What Is Your Preferred Play Style?

[Twinkle]

I prefer live scenes, but everyone in my circle right now is all mostly async. I try really hard not to seem ungrateful when I get offered RP, and I know it’s gonna take days to complete.

Then when I’m in a live scene, work or something else distracts me and then I become the second async person in that scene. Oh well.

[Roz]

@Faraday said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

@Tat said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

I’ve seen people turn open scenes into async scenes just by disappearing for a day and then coming back and going ‘sorry, got distracted’ without a word of discussion with their RP partner. More than once!

And I’ve had that happen lots of times pre-Ares too. The only difference is that Ares makes it easier to pick up a scene that got paused that way. Old-school we’d just go to a TP room the next day and have someone emit the last few poses for a refresher.

I had scene pauses plenty pre-Ares, but I definitely didn’t encounter someone actually disappearing without a word and come back as if it was NBD. Like, very occasionally you had someone with a RL emergency that suddenly came up, but generally in those rare cases they’d come back with immediate apology/explanation. (I can think of one player in a non-Ares setting who would regularly ghost mid-scene and then act like nothing had happened. They eventually got called out by folks for it because it was such a weird recurring behavior alongside many other weird behaviors.)

I actually think “ghosting” is the key word here. There’s a difference between pausing and ghosting. And if someone disappears and then wanders back and pretends like everything’s the same as if they’d come back after 15 minutes, that becomes rude and I’m probably not gonna play with that person.

[Faraday]

@Roz said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

very occasionally you had someone with a RL emergency that suddenly came up, but generally in those rare cases they’d come back with immediate apology/explanation.

Maybe my play group had more kid/work interruptions than average, but that happened pretty often.

Like you said, though, it was always accompanied by an apology and a “do you want to pick up or…” There wasn’t an expectation that it was NBD. All I’m saying is that expectation comes from culture not code. If people make it a big deal to ghost a scene, then you should see it reduce. If people treat it as NBD, then it’ll become NBD.

[Gashlycrumb]

About what percentage of asynch scenes are about a round of poses a day, vs what’s being called ‘distracted’ – poses every few hours throughout the day. I had imagined most asynch RP was the latter, people posing during their breaks at work. I can’t really do this and have been guessing that asynch isn’t for me because I’d slow it down.

What I like is to be able to log into the game and RP steadily at a pretty rapid pace (< 10 minutes between poses) during ‘prime time’ evening hours.

I’m quite patient and unconcerned about certain types of wandering off – if you often fall asleep at about this time and stop responding, I figure you’ve fallen asleep and if it bothered me I should not play with you at this hour. Or I used to play with emergency services dispatchers, who randomly disappear when there’s an emergency. Now with people playing on their phones I’ve been RPing with a night nurse or two, but they are probably more like ‘distracted’ RP, since they’ll be active for a couple of rounds (of RP) and then gone for twenty-thirty minutes while they do rounds (of checking that people haven’t died in their beds or something) and so on. It is much about knowing what to expect.

[bear_necessities]

I wish I could go back to the days of the before-fore when I was young and full of energy and able to pump out a pose in <10 minutes during prime time evening hours but my old lady brain can’t even string together a single sentence in that amount of time anymore. I’m old, tired, and have approximately 10,000 distractions going on simultaneously that I can’t turn off. If it’s not work, it’s the kids or the spouse or the dog or just me, because I’m tired and grumpy and hangry and so on and so forth.

Right now it took me like 10 minutes to respond to THIS because the dog wanted belly rubs and I’m trying to turn word salad into actual sentences that somebody could read lol

[Gashlycrumb]

@bear_necessities The other thing about me is I don’t really grok the long-poses-are-better thing.

[Roz]

@Gashlycrumb said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

About what percentage of asynch scenes are about a round of poses a day, vs what’s being called ‘distracted’ – poses every few hours throughout the day. I had imagined most asynch RP was the latter, people posing during their breaks at work. I can’t really do this and have been guessing that asynch isn’t for me because I’d slow it down.

I don’t have an answer to this, because I just don’t have the data, but it’s another interesting thing about definitions: to me, poses every few hours is definitely async and not distracted, which i think of more like – taking one hour to pose would be on the long side. (IME distracted often ends up being similar to active pacing, maybe a LITTLE slower, with occasional longer pauses as folks have a meeting, work distraction, etc. It has seemed more like ‘occasional pauses are more expected/anticipated.’)

Which just goes to show the importance of individual games defining what the terms mean for them.

Poses every couple hours definitely reads async to me, at least.

[Third Eye]

The difference between ‘distracted’ and ‘async’ might just be ‘distracted’ generally prompts the players involved to more clearly establish exceptions. ‘I’m at work and can RP normally but may be dragged into meetings that cause hour+ lags.’ Or ‘I can RP but am watching the kids so posing will be really slow.’ IDK, when both tags were introduced I was not clear on the difference but now I definitely feel it as a vibe and am way more comfortable doing a ‘distracted’ scene (it’s how I tag most of the RP I do during work hours, and those scenes tend to have concrete ends and people don’t seem to straight up ghost nearly as often).

[Gashlycrumb]

@Roz Yeah. I would have guessed that ‘distracted’ would mean 20-30 minutes between poses, I am chopping onions and need to finish and wash my hands before I can respond kinda thing. I would have guessed that ‘asynch’ would be, like five poses over the course of a day for most and that one-round-per-day would be more a special arrangement. Since I don’t like to mix MU with work hours at all, I figured I’d be really annoying, people waiting for me to pose, work, pose again at break, pose again at lunch, etc, when I won’t actually be there 'til my workday’s done, making me equivalent to the guy who takes an hour to pose when everybody else is taking ten minutes.

Not that I’ve really thought about it all that much. I have spent a fair amount of time pleading with staffers to just do the convo with NPC asynch one pose a day or even fewer, rather than scheduling it as an event three weeks from now when we both know it’ll probably take all of four rounds, but that’s about the limit of it thusfar. I keep running out of chargen-energy in spite of wanting to try several ares games.

[Faraday]

@Third-Eye said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

IDK, when both tags were introduced I was not clear on the difference but now I definitely feel it as a vibe and am way more comfortable doing a ‘distracted’ scene

Yeah admittedly the names maybe aren’t the greatest. The idea was meant to be that distracted scenes are often primarily synchronous, just with more pauses expected. Maybe it would’ve been less confusing just to call them async. I dunno.

I think it can be helpful to look outside MUs for parallels in the terminology.

• Voice calls and slack huddles are synchronous communication only because there’s an expectation that you won’t leave the other person hanging without a “sorry, someone at the door, BRB”, and then only for a few minutes at most.
• Texts and discord chat are asynchronous. You might get bursts of synchronous back and forth, but it’s perfectly normal for someone to stop replying for long periods without needing to justify it.

ETA: Maybe “Hybrid” would have been better than “Distracted”, in retrospect.

[KarmaBum]

@ratatat poses at a good clip when we’re online at the same time. But being on opposite sides of the world makes that tricky, so a lotta times it’s a few hours of traditional RP, then “I will answer this in the morning,” to be followed by a few rounds of distracted RP before we wrap up what is now I guess an async scene.

Is this async? Distracted? Traditional?

Beats me, but it’s what it takes to get good RP so it’s what I do.

[Roz]

@Faraday said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

@Third-Eye said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

IDK, when both tags were introduced I was not clear on the difference but now I definitely feel it as a vibe and am way more comfortable doing a ‘distracted’ scene

Yeah admittedly the names maybe aren’t the greatest. The idea was meant to be that distracted scenes are often primarily synchronous, just with more pauses expected. Maybe it would’ve been less confusing just to call them async. I dunno.

Whether or not “distracted” was exactly the right term, I do think having a term separate from async has been really helpful!! I wouldn’t want to see it go away.

@KarmaBum said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

@ratatat poses at a good clip when we’re online at the same time. But being on opposite sides of the world makes that tricky, so a lotta times it’s a few hours of traditional RP, then “I will answer this in the morning,” to be followed by a few rounds of distracted RP before we wrap up what is now I guess an async scene.

Is this async? Distracted? Traditional?

To me it’s traditional with a pause. I guess I always think of async as having expectation of consistent length between poses/rounds, whereas a traditional scene can be paused, such as overnight or during the time both parties aren’t awake/at the computer, and then it’s resumed at a generally synchronous pace, be it traditional or distracted.

[Third Eye]

@Roz said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

Whether or not “distracted” was exactly the right term, I do think having a term separate from async has been really helpful!! I wouldn’t want to see it go away.

Yeah, same. If anything I’ve found it more useful in terms of expectation setting than async, which has wildly different definitions depending on the player.

[Gashlycrumb]

@KarmaBum Yeah, that just seems like a pretty normal way to play.

Aside: I find I dislike the term ‘traditional’ in MU-land, having had these encounters with “my game will fix all the traditional MU problems!” people making games that feature problems those ‘traditional’ problems were designed to fix. (Unless you are comparing MUSH ‘tradition’ to ‘confederate heritage.’ In that case, go forth and be blessed.)

[Pavel]

One thing I will say about async scenes that has happened to me in the past, which annoyed me to no end: If I’m part of it, let me be fuckin’ part of it.

It’s async, stop just posing over or around me and actually let me contribute to the fuckin’ thing. It’s not my fault that you decided to all connect at the same time while I was asleep, because I live on the other side of the planet to you.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Roz said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?

whereas a traditional scene can be paused, such as overnight or during the time both parties aren’t awake/at the computer

Some places even had a local standard of being clear if you meant pause, meaning you’d pick up the scene immediately at the agreed time or when whoever shows up last shows, or hold, meaning you’d continue when everybody happened to be free. I’m all for it, and probably any other expectation management related courtesies we can establish.

[Duke Whisky]

@Pavel said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

One thing I will say about async scenes that has happened to me in the past, which annoyed me to no end: If I’m part of it, let me be fuckin’ part of it.

It’s async, stop just posing over or around me and actually let me contribute to the fuckin’ thing. It’s not my fault that you decided to all connect at the same time while I was asleep, because I live on the other side of the planet to you.

100% percent that. Async 3 pose rule scenes to me are kind of in this weird spot. If it is Async I’m setting myself up to be expected to pose maybe once or twice a day, instead I’m waking up and most of the scene has been, gone and happened.

–

Anyway about preferred style, I picked Async but I guess my approach on it was more that the scene happens outside of the current game timeline. There will be times it poses faster, if everyone in the scene is around at the same time, there will be times it poses slower.

Mostly it all comes down to communication for when around/not around, something I recognise I used to be good at when RPing with someone and letting them know when I was around/not around. Perhaps, since getting more used to ARES, I’ve stopped being as good as that.

So, going forward, trying to bring back that habit.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

Tempted to suggest adding on a ‘Glacial’ tag – meaning less than one pose round per day. Those scenes happen to me too – when agreed on with the others – but it would make it clear that when a scene is Async, that does not mean ‘take a week to respond’.

[STD]

@Pavel said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

It’s async, stop just posing over or around me and actually let me contribute to the fuckin’ thing. It’s not my fault that you decided to all connect at the same time while I was asleep, because I live on the other side of the planet to you.

I’m not sure if this a reasonable request, honestly. Async scenes are already absolutely glacial in pacing, so are very similar to mass scenes in that way. Pose order doesn’t seem to make much sense there… I’d even argue that 3PR is too restrictive for async scenes and that having it just be folk posing whenever they can is more logical.

When time between poses can literally take days, having a pose order is onerous in an extreme. How long can someone hold up an already extraordinarily slow scene before it’s considered a problem? Sure, there’s communication, but when poses are counted in terms of days, that’s the same type of lag you’ll get for any OOC communiques which will just delay things further. The only reasonable solution, I think, is to throw out any semblance of pose order and just pose whenever, even if that means some people are just ignored because they’re taking days to pose while everyone else is RPing at the breakneck pace of several hours.

Another reason I don’t like async scenes, honestly, though I just assumed as a natural course that async scenes didn’t have a pose order so didn’t mention it.

Lack of structured pose order is also why I’m skittish to participate in mass scenes, but that’s a different topic.

[Pavel]

@STD said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:

Async scenes are already absolutely glacial in pacing

If they were that slow, I wouldn’t be complaining about how fast they are, would I?