@KarmaBum said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

i wasn’t asking what types of RP she dislikes

Thank you for clarifying, as I also read it that way, and was like… damn, I tried to explain that it just doesn’t hit me as fun, and people were like NO I BELIEVE YOU DO LIKE IT!!!

what i really meant is that — i think social RP is a fairly broad category, and it’s moreso that i think there’s gonna be stuff under discussion here that myself and some others are going to categorize as social RP. so it’s more just like. “i don’t believe people hate all social RP ever because i think the category is broader than they’re suggesting”

• YES - Action, adventure, travel, cool scenery (and then generally something theme-specific, like “dark magic” or “rebel alliances” or something)
• NO - Slice of life

i’d count a lot of “travel” and “cool scenery” stuff as being social!

and slice of life is another hugely broad category for me tbh. like in talking about fiction in various forms, it’ll get applied to everything from “high schoolers getting into comedy hijinks that’s entirely fluff” to “following a family’s life in the aftermath of a serious loss as they deal with the process of grief.” so again, it may just be a question of definition

• Always enjoy playing weird NPCs for story purposes, so currently enjoying storytelling with some friends; historically enjoyed lots of scenes on GH where I got to play the weird creatures.
• The whole zombie arc on Crimson Compass.
• On Horror2 where we used the holy water in the stupidest possible way, which I think was just a 2-3 scene arc?
• The training montage on LA (even though I wasn’t actually in that scene).
• When my character exploded himself as a weyrling on HT.
• “Travel” scenes are always fun for me, especially travel to a surreal or impossible place. Preference for me is as a storyteller, but I’m down to be along for the ride.

some of these i just don’t have enough context for cause it’s just referencing events on games i’m not familiar with. but stuff like training scenes, travel scenes, etc.? those are social to me. hijinks with items just for fun is social to me.

playing NPCs, doing a zombie plot arc (i say just from assumption without context), etc., sounds like it’d just all fall into the ‘plot RP’ bucket for me

Hopefully, this helps.

i do legitimately appreciate you writing it out, thank you

@bear_necessities i’m trying to determine how people are defining things. my point with your example was just that it was a specific premise of social RP. i didn’t argue about people disliking very specific types of social RP. the same way people will dislike very specific types of plot.

i am asking what other types of RP she enjoys because i want to know how people are defining what is and isn’t social RP. i wasn’t asking what types of RP she dislikes, i’m asking what types of RP she likes. because 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. i’m asking what people think of as “types of RP” that aren’t plot and social. not specific scenarios, but overall types.

@KarmaBum said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

lol you didn’t even quote my entire point???

Sorry, that’s more an issue of replying on my phone.

My entire point is just that I know what social RP is, I have enjoyed it in the past, I do not enjoy it anymore. I do enjoy many other types of RP.

i’m actually curious what the list is! i mean that sincerely. because for me, the types of RP are pretty broad categories. like i think of social RP, and then plot RP, and i guess i can put smut/TS/whatevs is a category. but those are the big buckets for me that i can think of.

which comes back to my earlier point of “i think people are just arguing about different definitions”

@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

i don’t actually believe anyone would eschew a social scene with a new character that turned out to have great chemistry and was an awesome time. i just don’t. because everyone loves fun, engaging RP. and social scenes can turn out to be literally anything.

Except there are some scene premises that are just inherently not fun for me so I would truly not have a good time and would not be engaged. Case in point: movie night scenes. I absolutely do not like scenes where we sit around with 20 other characters, or even 2 other characters, and pretend to watch a movie. It’s not fun for me, and has in fact on three occasions killed my enjoyment entirely for a game despite being in those scenes with people I have actually good chemistry with and enjoy roleplaying with.

This is one example but surely if you all need others to accept that we can all actually enjoy different things, I can keep going.

i mean…yes, sure, that is a very specific premise you don’t like. that is not the same as someone claiming they don’t like social RP across the board, considering that social RP would include a huge swathe of interactions. talking about very specific premises don’t actually run counter to my point at all.

@KarmaBum said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

i don’t actually believe anyone would eschew a social scene

I’m fine if people don’t actually believe this.

lol you didn’t even quote my entire point???

my point is that sometimes a social scene is nothing but meaningless fluff. sometimes it is a scene where two characters hit it off in some fashion and end up having extremely meaningful interactions that build character connections and offer meaningful character development. both of these are social scenes. my point is that “social RP” encompasses a hell of a lot of stuff. it doesn’t stop being social RP when it turns out to be incredibly meaningful.

@Wizz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@Roz valid! some people just don’t like it, that’s absolutely fine. sorry if I made it seem like it wasn’t when I responded to you earlier, I was just trying to be a silly goose.

lmao not gonna lie, i don’t even remember what you replied to my first post. that was like. a week ago!!

i was just responding to the post i quoted. because i feel like it’s pretty relevant to acknowledge that people not liking async is usually because they simply — don’t like async. not because they just haven’t found the right async partner or instance.

@KarmaBum said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I definitely agree with this, which is why I’m always baffled about why people declare no bar RP/no social fluff.

Hm. Are you equally baffled by people who declare no smut? Or no lords and ladies?

People like different things.

lords and ladies is a specific genre, and smut is a very specific type of RP with pretty obvious reason why some people would choose not to partake.

social RP is literally just — the act of building relationships between characters. it is foundational enough to the development of characters that whenever people say they don’t like social RP, i honestly just assume it’s a matter of people defining things differently from each other.

ETA: i think that what people generally mean is that they don’t like RP that turns out to not be fun. which is universal. social RP can have a slightly higher hit or miss rate in terms of how fun the scene ends up being, and i do respect people saying they have less time to roll the dice on that. but every other type of RP is also hit or miss at varying levels.

i don’t actually believe anyone would eschew a social scene with a new character that turned out to have great chemistry and was an awesome time. i just don’t. because everyone loves fun, engaging RP. and social scenes can turn out to be literally anything.

what people don’t like is boring RP. which happens with every type of RP you can imagine. boring RP happens in plot, it happens in smut, it happens everywhere.

@Wizz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I get this and I do sympathize with it, and I’m just gonna suggest that exploratory ventures into a style you don’t personally enjoy are probably going to be colored by that bias, in addition to the simple fact that, again, there are a lot of people who are just bad at this period, lol, whether that’s due to inexperience or whatever else. it’s not just that playing a different way is worse.

i can say that my dislike of async has zero to do with the writing styles people may or may not utilize while playing. it has zero to do with the actual pose content, because that’s entirely variable

it has everything to do with the timing and rhythm constraints that ARE inherent to async. i’ve done plenty of async scenes with a bunch of different people over the years; it’s incredibly difficult even with people whose RP i love. it’s entirely about the nature of async itself

if async has no haters it means that i am dead

@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I actually remember a big argument on MSB about it at one point years ago, with someone saying that they felt insulted to get the second alt for a scene.

I love this because it implies some kind of sloppy seconds with RP partners.

it was literally absolutely that. they were mad at their perception that they were being placed in a secondary status, and they found it deeply offensive that someone might agree to a scene without revealing that they’d be playing another scene in parallel.

@bear_necessities Idk, my experience is that we were RPing multiple scenes at a time on MU*s from way back when, just using alts. (Either literally playing the alt as that character, or else spoofing Alt A via Alt B and playing two Alt A scenes at the same time.) That was definitely a common thing I saw on lots of games since my childhood.

I actually remember a big argument on MSB about it at one point years ago, with someone saying that they felt insulted to get the second alt for a scene. (This was a minority opinion, not a common one, but it just sticks in my head because of how funny the conversation was. Whoever it was was honestly REALLY offended.)

ETA: That said, it did still limit how many scenes you could do at once. You were limited to the number of character bits you could have, AKA limited by the game’s alt policy. And maybe more difficult to manage on games where stats and sheets and rolling were prevalent. Those limits fundamentally don’t exist on codebases like Ares now. If you’re playing 5 scenes at once, you pretty much have to be doing them async.

Eric Dane

for the love of god can we just have this thread without a year so that we can stop making new threads for this

@Pavel yeah idk why we need a new one every year

@Lemon-Fox my point wasn’t really about what you have personally experienced directly. just that, as catzilla pointed out, all of the stuff in this thread would constitute a bit more than “weird.” and, yeah, the common wisdom in the hobby is to not play on games where you fundamentally can’t trust the staffers to staff ethically and fairly.

if other people on a game i was on were getting sexually harassed by staff, or by other players and staff was covering it up/allowing it, i’d have to backflip outta there whether or not it was happening to me, because that’s fkn gross. even if i didn’t have any other games i was interested in. i’d go read a book or something or do anything else if i didn’t have a MU i wanted to play on. which you don’t have to do, but you probably shouldn’t also downplay the bad stuff going on at the same time.

and yeah, people are gonna have opinions if you roll in and announce “i acknowledge that really shitty behavior is being done by the people running this game, but it’s not being done to me, so…” that’s just how it goes.

@Lemon-Fox said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Him being weird doesn’t make the game unplayable.

staffers doing stuff like what’s in this thread should absolutely make a game unplayable lol

@Roadspike said in Other People:

@Roz said in Other People:

the absolute worst thing you can be on a MU* is average height

I… actually like to be within the realm of average height on MU*s (most of the time, not always). Then again, I’m also the guy who likes playing by-the-book pilots, Stormtroopers, and other characters who could be “generic” if not for how they’re played.

you are taking the joke too seriously

the absolute worst thing you can be on a MU* is average height

@MisterBoring said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

@Yam said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

I think negative bleed is less of a problem than someone just being a butt about things.

I sort of disagree with this, but I think it’s because different people and groups handle negative bleed differently.

Some circles take negative bleed and resolve it in a healthy manner, so it’s not a big problem.

Other groups (including a few major LARP organizations I can think of) seem to delight in using negative bleed to drive perceived rivals away to make sure their characters are dominant in all situations.

that’s literally what yam was saying though: the issue isn’t the feeling itself, it’s if people act like a butt because of the feeling. you could be feeling bleed like CRAZY, utterly miserable because of the stuff happening to your character, but also being self-aware enough to take a break and keep it off the game and away from the other players

“handling negative bleed differently” is the point

@Faraday Oh yeah, of course, it’s not ANY sort of maladaptive behavior in any sort of game. Crashing out over losing Fortnite isn’t the same thing, you’re right. Bleed is something specific to these sorts of situations where we’re identifying with characters we’re actively writing the stories of. It’s a phenomenon in RP spaces specifically because of the nature of the hobby and playing characters the way we do.

@Faraday said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

@Roz said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

I think bleed — by which I just mean having an emotional response to RP or IC events that is bad enough to feel harmful or maladaptive in some fashion, stuff that goes beyond the standard sort of emotional reaction you’d have to fiction – is incredibly common. Like, the vast majority of RPers will experience it in some fashion at one point or another.

That’s an interesting perspective. I’m not sure that I define “bleed” the same way, because I think the line between “standard sort of emotional reaction to fiction” and “maladaptive” is not well-defined.

People have emotional responses to fiction. People have emotional responses to gaming. It’s natural that someone is going to have emotional responses to fiction-gaming. I don’t personally call that “bleed”.

Bleed to me is when you fail to keep a healthy boundary between you and the character. Like when I cry at Titanic, it’s not because I think I’m Rose. It’s not because I’m over-empathizing with the character, or her emotions are bleeding into mine. It’s just a tragic story. Whereas I see bleed as transferring the character’s emotions onto your own to an unhealthy degree.

Yeah, I think you’re saying everything I was saying. People having emotional reactions to fiction is exactly what I meant when I said that “the standard sort of emotional reaction you have to fiction.” Like it’s fine and normal and healthy to feel sad at sad RP stories, the way that we feel sad at a sad movie. That’s why I said bleed is a reaction that goes beyond this sort of emotional response.

Bleed, as you said, is when we start getting emotional to a degree that really harms our enjoyment of the hobby. It’s when we start getting sad or frustrated or upset because of the story not going the way we want, because our character isn’t getting the story we want them to get, etc.

When I say “maladaptive,” I mean that we’re having an emotional response to stress that’s become harmful in some fashion. It causes us stress, anxiety, etc. in a way that we get stressed, anxious, upset in response to real life stressors outside of the game. Our mood might get ruined for the day, or even beyond that. We’re upset or frustrated in the situation.

I think bleed — by which I just mean having an emotional response to RP or IC events that is bad enough to feel harmful or maladaptive in some fashion, stuff that goes beyond the standard sort of emotional reaction you’d have to fiction – is incredibly common. Like, the vast majority of RPers will experience it in some fashion at one point or another.

The bleed is the cause of the real problem, which is when players have a bad reaction to the bleed and make it other people’s problems in a harmful way, but it’s not the same thing as being the problem itself. I think it’d be more helpful to recognize bleed as being a common issue that people are likely to encounter at some point or another, and instead talk about how to react to bleed in a healthy and productive way. I think it can be unhelpful when the community tends to frame bleed as “this is a bad thing that tends to happen because you’re not doing a good enough job of managing yourself” because it wraps the whole thing up in shame that may make it harder for people to recognize and handle well.