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MU Peeves Thread
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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. -
@Gashlycrumb It is my contention that Wheel of Time would be shorter by half if Jordan hadn’t described every stitch of clothes people wore. And, similarly, Song of Ice and Fire, but food instead of clothing.
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Referenced by
Tributary
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Trying to coordinate a series of events, reached out to a bunch of different organizations in-game and most bit immediately, so I put up an anonymous form to help set up scheduling to try to keep events from overlapping.
Already have gotten anonymous feedback on my roleplaying twice on it, from people (probably person, almost identical) who have never reached out to me in game telling me I’m trying to plan their events for them.
If you want to complain to me, complain to me, don’t leave anonymous shitposts on something I’m doing to generate activity with a social character. DM me, reach out to me in game and I’ll give you my Discord, I’m happy to talk about things. Getting around game rules to anonymously attack me like this in a place I can’t even respond is not the way.
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that’s so cute of them
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@Selira what the actual fuck
This is so unhinged.
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@Tez the best part is where they say that I don’t act in good faith while anonymously and passive-aggressively claiming I’m “trying to plan or schedule their rp”
Like, if you don’t want to come, just don’t come. If you want to do something else, do something else. I’m not forcing anything here. Just trying to schedule.
But clearly I’m the one acting in bad faith right now.
The kind of discouragement people get for trying to do shit is always just stunning.
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Me: i’m gonna RP!
Cat: sits on my keyboard
Me: i … guess not. -
I tend to fall into these long periods of inactivity and I’m right back there these days.
Right now I’m sort of struggling with the fact that the only game I’m even active on has me massively disengaged, working hard to avoid one massively toxic individual (who is a known quantity to many) and their tiny cadre of people whose bigtime "pick me " energy tends to suck the air of the room by virtue of their very presence.
Note, this is just a vent post, not a name n’ shame. None of these people have really gotten in my way directly but the general level of effort it takes to avoid extremely active and connected people is fucking exhausting and it’s just one of several contributing factors to me just not wanting to log in.
Time to fire up Baldur’s Gate 3 and talk to some birds again.
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That brainweasle that’s telling me that I cannot and have nothing contribute to a game, its scenes or its plot. It makes me freeze up and want to apologize for wasting people’s time.
I know it’s brainweasles. I know no one thinks about me enough to dislike me. But damn if it doesn’t make it hard to initiate.
