RP Safari - Pacing Styles
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@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I noticed the big novella style RPers on discord doing a lot of meta posing, crafting thoughts about other characters that those characters can’t respond to, and this is either very very popular or very not. I gather that style is more about the writing part than the collaborative part of collaborative writing.
I see this in Storium a lot too, and honestly it’s what’s kept me from enjoying that platform more. Players rarely interact with each other, they mostly interact alongside each other.
I guess there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but when I play these online games I do it to engage with other players. Not just to watch them do their thing while they watch me do mine.
There are exceptions, but ironically most of those take place off of Storium in Google-docs in the same way that pre-Ares async scenes took place in Google-docs. When the platform doesn’t support what the players need, they find ways around it.
What I don’t understand though…
The prevailing sentiment in this thread is that people prefer live/traditional RP, but I’ve seen complaints elsewhere that too many scenes are async now. If live is everyone’s preference, why aren’t there more live scenes? What’s stopping you? Ares, for example, lets you spin up a scene and mark the pacing expectation. Evennia/Rhost are still geared towards live RP overall. Where’s the obstacle? Is it just a scheduling thing?
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I prefer live scenes with pose rounds lasting 10-20 minutes, or at least what we call sessioned scenes, which is live for 1-2 hours one night, and then live for another 1-2 hours another night.
During the day, I’m okay with Distracted, where pose rounds last 15-60 minutes, but it can lead to me feeling bad if I take too long or my RP partner takes too long (I didn’t say it made sense).
A solid chunk of my RP is async, even though I don’t much like the style, simply because that’s what best fits into the available time. Most of my availability is after 8pm Pacific, when most non-Pacific folks (and many Pacific folks) are in bed or headed to bed. But if an async scene goes more than 24 hours between poses, or takes more than a week overall… I tend to lose the thread pretty hard.
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@Roadspike said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I prefer live scenes with pose rounds lasting 10-20 minutes, or at least what we call sessioned scenes, which is live for 1-2 hours one night, and then live for another 1-2 hours another night.
I’m actually not sure why split/sessioned stuff isn’t more of a Thing, I’d certainly prefer it when scheduling is an issue.
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@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
The prevailing sentiment in this thread is that people prefer live/traditional RP, but I’ve seen complaints elsewhere that too many scenes are async now. If live is everyone’s preference, why aren’t there more live scenes?
I mean, this is a sample size of about ten very opinionated people, lol. it’s just not going to be an accurate reflection of the entire population of the hobby.
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@Wizz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I mean, this is a sample size of about ten very opinionated people, lol. it’s just not going to be an accurate reflection of the entire population of the hobby.
The paradox of the MUSH discussion forum, alas
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@Wizz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I mean, this is a sample size of about ten very opinionated people, lol. it’s just not going to be an accurate reflection of the entire population of the hobby.
The MUSH community is not THAT big, so it’s not like we’re talking 10 players out of a million here. And this sentiment has been reflected across numerous other threads here. The question still remains though - are these folks just having trouble finding each other? Are they truly in a minority? Is there something else standing in their way?
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@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
The prevailing sentiment in this thread is that people prefer live/traditional RP, but I’ve seen complaints elsewhere that too many scenes are async now. If live is everyone’s preference, why aren’t there more live scenes?
I think there are probably plenty of live scenes. Async scenes are just more visible because they’re around longer. If you log into a game during a less active period and you see five or ten scenes on the active scenes list, and they’re all async… you’re going to assume that that’s the majority, or the only kind. But you’re only seeing them because they’re the ones still currently active. You missed seeing the twenty live scenes happening earlier in the week.
That and people complain loudly but praise quietly. “This thing isn’t what I want” is more visible than “I am satisfied with what is going on.” So you’ll likely hear people complaining about too much async and too little async, and the truth about availability is somewhere in the middle.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
My preferred pace is live. It almost never happens.
I’m in Europe, which places me in an awkward timezone for a lot of people. I suffer various health issues, chronic fatigue among them.
Because of that, most of my scenes are async. I prefer agreeing with others at the start what that actually means. Are we doing this scene over a day or two, expecting at least a few pose rounds a day? A pose round a day? Or are we going glacial, where people post whenever they’re able and a scene can take several weeks?
I am capable of them all. I just want to know in advance.
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@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
If live is everyone’s preference, why aren’t there more live scenes? What’s stopping you? Ares, for example, lets you spin up a scene and mark the pacing expectation. Evennia/Rhost are still geared towards live RP overall. Where’s the obstacle? Is it just a scheduling thing?
If I had to guess, it’s happening on private games. There are very few public games on Ares, and none of them appear to have a “live scene” culture.
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@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
There are very few public games on Ares, and none of them appear to have a “live scene” culture.
Empty Night and Aegis Company both have a heavy majority of ‘traditional’ pacing scenes listed in their 10+ active scenes. There are probably others.
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@Trashcan said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
Empty Night and Aegis Company both have a heavy majority of ‘traditional’ pacing scenes listed in their 10+ active scenes. There are probably others.
If I had to guess, that’s a result of the play screen defaulting to traditional pacing rather than actual intention. Just looking at Empty Night, of the active scenes listed as “traditional” pacing, only one of them was started today. Many of them were started several days (if not a week+ ago). Aegis Company seems to be largely the same as far as scene date and last activity go.
To me, the active scene list on either of those games does not seem to promote a “live” scene culture.
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@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
To me, the active scene list on either of those games does not seem to promote a “live” scene culture.
If I go to my office right now, it does not seem to promote an active workplace culture. Because it’s three in the morning.
Looking at one snapshot of one metric is a poor way of judging something.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@Pavel said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
That and people complain loudly but praise quietly. “This thing isn’t what I want” is more visible than “I am satisfied with what is going on.” So you’ll likely hear people complaining about too much async and too little async, and the truth about availability is somewhere in the middle.
^ this. I have a firm suspicion that if you were to do a broader anonymous survey that somehow managed to bring in enough people to be relevant, you probably would see some mild preference either way but not the extremes people like to express here because…we are always driven to express extremes, it’s just what this board is.
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@Wizz You’ll more likely get people bitching about your survey.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@Pavel OK well since I’m obviously wrong, please tell me how these games promote a live scene culture.
If a majority of scenes on the “active scenes” list began several days ago and are still ongoing, and nearly every single scene on the “recent scene list” are also several days old (versus, say, from yesterday or even two days ago), how does that say “live” to you?
The argument is that people prefer scenes that: a) are not async, b) are taking 7-10 minutes between poses, and c) end within the day.
Nothing in the active scenes or recent scenes list of either of these games suggest that’s what is happening.
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@Pavel said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
@Wizz You’ll more likely get people bitching about your survey.
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@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
OK well since I’m obviously wrong, please tell me how these games promote a live scene culture.
I was commenting on your methods, not your conclusion. If all you look at is the active scene list, all you’ll see are the scenes that are currently active. Which will, by their nature, skew towards the async. They’ll be there if you look at 3am or 8pm, and active scenes won’t.
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@Pavel Point. Counterpoint: many of the recent scenes aren’t particularly recent, either, which again points to the conclusion I was able to draw from the active scene list.
It’s not a bad thing, it’s not negative at all to either of these games. It’s just a mismatch from what people say they prefer to reality, which was @Faraday 's question to begin with.
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@bear_necessities I do wonder whether so much of the mismatch is simply due to what people see each codebase/software suite as being for. Ares is the async system, TinyMUX is for live WoD, Evennia is for… people who want to make Arx 2?, etc. So when we check Arescentral, we get games with a high (perceived or actual) async culture because… it’s Ares, that’s what it’s for.
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@Pavel That’s sort of what I was questioning above.
Like seriously, if you are having live RP, where are you having it? Is it JUST Silent Haven for live RP? Is it in private Ares games? Discord? I’m curious.
