Other ways people RP

[Tat]

A friend linked this article about someone developing an app for roleplay - as an alternative to RP on places like Discord.

And yes, I enjoyed my stories on Twitter, Discord and Reddit as much as ever (Amino has never felt good to me) but I can never stop wondering Do we really need to settle for this?

None of these apps are made for role-playing, the community itself has made a set of rules and concepts so that each platform can be usable, we are using a platform that was not made for us
…
Some don’t even support markdown, but what is clear is that none of these platforms have special features made for roleplaying, and that’s fine, because none of them were made for that, we have adapted them… but, we need to stop.

We need an app.

I found it pretty fascinating, especially in light of the conversations we have about what’s left in the hobby, and about the barriers to running a game. It’s always been so striking to me that people want to RP so much that they’ll use platforms that are just AWFUL for it and figure out ways to tell stories.

I wonder how we can leverage this passion to grow our version of the hobby. I wonder if they’d be interested, or if the barrier to entry is still too high, or if they’d find the other toys we use distracting rather than additive. I wonder if there are other cultural barriers that we don’t even think about (how we think about story or write poses or talk about OOC and IC).

[BloodAngel]

@Tat I have used rolegate in the past to run games. Play by post from your phone.

[Testament]

I’ve seen heavy use of Discords for RP, though I can’t say it’s conducive for it. I also see a lot of RP going on the one MMO that I play, but again, I don’t know if I’d call that conducive.

[Prototart]

as someone who once upon a time tried to get rl friends into MUSHing my experience was that the problem is less, like, accessibility and the programs used or whatever and more just that most games are pretty bad and most people on them are pretty weird and off putting to people who aren’t from their very specific subcultures

[GF]

@Prototart I still remember attempting to introduce my D&D group to Diku MUDs. They didn’t get it.

But then they went on to lose years of their lives to WoW, so I dunno.

[Solstice]

The buffer limits on Discord, even with Nitro, makes it such an annoying experience to RP on.

I get spammy when I’m playing with just one person, and Discord steps on that.

[mietze]

I have RPed on discord when it was the other person’s preference, but found that I struggled more than a bit.

For whatever reason google docs work best for my brain if it can’t be classic mush live scene. I’m not sure why. I could never get into bbs rp either even before I mushed (but thankfully it was someone there that pointed me to mu/mooing). I love the ares system but asynch scenes I need a partner who is okay with prodding me via different methods (like pinging me on discord) because my brain just doesn’t hold onto it. Same thing with Arx flashbacks.

It’s not lack of interest of that I don’t like very slow/asynchronous play in and of itself (I can perfectly maintain the thread and rhythm of gdoc play, and have had scenes go on for a week or more there! with hours and hours between poses). I think maybe it is because there’s a visual separation of RP and socializing. Discord I associate with too much chatting for me to feel immersion in there for RP. I’m not sure why ares asynch trips me up because it should not, it has all the distractions removed and all the rolling stuff that I always want on gdocs.

But anyway. I like to explore different things, but so far nothing has “stuck” other than gdocs which I have been using…since google docs was a thing!

[Solstice]

@mietze

This is actually really smart and so obvious that I’m annoyed I never considered it. Though, I think I’d get self-conscious of people seeing my typos and aborted half-formed poses in real time as I muddle through them.

[Duke Whisky]

Doing a +1 to Google Docs as well. I’m chatting away on Discord and sharing cat photos with you or recipes. It would end up blurring lines in different personas maintained.

[Third Eye]

My issue with async tends to be how wildly variable expectations are. I’m cool with it but do need to finish a scene in a couple days and have semi-consistent posing or I lose the thread. Some people just let those things go for weeks at a time. It’s a thing I’m going to be more assertive about my expectations of in the future, tho if the game culture is different that only does as much good as it does. So it goes.

In terms of the huge amount of RP on Discord, I wonder if these people are even aware of MUs, and if MUing in general would be prepared for an incoming population from them if there was ever visible advertising toward that niche.

[Narson]

@Third-Eye So much this. I’ve been in Asynch scenes that people just aren’t into and it drags on for literally months with people occasionally posing and it is just like those dinner parties where you want to stab yourself in the leg just so you have an excuse to leave.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@Narson said in Other ways people RP:

@Third-Eye So much this. I’ve been in Asynch scenes that people just aren’t into and it drags on for literally months with people occasionally posing and it is just like those dinner parties where you want to stab yourself in the leg just so you have an excuse to leave.

Most of my scenes are asyncs and the ones I GM certainly are. If I’ve learned one thing from that – it’s to enforce time limits. Hard.

Yes, people will bitch if you skip them. But if you made it clear up front that you’ll move the scene on after 24 hours unless somebody contacts you asking for time because real life reasons, then they can bitch. They were told on sign-up.

The problem is that a lot of people think they can do asyncs and then lose focus. Or they think that async means ‘whenever, if ever I feel like it’ and fail to consider the rest of the group who are left hanging.

A 24 hour limit on poses is not unreasonable. I’ll give more time if people get in touch and tell me that something is up. But if I hear nothing I’m going to assume that they lost interest, got distracted, or otherwise fell off the radar. In that case, it’s the people who’re sticking with the scene I want to take good care of, not the ones who bailed.

[Tat]

I’m curious whether folks RPing in Discord and Amino (and working on this app) are doing async RP, or if they’re doing something closer to synchronous or (in Ares terms) distracted RP.

I was really struck, looking at the screenshot for the app the article discusses, by how much it looks like the unified play screen on Ares - just with fewer bells and whistles.

Those of you who’ve dabbled in Discord RP, did you find cultural differences beyond the pace of play? What WAS the pace of play? Was it uniform, or varied?

[Yam]

@Tat In stretches between games run by friends, I search for RP servers in Discord via Disboard. I’m in a few major RP server advertisement hubs. I would say about 90% of the RP I find on Discord centers around async RP. To me it’s rare to find live/active RP, mostly because a lot of these are run by younger folk who believe the pose length indicates literacy and quality of RP, so people feel pressure to make massive posts padded with meaningless thought meta and fluff.

So much of the RP on Discord is async that threads die out contantly. Story seldom moves forward unless you find pockets of very active, very speedy RPers.

When I say async I’m talking about days between poses. Which either works for people or doesn’t, but I do think MUSHes gear towards quicker, 2-3 hour scenes as opposed to week/month-long scenes. I had to dip on a Discord RP recently because one person took a solid month to pose.

[Tez]

@Yam said in Other ways people RP:

I had to dip on a Discord RP recently because one person took a solid month to pose.

I’D RATHER DIE.

[farfalla]

I can’t do asynch at all, so my opinion on this is essentially irrelevant, but I don’t know how you gdocs people are doing it. I would rather die than let someone see my pose-in-progress.

[lucidmaus]

I absolutely need the feel of a time crunch and the live/active posing in order to stay engaged in a scene. I’ve done some GDocs scenes that were live/active enough that I could finish them, but the failure rate I have for those is much, much higher. Same with forum-style 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.

It’s just that, as @Yam said, some people believe that pose length equates to literacy and quality of RP and that doesn’t really mesh well with MU*-style RP. It can, if a person is both quick in terms of typing and doesn’t spend hours (or days) crafting ‘the perfect pose’, but I’m not sure how common that is.

[Roz]

@farfalla said in Other ways people RP:

I can’t do asynch at all, so my opinion on this is essentially irrelevant, but I don’t know how you gdocs people are doing it. I would rather die than let someone see my pose-in-progress.

When I did Gdocs I would literally write my pose in a different window, lol

[Duke Whisky]

Tell them to clear off while you craft your masterpiece. Then nudge them when done.

[Pyrephox]

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.