RP Safari - Pacing Styles
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I tend to be okay with “just talking” social RP if the characters involved are engaging enough. When I think of BaRP, I tend to think of more “primarily talking” social scenes. If that’s all I had access too would be sad after awhile though.
I think for some (maybe most?) people that may also include what I would count as more actiony type of social RP (playing a game/researching/building something) but I think that’s because I kind of like rolling dice too. I would put using abilities or little one-shot exploration stuff that isn’t really GMed and isn’t tied to a metaplot thing as mostly social too. But I can be perfectly happy with that for a long time. I’m not sure if that counts as slice of life (it certainly could, depending on the context!) or not. And then for some people dice rolling breaks immersion if it’s not important enough or it really stresses them out OOCly, or it is totally possible for someone to be a colossal showboating ass with dice rolls OOC too which isn’t super fun except to 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.
I’m gonna just take a guess…
Scheduling is a pain and if you’re doing it through messages that somebody might take a day to answer the proposed date can roll past before you’ve heard back from everyone that it’s good.
With asynch on the game a player is more likely to discover and interact with players whose habitual online-times don’t match their own. This creates RP groups with greater than usual scheduling conflicts. And it meaans that timing-incompatibility problems that you’d otherwise never even know about become evident on an Ares game. Of course, you also wouldn’t know about the player and characters either.
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@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
i think for me and some others, social RP is largely the vast majority of RP that isn’t super directly plot RP. and if that’s not the case for others, then this is an argument about semantics.
Yes, I think that this is absolutely a semantic difference in definitions. Since there is no one true universal definition of “social RP”, everyone’s going to come at it with their own personal definition. So it is entirely plausible that some people will say “all social RP is boring” based on their definition of social RP.
Personally, I don’t think RP fits neatly into boxes like “social”, “plot”, etc. for reasons that folks have described already. It’s a more nuanced dial. But if I were forced to define “social RP” it would be smalltalk / slice of life where it’s only about the social aspect and nothing else interesting and/or plot-related happens. I generally don’t like that. I’m not here for Life Simulator. I want a little drama or adventure.
I’m not saying I’ll never do social RP, but it’s not something I particularly enjoy.
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To me, Bar RP is “let’s just throw our characters somewhere and socialize about whatever”.
Social RP can be Bar RP but it can also be picking up a scene with these intentions:
- building/furthering a relationship between PCs
- discussing plot
- sharing plot or other activity happening in the game
- doing an activity together to help raise stats (like the mentioned training scene)
- meeting a PC I haven’t met yet
Etc.
The difference is intent. “Let’s just see what happens” vs “Let’s have our characters gossip about NPC X.”
All Bar RP is social RP but not all social RP is Bar RP.
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@catzilla said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
All Bar RP is social RP but not all social RP is Bar RP.
I still want to make a game with a single IC grid square: The Bar.
All RP is Bar RP. The only plot is The Bar.
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@catzilla Where does interrupting a totally innocent demon while he is trying to enjoy his succulent Chinese meal in the comfort of his penthouse apartment come on your scale?
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I’ve thought up a new pacing style:
Tedium game pacing. The MU will be connected to a generic incremental idle game (like Cookie Clicker), and each player will be given a number of pose tokens. Each pose will cost a number of tokens based on length, and if you run out of tokens, you must play the idle game to generate more tokens, which can also be spent to make the idle game work faster. Scenes will progress at a speed decided by the various players progression in the idle game generating the tokens.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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Auto clicker
According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly.
Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground.
The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.
Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black.
Ooh, black and yellow!
Let’s shake it up a little.
Barry! Breakfast is ready… -
Life got busy, so here is a very belated reply.
Anyways, it may be something different. It was sort of like the SCP stuff that’s popular today. The most prominent one that I remember was a wiki, and you could go to a page and edit it, retconning things, continuing the scene by writing new material, whatever. There were some rules of engagement about how much you could edit in a day, what sorts of things you could do, etc. I think some of it ended up on An Archive of Our Own at one point.
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@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I’ve thought up a new pacing style:
Tedium game pacing. The MU will be connected to a generic incremental idle game (like Cookie Clicker), and each player will be given a number of pose tokens. Each pose will cost a number of tokens based on length, and if you run out of tokens, you must play the idle game to generate more tokens, which can also be spent to make the idle game work faster. Scenes will progress at a speed decided by the various players progression in the idle game generating the tokens.
Ah, Gemstone IV, where people would abruptly leave the scene when their RPXP ran out.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
@Jumpscare said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
Ah, Gemstone IV, where people would abruptly leave the scene when their RPXP ran out.
Was that the one on AOL along with Modeus Operandi that went pay-to-play? Modeus Operandi was my first game, I miss it
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@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I’ve thought up a new pacing style:
Tedium game pacing. The MU will be connected to a generic incremental idle game (like Cookie Clicker), and each player will be given a number of pose tokens. Each pose will cost a number of tokens based on length, and if you run out of tokens, you must play the idle game to generate more tokens, which can also be spent to make the idle game work faster. Scenes will progress at a speed decided by the various players progression in the idle game generating the tokens.
Now I’m imagining TS scenes being on hold for days while people play cookie clicker to be able to put out their next pose.
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Aegis Company runner here, just want to belatedly chime in to say our scenes, especially events, do skew live. Async certainly happens but it’s generally reserved for interpersonal RP.
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@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
@Jumpscare said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
Ah, Gemstone IV, where people would abruptly leave the scene when their RPXP ran out.
Was that the one on AOL along with Modeus Operandi that went pay-to-play? Modeus Operandi was my first game, I miss it
I’m afraid I don’t know. A few years ago, a friend who is into MUDs told me to check it out for inspiration. It was so very strange and not in a fun way, haha.
Imagine you’re sitting down to dinner at a restaurant and having a great conversation with someone. You’re engaged and chatting for a good 30 minutes. But then he finishes his meal, says, “My time is up,” and immediately leaves in the middle of the discussion. Then someone else comes in, gets a meal, sits down in front of you, and expects you to start a new conversation from the beginning.
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@Superbia said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
Aegis Company runner here, just want to belatedly chime in to say our scenes, especially events, do skew live.
Please note that this isn’t a value judgment. I personally don’t care about the live/async split. But I’m a data analyst, and confirmation bias is one of my biggest peeves. So just to give you a very small sample set:
As of 3/18 -
Scenes already shared with the dates posted - 9 live- 3/17 - 2 scenes
- 3/16 - 0 scenes
- 3/15 - 4 scenes
- 3/14 - 3 scenes
Scenes started yesterday+ with those dates - 12 async
- 3/17 - 7
- 3/16 - 0
- 3/15 - 2
- 3/14 - 3
Looking at those four days, 43%* of your scenes are live.
*Ares doesn’t have a publicly available ‘scene shared date’, so I’m assuming that scenes posted on those days were also played those days (credit for “live” scenes).
Just for the sake of conversation, the other two games mentioned as having a live component - Empty Night and Keys - have even less, with no scenes posted on 3/16 or 3/17 for either game. So your game’s still ahead of the curve.
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@KarmaBum said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
*Ares doesn’t have a publicly available ‘scene shared date’, so I’m assuming that scenes posted on those days were also played those days (credit for “live” scenes).
To really do a data analysis you’d have to see scenes played, which is not directly connected to scenes posted, and have a way to tell whether those scenes were truly live or async (which may not always correspond to the option the person picked when they created the scene). Ares just doesn’t provide that data in form that you can easily query after the fact.
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@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
Ares just doesn’t provide that data in form that you can easily query after the fact.
I’d honestly be curious as to how many staff-folks try and track metrics for their games, and what, if any, tools they use to do so.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I’d honestly be curious as to how many staff-folks try and track metrics for their games, and what, if any, tools they use to do so.
On Shattered I tried to pay attention to it, it’s one of the things I find useful about having all the scenes visible, but it defaults to ‘feels’ and ‘how easy is it personally to get X kind of RP’, we didn’t collect hard numbers even insofar as we could’ve manually. All events were live unless it was a player doing some personal thing themselves, though, that was just how we did things.
