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MU Peeves Thread
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Nothing of value was lost.
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PEEVE: Perfectly good free time for RP ruined by chronic migraine.
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Why?
PROS: No one is a stickler for anything. It has slowed down since a spike but staff seems to be kind and attentive.
There is a group of role-players there that write amazingly well and it’s a bit intimidating. They seem to be friends and are active but I haven’t dealt with hostility.
If you give it a go ping me elsemu* and we can always RP.
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@Buttercup Had experiences with some of them on a different game and we do not mesh. It’s a shame, but these things happen.
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@Buttercup said in MU Peeves Thread:
There is a group of role-players there that write amazingly well and it’s a bit intimidating. They seem to be friends and are active but I haven’t dealt with hostility.
If you mean the people who write a novel for their poses and talk about 1000+ words poses, yes they write really well, but for myself, that’s not what I’m looking for in an RP partner. It’s too much. it drains my creativity way too fast trying to keep up with them, and I fear I will be seen as a lesser RPer for shorter, but still substantial, poses because of that. Longer is not better, in my honest opinion, especially in a cooperative hobby like RP.
I am finding that there is a core group that does like that, and it’s been making me wonder if Concordia is really the game for me because that seems to be what is seen as the ‘good’ RP on the game.
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@Pink If it helps (I know it might not), there are plenty of us there who are more than happy with a couple of well written lines as poses. Some days I am in an okay mood to be able to write a novel for a pose, but mostly my brain is way too fried for it. I’ve been in scenes on Concordia and elsewhere, where zingy one liners wind up as the end of a scene cause that’s just how we roll.
Kudos to those who manage to consistently feel capable of 1000+ word poses though, and some are lovely roleplayers whom I always enjoy rping with. Even if I feel a little inadequate for my relatively smol poses in comparison
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@Cornpopped I regularly pose 2 to 4 reasonably-sized paragraphs for poses, so I’m no slouch when it comes to word count, but I guess, for me, it feels like a mismatch in RP styles, and playing with those you are mismatched with is less enjoyable for me. I’d much rather play with someone who poses shorter poses than me rather than longer ones. I can adjust down so we’re on the same kind of rhythm, and that’s fine, it’s just a lot harder for me to adjust upwards.
I agree there are people who seem to be in the same posing style as myself, I’ve just not had a chance to RP with them yet, for various reasons.
The other problem I have with the people who write novels is that they give too much to react to, they advance the scene so much with their poses, that I’m left being like, I wanted to explore this one thing in this pose, but they’ve already moved on past it in their own pose that posing back an concentrating on that thing when they’ve already moved on from seems pointless.
Again, these are just my own opinions, and my own RP style I’ve developed in my 20+ years of M*ing.
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@Pink 4 paragraphs is a short pose in this environment??
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@imstillhere For some yeah, If you look at my previous reply, that’s about the length of the paragraphs I’m talking about in my poses.
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Heh. My peeve is this idea that long = good when it comes to writing.
Having genuinely worked as a professional editor, I assure you, it ain’t so.
The other problem I have with the people who write novels is that they give too much to react to, they advance the scene so much with their poses, that I’m left being like, I wanted to explore this one thing in this pose, but they’ve already moved on past it in their own pose that posing back an concentrating on that thing when they’ve already moved on from seems pointless.
In RP, this. Very much this.
Abelard looks down, embarrassed, and carefully sets his beer glass back in the ring of condensation it left on the table. “So, yeah,” he says, biting his lip, “That’s why I fucked the ocelot.”
Camille has arrived.
Brigid is sitting with Abelard at a table. She looks at him with compassion and says, “That must have been awful.”
Camille comes in and makes her way across the dance-floor, attracting attention with her boss moves and demonstrating all the latest steps. After the song ends she sashays swishily over to where Brigid and Abelard are sitting. With catlike grace she springs onto their table, kicking over a glass. “Fourscore and seven years ago,” she declaims loudly, “I started typing this pose, and civilizations may yet rise and fall before I am finished!” Twirling gleefully, she leaps away, singing, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum! Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum! "
Abelard stares as time collapses to a pinhole. When his inexplicable lethargy passes and he is able to react he picks at his shirtfront, noting ruefully that the beer splashed on him by Camille’s kicking feet has dried to an indelible stain.
Brigid says, “What the fuck.”
Very often either all the other PCs are frozen in time while the “great writer” fillibusters, rendering the dialogue disasterous, or it’s five hundred words describing how the trail of smoke from Camille’s cigarette swirls slowly and majestically about in the still air of the stinking and stuffy dive bar until it forms an elegant Rorschachian type image that resembles a tiny man standing outside a giant vagina wondering if he should go inside or not.
Edited for typoes and to add: Don’t feel bad for writing badly while gaming, either. Have fun, this is play-time. You’re probably not even close to as bad as you think, anyway.
'You ride the mechanical bull, you do not fight it.'
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I get this, though with the caveat that part of the constraints are that RP simply can’t flow like a novel in most instances.
The very nature of the give and take in collaborative writing means you have to backfill most dialog, else the conversation from the first person in the pose order will move on before it ever reaches the last person in the pose order.
Both length and brevity can be potent weapons in the right hands.
Game culture plays a large role in knowing where the general goalposts are, and I find it’s easiest to aim to match like for like unless/until I know what the expectation is of the players in the room with me. It’s why I prefer smaller scenes, where I already know where preferences are. Then it can as rapid-fire or as slow-paced as people feel like. And if it’s just one on one, perfect. We both know what we’re expecting after a round and scooch toward the middle.
(Which is to say, often the problem is usually less about length and more about railroading the scene, disrespecting the cadence that’s already been established, and generally failing to read the room. Bless your heart, Camille.)
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My advice? Teach people how you want to RP with them. A lot of us have a strong tendancy to match the person we are writing with, but sometimes we need to give ourselves a little grace. If someone throws out novel-length poses and you only have a paragraph or two in you? Give them that. They will either a) start mimicing your shorter pose length or b) keep going!
If someone doesn’t want to Rp with you because of your pose length, they aren’t worth RPing with anyway.
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@Solstice Spot on.
Ideally, everybody playing is keeping to an agreed-upon (probably an unspoken agreement) pace, not only about how frequently a new pose appears on the screen but about how much IC time each pose or round of poses represents.
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@bear_necessities said in MU Peeves Thread:
If someone throws out novel-length poses and you only have a paragraph or two in you? Give them that.
Amen. I can sometimes get wordy, especially when I’m especially caffeinated or excited. That’s absolutely not my default, and it’s draining to do. So if you give me a paragraph, I’ll happily match that.
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@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
Heh. My peeve is this idea that long = good when it comes to writing.
Going to second that. Every editor I ever worked with as a writer followed the engineer’s principle – the project is finished not when there is no more to add but when there is nothing left to take away.
Any pronouns. Come to Chincoteague. We have ponies. http://keys.aresmush.com
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@L-B-Heuschkel said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
Heh. My peeve is this idea that long = good when it comes to writing.
Going to second that. Every editor I ever worked with as a writer followed the engineer’s principle – the project is finished not when there is no more to add but when there is nothing left to take away.
A quotation oft misattributed to Michaelangelo or John Ruskin says something akin to: “All you have to do is to take a big chunk of marble and a hammer and chisel, make up your mind what you are about to create and chip off all the marble you don’t want.”
The same is true of writing. You’ve got the big chunk of marble that is language, and you hammer and chisel at it until you’ve gotten rid of all the words you don’t want.
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Short doesn’t mean better either.
An editor probably can and probably will help you artistically, but they’re probably more concerned about clarity than beauty. In a lot of circumstances the bigger concern might be how many pages or how much space the text takes up on a page, the journal’s standards, the costs of producing a book and the fact that people won’t pay more for a doorstop of a book than they will for a middling-thick one, and (until recently at least) manufacturing-related shit about folios and signatures.
Stephen King took two pages to say, “Stu switched off the gas pumps just as a slow-moving vehicle crashed into them and trashed the whole row,” and it’s pretty great. I felt the Game of Thrones teevee show makers were terribly remiss in failing to pause the story for a few seconds to let the camera linger lovingly over a table-load of food, and am kinda happy that House of the Dragon did it.
'You ride the mechanical bull, you do not fight it.'
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@Gashlycrumb Good and bad are far too subjective for us to make sweeping statements, of course. But you’re right in that there’s nothing inherently good or bad about either form. A half-dozen punchy lines are just as valid as a full page of prose, if either is used right.
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Agreed. though, when it comes to roleplayers, I find that the people who write giant poses (often purple ones) are very prone to doing it every single time, whereas people who write 3-4 liners are perfectly willing and able to write longer poses when the situation warrants it.
It’s about balance; you have to be able to keep the dynamic flow of the scene with the shoreter, quicker poses and then bust out the big guns when your character and their situation needs the weight.
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Grieving a bit over loss of RP energy. Well, loss of anything energy. I really appreciate how understanding my RP partners have been. I still fret. And I miss pick up and public scenes that are live. I figure I keep bombing impressions for anyone who isn’t familiar with my RP and storytelling capacity.
But going on now almost 2 months of pain and fatigue post covid is maddening. Luckily i think this time of year most everyone is crazy busy. I miss you.
even if RL is biting a lot of folks right now.
