MU Peeves Thread

[bear_necessities]

@RedJellyBean said in MU Peeves Thread:

Having a scene with someone and them not posing for days and giving various reasons, yet you know they’re RPing with someone else on another place the entire time, as well as other games.

Just say “hey it looks like you’ve been pretty busy and this scene is getting stale, let’s FTB and you can grab me again when you have more time?” And call it a day.

No sense in letting your brain weasels eat you alive.

[hellfrog]

@RedJellyBean I know for myself, async scenes are really hard. If I go 24 hours without thinking about/engaging with a scene, it gets really hard for me to go back to it. Even if it’s a scene with someone I LIKE rp with

I have a scene like this that I abandoned and it got auto stopped and I need to reach out and be like hey i’m sorry do you want to kick this thing up again or try a different scene I AM SORRY and ahhhhhhhhhh don’t be mad

[Kestrel]

@hellfrog

I’m super guilty of “accidental revenge” with async scenes. I say I don’t mind if the other person needs extra time, but the longer they take, the longer I take. And then it eventually snowballs from them taking 24 hours between replies to me taking 48.

[Rathenhope]

@RedJellyBean said in MU Peeves Thread:

So, I’m left wondering… does my RP suck, are they bored? Maybe the TS is better! I don’t know. Still sucks. And I still wait.

I have definitely felt like this and it sucks, cause then my brain goes “Well maybe they’re just actually not that interested in RPing with you?” and really I’d rather they just tell me that than leave me to wonder. But of course it’s probably not that. Brains suck etc.

[mietze]

Async is super hard for me too. Even with favorite people. Sometimes its okay if its “burst play” with just a waiting period before it goes again. But my brain flails unpredictably and it really doesn’t have to do with how much I enjoy the other person.

Its the one hangup I still have on most ares games. Especially in log heavy situations where a lot of people seem to read and track. Maybe it’s just because I had some really weird and comfortable alt stalking situations where I knew someone was keeping careful track of my logins and would page me on unrelated alts across games and in games to ask me how my role play was going with the person I was in the room with with implications. Or yes sometimes I worry that people will be mad at me if some things finish first (which is almost always related to pacing and other things that have nothing to do with how great the other people are and everything to do with my deficits.) And boy sometimes I do really feel my inadequacies in a async scene or when something goes into that.

Sonetimes I feel okay reaching out directly to the person(s) to check in. Sometimes it takes a while esp if I worry that they’re mad at me (even if I don’t fault them) because I need to prep myself for that conversation too and I don’t always have the energy to do that properly so that I’m not impinging on someone’s justified irritation and am capable of listening/resolving it.

What this leads to in a practical way is that my reluctance to disappoint moves from theory to actually happening because sometimes I also get hit with pressure I’m putting on myself. I’m a lot better at catching most things now but not always.

I think though that a lot of people I’ve met in mushland struggle with similar things too. And I just am also trying to get better about learning to wrap something once I feel like my brain is failing and hope that the other person(s) doesn’t feel that i don’t like them or will decide they don’t want to talk to me again because I’m awful or whatever.

I think most people are able to get over a momentary irritation (it happens even between really good friends or first choice rp partners too!) And its okay.

But i think it does contribute to ooc stress on a game sometimes at least for me. I want people to like me and want to RP with me, and I like and want to RP with most people too. Sometimes a particular pc or situation is easier to grab onto in that moment for so many reasons. A danger for me in async is that I can overextended easily. Still learning how to best balance that.

[Third Eye]

For me there’s async and then there’s Very Async, Dude.

Like, I can do a scene over the course of two or three days. That’s fine. It doesn’t engage me in quite the same way real-time RP does but I’ve found I’ve gotten used to it, there’s still scene energy, it’s a good way to keep up with people in different timezones or with different schedules.

But that’s not what a lot of people who say ‘async’ seem to mean. What they mean increasingly seems to be scenes that take a month to play and then kind of never end and then people just wander away. I’ve dipped into reading threads about RP on Reddit that aren’t MU*-specific this year and this seems really common in the Discord RP space and…idk, my friends, is this the future? Is this the future people want?

[sao]

Rp without end just becomes stress and obligation and guilt. cannot

[L. B. Heuschkel]

Async is my staple and I don’t mind Glacial (those that take more than a week) either – but it’s important to be clear about what a scene is before firing it up. Otherwise, half the people in it are going to be frustrated and the other half stressed.

[mietze]

I do think that there is something to “we don’t have to end because you’re going to have to go for the day so let’s not” that is tempting especially if you ARE enjoying things at that time.

Before, when people had to go it broke up, maybe with a hey can we meet again and pick this vibe/topic up again. You can tell some of the more experienced people because they often do suggest a wrap on things rather than defaulting to let’s move async! I have not had a lot of experience with deliberate async stuff (maybe 1 or 2 scenes and by that I mean expecting that there is going to be 8-10+ hours between poses and it mag take several days/a week or whatever). One was for a once a day multiple pc scene where people would do a couple of sentences or maybe more and half really didn’t even seem to read anyone else’s or excluding others (this to me is forgivable in a moving scene esp once its more than 2 folks but when you are posing once in 24 hours? ) and I fell apart after a couple of days. I have been in one that was enjoyable but I think it was someone who primarily played async and had learned how to deal with dumbasses like me.

We talked about length of real time for the whole scene. About how many poses per day. It was not a time sensitive thing. It was something that could easily be dropped into the ic timeline immediately once finished (thats the other thing I struggle with. Some timeywimey is okay esp when insertion will happen after the whole thing is done or negotiating where certain things will slip in but with social stuff or non plot heavy things I struggle with how to internally keep how it affects my pc and when straight!) It was slow paced but the depth and attentiveness was awesome and really pulled some of my best writing out of me!

I wish I remembered to check in like that or when a scene is transitioned but a lot of the time I’m excited and in the moment and I do tend to thrive on spontaneous play. So I forget or think i will do it later. And then fret when I realize I should have and probably people are already annoyed.

[Third Eye]

@L-B-Heuschkel said in MU Peeves Thread:

Async is my staple and I don’t mind Glacial (those that take more than a week) either – but it’s important to be clear about what a scene is before firing it up.

Up to a point this is fine. I assure you, I do this with people I have not played with before who want async. I’m someone who does not have an issue nudging people OOC or taking a certain amount of narrative direction to fade. In part this is why I’ve done well with Ares, up to a point.

But it really feels like something happened over the course of the last two years in which async became a lot more pronounced, more tilted toward glacial, and a lot more the default assumption to heavily Ares players and this year I have been really wondering where it came from. Is the Ares population growing more unique/separate from games that don’t use the scene system and this is just what has happened with the culture of it? Are people from forums and Discord gravitating to it and bringing their habits? I do not know. I feel like I stepped out of something of an RP bubble that I’d been in for three years, then essentially took a break for a year, then stepped back into Ares RP and it really does feel like the vibe around async has changed.

[Jenn]

For me… I actually don’t care. I love a slow asynch with a pose every three days as people have time. I love a snappy live that kills a few hours and is fun and done. I think all kinds of scenes and styles have their benefits and their detriments, and I’m happy to collaborate into the styles that work best. My only peeve is when folks aren’t honest about what’s going on or why.

Of course… There are also then the moments when it all goes off the rails and you spend 4 days with broken internet angry that it’s not your pose in like, twelve scenes and they’re typing at everyone under the sun EXCEPT YOU only to come to a month later to realize your internet was not functioning and it was your pose all along in each of them and you’ve been passive aggressive snarking your friends for a week with broken internet while they’re waiting on you to get your shit together… And after a month, you do, but forgot what was happening prior and oh, hell.

It’s been a year, y’all. 2024 is holding 2012’s beer and I’m scared. If I owe you poses, poke me. If I’ve been a dumbass and owe you apologies, poke me. If we’re all just having a bad time and need hugs and support and understanding, poke me.

[Pavel]

[Testament]

Ever since I changed jobs, my hours have gotten real weird in regards to RP. So async is pretty much how I’m going to exist save on weekends.

I once thought that being active on 3rd shift hours was tough, I think working on 2nd shift is worse.

[Nilli]

@Third-Eye This isn’t a “last two years” thing, but as someone who MU*d a lot when I was in high school/college, and then stopped and only got back to it in the last couple of years, there’s also the shift in how LONG scenes take. Two hours used to be SO LONG and now it feels like two hours just isn’t enough time to get through most scenes. AND now most of us are adults with jobs and families and other responsibilities other than writing that psych paper between poses, so carving out more than two hours for RP can be hard!

[Pavel]

@Nilli said in MU Peeves Thread:

other responsibilities other than writing that psych paper between poses

Some of us are doing that too.

[mietze]

@Nilli this is so interesting because sometimes I have the opposite experience! People drift away/check out a lot sooner (I don’t think this is a bad thing at all!) but when I was at the height of my mushing availability while little social pops often weren’t very long, if there was any kind of “big” scene it would take hours. And this was in the days were you were expected to look at people to see their descs not like the first hour being taken up by entrances describing them!

So if a timestop got dropped and combat was on or any kind of vs too, you were looking at potentially several days being unable to do anything else until the next arranged though usually that was the next night! I do my best to keep anything I run that’s social 3 hours or less (and would have loved it back in the olden days).

but this is why second phone line was a necessity, so you weren’t blocking all phone calls for like 6 hours +

I wonder if scenes take longer than they would have otherwise now because people are more into breaks/drifting (i love work slow all day stuff too), wheras at least on some of the games I used to play if you weren’t ready with your action/response when the GM called on you nobody was going to wait on you and you’d be skipped, which definitely had some implications sometimes. (I’m still a fan of GMs giving time limits and stuff though.)

[RedJellyBean]

@Rathenhope This. This is exactly what goes through my head and it bites. I realize that’s probably not it. But at the same time, I can’t help thinking they’ve found something shiny and new to RP with and that’s why I feel like I’m getting the leftovers. And I know that’s silly.

[Rathenhope]

@RedJellyBean Are you in my head? Are you me?

[Ashkuri]

For me async is at its most useful as an easy way to pause and continue. I don’t miss being like “do you have the last couple poses, my client crashed”

I like async alright in one on one scenes where I plan to write heaps of shit per pose.

Async that goes on and on forever is something I will do if I have great vibes with a person, but as real-time is my preference and I like to stay busy, sometimes I start feeling like I’ve started outpacing my own RP and it’s hard to write two timelines. I also find it hard to pose out of these long long ones.

When there are multiple async scenes going on, who I pose to ‘next’ has nothing to do with how much I like the person and everything to do with how much I need to think. The scene where I’m giving my opinions on Plato’s Cave is going to be a slower pose than the scene where I’m eating cake.

3+ person async is death to me. This kills the frog.

Overall, I really like the things async lets me do (pause, RP with people in other timezones, meet new people) but for the most part if my async partner offered me async or real time, I’d choose real time without much question.

[tsar]

I used to be a real die hard live scene RPer. I didn’t enjoy async, I didn’t want to see async, I didn’t want to LOOK IN ITS EYES.

Then I got a job where I’m up super early and even on the nights where I could stay up late, I’m spending that time with my family because I see less of them during the week. I have time, but the time is weird and not often all in one place except on my days off. And not everyone is available to play at 10:30 AM EST lol.

So, now I’ve been doing a lot of async and it’s not bad. It sure as hell beats having to leave the hobby entirely while my life is this way.