RP Safari - Pacing Styles

Yam

I’m sure this convo exists already but IDC, I don’t want to do work right now.

MUSHes originated supporting live RP, as in responses expected within maybe 7-10 minutes. We had a few oldbies on Otherspace that would RP purely in one-liners, because that’s just how RP happened early on, especially in MUDs. Eventually the prose stuff came along, so “live” became less instant. This is what appears to be most common currently, in most live MUSHes. You’d expect to get through at least 1 scene in 1 evening, if everything goes smoothly.

But there are many different platforms/formats/styles out there!

I’m a big fan of collaborative writing in general, and I’ve been all over the net, through all sorts of mediums, probably like the rest of you! Our hobby has evolved and seems to be settling into Discord, although I see forums have persisted.

In my journeying, I have RPed on IRC, AIM, old Homestead chatrooms, Neopets forums, social-graphical RP applications like Furcadia, web-based graphic chatrooms like Wolfhome, 3D avatar social spaces like Feral Hearts and Second Life, dedicated Discord servers, Google Docs, guys I sent in an application to join the giant LOTR Minecraft RP server, MINECRAFT. Although I lost interest quickly I think. RPI MUDs, the usual MUSHes/MUXes/MOOs, MMOs, specifically the various dedicated Warcraft private servers, through deviantart messaging, avidgamer forums, journal platforms like livejournal, and in the earliest of days, RPing via writing with pen and paper and passing notebooks to friends.

If it involved media or theme I was interested in, and it had some way of communicating through text, and people were generally on-board with the idea of RPing with me, I was going to RP.

All of these have different pacing. My personal perceptions:

Instant - From SECONDS to minutes. 3 minutes would be pushing it (MMOs/Warcraft/FFXIV, 3D social spaces like Second Life, VRChat, Feral Hearts, MUDs if they’re RPI)
Standard/Live - 7-10 minutes, but can stretch up to like, 15-20 in some cases. (most traditional MUSHes/MUXes/MOOs, I think perhaps some IRC places used to expect this pace)
Async - Ye olde play by post, where response time is loosely defined. I gather some async players generally go for a lighter pace at around 3 or 4 poses a day, or 1 a day. (Forums, Google Docs, Discord, web-based/ares mushes centered around a more casual pace)
Novella - I’ve seen 1 pose a day for the novella posts, up to one WEEK. And I’ve participated in them! And finished scenes, somehow! (Specific Discords billed as “Literate only”, usually, some async settings, some forum settings) Honestly this is just async on crack.

I prefer standard/live, because there’s nothing like being in the moment but still having enough description to FEEL the moment, and still be permitted to exchange quips like you would in MMO RP, where it’s seconds between responses. You can dip back and forth, from conversation to descriptive moments, and that’s the sweet spot for me. I say this as a slowass poser!

What about you? What pace do you like and why? Try not to get too caught up on what you think is superior. ALL GOOD (maybe) VIBES.

bear_necessities

My preferred pace is always live. Quick back and forth poses with turns that take 5-10 minutes, scenes that take 2-3 hours TOPS and actually feel satisfying, poses that are maybe a paragraph or two at most but are punchy, lively and on point? Fuck yes. That just isn’t my reality anymore.

My reality pace is probably 1-2 poses a day. Sometimes if I’m really into a scene and work/home isn’t too distracting, I can punch out a pose every half hour, 45 minutes, but that’s few and far between.

bear_necessities

This might be a little controversial or whatever but this thread has made me wonder if our pacing style has changed/evolved just due to how we MUSH now. It’s only semi-recently (like the past 5 years-ish) that I’ve been able to have multiple scenes going at once, which has in fact affected my pace. And because other people have multiple scenes going at once, that means they are posing at a different pace, which has in turn affected my pace.

Back in my MUD days (or Firan, Arx days), you really only could have one scene going. I mean, you could be playing multiple games at once (I know I was), but usually speaking you were only in one scene at a time on each MUSH. But now a days you could logically be on half a dozen scenes on MUSH A, three more on MUSH B, and maybe a dozen on MUSH C, and that’s absolutely going to affect your posing pace.

IDK my point, just a thought I guess.

Yam

@bear_necessities Totally a factor. Easier pathways/avenues to split up your attention while within the same setting. It’s VERY convenient when I need to RP with 3 different people on the same night. Less convenient when I… have decided to RP with 3 people in one night. I am the architect of my own destruction.

Admittedly me double-booking everything even with a SINGLE player bit still led to me cracking open a gdoc or asking the partner if they want to play on Discord. I could see that being discouraging for some folk, though.

Third Eye

Standard Live or more staggered/distracted live if I’m at work, which I’ve usually seen defined as poses can take like 20 mins+ to come in but you’re still done in a day or two and consistently paying attention. I prefer a relatively brisk pace for the improv feel of it but both are fine.

Async does not for me and I’m doing my best to minimize how often I do it. I fell into the trap of agreeing to it to be ‘nice’ once too often, particularly with people I don’t know. It’s OK if there’s no other option but it’s fundamentally not why I’m here and too much of it makes my enjoyment bottom out. This is also why I never really stuck with forum or dreamwidth RP, though I did try them.

Roz

@bear_necessities Idk, my experience is that we were RPing multiple scenes at a time on MU*s from way back when, just using alts. (Either literally playing the alt as that character, or else spoofing Alt A via Alt B and playing two Alt A scenes at the same time.) That was definitely a common thing I saw on lots of games since my childhood.

I actually remember a big argument on MSB about it at one point years ago, with someone saying that they felt insulted to get the second alt for a scene. (This was a minority opinion, not a common one, but it just sticks in my head because of how funny the conversation was. Whoever it was was honestly REALLY offended.)

ETA: That said, it did still limit how many scenes you could do at once. You were limited to the number of character bits you could have, AKA limited by the game’s alt policy. And maybe more difficult to manage on games where stats and sheets and rolling were prevalent. Those limits fundamentally don’t exist on codebases like Ares now. If you’re playing 5 scenes at once, you pretty much have to be doing them async.

Yam

@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I actually remember a big argument on MSB about it at one point years ago, with someone saying that they felt insulted to get the second alt for a scene.

I love this because it implies some kind of sloppy seconds with RP partners.

Roz

@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I actually remember a big argument on MSB about it at one point years ago, with someone saying that they felt insulted to get the second alt for a scene.

I love this because it implies some kind of sloppy seconds with RP partners.

it was literally absolutely that. they were mad at their perception that they were being placed in a secondary status, and they found it deeply offensive that someone might agree to a scene without revealing that they’d be playing another scene in parallel.

bear_necessities

@Roz Yeah I mean I’m not saying it didn’t happen. I definitely had 2 scenes going on Arx numerous times, plus probably a side scene in Discord. And I had a lot more energy back in my Arx days! But I do think that 3 scenes is vastly different from the scene counts I’ve had on Ares games, which could reach upwards of 5-6 on one game alone, all moving at various paces. At least my scenes on Arx were live-ish? Unless I was like LETS PAUSE AND RECONNECT TOMORROW AT 4PM.

MisterBoring

For me it’s probably the 7-10 minute pace. I don’t like asynch because of several bad experiences I’ve had where players would put their characters into multiple scenes that would twist up the narrative chronologically and require retcons and other stuff to fix. In one extreme case, a PC died while asynchronously participating in 3 other scenes with wildly separate chronological order to them, and the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.

I would say that I’d be okay with asynch or slower if the game had a rule that any given PC could only participate in a single scene at a time.

The whole 0-3 minutes thing seems like it has it’s own pitfalls, but even in my 30 years of playing I can’t honestly remember more than a handful of people attempting it.

Autumn

@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

This might be a little controversial or whatever but this thread has made me wonder if our pacing style has changed/evolved just due to how we MUSH now. It’s only semi-recently (like the past 5 years-ish) that I’ve been able to have multiple scenes going at once, which has in fact affected my pace. And because other people have multiple scenes going at once, that means they are posing at a different pace, which has in turn affected my pace.

So anecdotes are not data, but I have logfiles from a single game that date from 1994 through 2005, then from a second game with the same theme and significant playerbase continuity that date from 2007 through 2012, and then some additional snapshots of my own RP (albeit in different-themed games and with different player groups) since then. Just looking at these in isolation, an evolution in pacing style is clearly visible over time.

The early logs are almost all short, rapid-fire, and highly reactive – often just one sentence at time, with very little variance from the basic say/pose format.
By 2004, there was still some of that, but individual poses were starting to run longer, have better narrative flow, and show evidence of more reflection than reactivity.
By 2007-2008 the stylistic transition from reactive to reflexive has mostly completed and the use of @emit in place of than pose/say is starting to crop up occasionally, but it’s still pretty unusual and the average pose length is still only ~3-4 lines.
By 2012 we’re getting up to 5-6 lines per pose and seeing the occasional embedded paragraph break along with more regular use of @emit.

Past 2012 the evolution is mostly in terms of gradually increasing average pose length, steadily increasing use of formatting, and a gradual abandonment of say/pose entirely, with @emit almost completely replacing both of them.

I think for me the major inflection point happened around ~2006-2008 – it gradually became less improv and more writing. I stopped trying to react as the character and started trying to craft a narrative. Poses I wrote in 2010 read not too differently from poses I write today, except for being shorter and brisker; poses I wrote in 1998 are from a completely different mindset and only share the occasional telltale quirk of vocabulary or phrasing.

hellfrog

@Third-Eye said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Standard Live or more staggered/distracted live if I’m at work, which I’ve usually seen defined as poses can take like 20 mins+ to come in but you’re still done in a day or two and consistently paying attention. I prefer a relatively brisk pace for the improv feel of it but both are fine.

i was going to post my own preferences but THIRD EYE BLIND already did it. Sometimes my normal poses take 10-15 minutes, but that’s because i’m old and my brain is slow and i’m not a great writer. But hopefully, that shows in the poses and I don’t seem like I’m not paying attention. I try hard to be ‘in the moment’ because I hate it so much when I can tell my scene partners are distracted - my mental disability goes nuts.