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MU Peeves Thread
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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.
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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.
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I’m definitely one of those who are guilty of not being more disciplined with my Async scenes, which I need to fix on my end. I used to be an avid live scene RPer when I first started MUSHing but back then, I had a lot more free time to dedicate to RP and the people I RP with were also mostly in the same time zone and same time slots with free time. Now, RL is a bigger obstacle which is a shame, which is also why it’s impossible for me to play on more than one game.
Things have changed a lot with technology and also how life has changed for people. My free RL time has reduced and instead of hashing out a scene in four hours, I’m mostly down to two hours on a week night where I can fully focus. Oddly enough, even before Ares, I’ve had really great scenes with fun RPers where we can pause the scene after one night and pick up the next night. Or, even before Ares, I’ve done async (before it was coined Async) where the log was copied to google docs and continued there before the log is posted on the wikidot site for the game.
This is where my personal discipline needs to be tightened up on my end, where if a good scene has to be paused, instead of going fully async, it may be better to continue with a continued live scene on the second day. Async is definitely much harder when more people are in a scene, because everyone’s schedule is fragmented and it is much harder to line up the timing. That is why I try to reserve async to one on one scenes or plot advancing scenes so everyone has a chance to contribute to progression of the plot when they can. That’s one of the strong points of async it allows more people to participate instead of people not being in the same timezone of the majority being left out.
In the end, there are strong pros and cons to async, the challenge is to properly juggle it so it works out for those involved.
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I’ve been relying on Async RP a lot in the last year. And I’m glad for all the people who’ve put up with the stop-and-go pace of my life. Their RP has been super valuable to me. And the odd public or group scene that I’ve actually been able to make have been like pit stops on the way.
But there are definitely limits to the format. One of which, is group scenes. Gathering disparate people on competing schedules and differing time zones into the same virtual room at the same time can be like catching lightning in a bottle. But passing a pose baton between those same few people whenever works is more like powering a house party with infrequent bolts of static electricity.
So, it’s totally not a replacement for traditional pacing. But it is a huge relief when it’s all that I have time for. I do keep other peoples’ tastes in mind though and don’t tend to reach out, answer requests, or cold call for RP as much as I otherwise would. Because, while asking for RP can be awkward in general, asking with the caveat of ‘hey - I just met you, would you like to RP in a private scene with me over the course of several days?’ feels a little extra.
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I prefer live scenes where the immersion is 110% and the speed is breakneck for four hours straight. It’s just – health, age, and real-life geography make that pretty much a utopic fantasy most of the time. Sounds like I’m not the only one, either.
So to me, Async (and Glacial, the ultra-slow asyncs) is the lifesaver – I can do those or I can step away entirely. I balked some at first, I’ll admit – but I have also come to appreciate, as a writer, that having more time sometimes also means being able to provide a more interesting narrative.
I advise against large asyncs, though. Passing the speaker token around between six people like that is… well, little short of torture. Three to four seems to work, with room for an extra if enough of the three to four are faster.
Any pronouns. Come to Chincoteague. We have ponies. http://keys.aresmush.com
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@L-B-Heuschkel
For large asynch scenes, I’ve found really great luck with 6-8 people in them if it has a GM or ST involved. I use the layout of 1-2 GM poses per day, every 12 or 24 hours. In between each GM pose, every other player is allowed 1-2 poses in any order they want to do so in between. People know to check in either once or twice a day as pre-agreed and no one has to wait to post for ‘their turns’ and can do it at their own conveniences in between each story move forward via scene runner. -
I love async as someone who struggles in live scenes - especially large scenes or scenes with ‘stakes’ like combat, or STed stuff, time limits and Important Story Things.
I recently asked someone for advice on how to deal with those types of scenes and was sorta embarrassed to do so in the first place and then doubly so when the response was ‘I don’t really struggle with those, can’t help, sorry (paraphrase, and they were very nice)’ and was like … augh, I know it’s not just me, but it’s meeeeee. >_<
SO. Async
Getting new poses in async is like an advent calendar! Checking for poses is part of my routine. Love async. Didn’t love it before Ares. Ares makes async so easy (which may be part of the rise of these types of scenes as the Ares community adopts them).
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@Floof said in MU Peeves Thread:
I’ve been trying to just be like fuck it guess I’ll just be awful then! But it’s SO HARD.
Cheering you on. This is why my mother wrote “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” on her piano.
It’s irritating that “It’s only a game,” so often comes up in the context of, “You’re wrong to have hurt feelings about it,” but seldom in the context of, “Relax, you’re allowed to suck, it’s not your Ph.D. dissertation.”
Play for fun. With typoes, grammatical errors, and another beer if you want. You don’t have to impress people. I’ve had a lot of fun with people whose characters have orbs. Some of them have even been limpid pools. I’ve had fun with players who have limited English vocabularies and used me as a thesarus. I’ve had fun with players who regularly fall asleep at the keys. I’ve had fun with players who are emergency services workers and just dissapeared mid-scene.
And also, give people a break. Don’t dismiss them as sucky just because they don’t impress you the first time you see them. Let people enjoy the hobby instead of feeling like they shouldn’t show up if they’re not at the top of their game that day.
Also, people. You don’t suck. I’ve been playing these silly things since, uh, 1994 and I have yet to meet a MUer who could not write bestselling novels for John “See Jack Litigate. Litigate, Jack, Litigate” Grisham if they’d just get paid enough to try. I have RPed on MUs with Jim Butcher and Neil Gaiman and neither of them developed the gushy “they’re just the best RPer” groupies that your average staff-alt gathers. Hell, Gaiman essentially said it was too hard.
'You ride the mechanical bull, you do not fight it.'
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@heysparky I’ve been in a lot of ST/story/stakes things you ran or participated in real-time on Arx, seemed to go alright there?
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@imstillhere
Isn’t it funny how our perception of things can be so different from what other people perceive?
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@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Floof said in MU Peeves Thread:
I’ve been trying to just be like fuck it guess I’ll just be awful then! But it’s SO HARD.
… but seldom in the context of, “Relax, you’re allowed to suck, it’s not your Ph.D. dissertation.”
I appreciate this advice since these days I am frequently MU*ing to avoid working on this very thing. All the while frequently expecting the same level of detail & quality from myself when I am, for instance, pretending to be a vampire from Albuquerque.
they/them
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@imstillhere Yeah. That’s good. Still pit sweats over here.
I liken it to stage jitters? Still fulfilling to do. But lots of nerves in the doing.Nerves directly proportional to scene pace (where pace is a function of scene size) and indirectly proportional to my comfort in or knowledge of the setting and understanding of my character.
Nerves ratchet up enough and I cross a threshold that makes things difficult.
1-on-1 async = lowest possible nerves
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I just wanna say I am really glad for the people it works for, I am just also sad because my brain donwanna work that way so I must reach for you across a chasm of ???
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I really wanted async to work better for me because I can get really anxious about how long it takes me to pose sometimes, which can turn into a horrible feedback loop of anxiety and not posing. But async doesn’t seem to even help, it just gives me new anxieties and also seems to consistently add a layer of giant poses that can be very difficult for me to parse and respond to while also remembering the rest of what’s already happened in the scene, so I’ll go to respond and my brain is like NO I CANNOT WORK LIKE THIS and then I’m just a messy, anxious failure why do I even bother RPing?!
So, uh. Yeah! For some reason live works a little better for me, usually.
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I first started RPing in a forum/journal RP environment before making a switch to MU and MMO environments, and making the switch really helped me to work on things that had been a problem during my more async days - I had a bad habit of letting RP trail off into an endless loop of pleasantries and fluff, without addressing the thing that the scene had been started for. I also had a bad habit of overcommitting myself to a number of ongoing scenes and then basically dropping all of them when I got overwhelmed trying to respond to a bunch of posts every evening. Now I probably could go back to more async with a heightened consciousness of those things that made it harder for me, but I find it puts more pressure on me to do so, so I lean in on the format that helps curb those bad habits naturally.
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@somasatori said in MU Peeves Thread:
I appreciate this advice since these days I am frequently MU*ing to avoid working on this very thing. All the while frequently expecting the same level of detail & quality from myself when I am, for instance, pretending to be a vampire from Albuquerque.
I think my vampire knows yours, feel free to hit me up. If you say “I wanna use you as brain sorbet for the next hour and a half and then I really have to get back to work,” I’ll probably even set a timer and unimpressively close out the scene to shoo you off the game at the right time.
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Watching a known jerk continue to do jerk things in the MU* community and feeling unsure about whether it’d be the right call to just let people know that’s a known jerk. Idk, do people deserve second chances if they wanna be anonymous? … atm I’ve settled on the feeling that maybe it doesn’t really matter whether people know who they are or not, since the culprit seems eager to dig their own grave on a brand new identity anyway.
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@Kestrel If the same end is accomplished without you having to get involved, then that’s probably the way to go. It spares you some unnecessary danger.
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@Kestrel The only times I’ve had issues with someone, I quickly learned the other person was a known entity that others tend to avoid anyway. I think assholes have a habit of showing their true colors all on their own, and unless you’re concerned about them doing something harmful, it’s not worth worrying about.
