Scenes within Scenes
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making giant scenes OOCly mandatory — and saying that your character is shirking on their IC duty if you’re not at the scene — is indeed bad game policy. i understand that this was more common back in the day in certain areas of the hobby.
but i do think that it’s not strictly relevant to the more fundamental question of how tabletalk is and can be used. it’s a bad policy that games shouldn’t have, not something that’s inherent to all large scenes as a rule.
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@real_mirage said in Scenes within Scenes:
Why even play on a game with a large player base that is suppose to interact with each other then? I have always enjoyed large scenes because I believe it makes the world feel more alive. Even if its a scene I have nothing to do in, getting 20/30/40+ people together, online, all at once, is cool. Tables and places can make that more manageable, but I think the chaos of a large scene is part of the charm.
A game with a large player base I don’t mind, that provides a much wider variety of opportunities for RP. A large number of people in one scene? Definitely not for me for a number of reasons.
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Pacing. The larger the scene, the slower the pacing and it’s a domino effect. If you want to interact with everyone, you will need to wait for a number of poses before being able to respond, including a GM emit if it’s an event. So if someone has to take a little more time to think of how to react and the next person has to do the same, the pacing can grind to a very slow pace. Which can result to a scene going 5+ hours to get through enough pose rounds for something substantial to be accomplished without feeling rushed.
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Easier for people to get lost in the mix, harder to feel like you are contribute meaningfully, more challenging for those that do not naturally have a louder voice to be heard.
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For me, large scenes are much more mentally taxing to keep track of what is going on with everyone and being constantly worried that you missed something someone else did that was crucial. You also hate to feel like you left someone out by accident and they take it as a slight.
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Brain melting. Some people are great at large scenes and running events, personally it can be a challenge for me. It is also faster to drain the mental stamina as well which can be a shame because I want to try to stay sharp enough to continue to contribute.
On table and place posing, I know that it would probably make it harder on Ares in terms of posting the log. Maybe a table doesn’t want their part of the log posted, but I believe in Ares, everything is posted. Which is why it has a pseudo place code where it’s just normal posing, with a header of where that person is situated in the code.
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@KDraygo said in Scenes within Scenes:
On table and place posing, I know that it would probably make it harder on Ares in terms of posting the log. Maybe a table doesn’t want their part of the log posted, but I believe in Ares, everything is posted. Which is why it has a pseudo place code where it’s just normal posing, with a header of where that person is situated in the code.
i mean, in a hypothetical world where there was a tabletalk system on a game that kept it quiet during the scene for spam reasons, but then posted everything into the final log — which is actually an idea i was muddling over with friends earlier today — then it doesn’t matter if a table does or doesn’t want to have their tabletalk posted; if that’s how the system worked, that’s how it would work, and people would be forewarned and they’d adjust to the code or bail.
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@KDraygo said in Scenes within Scenes:
On table and place posing, I know that it would probably make it harder on Ares in terms of posting the log. Maybe a table doesn’t want their part of the log posted, but I believe in Ares, everything is posted. Which is why it has a pseudo place code where it’s just normal posing, with a header of where that person is situated in the code.
Ares doesn’t suppress table talk. It just identifies which poses are happening in which places. It would be difficult to suppress table talk on the web portal because you could potentially be controlling multiple alts and/or NPCs simultaneously from the same window. Also Ares’ scene system fundamentally doesn’t modify / customize the pose output per player. Anyone subscribed to the scene sees the same thing. You’d have to make significant structural changes to the scene system to support old-school table talk. And since I hate it, I have no intention of ever doing so.
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@Roz One could hypothetically have all the tabletalk ‘scenes’ logged and filed as sub-scenes under/linked to the main scene. Though I imagine it’d be a bit of a bugger figuring out what the tabletalk scenes are reacting to… but I’ll leave that to the people who read logs for fun.
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@Roadspike said in Scenes within Scenes:
If there’s “important shit” going on that the peanut gallery can’t interrupt? Don’t have the peanut gallery at the scene. Have them in their own side-scene, either happening at the same time as the “important shit” scene that they can watch freely, or RPed after the "important shit* scene but ICly taking place at the same time.
I can’t think of anything more annoying than reading a scene in one window and then flicking to another window to react to it in a separate scene. I also don’t see how this isn’t a “coded solution” to a social problem.
Plus, not everyone uses the web portal, so this two-scenes at once isn’t a great solution.
We just want to react to a scene in real-time. The way we might do - you know - if we were at a real event, sitting at our own group table in a real event setting?
Yeah - it takes some code to make that happen. It’s more realistic. A lot more realistic and less of a pain than trying to schedule a whole other scene where we have to read the log from the first scene and then react to the log while pretending we’re there. And it cuts down on a lot of spam for others who wouldn’t ICly be interested or able to hear what’s going on.
If it’s a one-way scene that again, can’t be interrupted? Don’t make it a scene! I’m sure we’ve all been in plenty of scenes where we thought, “This didn’t need to be a scene, it could’ve been a post/vignette/scene-set.” So don’t make them scenes. Have the GM post up their too-important-to-be-interrupted scene as a Vignette, and then have the actual scene be everyone’s reaction to it afterwards. You know, when people can actually interact with each other without interrupting.
99% of what is being talked about are player-run parties, ceremonies, sermons, etc. Not GM-run scenes or plot-important settings. Just RP events where the entire point is for people to gather.
One stand-out example were these dinners someone on Arx would put on that were blind-folded dinner dates with strangers. There would be hostess emits of the waiters, etc. and what was going on in the environment, and then with some exceptions we would primarily tabletalk with the blind dates we were paired up with.
Your solution for such an event would be a vignette written by the hostess, who would have to private message every attendee who they are supposed to sit with, and then like 10 individually scheduled one-on-one scenes tying into that. Sounds really exhausting.
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As with almost everything, it’s preferences, like Roz said. But there is absolutely something to be said for a game facilitating several different ways of interacting/playing.
If you have a big proclamation or press conference or whatever, and the storyteller wants it to be a scene – they can make it a scene. Plut places in there with tabletalk so people can sit around and chat with their buddies while it’s happening.
Then, the storyteller can take the salient bits of the scene, post them on a forum --the aforementioned e-mail it COULD have BEEN-- and the people who didn’t go can pretend they went and sat quietly listening, without the player having spent the time.
If you don’t LIKE the big scenes, don’t GO to the big scenes. If you do, GO.
It’s not a problem solved by one-or-the-other decision making, folks; these are issues that can be tackled inclusively.
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@Coin said in Scenes within Scenes:
If you don’t LIKE the big scenes, don’t GO to the big scenes. If you do, GO.
for real. the comments in the thread about hating big scenes in general are just kind of irrelevant here. if you hate big scenes, then don’t go to them. if you’re on a game that requires you to go to huge scenes, find a new game.
the thread is about what people like and don’t like out of tabletalk systems, not whether or not you want to go to the scenes where tabletalk is commonly used.
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@howyadoin what you said. I love traditional places, I think it can get annoying if people are using them in bad faith to do things that others would objectively notice and just not emoting at all about it to the larger scene, but when used well it enhances rp immersion for me. Feels realistic! I love chatting at an event w my buddies at a lil couch. As others have said, Arx had a good culture around it so that’s certainly colored my perception positively.
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@Artemis said in Scenes within Scenes:
I think it can get annoying if people are using them in bad faith
I think this right here underpins a great many negative experiences with coded systems designed with the intent to enhance the experience, or compensate for limitations of the time. They’re not inherently bad; they’re just often poorly used, or of an era where they aren’t required any longer but are kept around for the sake of nostalgic completeness’ sake.
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There’s also the places multi-room code, where you have a single room object for like… Boat, with the normal description being the boat itself, then you +join the fore party space, and the room desc changes to the party space, until you +join below deck, and the room desc changes to below deck, until you +join cabins, and the room desc…
Etc and so on; now everyone on the boat can see the poses (unless you still do place-only code emits), but it’s helpful for people who have doors open, or who can look down from the pilot’s house and see the party people, or or or.
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This has been insightful. Thanks gang!
