RP Safari - Pacing Styles
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@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
There are very few public games on Ares, and none of them appear to have a “live scene” culture.
I’m not sure how you define “few” but there are 16 currently open public ones and that’s actually the majority of the open Ares games in total.
@Pavel said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
async culture because… it’s Ares, that’s what it’s for.
Except that is expressly NOT what Ares is for. I know, because I designed it to do live scenes (since that is also my preference). The vast majority of scenes on my Ares games were live, because I made them that way.
Like I can’t control how people play with it, but on a technical level Ares supports live scenes just as well as it does async scenes. The only difference between it and PennMUSH is that you can also play async more easily.
So yes, there will be more async scenes visible on Ares games because people who were RPing with alts in TP rooms, or in Google docs, or on private sandboxes, or (way back when) on LiveJournal can now play in the game. They were always there, it’s just more visible on Ares games.
But having more async scenes doesn’t prevent anyone else from doing live scenes, any more than me eating chocolate prevents you from eating vanilla. So that’s why I’m trying to dig deeper into it.
Are people trying and failing to run live scenes? If so, why? Perhaps there are tools to help.
Or are they just annoyed that they want to join live scenes (i.e. they expect someone else to run them) and are annoyed that nobody is catering to their preference. That is a very different issue.
ETA: I’m not meaning to wrongfun anybody in that last paragraph btw. It’s totally fine to be frustrated that no game is providing what you prefer to play. I’ve been there myself. But I wouldn’t blame the game-runners for that, and I certainly wouldn’t blame the server.
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@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I’m not sure how you define “few” but there are 16 currently open public ones and that’s actually the majority of the open Ares games in total.
I’m actually sorry for saying that because I was definitely putting bias on it, I was really only looking at games with 4 or 5 stars.
ETA: And ignoring the comic book games admittedly
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@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I’m actually sorry for saying that because I was definitely putting bias on it, I was really only looking at games with 4 or 5 stars.
Heh okay, fair. Three stars is still good activity though, by my reckoning - that would make 10 public/active games, which is still almost as many as in the entire Evennia list (including all the pre-alphas). Grapevine lists 150, but that seems to be mostly MUDs.
Entirely earnest question - where are these bastions of non-Ares live MUSH RP? How does one find them?
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@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
Are people trying and failing to run live scenes? If so, why? Perhaps there are tools to help.
Or are they just annoyed that they want to join live scenes (i.e. they expect someone else to run them) and are annoyed that nobody is catering to their preference. That is a very different issue.
It could potentially be that Ares has gained the reputation of being the place for asynch. It has definitely done that for me, and it’s probably why the few Ares games I’ve joined I’ve eventually idled out on.
It’s not whether it is or isn’t able to do live scenes, it’s more that people view it as mostly asynch. I know it seems to me that a lot of people praising Ares do so for the easy way it enables asynch, so I just assume all Ares games are mostly asynch, and I say that having attempted to play a few.
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@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
It could potentially be that Ares has gained the reputation of being the place for asynch.
Oh yeah I think this is part of it in the last couple years at least. I view Ares itself as relatively pacing agnostic - staff and active players control the culture more than the platform - but you definitely see a drift toward async in what I would term the recent past, beyond games that are explicitly advertising themselves as Async Friendly/Async First (Keys is the example of that that comes to mind). I’ve wondered recently how much of this is changing player expectations from the people who were always on the platform 5+ years ago, when the first Ares games like Spirit Lake and Gray Harbor were around, and how much is players from more time-shifted mediums like Discord coming into Ares because it has more QOL features. I genuinely don’t know and it doesn’t feel like there’s a good way to figure it out. While it often feels like the Ares games share 75%+ of the same populations, some of them are entirely their own thing and don’t cross-pollinate much.
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@Third-Eye said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I’ve wondered recently how much of this is changing player expectations from the people who were always on the platform 5+ years ago, when the first Ares games like Spirit Lake and Gray Harbor were around,
So when I created Gray Harbor with KB, I feel like async wasn’t really as much of a thing? All our events were generally live, we would have a lot of open scenes going that were live, and I specifically was not a fan of letting scenes go for several days at a time. I could be misremembering, but async scenes at that time felt like they were more for people having 1 on 1s or for European players.
But I will say I have seen a shift towards scenes taking longer, lasting longer and longer, async being a “thing” moreso than ever. And I specifically just … don’t have the energy for live scenes anymore. I get too distracted, I don’t really want to sit at my computer for 2-3 hours at a time, and even though I still do a vast majority of my posing from work, my brain just always isn’t here for quick back and forths.
Maybe it’s a post-pandemic thing. I’m tired, man. I know a lot of people are. Maybe it’s a current state of games thing, because I really haven’t felt “energized” to play on public games like I have been in the past. IDK!
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@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
Except that is expressly NOT what Ares is for.
I know that. You know that. But you know how people are. It’s the only one that does async stuff out of the box that isn’t clunky or involving the word ‘timestop’, so it’s what people either assume or default to.
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For my personal RP, I’m honestly good with whatever at this point. If I’m in a scene that takes a few days, sure. If it takes a day, great. Whatever works for me and the person I’m playing with and how our energy lines up. I try gauge who I’m with too, and adjust if I know I’m RPing with someone who enjoys a shorter and more to the point scene.
I will not GM async scenes if I can ever help it. If I’m GMing, I need to be in the zone and I want to get in there, tell a story with you and get you back out into the world. It’s like a MISSION.
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@tsar This is pretty much where I’m at. My default these days is a scene that lasts 2-3 days, but I’ll make time for someone who has a preference for faster. Never, ever will ST async. That’s a nightmare.
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@Trashcan said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
There are very few public games on Ares, and none of them appear to have a “live scene” culture.
Empty Night and Aegis Company both have a heavy majority of ‘traditional’ pacing scenes listed in their 10+ active scenes. There are probably others.
We have plenty people doing live scenes on Keys. It’s just not the scenes you’ll see when scanning the scene list – that space is firmly claimed by the asyncs that linger for a while.
On Keys, at least, the trick is to find the people who share your preferred style.
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This is an extremely small sample, but between the three games mentioned as having a live RP cohort (Keys, Aegis Company and Empty Night)…
1 scene got posted yesterday (Aegis), and 1 scene got posted on 2/24 (Aegis).
There are 6 scenes shared from 2/23 (Empty Night & Aegis), but I’m not sure if those went up on 2/24 or 2/25. If we assume they were all played and posted on 2/23, then there are 8 live scenes shared across 3 days across 3 games.
Just some food for thought. If live RP is on these games, it is not getting shared publicly on a regular basis.
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T Tez forked this topic
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T Tez referenced this topic
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Some stuff on grid vs web scenes forked into it’s own thread here: https://brandmu.day/topic/644/grid-vs-web-scenes/10
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MOVED TO THE OTHER THREAD
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@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
What about you? What pace do you like and why?
Nothing beats live RP momentum and immediate character reaction.
I struggle with the yo-yo effect of Async and ultimately find I can’t get back into the scene mentally. It takes the spontaneous nature of RP out of the equation and I feel like that spontaneity is part and parcel in what makes RP special for me.
Also, acting “as” the character is important for me in RP. I can’t do that with async where I’m the character for a pose a day, or whatever the pacing is.
And maybe that’s the actual distinction: I RP to “act”, not to “write”.
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If I am MUing, as in everyone is controlling one character in a scene, it needs to be live. I cannot do async in such a framework. I lose emotional connection to the scene and interest. After the second day, I lose complete interest and have already moved on.
If I am doing novella stuff, which I call collaborative writing and I haven’t done in decades because I’m picky and it has an even smaller population than MUs do, it HAS to be async. Someone (I’m not scrolling up to see who) was poo-poo-ing on this style, suggesting that such a framework focuses on the writing aspect at the expense of collaboration. That is incorrect. I would actually argue that MU*ing is much less collaborative as everyone in a scene tends to be looking out for number one with number one being their character. It’s a different mindset.
You don’t consider one character in the scene just yours. All of the characters are yours and all the other participants’ to work with to craft a good story. What you control is a portion of the scene not a character. It’s like improv with a lot of “Yes, and…” The other writers become partners and you have to work with what they give you and they in turn have to work with what you give them to craft an interesting fiction.
The focus is on having a good scene that, if an uninvolved person read, they would go “Damn, that’s a good bit of writing and a good story.” If this were in person, it would be less D&D and more story-game, like Microscope, City of Winter, and Fall of Magic, with something like a talking stick that gets passed around the table with the person having the stick getting to come with whatever they want but the other players have some form of veto power. Also there tends to be way more OOC discussion, figuring out where everyone wants the scene to go, what they want accomplished with which characters etc. Also also, it leads to people being more willing to have bad things happen to the characters, since there is less personal investment in a particular character. A character is just one of many that you use to write a story. I have argued that MU*s should adopt this style more but everyone tends to react to it like I’m suggesting we sacrifice infants to the Elder Gods, so whatever.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
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@Ominous I think the very nature of large, multi paragraph posts (presumably with actions beyond fluff within them) doesn’t quite lend itself to the kind of flowing granular exchange most RP interaction needs.
In my experience with novella, at least in the recent years, what happens is people don’t want to wait another week for their turn, so they pack as much as they possibly can into a post, interacting with other characters and then presuming vague responses, so you get a kind of backed up out-of-order situation. If people play on the safer side, they opt to do a bunch of thought-posing, which I think is actually something that at least part of the crowd appreciates or is pleased with, in style of “Yay someone is thinking about my character”.
I’m unsure how it was decades ago, but at least presently, there is no controlling a portion of the scene. JUST your character. I got pretty severe responses when I indicated another character may be able to see some headlights or something entirely innocent like that, something to just move the scene along.
I’m actually unaware of any RP setting in which you are basically writing a book together and you aren’t controlling your character. This is the first I’ve heard of it. @Faraday is Storium something like that?
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@Ominous said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
If I am doing novella stuff, which I call collaborative writing and I haven’t done in decades because I’m picky and it has an even smaller population than MUs do, it HAS to be async. Someone (I’m not scrolling up to see who) was poo-poo-ing on this style, suggesting that such a framework focuses on the writing aspect at the expense of collaboration. That is incorrect. I would actually argue that MU*ing is much less collaborative as everyone in a scene tends to be looking out for number one with number one being their character. It’s a different mindset.
I think we’re maybe talking about different things. The long-form async style I’ve seen in venues like Storium and forum play still has the one-character-per-player hallmarks of MUs, only the poses are way way longer. Due to the length of time between everyone’s poses, it’s basically impossible to have a meaningful conversation or to coordinate actions with one another. Mostly folks either just do their own things separately (resulting in less collaboration) or are forced to go off-game to collaborate more directly in discord/google docs/whatever.
@Yam No - in Storium you mostly just control your own character. They’re a little more tolerant of power-posing someone else in the interests of expediency, but most of the moves I’ve seen are just one character.
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sorry-not sorry but the tendency here to frame async play as bad roleplaying somehow by default stylistic choice is not just inaccurate, it is rude.
I absolutely gaurantee you will find bad roleplayers everywhere regardless of pacing choices. the MU Peeves thread from the very earliest incarnation of this board 10+ years ago was full of people complaining about purple prose passhole-aggresshole meta posing before async was even a twinkle in Faraday’s eye, it didn’t just magically appear when we stopped sitting down for arbitrary four hour blocks and good, engaging roleplay didn’t disappear when people moved to other mediums.
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@Wizz 100% agree.
Some things may be made easier or more difficult in different pacing styles.
In rapid-fire pacing, it’s harder to polish/edit (due to time pressure), but it’s easier to do back-and-forth interactions. In async it’s the opposite. Neither is intrinsically better or worse, but one might align more closely to your preferences.
@Wizz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
before async was even a twinkle in Faraday’s eye
I certainly didn’t invent async RP on MUs. I’ve been doing async MUSH scenes by email almost as long as I’ve been MUSHing. It’s always been there. Now, with Ares, it can just be done on the game.
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Yammy, I agree with you about instant/live scene pacing, that’s been pretty consistent for the last 20+ years for me! I do notice perhaps that these days 10-15-20 can be usual for “live” unless the person organizing says something about keeping it to 15 or less. I wonder if that’s because there’s older brains working or something!
Async is so variable depending on game/r culture though, at least in my observation, that I now always ask what people intend the pacing to be. There are lots of people that do the 1 or a couple of poses per day thing. Some are like a pose every few days. For me personally I tend to mean every few hours, or a stop and then restart later in “live” mode, it’s just that it may be out of order with other game timestream stuff. I learned to ask because on one game in particular I was stuck in a huge group scene where the intent was a timely catchup but one person asked for async, I said fine because I was thinking everyone would pose a couple of times a day, but what ended up happening is that half the group reverted to posing 24 hours after the last pose, so in effect that was ONE pose in the entire SCENE per day and these were like normal live poses so like 2-4 sentences and I thought I was going to die. I’m not saying they were bad people, they weren’t. But I should have asked because I can’t handle that glacial of a pace, so that was totally on me for saying sure without asking.
I’ve been told my “style” of async may be more properly described as “distracted/work-friendly” so that’s what I’ve been calling it rather than async over the last few years.
I always appreciate when terms/pace is outlined specifically for that scene, because we all have different brains and assumptions so that seems to me to be the best way to cut down annoyance and increase engagement or to give people a friendly way to say “man thanks for your offer but that pace won’t work for me, I hope you guys have fun,” proactively before they’re feeling either totally overwhelmed or like they want to gnaw their own leg off to escape. I can’t do either end of the spectrum well (the instant OR the one pose in a scene per day/in a 4 person scene getting to do 1 pose every 4 days). My poor brain can only really keep things together for a bout a week regardless of pace, and for me the live/pause for up to 2 days/resume is better than the 4 day between posing stuff.
I would be willing to try the long delay novella RP pace though. I think that would work better for me and be okay than the : smiles and nods and says “How interesting, tell me more.” and having to wait 4 days to respond to it lol.
