@somasatori said in When is the last time you played?:

tbh there’s some kind of spark missing

this.

I never found places useful. It doesn’t add anything to the scene. It always sort of seemed like in games with places code, it was just the place to go to talk shit privately in a public event or finger each other or something lol.

In Ares, I really find places to be distracting and I haven’t seen it used in any meaningful way.

@hellfrog It seemed like a broader issue, like there’s something fundamental about async scenes as a whole vs a few people who don’t respect their time, though? Like I read that as saying “async scenes usually aren’t about people who need it due to timezone or availability conflicts anymore” and it seems really odd to say “async scenes usually are about people who don’t respect my time or have any interest/engagement in what I’m playing”.

But I’ll admit my reading comprehension could use some work.

@Third-Eye said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I’m perfectly willing to do time-shifted scenes due to timezone or availability conflicts and always have been. That isn’t usually what this is about anymore.

I’m confused. What is it usually about now?

@hellfrog said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

view of claims that specific choices are correct and protected due to having jobs and lives

No one is doing that here. I think everyone in this thread has said that any and all play style is valid.

@Trashcan I would think that data is skewed because the play screen defaults to traditional pacing and people may or may not make a selection there when starting the scene. I think a more reliable source of data would be the avg time between when the scene opened and closed, or when the scene was opened and shared, to determine true pacing.

@Jumpscare said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Ah, Gemstone IV, where people would abruptly leave the scene when their RPXP ran out.

Was that the one on AOL along with Modeus Operandi that went pay-to-play? Modeus Operandi was my first game, I miss it

@Roz for what it’s worth I was attempting to show you my definition of.social RP by providing an example of what I consider to be social RP.

@sao said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

that interrupted a movie night with rocket launchers would be fine.

That is not social RP to me. I would do that. So I guess there’s my definition

@Roz idk why @KarmaBum has to defend herself to you with a list of the RP she dislikes just for you to understand that she doesn’t engage in RP that she dislikes, but also I gave you an example and you just argued it away anyway so I’m not sure what you want here.

@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.

@helvetica We might be thinking of anthology games differently? I was thinking more like HorrorMu or Network, where you had an identity during the “season” and a real persona during the downtime, and those seasons changed up every 3-4 months. So a 12 month game entirely would probably not be very satisfying in that sort of dynamic.

I really like the idea of games being self-contained. I.E. we are here for 12 months to tell this story, and in 12 months it will be over. I wish more games did that instead of open-ended “small / big town supernatural” esque sort of thing.

@helvetica Do you mean 12 months in a single “chapter” or “season” of the anthology, or 12 months in total for the game itself? I’d wonder if a 12 month “chapter/season” would kind of defeat the purpose of the anthology, but that could be because my personal fatigue over a setting sets in around the 4-5 month mark.

Do you feel like this puts extra work / fatigue on a gamerunner? From a GM perspective, as I sit here and ponder the likelihood of my running another game, I have thought a lot about the 3 month bubble but not from the side of potential players and more from the side of myself. I’m the type of person that regularly has 3-4 worlds building in her head at any one given time … for me personally, the idea of running a single world for months and months (or even years) is so uninspiring to me that I actually give up before I even put pen to paper.

It’s why I’ve thought a lot more about anthology games, because at least then I can switch it up every few months (cowboys today, regency tomorrow!) but then I get stuck on the question of downtime and wander away from that idea too lol

Because I thought @Ashkuri’s post was a good topic of discussion and one I was actually thinking about today:

@Ashkuri said in MU Peeves Thread:

Even with all that effort, people naturally lose interest in the game/story over time. Very few people are stay to the end people, which is the nature of the medium. I think persevering through the fatigue of “does anyone even care?” is another kind of staff work, perhaps one that doesn’t get talked about a lot.

What’s stopping you from being a stay to the end person? Or, alternatively, what makes/made you a stay to the end person?

I don’t think I’ve ever “finished” a MUSH in my lifetime, not even the MUSHes I helped create. I certainly finished storylines - Gray Harbor comes to mind, I feel like we told a story that was relatively complete but people wanted to keep going so we let them. But I’ve never finished a MUSH. Mostly because when I’m done with my character, I stop being interested in the game itself - my storyline is over, I’ve got my own head canon, and I am OK with that.

What’re your thoughts?

@sao said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

because apparently knowing where you are in rp is critically important.

this is why I came up with “Somewhere out there” and “Textlandia” as locations because I am, in fact, out there somewhere.

@Trashcan Oh shit! I stand corrected, that’s a pretty cool metric.

@Trashcan I’m not sure how you would be able to “see” it happening because there’s no indication one way or another if a scene was started from the grid or started from the web. I will say that in my very early Ares days, I would start scenes from the grid all the time.

It is only recently (when Ares got rid of their web portal thing) that I stopped logging into the game, because I don’t have a MUSH client. So now I just use the buttons on the website. But I know a lot of people that still log into Ares using a MUSH client and start scenes from the grid.

@Trashcan I think what is meant by starting a scene from the grid is that you can be on a MUSH client and scene/start in any room on the grid.

Theoretically, if connected to a client, you COULD go into a room on the grid and pose into the void. But without starting a scene, no one would know you have a scene there, and it would require pretty random chance for someone else to also be connected to a client and wander into your space on the grid at the same time.

I wonder if it would make a difference if scenes started from the web defaulted to open. I don’t know. I think when Ares games initially became a thing, open scenes were a lot more prevalent. But again, that also was a time where ‘live’ or traditionally-paced scenes were more of a thing. Now-a-days, I rarely see open scenes ever, and I usually don’t join them when I do see them because I cannot keep up with a live pace.

@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!