RP Safari - Pacing Styles
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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.
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@bear_necessities Well, there’s Towers and Retro, both WoD MUs that are seemingly reasonably active, Liberation’s still going, Heroes Assemble, it looks like City of Hope is still around or newly revived, and it even looks as though Shadowrun Denver is active.
Games is out there, yo.
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I play both on Aegis Company and Empty Night, most of the scenes under my belt are Live. Though some of them do transition from Live to Distracted/Async to finish. Apparently I’ve participated in 82 scenes on Aegis Company and 15 on Empty Night, the latter I’m still learning and the last two weeks have been RL hell for me. Just sharing my experiences. I think a lot of the scenes listed as Live that stay up much longer than expected are because they did start as Live but are not able to be completed in that one sitting.
I am willing to play in all three modes (Live, Distracted, ASync), more than willing to leave it up to the people I RP with. However, I can say that Live is the easiest and ASync is the hardest. It is much easier for me to lock in during a live scene and not lose the thread or the mindset of my character. ASync is much more challenging for me since I have to step back into what my character was feeling from the last pose, sometimes having to reread the scene just to get a better feel again.
Live does transition to Distracted more often than not because some scenes can’t be finished in one sitting and closing it out early would not do it justice, but then that is where the challenges come in. You have to hope that your schedules match up the next day or soon or is transitions to ASync. Also, sometimes you’re having a great day when the scene started so you’re in a creative mindset. Then RL clobbers you the next day and it’s definitely not the same feeling. This goes even more so with ASync since you’re having to juggle different days of RL poking at you.
The biggest factor comes down to time which was much more available when we were younger. Now, adulting makes a mess of it, which is rather unfortunate.
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You can get real-time scenes if you make it a point to ask for them, at least on Ares games I’ve managed to stick on (Crimson Compass currently, Shattered in the recent past, I can’t speak for the two games mentioned). I have to curate my own experience/ask for it in a way I didn’t like 3 or 4 years ago, though. I suspect it’s similar most reasonably active players.
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@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
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.
If we take ‘two days ago’ as 2/23, then the recent scenes for Empty Night has 2 of those and both of them show the IC and OOC date as the same, which usually means it was started and finished on the same day. Aegis Company has 4 of those and all 4 show the same IC and OOC end date.
The active scenes list being mostly ‘stale’ scenes is survivorship bias. The scenes that are not going to finish in a day stay on there; the scenes that are end up on recent scenes, and between these 2 games I’m counting 6 likely same-day real-time scenes in the last 2 days.
I’m not saying we’re drowning in games where this is happening, but I am saying “none” is not accurate.
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@Trashcan said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I’m not saying we’re drowning in games where this is happening, but I am saying “none” is not accurate.
Yeah I’m definitely not saying none! Just was trying to answer Faraday’s question the best i can with the information that’s accessible.
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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.
I’m not sure how you define “few” but there are 16 currently open public ones and that’s actually the majority of the open Ares games in total.
@Pavel said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
async culture because… it’s Ares, that’s what it’s for.
Except that is expressly NOT what Ares is for. I know, because I designed it to do live scenes (since that is also my preference). The vast majority of scenes on my Ares games were live, because I made them that way.
Like I can’t control how people play with it, but on a technical level Ares supports live scenes just as well as it does async scenes. The only difference between it and PennMUSH is that you can also play async more easily.
So yes, there will be more async scenes visible on Ares games because people who were RPing with alts in TP rooms, or in Google docs, or on private sandboxes, or (way back when) on LiveJournal can now play in the game. They were always there, it’s just more visible on Ares games.
But having more async scenes doesn’t prevent anyone else from doing live scenes, any more than me eating chocolate prevents you from eating vanilla. So that’s why I’m trying to dig deeper into it.
Are people trying and failing to run live scenes? If so, why? Perhaps there are tools to help.
Or are they just annoyed that they want to join live scenes (i.e. they expect someone else to run them) and are annoyed that nobody is catering to their preference. That is a very different issue.
ETA: I’m not meaning to wrongfun anybody in that last paragraph btw. It’s totally fine to be frustrated that no game is providing what you prefer to play. I’ve been there myself. But I wouldn’t blame the game-runners for that, and I certainly wouldn’t blame the server.
