RP Safari - Pacing Styles
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@bear_necessities I do wonder whether so much of the mismatch is simply due to what people see each codebase/software suite as being for. Ares is the async system, TinyMUX is for live WoD, Evennia is for… people who want to make Arx 2?, etc. So when we check Arescentral, we get games with a high (perceived or actual) async culture because… it’s Ares, that’s what it’s for.
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@Pavel That’s sort of what I was questioning above.
Like seriously, if you are having live RP, where are you having it? Is it JUST Silent Haven for live RP? Is it in private Ares games? Discord? I’m curious.
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@bear_necessities Well, there’s Towers and Retro, both WoD MUs that are seemingly reasonably active, Liberation’s still going, Heroes Assemble, it looks like City of Hope is still around or newly revived, and it even looks as though Shadowrun Denver is active.
Games is out there, yo.
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I play both on Aegis Company and Empty Night, most of the scenes under my belt are Live. Though some of them do transition from Live to Distracted/Async to finish. Apparently I’ve participated in 82 scenes on Aegis Company and 15 on Empty Night, the latter I’m still learning and the last two weeks have been RL hell for me. Just sharing my experiences. I think a lot of the scenes listed as Live that stay up much longer than expected are because they did start as Live but are not able to be completed in that one sitting.
I am willing to play in all three modes (Live, Distracted, ASync), more than willing to leave it up to the people I RP with. However, I can say that Live is the easiest and ASync is the hardest. It is much easier for me to lock in during a live scene and not lose the thread or the mindset of my character. ASync is much more challenging for me since I have to step back into what my character was feeling from the last pose, sometimes having to reread the scene just to get a better feel again.
Live does transition to Distracted more often than not because some scenes can’t be finished in one sitting and closing it out early would not do it justice, but then that is where the challenges come in. You have to hope that your schedules match up the next day or soon or is transitions to ASync. Also, sometimes you’re having a great day when the scene started so you’re in a creative mindset. Then RL clobbers you the next day and it’s definitely not the same feeling. This goes even more so with ASync since you’re having to juggle different days of RL poking at you.
The biggest factor comes down to time which was much more available when we were younger. Now, adulting makes a mess of it, which is rather unfortunate.
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You can get real-time scenes if you make it a point to ask for them, at least on Ares games I’ve managed to stick on (Crimson Compass currently, Shattered in the recent past, I can’t speak for the two games mentioned). I have to curate my own experience/ask for it in a way I didn’t like 3 or 4 years ago, though. I suspect it’s similar most reasonably active players.
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@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
If a majority of scenes on the “active scenes” list began several days ago and are still ongoing, and nearly every single scene on the “recent scene list” are also several days old (versus, say, from yesterday or even two days ago), how does that say “live” to you?
The argument is that people prefer scenes that: a) are not async, b) are taking 7-10 minutes between poses, and c) end within the day.
If we take ‘two days ago’ as 2/23, then the recent scenes for Empty Night has 2 of those and both of them show the IC and OOC date as the same, which usually means it was started and finished on the same day. Aegis Company has 4 of those and all 4 show the same IC and OOC end date.
The active scenes list being mostly ‘stale’ scenes is survivorship bias. The scenes that are not going to finish in a day stay on there; the scenes that are end up on recent scenes, and between these 2 games I’m counting 6 likely same-day real-time scenes in the last 2 days.
I’m not saying we’re drowning in games where this is happening, but I am saying “none” is not accurate.
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@Trashcan said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I’m not saying we’re drowning in games where this is happening, but I am saying “none” is not accurate.
Yeah I’m definitely not saying none! Just was trying to answer Faraday’s question the best i can with the information that’s accessible.
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@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
There are very few public games on Ares, and none of them appear to have a “live scene” culture.
I’m not sure how you define “few” but there are 16 currently open public ones and that’s actually the majority of the open Ares games in total.
@Pavel said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
async culture because… it’s Ares, that’s what it’s for.
Except that is expressly NOT what Ares is for. I know, because I designed it to do live scenes (since that is also my preference). The vast majority of scenes on my Ares games were live, because I made them that way.
Like I can’t control how people play with it, but on a technical level Ares supports live scenes just as well as it does async scenes. The only difference between it and PennMUSH is that you can also play async more easily.
So yes, there will be more async scenes visible on Ares games because people who were RPing with alts in TP rooms, or in Google docs, or on private sandboxes, or (way back when) on LiveJournal can now play in the game. They were always there, it’s just more visible on Ares games.
But having more async scenes doesn’t prevent anyone else from doing live scenes, any more than me eating chocolate prevents you from eating vanilla. So that’s why I’m trying to dig deeper into it.
Are people trying and failing to run live scenes? If so, why? Perhaps there are tools to help.
Or are they just annoyed that they want to join live scenes (i.e. they expect someone else to run them) and are annoyed that nobody is catering to their preference. That is a very different issue.
ETA: I’m not meaning to wrongfun anybody in that last paragraph btw. It’s totally fine to be frustrated that no game is providing what you prefer to play. I’ve been there myself. But I wouldn’t blame the game-runners for that, and I certainly wouldn’t blame the server.
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@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I’m not sure how you define “few” but there are 16 currently open public ones and that’s actually the majority of the open Ares games in total.
I’m actually sorry for saying that because I was definitely putting bias on it, I was really only looking at games with 4 or 5 stars.
ETA: And ignoring the comic book games admittedly
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@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I’m actually sorry for saying that because I was definitely putting bias on it, I was really only looking at games with 4 or 5 stars.
Heh okay, fair. Three stars is still good activity though, by my reckoning - that would make 10 public/active games, which is still almost as many as in the entire Evennia list (including all the pre-alphas). Grapevine lists 150, but that seems to be mostly MUDs.
Entirely earnest question - where are these bastions of non-Ares live MUSH RP? How does one find them?
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@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
Are people trying and failing to run live scenes? If so, why? Perhaps there are tools to help.
Or are they just annoyed that they want to join live scenes (i.e. they expect someone else to run them) and are annoyed that nobody is catering to their preference. That is a very different issue.
It could potentially be that Ares has gained the reputation of being the place for asynch. It has definitely done that for me, and it’s probably why the few Ares games I’ve joined I’ve eventually idled out on.
It’s not whether it is or isn’t able to do live scenes, it’s more that people view it as mostly asynch. I know it seems to me that a lot of people praising Ares do so for the easy way it enables asynch, so I just assume all Ares games are mostly asynch, and I say that having attempted to play a few.
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@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
It could potentially be that Ares has gained the reputation of being the place for asynch.
Oh yeah I think this is part of it in the last couple years at least. I view Ares itself as relatively pacing agnostic - staff and active players control the culture more than the platform - but you definitely see a drift toward async in what I would term the recent past, beyond games that are explicitly advertising themselves as Async Friendly/Async First (Keys is the example of that that comes to mind). 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, and how much is players from more time-shifted mediums like Discord coming into Ares because it has more QOL features. I genuinely don’t know and it doesn’t feel like there’s a good way to figure it out. While it often feels like the Ares games share 75%+ of the same populations, some of them are entirely their own thing and don’t cross-pollinate much.
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@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!
