RP Safari - Pacing Styles
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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.
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Lol man, I really tried hard to craft an intro that didn’t imply ares was the sole creator of async. Forums existed! It’s just that this setting firmly didn’t permit it, or at least much of it, and now it does, and that does have an effect in some manner.
I MUSH because this is one of those few places that I can find live RP that’s not MMO. The way that I had to beg people to give me a single paragraph of detail in MMO RP, instead of just pure dialog… Like, they wanted to RP with me! But I had these pesky conditions. I need meat!
But I’m not blind to the future, and Discord is full of async/long format style RPing. This is clearly what most younger (and some older) RPers want. If you sense any rankling, it’s because someone’s favored style may be dying, which means less people to RP with. It’s the nature of the game.
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@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
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.
oh for sure. I actually grew up on PbP forums just as much as MU*s myself. I am more just framing how some responses to this topic unfortunately start to come off to me every time it pops up.
@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
If you sense any rankling, it’s because someone’s favored style may be dying, which means less people to RP with. It’s the nature of the game.
I get this and I do sympathize with it, and I’m just gonna suggest that exploratory ventures into a style you don’t personally enjoy are probably going to be colored by that bias, in addition to the simple fact that, again, there are a lot of people who are just bad at this period, lol, whether that’s due to inexperience or whatever else. it’s not just that playing a different way is worse.
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@Wizz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
there are a lot of people who are just bad at this period
I definitely agree with this, which is why I’m always baffled about why people declare no bar RP/no social fluff. All RP has the capacity to be bad (or GREAT). I can trust @Ashkuri to make mail sorting somehow entertaining, heart-wrenching, and character development rich.
I suppose in the end there are MANY factors that feed into “good” or “bad” RP… but that nuance is too confusing to talk about. <<; Or maybe just less fun to talk about.
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@Wizz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I get this and I do sympathize with it, and I’m just gonna suggest that exploratory ventures into a style you don’t personally enjoy are probably going to be colored by that bias, in addition to the simple fact that, again, there are a lot of people who are just bad at this period, lol, whether that’s due to inexperience or whatever else. it’s not just that playing a different way is worse.
i can say that my dislike of async has zero to do with the writing styles people may or may not utilize while playing. it has zero to do with the actual pose content, because that’s entirely variable
it has everything to do with the timing and rhythm constraints that ARE inherent to async. i’ve done plenty of async scenes with a bunch of different people over the years; it’s incredibly difficult even with people whose RP i love. it’s entirely about the nature of async itself
she/her | playlist
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@Roz valid! some people just don’t like it, that’s absolutely fine. sorry if I made it seem like it wasn’t when I responded to you earlier, I was just trying to be a silly goose.
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@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I definitely agree with this, which is why I’m always baffled about why people declare no bar RP/no social fluff.
Hm. Are you equally baffled by people who declare no smut? Or no lords and ladies?
People like different things.
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@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
which is why I’m always baffled about why people declare no bar RP/no social fluff
They also baffle me, though I suspect for different reasons.
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@KarmaBum said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I definitely agree with this, which is why I’m always baffled about why people declare no bar RP/no social fluff.
Hm. Are you equally baffled by people who declare no smut? Or no lords and ladies?
Nope, that doesn’t confuse me at all. The subject matter there is crystal clear, whereas what counts as plot versus… well, anything else seems hard to pin down. What if the characters briefly talk about some vague plot related thing and then decide to go drinking? Like, I’m trying to figure out where the line is. What’s the threshold for the right amount of plot? I feel like I’m missing something.
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@Yam Interesting.
I guess it is just a matter of differing tastes. I used to enjoy random social interactions, but I do not anymore. They just do not entertain me, the same way that I am not entertained by Bridgerton or MMA.
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@KarmaBum said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
They just do not entertain me, the same way that I am not entertained by Bridgerton or MMA.
My brain left out the or in this sentence the first time I read it, and I suddenly imagined an MMA promotion that forces its fighters to dress in Regency appropriate attire for their fights.
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@MisterBoring I truly did not ever expect circumstances to line up again to where I could share this, but here we are.
Jane Austen Fight Club
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@Wizz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
@Roz valid! some people just don’t like it, that’s absolutely fine. sorry if I made it seem like it wasn’t when I responded to you earlier, I was just trying to be a silly goose.
lmao not gonna lie, i don’t even remember what you replied to my first post. that was like. a week ago!!
i was just responding to the post i quoted. because i feel like it’s pretty relevant to acknowledge that people not liking async is usually because they simply — don’t like async. not because they just haven’t found the right async partner or instance.
@KarmaBum said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I definitely agree with this, which is why I’m always baffled about why people declare no bar RP/no social fluff.
Hm. Are you equally baffled by people who declare no smut? Or no lords and ladies?
People like different things.
lords and ladies is a specific genre, and smut is a very specific type of RP with pretty obvious reason why some people would choose not to partake.
social RP is literally just — the act of building relationships between characters. it is foundational enough to the development of characters that whenever people say they don’t like social RP, i honestly just assume it’s a matter of people defining things differently from each other.
ETA: i think that what people generally mean is that they don’t like RP that turns out to not be fun. which is universal. social RP can have a slightly higher hit or miss rate in terms of how fun the scene ends up being, and i do respect people saying they have less time to roll the dice on that. but every other type of RP is also hit or miss at varying levels.
i don’t actually believe anyone would eschew a social scene with a new character that turned out to have great chemistry and was an awesome time. i just don’t. because everyone loves fun, engaging RP. and social scenes can turn out to be literally anything.
what people don’t like is boring RP. which happens with every type of RP you can imagine. boring RP happens in plot, it happens in smut, it happens everywhere.
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@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
i don’t actually believe anyone would eschew a social scene with a new character that turned out to have great chemistry and was an awesome time. i just don’t. because everyone loves fun, engaging RP. and social scenes can turn out to be literally anything.
Except there are some scene premises that are just inherently not fun for me so I would truly not have a good time and would not be engaged. Case in point: movie night scenes. I absolutely do not like scenes where we sit around with 20 other characters, or even 2 other characters, and pretend to watch a movie. It’s not fun for me, and has in fact on three occasions killed my enjoyment entirely for a game despite being in those scenes with people I have actually good chemistry with and enjoy roleplaying with.
This is one example but surely if you all need others to accept that we can all actually enjoy different things, I can keep going.
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@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
i think that what people generally mean is that they don’t like RP that turns out to not be fun. which is universal.
I think that’s what people generally mean, yes.
I also agree that I do not like RP that turns out to be not fun.
@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
i don’t actually believe anyone would eschew a social scene
I’m fine if people don’t actually believe this.
