But now that I have thought about, makes me wonder how many times the other person would watch me type, stop, then furiously delete whatever I had been typing.

What we had the most success with was going and joining people in the places they were playing, playing with them in their environment, and then once they were a known factor, they’d share about the other format. We usually got a handful of people pretty regularly (almost exclusively for vampire; I don’t know if it was something about who was recruiting or where they were doing it, but).

I was also on the edges of some more traditional advertising for our hobby (as in ads or promoted posts were bought for ‘gamer’ audiences on one of the social media platforms), and I wish I could remember much more than this, but I do remember a “victim of our own success” situation. They were NOT prepared for their message to reach 100,000 people, and to have even a faction of those who were reached show interest was devastating on the game’s infrastructure. This was roughly around the time that Castle Marrach (that paid game?) and its platform were coming online, whenever that was.

ETA: Just addressing WoD (because this is what my active experience was in) LARP -> mush was the hardest transition, and the LiveJournal RPers (in general!) had the easiest time adapting. I would posit this had do to with what @Roz mentioned above – the vocab involved. The LJ community seemed to use the same vocab, possibly because we had a GRIP of people leave mushing at one point to go do LJ RP instead. Tabletop folks were hit or miss, IRC folks required a LOT of “no, your car cannot fly, stop it” handholding. Mudders mostly needed rehabbed to not PVP when somebody used the look command at them.

I used to have a document that had all of the basic ‘this is how you interact with this environment’ commands explained using terms from the various environments. Like, 'on mmo you use ‘/me blah blah’, here you use ‘pose blah blah’. I do not have it any more, but a resource like that tends to be invaluable for people making the transition. Seeing it up front instead of having to figure it out as each command comes up helps with progress on adapting one’s muscle memory.

Obviously you write and perfect your pose in notepad++ and then just paste it into the gdoc in all its glory

Only if you’re a native speaker. Otherwise you write and perfect it in Grammarly before pasting it in.

Yes, I do that. Grammarly’s Chrome plugin works with Ares’ web portal too.

@Roz What did your outreach look like?

This was years ago but I mostly remember us doing Tumblr ads on the big active fandom tags. However, I recall @Yam making specific effort to hunt down good Tumblr RPers and inviting them.

What were the biggest hurdles for them? Do you think they’d be different on an Ares or Evennia game?

This is also hard to remember. I recall terminology being weird for them? We have a lot of vocab that we’re all used to (scene, pose, that sort of thing) that is not immediately intuitive. Ares might be an easier sell for people used to RPing on the web in some form. I don’t imagine Evennia would feel hugely different, as its interface still requires a client of some form.

What were the biggest hurdles for them? Do you think they’d be different on an Ares or Evennia game?

*probably maybe some other people also wrote good guide, i’m not trying to deny them asspats

@Roz wow i didn’t realize that was you until I hit reply – and i even recognize that avatar.

I’m trying to be nice to the people who hate animated avatars!

Yeah! Arx actually ended up with more than a few people from forum/other types of RP. It just takes outreach

AKA HANDHOLDING. If you have the time/motivation for it, it is definitely doable and you will catch interest.

Yeah, I think we ended up writing a big guide to MU* RP, how clients work, terminology, etc.

AKA HANDHOLDING. If you have the time/motivation for it, it is definitely doable and you will catch interest.

I don’t know that all RPers (or even most? I’m thinking forum and Discord and the like) will find the MU* format comfortable; it’s not just creative writing, but it’s creative writing with a smidge of pressure to produce something relatively quickly.

There would definitely be some who likely would love and thrive in a MU* style. I staffed on a game that did a lot of outreach to Tumblr RPers because our theme had a large fandom there, and we gained multiple people new to MU*s who had a lot of fun. People RPing on non-ideal platforms like Tumblr, Discord, etc., don’t necessarily know there are other options. People who prefer a forum style – longer poses, slower pace – may not, but I think, in general, people underestimate the potential interest you could convert.

When I did Gdocs I would literally write my pose in a different window, lol

Yuuuuup. Having people watch me live-type a pose (or anything in GDocs) hits me in the same weird place that +watchers did.

Story seldom moves forward unless you find pockets of very active, very speedy RPers.

These are clearly the ones we need to show M*s to

I’ve done a fair amount of text-based tabletop on Discord, though, and it works very well. I think with threads, it could work even better, and not be as horribly spammy to find things; each scene could be its own thread, which gets archived afterwards, but it’s still there for searching.

I can’t do asynch at all, so my opinion on this is essentially irrelevant, but I don’t know how you gdocs people are doing it. I would rather die than let someone see my pose-in-progress.

When I did Gdocs I would literally write my pose in a different window, lol

I don’t know that all RPers (or even most? I’m thinking forum and Discord and the like) will find the MU* format comfortable; it’s not just creative writing, but it’s creative writing with a smidge of pressure to produce something relatively quickly.

It’s just that, as @Yam said, some people believe that pose length equates to literacy and quality of RP and that doesn’t really mesh well with MU*-style RP. It can, if a person is both quick in terms of typing and doesn’t spend hours (or days) crafting ‘the perfect pose’, but I’m not sure how common that is.

I had to dip on a Discord RP recently because one person took a solid month to pose.

I’D RATHER DIE.

So much of the RP on Discord is async that threads die out contantly. Story seldom moves forward unless you find pockets of very active, very speedy RPers.

When I say async I’m talking about days between poses. Which either works for people or doesn’t, but I do think MUSHes gear towards quicker, 2-3 hour scenes as opposed to week/month-long scenes. I had to dip on a Discord RP recently because one person took a solid month to pose.

I was really struck, looking at the screenshot for the app the article discusses, by how much it looks like the unified play screen on Ares - just with fewer bells and whistles.

Those of you who’ve dabbled in Discord RP, did you find cultural differences beyond the pace of play? What WAS the pace of play? Was it uniform, or varied?

@Third-Eye So much this. I’ve been in Asynch scenes that people just aren’t into and it drags on for literally months with people occasionally posing and it is just like those dinner parties where you want to stab yourself in the leg just so you have an excuse to leave.

Most of my scenes are asyncs and the ones I GM certainly are. If I’ve learned one thing from that – it’s to enforce time limits. Hard.

Yes, people will bitch if you skip them. But if you made it clear up front that you’ll move the scene on after 24 hours unless somebody contacts you asking for time because real life reasons, then they can bitch. They were told on sign-up.

The problem is that a lot of people think they can do asyncs and then lose focus. Or they think that async means ‘whenever, if ever I feel like it’ and fail to consider the rest of the group who are left hanging.

A 24 hour limit on poses is not unreasonable. I’ll give more time if people get in touch and tell me that something is up. But if I hear nothing I’m going to assume that they lost interest, got distracted, or otherwise fell off the radar. In that case, it’s the people who’re sticking with the scene I want to take good care of, not the ones who bailed.

In terms of the huge amount of RP on Discord, I wonder if these people are even aware of MUs, and if MUing in general would be prepared for an incoming population from them if there was ever visible advertising toward that niche.