RP Safari - Pacing Styles
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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!
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@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
Except that is expressly NOT what Ares is for.
I know that. You know that. But you know how people are. It’s the only one that does async stuff out of the box that isn’t clunky or involving the word ‘timestop’, so it’s what people either assume or default to.
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For my personal RP, I’m honestly good with whatever at this point. If I’m in a scene that takes a few days, sure. If it takes a day, great. Whatever works for me and the person I’m playing with and how our energy lines up. I try gauge who I’m with too, and adjust if I know I’m RPing with someone who enjoys a shorter and more to the point scene.
I will not GM async scenes if I can ever help it. If I’m GMing, I need to be in the zone and I want to get in there, tell a story with you and get you back out into the world. It’s like a MISSION.
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@tsar This is pretty much where I’m at. My default these days is a scene that lasts 2-3 days, but I’ll make time for someone who has a preference for faster. Never, ever will ST async. That’s a nightmare.
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I think another thing to consider is that in the “old” days a lot of the live RP was like…pickup RP. You went somewhere on grid, stuck up your LFG flag and whoever turned up turned up and you sort of just made do with that. This led to a lot of the dreaded Bar RP.
The deliciousness of Ares is (for me) that I don’t have to put up with that any more. I can go and read everyone’s hooks, pick out who interests me (and almost as importantly, who I have no interest in) and then just seek to RP with those 5-10 people.
That lends itself to more 1 on 1 private scenes that can very naturally go async as the parties go about their lives, and I find those scenes tend to be more directed and purposeful. I am going to stick with that scene until its finished, rather than just “posing out” of the bar scene when my interest/patience wanes.
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@Third-Eye said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
’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.
Are we getting more players from other mediums though? I’ve only heard of a handful here and there, but I admittedly don’t have hard numbers.
I really wonder how much of it is just shifting player preferences. Other folks in other threads have talked about the MU population getting older, having more responsibilities, less time, etc. And in a world where Netflix designs TV shows around distracted-viewing, is it really that surprising that fewer people want to devote an uninterrupted 4-hour block of time out of their evening to pose every 5 minutes?
I don’t want live RP to go away. I still far prefer it. But even I don’t have time for it any more.
@Pacha said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
The deliciousness of Ares is (for me) that I don’t have to put up with that any more.
Ares lets you choose.
You can plunk yourself down on the grid and scene/start a random pickup scene --OR-- you can selectively start private scenes with only the people you want to play with.
You can RP with live/traditional pacing --OR-- you can play async across disparate schedules and timezones.
If more people are choosing the alternatives, maybe it’s just showing that the old ways were never that popular to begin with.
While that may be paltry consolation to those of us with different preferences, the good news is that server doesn’t care how you play. It just may take more effort to find your people. Make a game where pickup RP is encouraged, or where staff runs only live events. And even if it’s not your game, you can still lead by example, organize, and try to find folks who want to play that way too.
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@Trashcan said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
@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.
Empty Night and Aegis Company both have a heavy majority of ‘traditional’ pacing scenes listed in their 10+ active scenes. There are probably others.
We have plenty people doing live scenes on Keys. It’s just not the scenes you’ll see when scanning the scene list – that space is firmly claimed by the asyncs that linger for a while.
On Keys, at least, the trick is to find the people who share your preferred style.
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This is an extremely small sample, but between the three games mentioned as having a live RP cohort (Keys, Aegis Company and Empty Night)…
1 scene got posted yesterday (Aegis), and 1 scene got posted on 2/24 (Aegis).
There are 6 scenes shared from 2/23 (Empty Night & Aegis), but I’m not sure if those went up on 2/24 or 2/25. If we assume they were all played and posted on 2/23, then there are 8 live scenes shared across 3 days across 3 games.
Just some food for thought. If live RP is on these games, it is not getting shared publicly on a regular basis.
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@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
You can plunk yourself down on the grid and scene/start a random pickup scene --OR-- you can selectively start private scenes with only the people you want to play with.
You can RP with live/traditional pacing --OR-- you can play async across disparate schedules and timezones.
If more people are choosing the alternatives, maybe it’s just showing that the old ways were never that popular to begin with.
TEZ, THIS IS OFF TOPIC, fork me if you want.
I’m not positive this is a conscious choice people are making as much as it might be influenced by some of the game design of Ares and the web portal in particular. The Ares game I played on (just one, so grain of salt) was probably 80% ‘live’ scenes, and I don’t know that I ever saw someone start a scene from the grid a single time. It wasn’t even clear to me as a new player that you could. What was clear was that using the scene system rather than just walking into a room and posing at each other had huge benefits and you should use it.
Even knowing that you could start a scene from the grid, again, I never saw anyone do it and I never did it even though I’d just come from a game where that was the only way of RPing. Why? Because it is just so much easier to click ‘Create a Scene’ and fill out the fields, which you will need to do anyway to share it and it’s clunky to do them all from the client. You don’t have to wander the grid like a fool peering in shop windows for the right room. You can just select from the list.
Following on to this, the default privacy setting when setting up a scene in this manner is prepopulated for you as private, and therefore I wonder how many people are even thinking about whether this scene could be open or not as they’re going through the motions to get something started if they did not predetermine that they wanted it to be open before they even got to that screen. On a grid-only game, this is not something you have to think about. If you go to a public place and start RPing, it’s an open scene. If you start a scene on Ares’ webportal, unless you deliberately and intentionally set out to have an open scene, the UI assumes you meant it to be private, and people tend to follow the path of least resistance.
Conversely, if you start a scene from the grid without passing additional arguments, no matter where you are, the default is open.
