RP Safari - Pacing Styles
-
If I am MUing, as in everyone is controlling one character in a scene, it needs to be live. I cannot do async in such a framework. I lose emotional connection to the scene and interest. After the second day, I lose complete interest and have already moved on.
If I am doing novella stuff, which I call collaborative writing and I haven’t done in decades because I’m picky and it has an even smaller population than MUs do, it HAS to be async. Someone (I’m not scrolling up to see who) was poo-poo-ing on this style, suggesting that such a framework focuses on the writing aspect at the expense of collaboration. That is incorrect. I would actually argue that MU*ing is much less collaborative as everyone in a scene tends to be looking out for number one with number one being their character. It’s a different mindset.
You don’t consider one character in the scene just yours. All of the characters are yours and all the other participants’ to work with to craft a good story. What you control is a portion of the scene not a character. It’s like improv with a lot of “Yes, and…” The other writers become partners and you have to work with what they give you and they in turn have to work with what you give them to craft an interesting fiction.
The focus is on having a good scene that, if an uninvolved person read, they would go “Damn, that’s a good bit of writing and a good story.” If this were in person, it would be less D&D and more story-game, like Microscope, City of Winter, and Fall of Magic, with something like a talking stick that gets passed around the table with the person having the stick getting to come with whatever they want but the other players have some form of veto power. Also there tends to be way more OOC discussion, figuring out where everyone wants the scene to go, what they want accomplished with which characters etc. Also also, it leads to people being more willing to have bad things happen to the characters, since there is less personal investment in a particular character. A character is just one of many that you use to write a story. I have argued that MU*s should adopt this style more but everyone tends to react to it like I’m suggesting we sacrifice infants to the Elder Gods, so whatever.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
-
@Ominous I think the very nature of large, multi paragraph posts (presumably with actions beyond fluff within them) doesn’t quite lend itself to the kind of flowing granular exchange most RP interaction needs.
In my experience with novella, at least in the recent years, what happens is people don’t want to wait another week for their turn, so they pack as much as they possibly can into a post, interacting with other characters and then presuming vague responses, so you get a kind of backed up out-of-order situation. If people play on the safer side, they opt to do a bunch of thought-posing, which I think is actually something that at least part of the crowd appreciates or is pleased with, in style of “Yay someone is thinking about my character”.
I’m unsure how it was decades ago, but at least presently, there is no controlling a portion of the scene. JUST your character. I got pretty severe responses when I indicated another character may be able to see some headlights or something entirely innocent like that, something to just move the scene along.
I’m actually unaware of any RP setting in which you are basically writing a book together and you aren’t controlling your character. This is the first I’ve heard of it. @Faraday is Storium something like that?
-
@Ominous said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
If I am doing novella stuff, which I call collaborative writing and I haven’t done in decades because I’m picky and it has an even smaller population than MUs do, it HAS to be async. Someone (I’m not scrolling up to see who) was poo-poo-ing on this style, suggesting that such a framework focuses on the writing aspect at the expense of collaboration. That is incorrect. I would actually argue that MU*ing is much less collaborative as everyone in a scene tends to be looking out for number one with number one being their character. It’s a different mindset.
I think we’re maybe talking about different things. The long-form async style I’ve seen in venues like Storium and forum play still has the one-character-per-player hallmarks of MUs, only the poses are way way longer. Due to the length of time between everyone’s poses, it’s basically impossible to have a meaningful conversation or to coordinate actions with one another. Mostly folks either just do their own things separately (resulting in less collaboration) or are forced to go off-game to collaborate more directly in discord/google docs/whatever.
@Yam No - in Storium you mostly just control your own character. They’re a little more tolerant of power-posing someone else in the interests of expediency, but most of the moves I’ve seen are just one character.
-
sorry-not sorry but the tendency here to frame async play as bad roleplaying somehow by default stylistic choice is not just inaccurate, it is rude.
I absolutely gaurantee you will find bad roleplayers everywhere regardless of pacing choices. the MU Peeves thread from the very earliest incarnation of this board 10+ years ago was full of people complaining about purple prose passhole-aggresshole meta posing before async was even a twinkle in Faraday’s eye, it didn’t just magically appear when we stopped sitting down for arbitrary four hour blocks and good, engaging roleplay didn’t disappear when people moved to other mediums.
-
@Wizz 100% agree.
Some things may be made easier or more difficult in different pacing styles.
In rapid-fire pacing, it’s harder to polish/edit (due to time pressure), but it’s easier to do back-and-forth interactions. In async it’s the opposite. Neither is intrinsically better or worse, but one might align more closely to your preferences.
@Wizz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
before async was even a twinkle in Faraday’s eye
I certainly didn’t invent async RP on MUs. I’ve been doing async MUSH scenes by email almost as long as I’ve been MUSHing. It’s always been there. Now, with Ares, it can just be done on the game.
-
Yammy, I agree with you about instant/live scene pacing, that’s been pretty consistent for the last 20+ years for me! I do notice perhaps that these days 10-15-20 can be usual for “live” unless the person organizing says something about keeping it to 15 or less. I wonder if that’s because there’s older brains working or something!
Async is so variable depending on game/r culture though, at least in my observation, that I now always ask what people intend the pacing to be. There are lots of people that do the 1 or a couple of poses per day thing. Some are like a pose every few days. For me personally I tend to mean every few hours, or a stop and then restart later in “live” mode, it’s just that it may be out of order with other game timestream stuff. I learned to ask because on one game in particular I was stuck in a huge group scene where the intent was a timely catchup but one person asked for async, I said fine because I was thinking everyone would pose a couple of times a day, but what ended up happening is that half the group reverted to posing 24 hours after the last pose, so in effect that was ONE pose in the entire SCENE per day and these were like normal live poses so like 2-4 sentences and I thought I was going to die. I’m not saying they were bad people, they weren’t. But I should have asked because I can’t handle that glacial of a pace, so that was totally on me for saying sure without asking.
I’ve been told my “style” of async may be more properly described as “distracted/work-friendly” so that’s what I’ve been calling it rather than async over the last few years.
I always appreciate when terms/pace is outlined specifically for that scene, because we all have different brains and assumptions so that seems to me to be the best way to cut down annoyance and increase engagement or to give people a friendly way to say “man thanks for your offer but that pace won’t work for me, I hope you guys have fun,” proactively before they’re feeling either totally overwhelmed or like they want to gnaw their own leg off to escape. I can’t do either end of the spectrum well (the instant OR the one pose in a scene per day/in a 4 person scene getting to do 1 pose every 4 days). My poor brain can only really keep things together for a bout a week regardless of pace, and for me the live/pause for up to 2 days/resume is better than the 4 day between posing stuff.
I would be willing to try the long delay novella RP pace though. I think that would work better for me and be okay than the : smiles and nods and says “How interesting, tell me more.” and having to wait 4 days to respond to it lol.
-
Lol man, I really tried hard to craft an intro that didn’t imply ares was the sole creator of async. Forums existed! It’s just that this setting firmly didn’t permit it, or at least much of it, and now it does, and that does have an effect in some manner.
I MUSH because this is one of those few places that I can find live RP that’s not MMO. The way that I had to beg people to give me a single paragraph of detail in MMO RP, instead of just pure dialog… Like, they wanted to RP with me! But I had these pesky conditions. I need meat!
But I’m not blind to the future, and Discord is full of async/long format style RPing. This is clearly what most younger (and some older) RPers want. If you sense any rankling, it’s because someone’s favored style may be dying, which means less people to RP with. It’s the nature of the game.
-
@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I certainly didn’t invent async RP on MUs. I’ve been doing async MUSH scenes by email almost as long as I’ve been MUSHing. It’s always been there. Now, with Ares, it can just be done on the game.
oh for sure. I actually grew up on PbP forums just as much as MU*s myself. I am more just framing how some responses to this topic unfortunately start to come off to me every time it pops up.
@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
If you sense any rankling, it’s because someone’s favored style may be dying, which means less people to RP with. It’s the nature of the game.
I get this and I do sympathize with it, and I’m just gonna suggest that exploratory ventures into a style you don’t personally enjoy are probably going to be colored by that bias, in addition to the simple fact that, again, there are a lot of people who are just bad at this period, lol, whether that’s due to inexperience or whatever else. it’s not just that playing a different way is worse.
-
@Wizz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
there are a lot of people who are just bad at this period
I definitely agree with this, which is why I’m always baffled about why people declare no bar RP/no social fluff. All RP has the capacity to be bad (or GREAT). I can trust @Ashkuri to make mail sorting somehow entertaining, heart-wrenching, and character development rich.
I suppose in the end there are MANY factors that feed into “good” or “bad” RP… but that nuance is too confusing to talk about. <<; Or maybe just less fun to talk about.
-
@Wizz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I get this and I do sympathize with it, and I’m just gonna suggest that exploratory ventures into a style you don’t personally enjoy are probably going to be colored by that bias, in addition to the simple fact that, again, there are a lot of people who are just bad at this period, lol, whether that’s due to inexperience or whatever else. it’s not just that playing a different way is worse.
i can say that my dislike of async has zero to do with the writing styles people may or may not utilize while playing. it has zero to do with the actual pose content, because that’s entirely variable
it has everything to do with the timing and rhythm constraints that ARE inherent to async. i’ve done plenty of async scenes with a bunch of different people over the years; it’s incredibly difficult even with people whose RP i love. it’s entirely about the nature of async itself
she/her | playlist
-
@Roz valid! some people just don’t like it, that’s absolutely fine. sorry if I made it seem like it wasn’t when I responded to you earlier, I was just trying to be a silly goose.
-
@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I definitely agree with this, which is why I’m always baffled about why people declare no bar RP/no social fluff.
Hm. Are you equally baffled by people who declare no smut? Or no lords and ladies?
People like different things.
