Within the past month.

@Pyrephox said in Scenes within Scenes:

I feel like there were a few games – Star Trek games, maybe? Back in the Days of Yore that had where you could spectate scenes in viewing rooms - like watch an Away Team get into wacky adventures. I wouldn’t mind that sort of set up for the Big Scene People Need To Be At…but honestly, traditional places are more flexible.

One of the really early MUSHes I played, a Harry Potter game called Alere Flammas, had a ‘viewing room’ where you could watch events or classes even if your PC wasn’t in them. IIRC this was pretty common on the BSG games, too. It’s not really what anyone’s talking about here, since the watch parties were OOC, but it was neat.

@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

oftentimes it really just literally is “my brain cannot keep engaged in this format.”

You also totally lose the improv element which is part of what a lot of us like about this.

I’ll admit, my dislike of async has been aggravated by people who I fundamentally do not think have had any respect for my time or any interest/engagement in what we were playing. I’m perfectly willing to do time-shifted scenes due to timezone or availability conflicts and always have been. That isn’t usually what this is about anymore.

@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Yeah, I’m aware, but even having the ability to look at a list of scenes and just see flat data about the average time between poses might make it easier for people to choose scenes they want to join based on their personal preferences.

A lot of Ares games have these posted but they differ from game to game and, shock of shock, sometimes players don’t read things.

@Trashcan
You are a treasure, my friend, these numbers are really cool.

I’m not saying these numbers are wholly accurate. Shattered started as, I think, quite heavily real-time RP based and drifted toward more time-shifted stuff as it aged, which is both the nature of the activity bubble tapering off and an overall Ares trend I didn’t personally like. But we did try to prioritize Traditional pacing and playing there felt different than the Ares games I’ve tried since it closed (which isn’t a complete sample) .

When I venture into staff waters again there’ll probably be more conscious tracking of this stuff in real-time because it’s useful in creating the kind of environment you want.

@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I’d honestly be curious as to how many staff-folks try and track metrics for their games, and what, if any, tools they use to do so.

On Shattered I tried to pay attention to it, it’s one of the things I find useful about having all the scenes visible, but it defaults to ‘feels’ and ‘how easy is it personally to get X kind of RP’, we didn’t collect hard numbers even insofar as we could’ve manually. All events were live unless it was a player doing some personal thing themselves, though, that was just how we did things.

@junipersky said in RP Standards:

I think that was more me just having more on my plate than before though.

I mean, there’s genuinely been a shift in the hobby, at least where me and my buddies play, toward longer and slower that I don’t necessarily like, I don’t think putting this off on a personal thing is correct. Mostly I hope there are enough people left who still like the kind of RP that I like that I can find My People and My Games.

The closest I’ve come to seeing RP ‘standards’ posted was on a Pern MUSH I didn’t stick with for long (Second Pass, I kinda got there at the end of its life, unfortunately), and it was more of an explanation of MUSH RP conventions than hard-and-fast rules. Their site is gone now, alas, but I found their old RP Etiquette Guide after some nosing around in The Way Back Machine.

Posing in general.

• Please make an effort to correct typos and use something resembling proper English grammar. If you have a writing-related disability, a spellchecker will catch the most egregious ones and people will be willing to cut you some slack on the rest if you warn them up front.
• There’s a place and time for the one-line pose and the twenty-line pose. Second Pass poses usually run between 3 and 6 lines, with a few outliers in either direction. In general, try to create a happy equilibrium. Keep in mind the time needs of other players when you tend towards longer poses, and their need to have something to respond to when you tend towards shorter poses.
• /Read things/. Read descs, read bbposts, read news files, read other people’s poses. Then try to retain at least a general sense of having read it.

I tend to think the middle part is pretty standard for MUSH RP, at least in its day (this copy-paste is from a 2016 capture), but even that varies pretty wildly depending on individual game culture. Mostly, I think, people figure out what the ‘vibe’ is in RP by the most active players and staffers and emulate it.

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.