Scenes within Scenes
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Table talk! Places! Mechanics where if you go to an event, you can slip into one of these locations/items/settings and have your local conversation contained in some way, whether it blocks out the rest of the scene chatter from other locations except purposeful text from the GM, or it simply applies a label to make it clear text is coming from your specific location… or maybe there’s a different variant you’ve seen?
I want to know what you’ve encountered, what works for you, what doesn’t, etc.
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I think they work for some people, but I myself honestly forget they’re in the game, even when I sit my character at a place.
So for me it’s:
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@Yam I like them when there is a scene going on that it is my IC role to watch. Watching by itself is boring but kibbitzing privately with people at the same table as me is fun. It is a pain in the ass to log though.
I don’t find it very useful when all it does is put stuff at the beginning of a pose, though. I get why it exists but my brain is inherently cluttered so it doesn’t work well for me.
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Back on FORT BLOODSHED (of ‘staff sent wild animals to ruin my canoodling’ fame) table talk was routed to a channel staff could see, and the staff characters would show up and accost you if you were saying something they didn’t like. That was about 10,000 years ago and I’m still wary of table talk.
But more genuinely, I think there’s pros and cons. It allows a smaller conversation during a giant scene, but rare are the games these days in which such giant scenes still occur. It can create some drama when you get left out of a tabletalk or someone poses to the room “Wow look at Ashkuri he is such an expired salami lol lmao” and then goes “oh sorry that was meant for my table!”
I think for Ares games, whose logging features do not mesh well with tabletalk as it was known in other formats, the “side scene” is better: spinning up another scene where you and your friend(s) have that small conversation from the party in the smaller group.
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@Ashkuri Ares has built-in places feature that simply identifies chat happening in different places. It doesn’t mess up the log because nothing is hidden from anyone.
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I never found places useful. It doesn’t add anything to the scene. It always sort of seemed like in games with places code, it was just the place to go to talk shit privately in a public event or finger each other or something lol.
In Ares, I really find places to be distracting and I haven’t seen it used in any meaningful way.
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@bear_necessities said in Scenes within Scenes:
In Ares, I really find places to be distracting and I haven’t seen it used in any meaningful way.
I don’t really like them much either, but I absolutely hated the old-school places systems so… meh.
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I don’t like them. There’s no real reason RP should be invisible to the room simply because it occurred at a table, and it ends up being used so people can have their secret conversation while also being able to see everything else that happened in the room.
It’s a hugely requested feature on games that don’t have it. But if a scene is so busy that you need to split it up, just do that? Move to a different room. Take your friends onto the balcony. Actually commit to moving far enough away to experience some quiet. Don’t just move to a table and listen to everything anyway.
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The only times I found places remotely useful were in very, very large scenes – typically big sphere meetings, where you could organize talk to just your specific group of players you wanted to play with. However, that always made those big scenes feel like “this meeting could have been an email” occasions since no one is really engaging with the meeting in any meaningful way.
I’m with @Juniper in that it doesn’t make a lot of narrative sense to have a place where I’m functionally unable to be heard. That seems like it should just be another room.
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I think that -in general- places code is trying to police a social problem (players having their characters react to things their characters shouldn’t be able to hear) with a code solution (making it so players can’t hear some of what’s said). And I’m generally not in favor of that.
I’ve used the Ares places code in large combat scenes to highlight what area of the battlefield players are posing from, but since as a GM, I can’t pose to a specific place without changing places regularly, my GM poses don’t have a places tag. That’s okay, but it loses some of what’s useful about the Ares places code: highlighting what’s happening near your character.
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Through the early 2000s, the big Pern games had strict building quotas, so areas couldn’t actually build rooms for everything. Your builder might get a 20-room quota, so admin had to prioritize. It wasn’t uncommon to have 30+ people in the Galleries room, all watching and reacting to the same Hatching room scene, which also has 10+ people posing in it, so having places helped minimize the spam. The galleries might have four sections in it, so you’d be seeing the big event spam and then mostly just the 5-10 people your PC was actually close enough to talk to.
And all the people apologizing for forgetting to use the places code.
I remember on at least one WoD game, the code interacted with code for things like heightened senses and obfuscation. People could drop into table-talk to avoid having an invisible character eavesdrop, and/or certain characters could eavesdrop if they had the right stats.
It was a nice bauble - not unlike mutter code that would replace random bits of dialogue with ellipses, or language code that only translated things if you had the right stats.
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i am a FAN of the traditional places/tabletalk system; i have been at countless big event scenes that would have felt entirely unmanageable without them.
@Juniper said in Scenes within Scenes:
But if a scene is so busy that you need to split it up, just do that? Move to a different room. Take your friends onto the balcony. Actually commit to moving far enough away to experience some quiet. Don’t just move to a table and listen to everything anyway.
the situations where i have most often used tabletalk/places code, that’s just not viable due to the nature of the scene. it would generally be at a large event of some kind where there’s specific need or reason to stay in the main room for the events going on.
@Roadspike said in Scenes within Scenes:
I think that -in general- places code is trying to police a social problem (players having their characters react to things their characters shouldn’t be able to hear) with a code solution (making it so players can’t hear some of what’s said). And I’m generally not in favor of that.
that reasoning has honestly never occurred to me. for me, places/tt has always been about making large scenes more manageable by reducing the overall spam levels.
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@Roz said in Scenes within Scenes:
@Roadspike said in Scenes within Scenes:
I think that -in general- places code is trying to police a social problem (players having their characters react to things their characters shouldn’t be able to hear) with a code solution (making it so players can’t hear some of what’s said). And I’m generally not in favor of that.
that reasoning has honestly never occurred to me. for me, places/tt has always been about making large scenes more manageable by reducing the overall spam levels.
That reasoning has definitely occurred to me and is fully legitimate as a reasoning because - well - not everyone can control themselves when there’s tea / a great pun opportunity / or a fantastic ‘that’s what she said!’ just hanging there for the taking.
But the real purpose of table talk is to isolate the inane peanut gallery chatter from the actual important shit going on.
And also to make mostly one-way scenes (such as sermons, lectures, ceremonies, giant meetings and concerts) less boring.
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Very much a fan of traditional places. If we MUST have large scenes where a few key characters are going to Do Stuff and the rest of the characters need to sit there and watch, then at least give me the opportunity to RP with a few people while watching without spamming the rest of the scene.
Hate Ares places system because it doesn’t fix the main thing I want from tabletalk - reducing the number of poses I see that I don’t need to react to and making it easier for me to keep up with the poses my character is focusing on.
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@Pyrephox said in Scenes within Scenes:
Hate Ares places system because it doesn’t fix the main thing I want from tabletalk - reducing the number of poses I see that I don’t need to react to and making it easier for me to keep up with the poses my character is focusing on.
Yeah I think a places system needs to consider several different concerns:
- Overwhelm from sheer volume of spam
- Knowing what your character reasonably hear / react to (even setting aside the “cheating” aspect someone mentioned above, there’s still a mental load of figuring out whether something is noticeable)
- Organization of what’s happening where
- Sharing in the overall story together (e.g., log completeness and not feeling isolated from one another in separate rooms)
- Complexities of the posing interface
When I was designing Ares’ places system, I concluded there’s just no way to do ALL of these things at once. You have to pick and choose priorities. For example, traditional table talk emphasizes the first few and compromises the last few. Ares’ system is the opposite.
Since everyone has different things that are most important to them, they’re going to prefer different systems.
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I like places. Part of that is just the nostalgia that drives, I think, like 90% of MU* stuff. Part of it’s because you usually really can’t see shit happening in a booth at a club. And part of it’s because one time a friend and I got yelled at for “spamming a public scene” and it was just us doing our normal poses.
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@howyadoin said in Scenes within Scenes:
But the real purpose of table talk is to isolate the inane peanut gallery chatter from the actual important shit going on.
And also to make mostly one-way scenes (such as sermons, lectures, ceremonies, giant meetings and concerts) less boring.
Again, this seems like a code solution trying to fix a social problem.
If there’s “important shit” going on that the peanut gallery can’t interrupt? Don’t have the peanut gallery at the scene. Have them in their own side-scene, either happening at the same time as the “important shit” scene that they can watch freely, or RPed after the "important shit* scene but ICly taking place at the same time.
If it’s a one-way scene that again, can’t be interrupted? Don’t make it a scene! I’m sure we’ve all been in plenty of scenes where we thought, “This didn’t need to be a scene, it could’ve been a post/vignette/scene-set.” So don’t make them scenes. Have the GM post up their too-important-to-be-interrupted scene as a Vignette, and then have the actual scene be everyone’s reaction to it afterwards. You know, when people can actually interact with each other without interrupting.
Formerly known as Seraphim73 (he/him)
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@Roadspike said in Scenes within Scenes:
Have them in their own side-scene, either happening at the same time as the “important shit” scene that they can watch freely
That is practically the same thing as using places code, when it’s used correctly. Additionally, not every system allows you to just watch other scenes freely.
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@Pavel said in Scenes within Scenes:
@Roadspike said in Scenes within Scenes:
- Have them in their own side-scene, either happening at the same time as the “important shit” scene that they can watch freely
That is practically the same thing as using places code, when it’s used correctly. Additionally, not every system allows you to just watch other scenes freely.
It is practically the same thing, and I don’t actually think it would be that hard to address with code. You’d create a sort of sub-scene class that links back to a parent scene and shows the emits from the parent to the child but not the reverse. It’s not wildly dissimilar in concept from how combats work in Ares.
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@Trashcan It’s not hard to address with code given we have the code already. And the current/traditional/typical code implementation allows for interruptions, as they are sometimes required or desired.
Though honestly, I’m more on board with the suggestions that involve “just fucking don’t” for scenes that require it. I don’t need massive meetings, huge parties, all that shit. If you like those, I think you’re weird but whatever, if you like those and don’t see utility in places code, I think you’re weirder.
