What Is Your Preferred Play Style?

[Jumpscare]

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?

[Faraday]

@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.

[Tat]

@Faraday said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

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”.

I know there’s not, but there’s also no ‘typical RPer’ time tolerated between poses anymore. You can’t define async by a standard that doesn’t exist, because people are assuming VASTLY different ‘typical time between poses’.

I’ve seen people turn open scenes into async scenes just by disappearing for a day and then coming back and going ‘sorry, got distracted’ without a word of discussion with their RP partner. More than once!

Async-primary isn’t my style of play, but I see its place and I’m happy it works for some people. But I’ve seen some real rudeness take place from people who assume that a scene can be taken async at any time by any person, and that makes me crazy. Async isn’t the problem here, obviously, the lack of communication is.

I think it’s probably increasingly important for games to clearly label what the ‘default assumption’ is for scene pacing, to define its terms, to state what general pace the game aims for, and to be clear about what sorts of scenes should require clarification with your RP partners.

I also see a lot more of this in RP requests - people asking for distracted or work slow, etc. specifically - so I think we’re getting there.

[KarmaBum]

@shit-piss-love said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

The idea of a social scene that takes literal days sounds awful.

This might be going back to the whole “what do you consider social RP.”

I will not attend Async Karaoke Night, for example, but “our PCs need to talk” is a social scene. I’ve had several really clutch “we need to talk” scenes in the last couple of weeks, and all of them took multiple days to finish.

[Roz]

@Tat said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

I think it’s probably increasingly important for games to clearly label what the ‘default assumption’ is for scene pacing, to define its terms, to state what general pace the game aims for, and to be clear about what sorts of scenes should require clarification with your RP partners.

I think this part specifically is absolutely the most important bit.

[bear_necessities]

@Tat said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

I’ve seen people turn open scenes into async scenes just by disappearing for a day and then coming back and going ‘sorry, got distracted’ without a word of discussion with their RP partner. More than once!

This. I hate this. I don’t mind async but please communicate with me?! I’ve had people fall off the face of the scene without warning and not come back for DAAAYYYSSSS, it’s very frustrating.

[shit-piss-love]

@KarmaBum said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

@shit-piss-love said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

The idea of a social scene that takes literal days sounds awful.

This might be going back to the whole “what do you consider social RP.”

I will not attend Async Karaoke Night, for example, but “our PCs need to talk” is a social scene. I’ve had several really clutch “we need to talk” scenes in the last couple of weeks, and all of them took multiple days to finish.

Totally. When I think “social” scene what I am thinking about are purely social scenes that move no plot or even interpersonal narrative of meaning forward. Your Bar-RP, this-dang-weather, did you hear about so-and-so stuff.

[Faraday]

@Tat said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

I know there’s not, but there’s also no ‘typical RPer’ time tolerated between poses anymore. You can’t define async by a standard that doesn’t exist, because people are assuming VASTLY different ‘typical time between poses’.

I’m defining it based on the conventions that have existed for decades. Barring some other discussion/agreement/convention, when it was “your turn”, more than a few minutes would get frowns and after 20-30 people would start assuming your connection had dropped out.

Not saying anyone else has to define it that way, mind you, but that’s how I, personally, define it.

@Tat said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

I’ve seen people turn open scenes into async scenes just by disappearing for a day and then coming back and going ‘sorry, got distracted’ without a word of discussion with their RP partner. More than once!

And I’ve had that happen lots of times pre-Ares too. The only difference is that Ares makes it easier to pick up a scene that got paused that way. Old-school we’d just go to a TP room the next day and have someone emit the last few poses for a refresher.

Culture is influenced by what tools people have, but at the end of the day it’s driven by people. Each community needs to establish its guidelines–not just by what’s in a policy file somewhere, but by how they act and what they tolerate.

[Twinkle]

I prefer live scenes, but everyone in my circle right now is all mostly async. I try really hard not to seem ungrateful when I get offered RP, and I know it’s gonna take days to complete.

Then when I’m in a live scene, work or something else distracts me and then I become the second async person in that scene. Oh well.

[Roz]

@Faraday said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

@Tat said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

I’ve seen people turn open scenes into async scenes just by disappearing for a day and then coming back and going ‘sorry, got distracted’ without a word of discussion with their RP partner. More than once!

And I’ve had that happen lots of times pre-Ares too. The only difference is that Ares makes it easier to pick up a scene that got paused that way. Old-school we’d just go to a TP room the next day and have someone emit the last few poses for a refresher.

I had scene pauses plenty pre-Ares, but I definitely didn’t encounter someone actually disappearing without a word and come back as if it was NBD. Like, very occasionally you had someone with a RL emergency that suddenly came up, but generally in those rare cases they’d come back with immediate apology/explanation. (I can think of one player in a non-Ares setting who would regularly ghost mid-scene and then act like nothing had happened. They eventually got called out by folks for it because it was such a weird recurring behavior alongside many other weird behaviors.)

I actually think “ghosting” is the key word here. There’s a difference between pausing and ghosting. And if someone disappears and then wanders back and pretends like everything’s the same as if they’d come back after 15 minutes, that becomes rude and I’m probably not gonna play with that person.

[Faraday]

@Roz said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

very occasionally you had someone with a RL emergency that suddenly came up, but generally in those rare cases they’d come back with immediate apology/explanation.

Maybe my play group had more kid/work interruptions than average, but that happened pretty often.

Like you said, though, it was always accompanied by an apology and a “do you want to pick up or…” There wasn’t an expectation that it was NBD. All I’m saying is that expectation comes from culture not code. If people make it a big deal to ghost a scene, then you should see it reduce. If people treat it as NBD, then it’ll become NBD.

[Gashlycrumb]

About what percentage of asynch scenes are about a round of poses a day, vs what’s being called ‘distracted’ – poses every few hours throughout the day. I had imagined most asynch RP was the latter, people posing during their breaks at work. I can’t really do this and have been guessing that asynch isn’t for me because I’d slow it down.

What I like is to be able to log into the game and RP steadily at a pretty rapid pace (< 10 minutes between poses) during ‘prime time’ evening hours.

I’m quite patient and unconcerned about certain types of wandering off – if you often fall asleep at about this time and stop responding, I figure you’ve fallen asleep and if it bothered me I should not play with you at this hour. Or I used to play with emergency services dispatchers, who randomly disappear when there’s an emergency. Now with people playing on their phones I’ve been RPing with a night nurse or two, but they are probably more like ‘distracted’ RP, since they’ll be active for a couple of rounds (of RP) and then gone for twenty-thirty minutes while they do rounds (of checking that people haven’t died in their beds or something) and so on. It is much about knowing what to expect.

[bear_necessities]

I wish I could go back to the days of the before-fore when I was young and full of energy and able to pump out a pose in <10 minutes during prime time evening hours but my old lady brain can’t even string together a single sentence in that amount of time anymore. I’m old, tired, and have approximately 10,000 distractions going on simultaneously that I can’t turn off. If it’s not work, it’s the kids or the spouse or the dog or just me, because I’m tired and grumpy and hangry and so on and so forth.

Right now it took me like 10 minutes to respond to THIS because the dog wanted belly rubs and I’m trying to turn word salad into actual sentences that somebody could read lol

[Gashlycrumb]

@bear_necessities The other thing about me is I don’t really grok the long-poses-are-better thing.

[Roz]

@Gashlycrumb said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

About what percentage of asynch scenes are about a round of poses a day, vs what’s being called ‘distracted’ – poses every few hours throughout the day. I had imagined most asynch RP was the latter, people posing during their breaks at work. I can’t really do this and have been guessing that asynch isn’t for me because I’d slow it down.

I don’t have an answer to this, because I just don’t have the data, but it’s another interesting thing about definitions: to me, poses every few hours is definitely async and not distracted, which i think of more like – taking one hour to pose would be on the long side. (IME distracted often ends up being similar to active pacing, maybe a LITTLE slower, with occasional longer pauses as folks have a meeting, work distraction, etc. It has seemed more like ‘occasional pauses are more expected/anticipated.’)

Which just goes to show the importance of individual games defining what the terms mean for them.

Poses every couple hours definitely reads async to me, at least.

[Third Eye]

The difference between ‘distracted’ and ‘async’ might just be ‘distracted’ generally prompts the players involved to more clearly establish exceptions. ‘I’m at work and can RP normally but may be dragged into meetings that cause hour+ lags.’ Or ‘I can RP but am watching the kids so posing will be really slow.’ IDK, when both tags were introduced I was not clear on the difference but now I definitely feel it as a vibe and am way more comfortable doing a ‘distracted’ scene (it’s how I tag most of the RP I do during work hours, and those scenes tend to have concrete ends and people don’t seem to straight up ghost nearly as often).

[Gashlycrumb]

@Roz Yeah. I would have guessed that ‘distracted’ would mean 20-30 minutes between poses, I am chopping onions and need to finish and wash my hands before I can respond kinda thing. I would have guessed that ‘asynch’ would be, like five poses over the course of a day for most and that one-round-per-day would be more a special arrangement. Since I don’t like to mix MU with work hours at all, I figured I’d be really annoying, people waiting for me to pose, work, pose again at break, pose again at lunch, etc, when I won’t actually be there 'til my workday’s done, making me equivalent to the guy who takes an hour to pose when everybody else is taking ten minutes.

Not that I’ve really thought about it all that much. I have spent a fair amount of time pleading with staffers to just do the convo with NPC asynch one pose a day or even fewer, rather than scheduling it as an event three weeks from now when we both know it’ll probably take all of four rounds, but that’s about the limit of it thusfar. I keep running out of chargen-energy in spite of wanting to try several ares games.

[Faraday]

@Third-Eye said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

IDK, when both tags were introduced I was not clear on the difference but now I definitely feel it as a vibe and am way more comfortable doing a ‘distracted’ scene

Yeah admittedly the names maybe aren’t the greatest. The idea was meant to be that distracted scenes are often primarily synchronous, just with more pauses expected. Maybe it would’ve been less confusing just to call them async. I dunno.

I think it can be helpful to look outside MUs for parallels in the terminology.

• Voice calls and slack huddles are synchronous communication only because there’s an expectation that you won’t leave the other person hanging without a “sorry, someone at the door, BRB”, and then only for a few minutes at most.
• Texts and discord chat are asynchronous. You might get bursts of synchronous back and forth, but it’s perfectly normal for someone to stop replying for long periods without needing to justify it.

ETA: Maybe “Hybrid” would have been better than “Distracted”, in retrospect.

[KarmaBum]

@ratatat poses at a good clip when we’re online at the same time. But being on opposite sides of the world makes that tricky, so a lotta times it’s a few hours of traditional RP, then “I will answer this in the morning,” to be followed by a few rounds of distracted RP before we wrap up what is now I guess an async scene.

Is this async? Distracted? Traditional?

Beats me, but it’s what it takes to get good RP so it’s what I do.

[Roz]

@Faraday said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

@Third-Eye said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

IDK, when both tags were introduced I was not clear on the difference but now I definitely feel it as a vibe and am way more comfortable doing a ‘distracted’ scene

Yeah admittedly the names maybe aren’t the greatest. The idea was meant to be that distracted scenes are often primarily synchronous, just with more pauses expected. Maybe it would’ve been less confusing just to call them async. I dunno.

Whether or not “distracted” was exactly the right term, I do think having a term separate from async has been really helpful!! I wouldn’t want to see it go away.

@KarmaBum said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

@ratatat poses at a good clip when we’re online at the same time. But being on opposite sides of the world makes that tricky, so a lotta times it’s a few hours of traditional RP, then “I will answer this in the morning,” to be followed by a few rounds of distracted RP before we wrap up what is now I guess an async scene.

Is this async? Distracted? Traditional?

To me it’s traditional with a pause. I guess I always think of async as having expectation of consistent length between poses/rounds, whereas a traditional scene can be paused, such as overnight or during the time both parties aren’t awake/at the computer, and then it’s resumed at a generally synchronous pace, be it traditional or distracted.