RP Safari - Pacing Styles
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@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.
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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.
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@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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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@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.
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Standard/live for me. I don’t mind waiting for an emote that has some weight to it, but I expect my partner’s full attention. If I am waiting around because you’re trying to seduce Bridget in another window, that’s just disrespectful.
I have been known to do some novella in various forums. I fell out of it mainly because people would get bored of a story literally by the time everyone had finished doing their introductions and just bounce to the next thread. I’d started plenty of stories but god, I wanted to finish a single scene with all the people I’d started with.
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asynchronous babyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
that or I also enjoy “work slow”/staggered or whatever because I, too, am old and slow-brained, and tbh I have always hated feeling the pressure of “live” pacing.
I was never very good at it and it made me feel bad whenever strangers started getting impatient, so everybody kinda easing up more or less has been nice.
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if async has no haters it means that i am dead
she/her | playlist
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@Roz
fuckinFITE ME
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I stopped hating on async when I started refusing to stay up way too late for any of you
hoescourtesans. -
THIS IS A NO JUDGMENT ZONE
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@Yam There isn’t a universal terminology of course, but just for context… In Ares the terms used in the scene dropdown are:
Your Term Ares Term Instant Not Used Standard/Live Traditional Async Distracted Novella Asynchronous I mention this not to be pedantic, but just to highlight that the same term (e.g., “Async”) can mean wildly different pacing styles to different people. (In Storium, their “Fast” pacing is on par with our Distracted, lol.)
In my experience, the distinction between Distracted and Async is that a Distracted scene is likely to get done in the span of a single day and Async usually takes much longer.
While I see Async (Ares definition) scenes as a necessary evil when schedules don’t align or a scene can’t be wrapped up neatly, I don’t actually like them much. One of the defining characteristics of MUs for me is the fact that the in-game time passes at a set rate compared to the RL time. Async RP screws with the continuity and often leads to scenes petering out / left hanging.
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@Faraday Makes sense. I didn’t include distracted because to me that’s just like “hey I want to angle for live/standard but I’m at work, you okay with delays longer than maybe 15 mins” but it ultimately finishes within a day. USUALLY. I was trying to keep it platform agnostic, although I realize we’re all a bunch of mushers and ares facilitates a new pace within this niche environment, even if this pace has existed in forums since forever.
Curious how many people resolve their workslow/distracted scenes within a day.
I see more async scenes than distracted, spanning weeks.
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‘async’ to me reads as ‘we are going into this expecting it will be ongoing for days, weeks, or even months’ and i just cannot
fr fr
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@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
Curious how many people resolve their workslow/distracted scenes within a day.
I haven’t been able to play for awhile, but previously? Almost always. Multi-day async scenes were limited to cases where our schedules couldn’t line up and something important needed to happen.
I find it interesting that the norm is so different in other online RP styles. In Storium, the multi-week async scenes are the norm, and people use Google Docs for the more rapid back-and-forths that are closer to MU distracted or shorter async ones.
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@hellfrog said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
‘async’ to me reads as ‘we are going into this expecting it will be ongoing for days, weeks, or even months’ and i just cannot
personally speaking, days, probably. weeks? a few times but not often. I don’t know that any one async scene I have been in has ever gone on for more than a month, it messes with continuity too much.
a scene that takes about a week became my new norm and I KNOW AND LOVE THAT IT IS HERESY
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@Wizz Yeah, I would say a week is the new norm
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I think I’ve always been a slower-ish poser. Whether because I used to smoke and would take quick breaks or because I was just typing so much - I donno. So even now, my live rp tends to be 7-10 minutes to pose.
Recently I’ve abandoned clients for the Ares portal and with that shift, have also become more of an async rp’er. I work a LOT and having a scene that I know can run a few days to fit my schedule is just awesome. No stress, no rush - I’m digging it. It’s rare that I have more than one scene going on though.
I still do live scenes on the weekends here and there, but async is kinda my new jam.
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@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
Curious how many people resolve their workslow/distracted scenes within a day.
Me, generally. Sometimes two if there’s a need to pause but I pick that pacing specifically so they won’t go on forever.
