What Is Your Preferred Play Style?
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When I am storytelling— sync. So far I have not had luck with storytelling in an asynchrony fashion. Either myself or the players end up losing interest for the scene.
When I’m RPing personally, async is good for starting a scene late at night and continuing the next day. Or breaking up scenes when I’m at work and can pose every few hours.
I will say personally I love text RP on Ares games. They’re easy to pick up and micro dose some RP but you can do a full scene.
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Async. With chronic fatigue and shitty health, I am not always up for sitting up for hours at a time. Living in Europe, I’d have to sit up for hours at a time in the middle of the night which is also not an option.
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I think people use ‘async’ differently here and some definitions might be helpful.
To me, async is a scene that’s lasting 3+ days (usually more like a week) with hours or even days between poses.
Starting a scene and pausing it to pick up the next day, with the expectation that you’ll finish that same day, isn’t async.
RPing a scene over the course of a workday with 30 minutes between poses and the occasional hour+ long pause for lunch, meeting, commute, etc isn’t async.
I’d call those things ‘paused’ and ‘distracted’, respectively. I think a lot of people who don’t like async are fine with those sorts of slower-paced RP, and for me at least, Ares makes them possible because I can pick up and put down the scene with ease.
I want a scene to fit within my internal consistent timeline, which usually means ending within 24 hours of starting, with the occasional exception. I’m much less ‘synchronous’ in terms of a 3 hour dedicated stretch than I used to be - but I still don’t enjoy async scenes.
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Synchronous.
For me, personally, there’s a rhythm and an energy to a scene that is very difficult for me to sustain with multiple hour pauses between poses. Also, I am rather depressingly likely to forget that I was in that scene if there’s a multi-hour pause between poses.
I’m happy that Ares accommodates async, and I can sometimes do an async scene if I know in advance that it’s going to be one and what the expected posing speed is, but sync will always be my preference.
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I like how FOMO kind of goes away with asynch and I don’t feel like I need to be checking for poses constantly, but it can definitely be a drag when a scene you’re really excited about ends up stretching on for days. Especially if it’s something that you need an end to in order to inform other scenes.
There are times when it’s hard to keep up the drama of a scene when you’re only posing once a day. So even if a scene is async I’m the person posing immediately after the other person does usually and I love scenes where everyone is just posing quickly.
But I’m usually just happy to get a scene in general so I’ll make do with whatever.
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I tried Async once or twice on the handful of Ares games I’ve played on (it’s really 2 or 3, I haven’t played a lot of em because I mostly play WoD), and it just didn’t work for me. I was kinda sad about this given my timezone etc, but it just didn’t work.
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I prefer running Event Scenes synchronous or paused and picked back up. For non-event scenes I trend towards asynch but prefer if the scenes only last a 3 days or so depending on what’s going on. I can’t handle the ones that takes weeks or months to finish (with some exceptions). RL just gets busy or the brain doesn’t have the energy so it’s nice to be able to asynch or pause and pick up as needed.
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@Pyrephox said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
For me, personally, there’s a rhythm and an energy to a scene that is very difficult for me to sustain with multiple hour pauses between poses. Also, I am rather depressingly likely to forget that I was in that scene if there’s a multi-hour pause between poses.
This was a real problem for me till, like, four months ago when I just gave in. I feel exactly where you’re coming from. I used to just drag-ass through async RP like “wtf was this scene even about?? yawwwwn”
I will say, I’m a lot fucking happier as an RPer now that I tilted into async as a lifestyle. Some of my scenes are “traditional,” some are what @Tat described as “distracted,” many/most are async, and I really dgaf about how long it takes between poses. Now, I happily spit out paragraph after paragraph of gobby meta a couple times a day and call it a pose.
My new mentality is: I would rather wait hours or even days for a good pose that you wanted to write than 10 minutes for a shitty one that you felt obligated to churn out against a ticking clock.
(this is not to convince anyone to come over to the dark side; just that i have found mushing to be a much more enjoyable hobby now that idgaf how long a scene takes~)
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The last time we had this thread, I was hands down synchronous/distracted play almost exclusively. I needed scenes to end that day, or at the very WORST the very next day because anything else would just make me lose the thread and everything seems to happen so fast in the MU* universe anyway that even a day between scenes can seem like 320 weeks.
But now here today, I am almost exclusively distracted/async. It’s rare for me to have a solid block of time in order to have a scene that ends in 2-3 hours (though I still love it when it happens) and honestly I vastly prefer the QUALITY of RP I get in a distracted/async scene than I do in a more traditionally paced one (and I wrote this before I read @KarmaBum 's answer so THIS ISNT US BEING THE SAME PERSON OK?!)
I still occassionally have issues of picking back up the thread though that definitely depends on what is happening in the scene in the first place. I still occassionally have a problem with what I can only refer to as disassociation - where I feel like I’m playing 3 characters at once, because I’m in the far past in one scene, the recent past in another, and the current time in another - but really that only honestly happens when the scenes I’m playing are purely social fluff.
I do still get FOMO, but that’s only because the MU* world moves SO fast, and if you’re playing a game that’s a mix of more traditionally paced/distracted scenes, since a character can basically be a different person entirely or gotten married, pregnant, had the baby and divorced in a span of two freaking weeks so that makes async RP harder lol
ETA: That last paragraph was like fucking word salad but I’m tired and not going to fix it so just figure it out already
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Sync sync sync. I’ll pause scenes to resume them synced, or do a little work slow, but I’ll rarely async. My brain struggles with it too much.
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I always prefer sync. I am learning to appreciate some of the benefits of async and I will play however I need to play to get time with people I like, but it’s hard for me to stay in my character’s headspace over more than a day or so.
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I already didn’t like multi-paragraph poses in sync and am an active proponent of that short pose lyfe where pose length can be down to a single sentence if it makes sense for the moment in the scene (especially dialog). So async just does not work for me.
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Sync. I like the immediacy.
I’m fine with async but I don’t think my definition of it fits what the players who REALLY like async want. If a scene lasts two or three days due to scheduling or timezones, especially if there’s clear intent by everybody to one day finish this thing, that doesn’t really bug me. If it goes on for a week+ and resembles more forum or journal RP, that’s not my bag, I’d have stuck in those mediums if it was.
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I feel like this would be partially based on the type of scene or even the environment of the game. I think social based stuff is a lot easier to do async where as action based items feel like they need to be sync’d just to keep moving.
I also like the separation of sync / distracted / async. I really don’t have the life space to do sync’d anymore, almost always I’m distracted or async, but the problem for me like so many other mentioned is getting the motivation blues when it comes to async taking too long.
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@Paradox We do that on Keys, yeah. Async is generally expected to be about a pose round a day or less as agreed on. Distracted, on the other hand, it’s work slow friendly but not days between rounds.
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@Paradox said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
I feel like this would be partially based on the type of scene or even the environment of the game. I think social based stuff is a lot easier to do async where as action based items feel like they need to be sync’d just to keep moving.
I also like the separation of sync / distracted / async. I really don’t have the life space to do sync’d anymore, almost always I’m distracted or async, but the problem for me like so many other mentioned is getting the motivation blues when it comes to async taking too long.
Huh that’s interesting, I feel exactly the opposite. The idea of a social scene that takes literal days sounds awful. But a scene with action in it feels like it could keep me coming back.
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I prefer Synchonous/live, but my available time doesn’t match up with too many people very well, so I mostly end up getting asynch scenes. I’m okay with those for talk/discussion/small scenes, as long as they don’t last more than about a week RL and move along at a good clip. But I’ve learned that I can’t run asynch scenes – it requires a style closer to Play-By-Post that I haven’t been able to get my head wrapped around yet.
I really do like that Ares makes asynch scenes easier and, as @Faraday said, keeps them on-game and on the right characters.
As @Tat mentions, I sometimes have trouble getting asynch scenes settled into my personal timeline, and that definitely bugs me.
Formerly known as Seraphim73 (he/him)
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Ok if asynch is a pose round a day or less, I don’t think I could asynch at all. That’s play by post or forum games at that point. I’ve done what I thought was asynch (like a scene that took a week to finish) but I struggled. At a pose round a day I just could not.
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Async is great. But I prefer sync because my brain hates it when I leave things unfinished. It just lurks in the back of my mind, giving me a twinge of anxiety every hour or so, because it’s not done yet and I need to check in, because what if they’re waiting on me?
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@Tat said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
To me, async is a scene that’s lasting 3+ days (usually more like a week) with hours or even days between poses.
Starting a scene and pausing it to pick up the next day, with the expectation that you’ll finish that same day, isn’t async.
RPing a scene over the course of a workday with 30 minutes between poses and the occasional hour+ long pause for lunch, meeting, commute, etc isn’t async.There is no one universal definition, but FWIW I use the technical definition of async, which merely means “not an immediate response”. So any situation where you have more than what your typical RPer would tolerate from “hey it’s your turn to pose”, IMHO, is async RP. Whether that scene is allowed to linger for a few hours or a few weeks is entirely up to the people involved and when they agree to call “cut”.
As a side note, I think the same tools that support async RP also support RP that’s out of sync with the main MU timeline (backscenes, paused scenes, etc.) I consider those sort of async cousins.
