RP Standards
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Some Storium games have word count min or max limits, and it only ever gets in the way.
Some of my friends prefer rapid-fire poses with a higher degree of response/interaction. Others write multiple paragraphs. I’m somewhat in the middle. Regardless, it’s not something I would ever want to regulate.
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It’s my opinion that outside of the loosest standards, standards only hurt the game.
The loose standard I would set for RP would be “If your pose reads like a drunk person with large hands texting on a tiny phone, you need to work on your prose.”
Additionally, everybody’s posing habits change on a whim. If a player has lots of energy and inspiration, then lots of amazingly detailed prose comes out. If they’re burnt out from work and haven’t done anything creative in a few days, it’s probably gonna be a lot of short and to the point single line stuff.
My personal baseline is maybe 8-10 sentences. 2 paragraphs of descriptive stuff, 2-4 lines of dialogue. It fluctuates up and down from there.
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The closest I’ve come to seeing RP ‘standards’ posted was on a Pern MUSH I didn’t stick with for long (Second Pass, I kinda got there at the end of its life, unfortunately), and it was more of an explanation of MUSH RP conventions than hard-and-fast rules. Their site is gone now, alas, but I found their old RP Etiquette Guide after some nosing around in The Way Back Machine.
Posing in general.
- Please make an effort to correct typos and use something resembling proper English grammar. If you have a writing-related disability, a spellchecker will catch the most egregious ones and people will be willing to cut you some slack on the rest if you warn them up front.
- There’s a place and time for the one-line pose and the twenty-line pose. Second Pass poses usually run between 3 and 6 lines, with a few outliers in either direction. In general, try to create a happy equilibrium. Keep in mind the time needs of other players when you tend towards longer poses, and their need to have something to respond to when you tend towards shorter poses.
- /Read things/. Read descs, read bbposts, read news files, read other people’s poses. Then try to retain at least a general sense of having read it.
I tend to think the middle part is pretty standard for MUSH RP, at least in its day (this copy-paste is from a 2016 capture), but even that varies pretty wildly depending on individual game culture. Mostly, I think, people figure out what the ‘vibe’ is in RP by the most active players and staffers and emulate it.
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I think that rp standards is a personal thing. It might hurt me if you are constantly spelling all the words wrong, but I try to be understanding.
I think rp standard is less game directed and more scene directed. I have problems keeping up with rapid fire but I can do it. I’m a multi paragraph person. That’s not everyone’s happiness. I try to fit my standard to the story flow of my co-writer.
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I was generally a shorter poster. 1-6 lines. If I could get by with less, I did, because I wanted to keep things snappy.
As I drew closer to the end of my Mu* career the less I could cope with people who took a half-hour + to pose their three massive paragraphs I ended up only responding to a little of.
I think that was more me just having more on my plate than before though.
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@junipersky said in RP Standards:
I think that was more me just having more on my plate than before though.
I mean, there’s genuinely been a shift in the hobby, at least where me and my buddies play, toward longer and slower that I don’t necessarily like, I don’t think putting this off on a personal thing is correct. Mostly I hope there are enough people left who still like the kind of RP that I like that I can find My People and My Games.
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I’m not going to crawl up someone’s ass for being illiterate but I’m also not obligated to put a lot of time and effort into somebody who isn’t my match. If it gets bad, I’ll just politely excuse myself and bounce.
Imo hard standards are useless because 1) people will twist any kind of written rule, do the bare minimum, or get extremely loud and teary about their disability or personal circumstances, and 2) you can’t force two people to hang out together ANYWAY, so it’s a problem that solves itself as players suss each other out and pick their partners.
People attract people of similar ability. They’ll find someone who enjoys their monkey-keyboard-smashing or they’ll move to a game that fits that culture better.
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@junipersky said in RP Standards:
I was generally a shorter poster. 1-6 lines. If I could get by with less, I did, because I wanted to keep things snappy.
As I drew closer to the end of my Mu* career the less I could cope with people who took a half-hour + to pose their three massive paragraphs I ended up only responding to a little of.
i knew someone on shang who would take an hour and a half to do a like two page long pose that was so completely and exclusively about themselves that there was literally nothing to react to or act on
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@Prototart They clearly misunderstood the idea of masturbating.
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One of my clearest memories is back on Warcraft when I had my brief RP career there, waiting 45 minutes for someone to write a pose that took up ten or eleven full emotes to get through due to the character cap. It was almost all fluff, fairly repetitive, I was annoyed but kept moving. His character’s partner did the same so it took nearly an hour and a half for me to even be able to play.
Sure, I thought. They’re setting the scene in this imaginary place we are in. Irking but at least just the first pose.
The second round took even longer and they just ended up referencing most of the same things again, and that was pretty much the moment my Warcraft RP career died and my attitude toward people who claimed that longer writing meant better writing changed forever to the negative.
Combine this with an attempt by a lot of people to carefully address and keep alive every single conversation thread in the previous pose and make sure everything raised gets addressed, it can get exhausting.
I suspect this is part of the reason I bounce off of certain styles of games, posing and scene structures. In a collaborative work, dialogue, action and pacing are the three key elements, much more so than talking about how the wind rustles the leaves of the plants on the shelf a dozen times.
So, all that to say, I think the literate/semi-literate labels are actively harmful, not to mention insultingly inaccurate. When collaboration becomes a performative display at how good you are at writing with yourself, that’s just egotistical masturbation.
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@Cobalt god no, I’m just trolling tez
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@hellfrog and me
