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What Is Your Preferred Play Style?
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.)
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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.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
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@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.
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@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.
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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.
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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’.
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@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.
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@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?
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@Pavel said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
@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?
It’s a relative thing. Async scenes are typically paced in the multiple hour per pose range up to days per pose. That’s still agonizingly slow compared to synchronous, which tends to top out at the tens of minutes.
If everyone in an async scene is taking mere hours to produce one pose, while someone else is taking days, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for everyone else to just ignore the person until they pose. Just like in a sync scene where someone has to idle for an hour, they’re usually removed from the pose order until they return.
ETA: And since the length of time per pose in an async scene is so wildly variable, the only practical solution is for everyone to pose just whenever they can.
Maybe a way around this would be for async scenes to have a maximum time-to-pose, after which the person in the pose order is skipped and the next is given their time. Have the Max Pose Time be a parameter when setting up a scene. I don’t know how conducive to this code change Ares would be, though.
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@STD Except none of that applies to what I said. Timezones exist, and if you don’t want to allow for that, then either say so or play synchronously. If I have to wait hours for the Americans to wake up and continue, then they can do the same for me.
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@Pavel said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
@STD Except none of that applies to what I said.
Maybe I’m being stupid, but I don’t understand how none of that applies?
If I have to wait hours for the Americans to wake up and continue, then they can do the same for me.
This is what seems unreasonable to me. At such large variances of pose times, it seems perfectly fine for those that can pose quicker to do so, exactly like in mass scenes. There doesn’t seem to be another practical way to do that and not have async scenes take so long that any interest or context of them is completely lost.
Async scenes already take days. Do you really want them to take weeks or months? Long after whatever happened in them is relevant or can be referenced in ongoing RP?
Timezones exist, and if you don’t want to allow for that, then either say so or play synchronously.
Okay, this is more reasonable. Setting expectations at the front for the maximum of how long poses should take is good. That way, no one is blindsighted. Again, though, there’s no real support for this feature as is. Async scenes have such a broad diversity in what is considered acceptable pose times that the only reasonable solution is to have everyone just pose whenever they can.
I guess as a stop-gap, there could be an OOC note added to the scene description along the lines of ‘this is an async scene and participants are expected to pose once at least every four hours’. Players who can’t meet that minimum can then just choose not to participate.
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@STD said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
Do you really want them to take weeks or months?
I want to be able to play the goddamn game as more than an interesting prop.
I think it’s unreasonable that I join a scene, get one or two poses in before all the Americans go to bed, and then I wake up (not more than a few hours later than prime time EST) to find the scene’s done with and i barely got to participate.
If you’re able to sit and pose quickly, while others in the scene can’t? Do something else!
ETA: It’s been fifteen-plus years of making allowances to my schedule to be convenient to Americans. Async exists now, so everyone should make allowances for each other. Tough shit that things take longer.
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I… really don’t know what else to say. I just can’t find this to be a reasonable request. It seems directly analogous to mass scenes to me, and the hobby as a whole has already decided on the best response to those: 3PR. Anyone who can’t pose fast enough gets skipped.
The problem might be with me, since I can’t do async scenes. I mean, one of the reasons I was attracted to MUing way back in the day over PBE or forum RP games was because of the immediacy of it.
If a scene is going to take weeks or months (or even days) to go through, then that just seems like a better fit for forum or PBE RP to me.
I fully admit I might just be out of touch here because I don’t do async. I’ll extract myself from the discussion here.
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@STD said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
I fully admit I might just be out of touch here because I don’t do async.
Then why did you try to speak as if you had knowledge of the subject? It’s incredibly condescending to suggest my request at being able to participate asynchronously is unreasonable when you have no idea what you’re talking about.
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@Pavel said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
Then why did you try to speak as if you had knowledge of the subject?
Because it’s not rocket surgery. I didn’t think specialized knowledge was required. I don’t know a thing about farming, but I can raise a desk cactus. It simply didn’t occur to me that async etiquette was very complex or different. As I said previously, I considered it analogous to mass scenes. Maybe I’m wrong.
It’s incredibly condescending to suggest my request at being able to participate asynchronously is unreasonable when you have no idea what you’re talking about.
That was not my intention. As I said, I didn’t think the problem was complex or deep. It seems self-evident to me. Maybe I am wrong.
Fuck me, I guess, for daring to think something was obvious, reconsidering that, and admitting possible fault and lack of understanding. How condescending of me.
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@STD said in What Is Your Preferred Play Style?:
I don’t know a thing about farming, but I can raise a desk cactus.
Well, to use this analogy, you lectured a farmer on what reasonable expectations are for farmers. So just stop.
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The problem here, for Europeans and others outside of US timezones, is that if scenes move while we sleep – then the risk is very great that we essentially get reduced to sidelined NPCs. Sure, we’re welcome to pose if we can get a word in but everything happens while we sleep. At best, you get to join events and see the group take off while you go to bed.
Async has problems of its own for sure, but at least it allows those of us who can’t sit up past midnight every night to actually play.
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Pavel’s point seems entirely reasonable to me? It sounds like he’s experiencing people playing and finishing a scene more or less synchronously while he’s asleep. Which defeats the purpose of setting something as async.
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Could an admin maybe split the slap fight off somewhere else? Most of this was pretty thoughtful opinions.
