Don’t forget we moved!
https://brandmu.day/
Other ways people RP
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Tell them to clear off while you craft your masterpiece. Then nudge them when done.
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I wasn’t fond of Gdoc RP because it put me in more a writer’s mindset. I wanted to write paragraphs and be more narrative, and that’s not what I want from RP.
I’ve done a fair amount of text-based tabletop on Discord, though, and it works very well. I think with threads, it could work even better, and not be as horribly spammy to find things; each scene could be its own thread, which gets archived afterwards, but it’s still there for searching.
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@Yam said in Other ways people RP:
Story seldom moves forward unless you find pockets of very active, very speedy RPers.
These are clearly the ones we need to show M*s to
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@Roz said in Other ways people RP:
When I did Gdocs I would literally write my pose in a different window, lol
Yuuuuup. Having people watch me live-type a pose (or anything in GDocs) hits me in the same weird place that +watchers did.
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Obviously you write and perfect your pose in notepad++ and then just paste it into the gdoc in all its glory
fr fr
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@lucidmaus said in Other ways people RP:
I don’t know that all RPers (or even most? I’m thinking forum and Discord and the like) will find the MU* format comfortable; it’s not just creative writing, but it’s creative writing with a smidge of pressure to produce something relatively quickly.
There would definitely be some who likely would love and thrive in a MU* style. I staffed on a game that did a lot of outreach to Tumblr RPers because our theme had a large fandom there, and we gained multiple people new to MU*s who had a lot of fun. People RPing on non-ideal platforms like Tumblr, Discord, etc., don’t necessarily know there are other options. People who prefer a forum style – longer poses, slower pace – may not, but I think, in general, people underestimate the potential interest you could convert.
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@Roz wow i didn’t realize that was you until I hit reply – and i even recognize that avatar. Yeah! Arx actually ended up with more than a few people from forum/other types of RP. It just takes outreach
AKA HANDHOLDING. If you have the time/motivation for it, it is definitely doable and you will catch interest.
fr fr
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@hellfrog said in Other ways people RP:
@Roz wow i didn’t realize that was you until I hit reply – and i even recognize that avatar.
I’m trying to be nice to the people who hate animated avatars!
Yeah! Arx actually ended up with more than a few people from forum/other types of RP. It just takes outreach
AKA HANDHOLDING. If you have the time/motivation for it, it is definitely doable and you will catch interest.
Yeah, I think we ended up writing a big guide to MU* RP, how clients work, terminology, etc.
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@Roz yeah you wrote some good guide. asspats in order
*probably maybe some other people also wrote good guide, i’m not trying to deny them asspats
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@Roz What did your outreach look like?
What were the biggest hurdles for them? Do you think they’d be different on an Ares or Evennia game?
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@Tat said in Other ways people RP:
@Roz What did your outreach look like?
This was years ago but I mostly remember us doing Tumblr ads on the big active fandom tags. However, I recall @Yam making specific effort to hunt down good Tumblr RPers and inviting them.
What were the biggest hurdles for them? Do you think they’d be different on an Ares or Evennia game?
This is also hard to remember. I recall terminology being weird for them? We have a lot of vocab that we’re all used to (scene, pose, that sort of thing) that is not immediately intuitive. Ares might be an easier sell for people used to RPing on the web in some form. I don’t imagine Evennia would feel hugely different, as its interface still requires a client of some form.
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@hellfrog said in Other ways people RP:
Obviously you write and perfect your pose in notepad++ and then just paste it into the gdoc in all its glory
Only if you’re a native speaker. Otherwise you write and perfect it in Grammarly before pasting it in.
Yes, I do that. Grammarly’s Chrome plugin works with Ares’ web portal too.
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Once upon a stone age, I used to (successfully) send people out to IRC rooms / the White Wolf “official” chats to troll for people to pull to Ashes/the mushing environment, and it was usually pretty successful (in the 90s).
What we had the most success with was going and joining people in the places they were playing, playing with them in their environment, and then once they were a known factor, they’d share about the other format. We usually got a handful of people pretty regularly (almost exclusively for vampire; I don’t know if it was something about who was recruiting or where they were doing it, but).
I was also on the edges of some more traditional advertising for our hobby (as in ads or promoted posts were bought for ‘gamer’ audiences on one of the social media platforms), and I wish I could remember much more than this, but I do remember a “victim of our own success” situation. They were NOT prepared for their message to reach 100,000 people, and to have even a faction of those who were reached show interest was devastating on the game’s infrastructure. This was roughly around the time that Castle Marrach (that paid game?) and its platform were coming online, whenever that was.
ETA: Just addressing WoD (because this is what my active experience was in) LARP -> mush was the hardest transition, and the LiveJournal RPers (in general!) had the easiest time adapting. I would posit this had do to with what @Roz mentioned above – the vocab involved. The LJ community seemed to use the same vocab, possibly because we had a GRIP of people leave mushing at one point to go do LJ RP instead. Tabletop folks were hit or miss, IRC folks required a LOT of “no, your car cannot fly, stop it” handholding. Mudders mostly needed rehabbed to not PVP when somebody used the look command at them.
I used to have a document that had all of the basic ‘this is how you interact with this environment’ commands explained using terms from the various environments. Like, 'on mmo you use ‘/me blah blah’, here you use ‘pose blah blah’. I do not have it any more, but a resource like that tends to be invaluable for people making the transition. Seeing it up front instead of having to figure it out as each command comes up helps with progress on adapting one’s muscle memory.
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@Roz there’s no way I’m using two different apps to RP, it almost sounds worse than trusting the person not to watch me write the pose.
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@farfalla I’ve never thought about that. The few times I’ve done RP via Gdocs, it’s always been because of the varying time differences, either because of geographic location or the fact that people operate on different work/sleep cycles.
But now that I have thought about, makes me wonder how many times the other person would watch me type, stop, then furiously delete whatever I had been typing.
