OK full disclosure: that post was about how I laughed.

like a disgusted, “why is this community like this” laugh…but I kind of needed the laugh?

what a time to be alive.

@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.

@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

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.

oh for sure. I actually grew up on PbP forums just as much as MU*s myself. I am more just framing how some responses to this topic unfortunately start to come off to me every time it pops up.

@Yam said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

If you sense any rankling, it’s because someone’s favored style may be dying, which means less people to RP with. It’s the nature of the game.

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.

sorry-not sorry but the tendency here to frame async play as bad roleplaying somehow by default stylistic choice is not just inaccurate, it is rude.

I absolutely gaurantee you will find bad roleplayers everywhere regardless of pacing choices. the MU Peeves thread from the very earliest incarnation of this board 10+ years ago was full of people complaining about purple prose passhole-aggresshole meta posing before async was even a twinkle in Faraday’s eye, it didn’t just magically appear when we stopped sitting down for arbitrary four hour blocks and good, engaging roleplay didn’t disappear when people moved to other mediums.

@Pavel said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@Wizz You’ll more likely get people bitching about your survey.

@Pavel said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

That and people complain loudly but praise quietly. “This thing isn’t what I want” is more visible than “I am satisfied with what is going on.” So you’ll likely hear people complaining about too much async and too little async, and the truth about availability is somewhere in the middle.

^ this. I have a firm suspicion that if you were to do a broader anonymous survey that somehow managed to bring in enough people to be relevant, you probably would see some mild preference either way but not the extremes people like to express here because…we are always driven to express extremes, it’s just what this board is.

@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

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?

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.

@lucidmaus said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I need the slight pressure of time - and the tight focus on a single scenario - to wrap a scene, rather than let it shamble on into inconclusive perpetuity.

what I’ve found is that without the former pressure of time so much, all you need to do is concentrate more on the latter. you think about the goal of the scene as you go and each pose becomes a little more focused and driven.

it does take away a bit of that like, split second-spirit of improv feeling, which is a big part of what plenty of people enjoy about this medium, but it’s still been fun and exciting and you have the opportunity to try a lil more on the writing side of things when it’s not like “oh god I gotta kick this out in the next couple of minutes.”

@hellfrog said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

‘async’ to me reads as ‘we are going into this expecting it will be ongoing for days, weeks, or even months’ and i just cannot

personally speaking, days, probably. weeks? a few times but not often. I don’t know that any one async scene I have been in has ever gone on for more than a month, it messes with continuity too much.

a scene that takes about a week became my new norm and I KNOW AND LOVE THAT IT IS HERESY

@Roz
fuckin

FITE ME

asynchronous babyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

that or I also enjoy “work slow”/staggered or whatever because I, too, am old and slow-brained, and tbh I have always hated feeling the pressure of “live” pacing.

I was never very good at it and it made me feel bad whenever strangers started getting impatient, so everybody kinda easing up more or less has been nice.

@bear_necessities said in Memorable Scenes:

When @ham’s character died to a fucking doorknob and we came back to the apartment we had all been sharing and saw his pillow (with the Barbie pillow case, I think??) and started crying.

one scene I think back to a lot was my first GM’d staff response on Arx with Valenzo.

he was the captain of a ship who had been cursed in some mysterious way thad had led to him being hunted by a pack of assassin demons and also coincidentally having a demon doppelganger known as a mirrorborn. the scene involved Valenzo deliberately calling the mirrorborn, who was trying to convince him to make a bargain to release it into the world in exchange for his protection. Val only knew bits and pieces about the nature of his curse, but two key things weighed on him – the assassin demons were extremely dangerous, but mirrorborn could only sustain themselves in the world outside their realm by preying on humans. realizing that by saving his own skin he’d be putting others at risk, he ultimately refused the bargain, and the demon left in disgust – after telling him his best friend’s life was in peril.

I remember this one so fondly because not only was it a defining moment for a character I really enjoyed playing and one that informed pretty much the rest of my time with him, but the GM was just amazing. I’ll always remember one pose, which was SO sinister and gave me RL goosebumps, that she conveyed in just a few words – basically just the demon leaning forward and touching the surface of the mirror when it looked like Val might let it out – but the implications and the tension were ramped up sooo much more by everything she didn’t say. masterful stuff that still makes me grin when I think about it, and really appreciate how magical this hobby can be.

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

https://swdarktimes.com looks… active. I dunno anything about it, but it was on the Ares list and it appears vaguely Star Wars.

…
…
…

From the website:

Playstyle

Scenes are written collaboratively.

No dice.

No complicated skill system.

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

Quit to make a pointless statement?

what’s pointless about it?

@Faraday said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

“Bleed”, to me, is something else. It’s a crossing of boundaries that’s more than just the simple emotional response.

the part I meant specifically when I originally brought up insanely uncomfortable amounts of bleed is where the boundaries between someone’s understanding of events as happening to their character and happening to them have gotten so hazy that they start taking purely IC things intensely personally, and it changes the way they make their characters behave and affects their relationships with other players.

bleed itself by the definition people have been providing here is absolutely something that happens to everyone and isn’t that extreme on its own, I think, as long as you’re being self aware enough to recognize it and manage it, as already mentioned.

@Evilgrayson

that last part read like something Liam Neeson should have been growling into a phone and now I feel like I missed something, lol.