If a game hits for me I tend to stick with it for the long haul, at least if Something doesn’t happen (I also bounce off places that aren’t for me pretty quickly). I get more invested in characters over time as they and their IC connections develop. It’s part of why the 3 Month Bubble is so frustrating for me as both as a player and a staffer. It’s reality, I’ll just never enjoy it.

Oh good, other people use the ‘Locations’ menu to start scenes, whenever I say this is almost exclusively how I do it people are surprised.

@Yam said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

I realize there are still tinymux islands out there, traditional moos, etc, but I gather most of this forum is or has been on at least one Ares game.

This is YET ANOTHER OFF-TOPIC POST in a thread that was forked already, but a lot of this is ease of actually finding a game. I used to troll MudConnector for games but that site is imo basically unusable now and no replacement has stuck. They certainly exist, I have some of them bookmarked, but they’re neither particularly user-friendly or complete. Ares and Evennia has complete and easy-to-view game listings, so that’s what people know about, at least this audience.

I honestly have no idea how I’d even go about finding a new MUSH/MUX at this point apart from hollering into the wilderness either here or on Reddit’s r/mud section with mixed results.

@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

It could potentially be that Ares has gained the reputation of being the place for asynch.

Oh yeah I think this is part of it in the last couple years at least. I view Ares itself as relatively pacing agnostic - staff and active players control the culture more than the platform - but you definitely see a drift toward async in what I would term the recent past, beyond games that are explicitly advertising themselves as Async Friendly/Async First (Keys is the example of that that comes to mind). I’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. I genuinely don’t know and it doesn’t feel like there’s a good way to figure it out. While it often feels like the Ares games share 75%+ of the same populations, some of them are entirely their own thing and don’t cross-pollinate much.

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.

@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.

@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Curious how many people resolve their workslow/distracted scenes within a day.

Me, generally. Sometimes two if there’s a need to pause but I pick that pacing specifically so they won’t go on forever.

Standard Live or more staggered/distracted live if I’m at work, which I’ve usually seen defined as poses can take like 20 mins+ to come in but you’re still done in a day or two and consistently paying attention. I prefer a relatively brisk pace for the improv feel of it but both are fine.

Async does not for me and I’m doing my best to minimize how often I do it. I fell into the trap of agreeing to it to be ‘nice’ once too often, particularly with people I don’t know. It’s OK if there’s no other option but it’s fundamentally not why I’m here and too much of it makes my enjoyment bottom out. This is also why I never really stuck with forum or dreamwidth RP, though I did try them.

The idea of dealing with players who think they’re a paying ‘customer’ always gets a legit, IRL, full-body shudder out of me when this comes up.

I’m also uninterested in pay-for-play MU-style RP, but I also never subbed to an MMO, which ate a lot of MUDers when they were just coming on the scene. To some degree I think I’m just not a player that appeals to, at least when it comes to this stuff.

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’m vaguely reminded of some L&L that drew ire for taking a break for Christmas.

Oh, it’s not just that L&L game (iirc it was Concordia but I didn’t play there so this is just the haze of forum memory). It is shocking how this comes up, every single year, across the spectrum of games. People complained on the last place I staffed when a major plot arc concluded in late October/early November and staff said they weren’t starting new ones until after the holidays. IDK, my friends.

Kinda in addition to that, my experience is that if you’re passionate about Your Weird Thing, it’ll find its audience (if it’s made with some degree of competence and dedication, which are harder, but leaving that aside). It might not be the audience you expect, and you may have to tank some of your buddies being offended you didn’t make the game ‘they’ wanted, but it’s more rewarding in the end.

@Ashkuri said in Brainstorming Game Ideas:

IMO you can’t build for “what people want.” You can’t even build for what your friends might like, because even the closest of us don’t always like the same things. You can only build what you personally love, and that personal enthusiasm makes the work less “hell.”

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.

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

Player ooc behavior during the application process will catch more people. How do they handle being told no? How do they handle a mild wait time? How many arguments/how much showboating do they do on channels in the wait time?

How someone handles thematic correction during the App Process is incredibly telling. It’s also much easier to screen Problems out at this point than it is once they get on the grid and feel empowered because some staffer rubber-stamped them.

@Yam
Picking up a roster on Arx was like that. Creating an OC was a fairly fiddly process that I gave up on the first time. Arx seemingly wasn’t really optimized for doing that, though, and being steered toward a roster was always kinda working as intended imo. You make your choices.

Even as somebody who still plays on-client a fair amount, I wouldn’t want to do CG in a pure text interface again. It’s just so much easier on web to save things/proof things/edit things.

Also staff-side it’s way easier to make small changes if I need to, give notes to players, or see where somebody’s getting an error (either through user error or something screwy with the game).

LOL I still like to RP.

Also other things, but I don’t think it’s inhibiting my life. I go in and out of it, like most hobbies.

When it went down a friend of mine commented that it coincided with one of the Cloudflare faceplants, which makes sense as a ‘I don’t want to go through any effort to maintain this’ moment. It was just unresponsive the last time I tried to pull it up but I can’t say I’m surprised the URL got snatched up by a bad actor, given that trolls seemed to still haunt both it and BMD periodically.

@helvetica said in AI In Poses:

@hellfrog said in AI In Poses:

wow wow
wonder where they are from? what happened in the mushing world

I don’t want to ruin the plot of Serial Experiments Lain for you, but…

My crystal ball is telling me they’re from a chan, of some sort. Perhaps a chan of 4s, if you will…

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

Okay. So, give me a place to play. Somewhere fairly busy, without draconian standards of what you can or cannot pose, where I can be a socialite without running scenes or getting anything approved.

We have very, very different tastes, you and I, I sense, so I am of no help to you here, but I am curious what games you tried that had these unacceptable things.

Be Doing a Thing.

I think a lot of the reason people complain about non-action RP is that frequently people aren’t doing anything.

Fix a random household object. Be enthused about a piece of media. Lose something and rope other people into finding it. Make up a thing about a family NPC and talk about it. Gossip about A Thing That Happened IC. Don’t be purely passive, basically.