@Tez BRING BACK DOWNVOTES

@Ashkuri stop silencing me!!!

ETA: omfg just learned that the forum will give you a maximum of three exclamation marks. this is getting in the way of my comedy!!!

@Ashkuri i’ve been in the hobby a very long time and i’ve never run out of opinions in my life

@Coin said in Scenes within Scenes:

If you don’t LIKE the big scenes, don’t GO to the big scenes. If you do, GO.

for real. the comments in the thread about hating big scenes in general are just kind of irrelevant here. if you hate big scenes, then don’t go to them. if you’re on a game that requires you to go to huge scenes, find a new game.

the thread is about what people like and don’t like out of tabletalk systems, not whether or not you want to go to the scenes where tabletalk is commonly used.

@KDraygo said in Scenes within Scenes:

On table and place posing, I know that it would probably make it harder on Ares in terms of posting the log. Maybe a table doesn’t want their part of the log posted, but I believe in Ares, everything is posted. Which is why it has a pseudo place code where it’s just normal posing, with a header of where that person is situated in the code.

i mean, in a hypothetical world where there was a tabletalk system on a game that kept it quiet during the scene for spam reasons, but then posted everything into the final log — which is actually an idea i was muddling over with friends earlier today — then it doesn’t matter if a table does or doesn’t want to have their tabletalk posted; if that’s how the system worked, that’s how it would work, and people would be forewarned and they’d adjust to the code or bail.

i tried to figure out when the last time i played was and i’m honestly still not sure, but it’s at least been over a year, so i put that. kind of shocking for me to think about, because it’s longer than i’ve been away from the hobby for a very, very long time. but i’ve just been doing other things! doing a lot more writing and reading and the like. i’ll be back when my whims change.

making giant scenes OOCly mandatory — and saying that your character is shirking on their IC duty if you’re not at the scene — is indeed bad game policy. i understand that this was more common back in the day in certain areas of the hobby.

but i do think that it’s not strictly relevant to the more fundamental question of how tabletalk is and can be used. it’s a bad policy that games shouldn’t have, not something that’s inherent to all large scenes as a rule.

@Faraday said in Scenes within Scenes:

@Pavel said in Scenes within Scenes:

Because one can interact with people outside of their little group, should they choose.

Theoretically I guess, but in my experience this almost never happens. (see the comments above regarding interruptions, being yelled at for spam, etc.)

The only poses I ever saw going to the main room were the static announcements or the “oops I forgot to use tt command” nonsense.

But to each their own.

raises hand i saw it happen a lot on places like arx. depending on the event, it would be a mix of posing to the room and posing to tabletalk, people would pose indicators of reactions that would be notable enough for others in the scene to see, move between different tabletalk areas, react to something happening outside of tabletalk, etc. these weren’t rarities, they were things i’d see at nearly every event scene of any size.

@Roadspike said in Scenes within Scenes:

@howyadoin said in Scenes within Scenes:

But the real purpose of table talk is to isolate the inane peanut gallery chatter from the actual important shit going on.

And also to make mostly one-way scenes (such as sermons, lectures, ceremonies, giant meetings and concerts) less boring.

Again, this seems like a code solution trying to fix a social problem.

If there’s “important shit” going on that the peanut gallery can’t interrupt? Don’t have the peanut gallery at the scene. Have them in their own side-scene, either happening at the same time as the “important shit” scene that they can watch freely, or RPed after the "important shit* scene but ICly taking place at the same time.

If it’s a one-way scene that again, can’t be interrupted? Don’t make it a scene! I’m sure we’ve all been in plenty of scenes where we thought, “This didn’t need to be a scene, it could’ve been a post/vignette/scene-set.” So don’t make them scenes. Have the GM post up their too-important-to-be-interrupted scene as a Vignette, and then have the actual scene be everyone’s reaction to it afterwards. You know, when people can actually interact with each other without interrupting.

what if some players like it, though? like, we all have different experiences here, and i very much recognize that plenty of the experiences being talked about here are indeed very unpleasant. but also there have been people talking about how this scenario has been enjoyable to them. i have been in big scenes about Official Stuff where maybe my character present wasn’t a part of the Official Stuff, but i was able to discuss it while it was happening, and sometimes there would be in fact be reason to respond to things publicly in the scene.

a wholesale hatred of all large scenes of all types isn’t actually universal. if you’re coming from the assumption of “everyone hates this,” then yes, it will look like just trying to solve a social problem with code. but instead, you have to accept that you have a population of people who are actively interested in these scenes and just want it to be more easily parseable.

i am a FAN of the traditional places/tabletalk system; i have been at countless big event scenes that would have felt entirely unmanageable without them.

@Juniper said in Scenes within Scenes:

But if a scene is so busy that you need to split it up, just do that? Move to a different room. Take your friends onto the balcony. Actually commit to moving far enough away to experience some quiet. Don’t just move to a table and listen to everything anyway.

the situations where i have most often used tabletalk/places code, that’s just not viable due to the nature of the scene. it would generally be at a large event of some kind where there’s specific need or reason to stay in the main room for the events going on.

@Roadspike said in Scenes within Scenes:

I think that -in general- places code is trying to police a social problem (players having their characters react to things their characters shouldn’t be able to hear) with a code solution (making it so players can’t hear some of what’s said). And I’m generally not in favor of that.

that reasoning has honestly never occurred to me. for me, places/tt has always been about making large scenes more manageable by reducing the overall spam levels.

@Wuff said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@howyadoin said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@Prototart said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Asynch: It’s like you and a friend swapping poses over @mail because their dick game is completely and totally insane

No one - and I mean no one’s - dick game is good enough to suffer through async.

Async is better than no sync sometimes. Some people are worth the effort and the patience.

fwiw, i really don’t want to frame this whole thing as a matter of just having patience, or some people “not being good enough” to async with.

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

@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

For me my brain sorts the metric as:

Live - 1-15 minutes between poses
Async - 16 minutes - several hours between poses
Distracted - Days between poses.

If the system had a way to track the date / time for each pose, it could feasibly keep a running tally on the average time between poses and then sort the scenes by what type they are.

i think you have async and distracted reversed. generally people are using “distracted” as “live but maybe a little longer between poses because folks are at work and might get pulled away for bits.” still often completed in one session, vs async potentially going over days.

@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.