Asking for RP

[farfalla]

I also hate when the set is otherwise normal except they make themselves impossible to engage. Like bar RP, good, easy enough to engage, but then they pose “Character is deeply engaged in a book and doesn’t notice anything around them.”

[GF]

@farfalla That’s why I kind of dread setting a scene. So many times I’ll spend fifteen minutes establishing the time, setting, mood, and things I’m doing that could possibly be a hook, and they’ll pose that they walk in wearing this or that outfit, waiting for my character to go engage them. One of these days I’m just going to respond to that with, “I walk over and say, ‘Hey, I noticed you when you walked in because you look like a PC, not like all the NPCs in the background. Want to do something?’”

[KarmaBum]

@GF I have absolutely given a nod in the meta before to the fact that my character notices someone else’s because otherwise this scene is gonna be over real quick.

[STD]

@mietze said in Asking for RP:

I have actually seen someone parallel RP in a scene instead of engaging with the others (and this was a scene they trawled for!).

I must be very weird because one of my favorite scenes from Way Back in the Day was basically this.

It was on a Babylon 5 MU* and our two characters were in a bar on the Zoccolo which was playing an ISN feed of a debate between two talking heads.

We took turns posing the ISN feed and didn’t even interact with each other. Somehow it was hugely amusing, though.

[mietze]

@STD i could see the fun in that but to me that is still interactive RP (you’re responding to each other’s poses just not with your PCs). You’re not ignoring everyone’s poses and not responding to anything in them to just do your own unrelated vignette!

[Pavel]

@mietze said in Asking for RP:

vignette

I constantly misread this word as vinaigrette . Not really important information, but I figured someone might giggle that my first thought is that people are RPing in some kind of sauce/dressing.

[helvetica]

@Pavel A vignette? In front of my salad?

[Pavel]

@helvetica said in Asking for RP:

@Pavel A vignette? In front of my salad?

Don’t worry! It’s just French.

[helvetica]

@Pavel said in Asking for RP:

@helvetica said in Asking for RP:

@Pavel A vignette? In front of my salad?

Don’t worry! It’s just French.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@mietze said in Asking for RP:

@STD i could see the fun in that but to me that is still interactive RP (you’re responding to each other’s poses just not with your PCs). You’re not ignoring everyone’s poses and not responding to anything in them to just do your own unrelated vignette!

Yeah, if this happened to me I’d grin and go with it, just for the novelty of doing something like that interactively.

[STD]

@mietze said in Asking for RP:

@STD i could see the fun in that but to me that is still interactive RP (you’re responding to each other’s poses just not with your PCs). You’re not ignoring everyone’s poses and not responding to anything in them to just do your own unrelated vignette!

Hmm. You have a point. We were interacting, just not directly.

Isn’t there some kind of roleplaying trope about several dozen dark and mysterious stealthy folk all sitting in a tavern being so dark and mysterious that none of them ever interact with anyone else? I suppose that is more like what you’re talking about.

[lucidmaus]

I’m absolutely terrible about asking for RP. I might ask 25% of the time and that’s being generous, even though I think I respond about 80% of the time (if given a firm deadline-type ‘do you want to RP now or on X day?’ kind of request.)

It’s weird, though; like, I don’t mind setting if the person asking wants me to? But I - like others, it looks like! - have it in my head that if I’m asking, then I need to come up with an idea for a thing and I don’t usually have those unless there’s a storyline to pursue or a particularly necessary scene for a plot or w/e.

And then I angst that people don’t want to RP with me or they’re bored of me and while I might know that’s not true, there’s not shutting up the little voice in my head.

Brain weasels: not even once.

[Livia]

I really am feeling like the majority of the issue ties to ‘I want to RP but can’t think of the details so I won’t ask’ which I hadn’t really considered before.

I’ve tried pretty hard over the past week to just do the thing and ask people to play, which I know isn’t always that easy for people, but it’s worked out pretty well for me I think.

[Pavel]

My main RP impediment is time. Not that I don’t have time for RP, but people often want hours long scenes, whereas I’d much prefer 30-45 minutes of solid RP than three hours of drek.

[Sammich]

@Pavel said in Asking for RP:

whereas I’d much prefer 30-45 minutes of solid RP than three hours of drek.

It takes me like 10 minutes to write a pose, so 30-45 minutes of solid RP is like me making 2 or 3 poses.

I envy people who have the creativity and writing skill to crank out a good pose faster than that.

[Pax]

It also depends on the game. If it’s a game where I know a lot of people, have RPed with them before, I am practically brazen. If it’s a game where there’s some kind of primary established playgroup and I’m outside of it, I’ll throw out feelers, I’ll ask people, but it’s more fatiguing, and at a certain point I feel that “if people were interested, they’d say something” and then I generally just fade out entirely from the game because that usually doesn’t happen; people like to play within their groups and there’s nothing wrong with that, unless you’re not in the group and you want to play.

[Coin]

@Sammich said in Asking for RP:

@Pavel said in Asking for RP:

whereas I’d much prefer 30-45 minutes of solid RP than three hours of drek.

It takes me like 10 minutes to write a pose, so 30-45 minutes of solid RP is like me making 2 or 3 poses.

I envy people who have the creativity and writing skill to crank out a good pose faster than that.

Sometimes a scene can just be 2-3 poses each.

This actually ties into the topic in a roundabout way because a lot of people seem very reticent to have quick, short, to-the-point scenes, and I think it’s because it takes so long to work yourself up to asking, then getting a response, then setting the scene, that if it’s over too quickly it triggers the Sunk Cost Fallacy (i.e. ‘I put X amount of effort into this, it should last at least Y amount of time’). Except a short scene, in my experience, can be so satisfying, too.

I dunno. Maybe I’m weird. I like short scenes. I also think if more people were willing to engage in short scenes, we’d have broader networks of character interaction in games and things would be less cliquish, because people wouldn’t feel like ‘that person never interacts with anyone but them’ when the truth is they’re probably just keeping to their friends because RPing takes so much time.

But that’s a rabbit hole.

[Coin]

Double post because: this is why I enjoy playing NPCs a lot, too. There’s no expectation of ‘are we gonna bang?’ ‘are we gonna form a deep connection?’ ‘are we gonna… whatever?’

If I’m playing an NPC, the scene is the point, not whatever is behind it, and people will often go straight to it, because they want that nugget of plot or whatever out of it, and the scenes can move things forward in a way that a PC holding plot elements often can’t because the scenes turn into something people are far more invested in.

(This idea feels a little less worked out than the previous, but I still think it has merit. But again: rabbit hole.)

[Faraday]

@Coin said in Asking for RP:

I also think if more people were willing to engage in short scenes, we’d have broader networks of character interaction in games and things would be less cliquish, because people wouldn’t feel like ‘that person never interacts with anyone but them’ when the truth is they’re probably just keeping to their friends because RPing takes so much time.

+1 for this. So many times I feel like a scene has run its course and it would be better to stop and do something else, but it feels rude to do so. Like the expectation is once you start a scene you’re locked in until you have to log off.

[GF]

One thing I appreciate about Ares is that if we’re going to maintain the idea that scenes must have a minimum length to be valid, then async posing at least allows you to spread yourself to more than one person at a time.