@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

i think for me and some others, social RP is largely the vast majority of RP that isn’t super directly plot RP. and if that’s not the case for others, then this is an argument about semantics.

Yes, I think that this is absolutely a semantic difference in definitions. Since there is no one true universal definition of “social RP”, everyone’s going to come at it with their own personal definition. So it is entirely plausible that some people will say “all social RP is boring” based on their definition of social RP.

Personally, I don’t think RP fits neatly into boxes like “social”, “plot”, etc. for reasons that folks have described already. It’s a more nuanced dial. But if I were forced to define “social RP” it would be smalltalk / slice of life where it’s only about the social aspect and nothing else interesting and/or plot-related happens. I generally don’t like that. I’m not here for Life Simulator. I want a little drama or adventure.

I’m not saying I’ll never do social RP, but it’s not something I particularly enjoy.

@Wizz 100% agree.

Some things may be made easier or more difficult in different pacing styles.

In rapid-fire pacing, it’s harder to polish/edit (due to time pressure), but it’s easier to do back-and-forth interactions. In async it’s the opposite. Neither is intrinsically better or worse, but one might align more closely to your preferences.

@Wizz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

before async was even a twinkle in Faraday’s eye

I certainly didn’t invent async RP on MUs. I’ve been doing async MUSH scenes by email almost as long as I’ve been MUSHing. It’s always been there. Now, with Ares, it can just be done on the game.

@Clarion said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

you can have rich room descriptions that give you something to RP off of.

Yeah for example see the locations directory on Keys. Each of those locations, like Abandoned Animatronic Pizza Place, is equivalent to a grid room. Many games also provide either ASCII or graphical maps like Keys’ here to show how the locations relate to each other.

Now if you desire the “immersive feel” of literally typing N/E/N/In or whatever to reach the pizza place, then sure - that’s personal preference and off-grid/web RP is not going to be your thing. No shade. (Though I stress again that Ares games also have grids you can play on.)

But the arguments that off-grid/web play means RPing in some void where you have nothing to go on and nobody can ever run into you are simply not how this works.

@Ominous said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

Those set up scenes never seem to be “our characters come across one another and strike up a conversation before becoming fast friends a few scenes later.” They always seem to start in media res

I’m not disputing your personal experience, but it’s been very different than mine. You don’t have to randomly encounter someone on the grid to have an impromptu scene with them. I can’t count the number of times I’ve set up a 1-on-1 scene with somebody my character didn’t already know and then just had them randomly meeting for the first time ICly. The only difference is the amount of OOC coordination involved.

@Ominous said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

The second problem I have is that it doesn’t leave room for happenstance.

Again, Ares’ scene system just gives you the choice. If you want happenstance, you leave the scene open. Others are free to join. If you don’t, you make the scene private.

Here are just a few of the many different ways you can RP in Ares:

• Grid RP: Faraday hangs out in the Gym hoping for someone to come by. When Ominous enters the grid room, Faraday poses doing something. Ominous responds. Yam joins from the web portal. Roadspike wanders into the grid room and joins too.
• Off-Grid Client Open RP: Faraday PMs Ominous: “Hey, want to do a scene? Our characters seem to both like basketball, maybe they could meet in the Gym?” We use scene/start to start an off-grid client RP set in the Gym and our characters meet for the first time. Since we left the scene open, Yam can use scene/join to join it. Roadspike can also join from the web portal.
• Pickup Web RP: Faraday creates a web scene set in the Gym, leaving it open. Ominous, Roadspike, and Yam all join from either web or client.
• Private RP: Faraday and Ominous have a basketball showdown off-grid, set in the Gym, and since it’s private, nobody else can join.

You can still do pickup RP. You can still do random grid RP. You can just ALSO do private RP more easily. Philosophically I just don’t think it’s good to force people to play in ways that they don’t want to for some imagined “good of the game”.

@Ominous said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

If I am doing novella stuff, which I call collaborative writing and I haven’t done in decades because I’m picky and it has an even smaller population than MUs do, it HAS to be async. Someone (I’m not scrolling up to see who) was poo-poo-ing on this style, suggesting that such a framework focuses on the writing aspect at the expense of collaboration. That is incorrect. I would actually argue that MU*ing is much less collaborative as everyone in a scene tends to be looking out for number one with number one being their character. It’s a different mindset.

I think we’re maybe talking about different things. The long-form async style I’ve seen in venues like Storium and forum play still has the one-character-per-player hallmarks of MUs, only the poses are way way longer. Due to the length of time between everyone’s poses, it’s basically impossible to have a meaningful conversation or to coordinate actions with one another. Mostly folks either just do their own things separately (resulting in less collaboration) or are forced to go off-game to collaborate more directly in discord/google docs/whatever.

@Yam No - in Storium you mostly just control your own character. They’re a little more tolerant of power-posing someone else in the interests of expediency, but most of the moves I’ve seen are just one character.

@Trashcan said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

Even knowing that you could start a scene from the grid, again, I never saw anyone do it and I never did it even though I’d just come from a game where that was the only way of RPing. Why? Because it is just so much easier to click ‘Create a Scene’ and fill out the fields, which you will need to do anyway to share it and it’s clunky to do them all from the client. You don’t have to wander the grid like a fool peering in shop windows for the right room. You can just select from the list.

It should be covered in the basic help files/tutorial, but even setting that aside - There’s almost no functional difference between starting a scene from the grid and starting the scene from the web portal. If you mark it open to the public, both provide a way for any random person to join the scene and RP according to the scene’s pacing from either the MU client or the web portal.

So yes, it’s different, but it’s not different in a way that (IMHO) makes it harder to play live.

To your other point though - yes, there’s a default private setting for web/off-grid scenes, but it used to default to Open. Lots of people complained, because the majority wanted the default to be private. So I changed the default. You’re saying that game design is influencing behavior, but it’s actually the other way around.

Harkening back to the “old days” - you could start a scene in a TP room or on grid. It’s a choice. Even before Ares there were people complaining about “too many” people doing private TP room scenes, which always felt like WrongFun to me. YMMV of course.

MOVED TO THE OTHER THREAD

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

’ve wondered recently how much of this is changing player expectations from the people who were always on the platform 5+ years ago, when the first Ares games like Spirit Lake and Gray Harbor were around, and how much is players from more time-shifted mediums like Discord coming into Ares because it has more QOL features.

Are we getting more players from other mediums though? I’ve only heard of a handful here and there, but I admittedly don’t have hard numbers.

I really wonder how much of it is just shifting player preferences. Other folks in other threads have talked about the MU population getting older, having more responsibilities, less time, etc. And in a world where Netflix designs TV shows around distracted-viewing, is it really that surprising that fewer people want to devote an uninterrupted 4-hour block of time out of their evening to pose every 5 minutes?

I don’t want live RP to go away. I still far prefer it. But even I don’t have time for it any more.

@Pacha said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

The deliciousness of Ares is (for me) that I don’t have to put up with that any more.

Ares lets you choose.

You can plunk yourself down on the grid and scene/start a random pickup scene --OR-- you can selectively start private scenes with only the people you want to play with.

You can RP with live/traditional pacing --OR-- you can play async across disparate schedules and timezones.

If more people are choosing the alternatives, maybe it’s just showing that the old ways were never that popular to begin with.

While that may be paltry consolation to those of us with different preferences, the good news is that server doesn’t care how you play. It just may take more effort to find your people. Make a game where pickup RP is encouraged, or where staff runs only live events. And even if it’s not your game, you can still lead by example, organize, and try to find folks who want to play that way too.

@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I’m actually sorry for saying that because I was definitely putting bias on it, I was really only looking at games with 4 or 5 stars.

Heh okay, fair. Three stars is still good activity though, by my reckoning - that would make 10 public/active games, which is still almost as many as in the entire Evennia list (including all the pre-alphas). Grapevine lists 150, but that seems to be mostly MUDs.

Entirely earnest question - where are these bastions of non-Ares live MUSH RP? How does one find them?

@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.

@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?

@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?

@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.

@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.

@Pyrephox said in Paid Role-Playing:

In practice, though, it would raise my standards for what I expected in return to the point where I’d want a professional product, as opposed to the hobbyist arrangements we have now.

This is exactly why I would be uncomfortable making any kind of “pay to play” mechanism. It’s one thing to ask people to chip in for the collective costs of something they’re using. In RL, a club that needs to rent a venue might ask members to chip in to cover those costs. Likewise, I see nothing wrong with a MU having a tip jar or something for folks to help defray the server costs. But as soon as you start charging more than the costs, you’ve turned it from a community club into a profit-making venture, and that just feels different.

There have been lots of awesome scenes over the years, but I think the one that stands out the most is the finale of Battlestar Pacifica. It was an epic three-pronged final battle that paid off a bunch of story threads. Really proud of how it all turned turned out. It was nice to have a game go out with a bang instead of just petering out as MUs tend to do.

Blowing up the namesake ship was kinda bittersweet though:

As the fleet begins to stand down from Condition One, the damage control officer calls over for Starr’s attention. “Sir - the mains are drifting into the red. We have massive decompressions along frames 122-200 -” He points to the board. “Fires and structural damage are hampering damage control efforts in the starboard flight pod.”

Starr eyes the board with a grim frown. “You’re saying we could lose the ship.”

The officer replies back, in a low voice. “Sir, I’m saying we already have. It’s just a matter of time.”

Starr stares at the board for another long moment, before she finally nods. She picks up the handset again. “Attention all hands. This is the commander. Execute emergency evacuation procedures. Launch all Vipers and Raptors. Salvage critical material where you can and report to the escape pods.” There’s a sad tone to her voice when she says with finality, “Abandon ship.”

@Yam There was definitely monetization via the book sales, but I thought there was also some kind of more direct payment too. Some kind of character perks you could buy? I might be mixing up games, but I know it was a thing somebody tried once.

I think the more freeform story-driven RP experience is too subjective to work well as a paid endeavor. I shudder to imagine “pay to win” applied to storytelling.

That said, I’m pretty sure there were some monetized games in the early 90s that were more RP-oriented. Maybe they were closer to RPIs. I think Otherspace had some things you could pay for? Or maybe it was just a patreon style tip jar? It’s been forever, and I was only there briefly, so apologies if I’m misremembering.

@Third-Eye said in Brainstorming Game Ideas:

The only thing that will motivate someone to create and put the hard work into starting a game long-term is to build what YOU want, to some degree with no eye toward whether it might be popular or not. That doesn’t mean ignoring advice, though frankly sometimes it does.

This. Also you’d maybe be surprised how much fun you can have with a handful of really passionate players.

@Yam said in Web-based CharGen or in-game CharGen:

I’ve often wondered how much applications actually filter anything.

Apps for me are more about filtering out players who don’t understand the theme. I can’t count the number of times that the app process has blocked an “oh heck to the no” type of character. And games without apps have led to some pretty forehead-slapping retcons.

This is harder to do with roster chars because the backstory is already written for them. Those “job interview” type apps have always icked me out as a player, so I’ve never wanted to do them as staff.

@Pavel said in Web-based CharGen or in-game CharGen:

Faraday and Cobalt. Next question.

Aw thanks.