispers and I retort with “Maybe if you didn’t use mind-bending powers (ooc meta) to figure out I’m unguilded and tried recruiting me, I would not have wasted your time”
Would rather interact with a hardcore recruiter than an RP leech tbh
Too many people take RP creators for granted and are happy to have handouts without ever having to commit to anything
Inb4 “aren’t you an officer for a guild?” ye, but I’m highlighting the other extreme in this instance, key word extreme
It is what it is, people want to recruit for guilds, people want to join, other people don’t, it all comes down to effort between parties. If one party isn’t putting the effort in? Just leave.
Real talk though, when specifically doing recruitment RP on a hidden apostole, I most often use my highly potent psychic powers of TRP reading to approach people who’d potentially fit in the guild (only so much time left late evenings…). Given nature of the guild however I don’t approach valiantly to say “You don’t have a surcoat! Do you want to join the Scarlet Crusade?” but instead try to sell them some propaganda before my character figures out if they may be actually prone to some good old radicalisation.
If the person doesn’t end up interested IC or OOC at least we have some unique RP rather than n’th recruitment drill. I take that as a win.
I have a small issue with recruitment RP, but it’s more of a natural consequence than necessarily an issue with recrtuitment itself. I will personally never recruit for a guild I’m in (if they want to join, they can just say so), but I do like RPing with ”randoms” a lot and often try to rope other people into whatever I got going on at the moment.
A problem with this, then, is that I’ve noticed there seems to be an expectation that asking a character to ”work” with me on something IC usually makes them think I’m asking them to join my guild, just because I have a tag above my head. In some cases, it feels like this deters people from actually going along with the RP, when it’s never my intention to force them to join the guild to participate. At times, I’ve had to explain it has nothing to do with guild recruitment, but I guess there’s no real way to stop these misunderstandings from happening.
Aside from that, my preferred ”style” of recruitment is to just RP with people and then if they have fun, they’ll probably ask to join or something like that. I fully understand why it’s sometimes necessary for some guilds (especially if they’re just starting out/don’t have a core beforehand) to actively recruit IC and don’t mind it, just isn’t my personal cuppa.
