Pacing in Ares Scenes
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Touched off by the convo in the Peeves thread. I am honestly curious, as someone with a limited degree of oversight on an Ares game. I tend to treat Open scenes with no Limited provisos as normal/real-time scenes, but idk if I'm the majority. I do do a decent amount of pausing and time-shifting in private scenes but I figure that's just whatever you and your partner agree upon. Also, what do people think a good 'standard' is for Open/non-Limited scenes, if one is having a standard?
ETA: '5' is 5-15 minutes/basically real-time because I cannot make polls
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I can't give this a single answer because it depends, a) on the scene, b) on the person.
@Paradox and I for example can take weeks to work on scenes because they're not a priority and he's heckin' busy IRL.
A backscene will also not be priority and thus take longer.
On average I'm usually in the 'a pose every 15-20 minutes' or 'every couple hours' depending on the type of scene.
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I would really prefer quick scenes in real time. I've tried to do scenes over multiple days and it killed my interest in the last game I tried to do that in, I think.
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Just going to echo the last two statements. I just got back into playing an Ares based game and while it does feel like relearning all over again. I prefer my scenes 'live', as it were.
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Just as in Penn or Tiny games, it depends entirely on the game's customs, the people involved, and the expectations. There is no one universal constant.
On my last Penn game, I had scenes with Friend A who'd pose once every couple hours. I had scenes with Friend B who was on a different timezone and we'd pose at each other via Google Docs once every couple days. I had scenes with Friends C & D who'd pose maybe once every 30 minutes. And I had scenes with Friends E & F who were super-fast short-posers who'd pose every five minutes.
I played with all of those same people on Ares and the timing was exactly the same. The only difference was that Friend A no longer needed to worry about keeping a connection open for backscroll, and Friend B and me no longer needed to use a G-Doc because async RP can happen within the game itself.
If more non-live scenes are happening on Ares, it's not because of the server it's because the people involved have been using other tools (like G-Doc or whatever) all along, and now they just have an in-game vehicle for that type of RP.
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I will forever sing Ares praises because it's the only platform where I really feel like I can be flexible with my time and posing. The logging feature is amazing, the fact that I can just instantly access my scene, etc. It's all great, I love it, and I can't thank @faraday enough because I don't think I'd be able to keep mushing if it weren't for Ares.
I prefer live scenes that take 10-15 minutes between poses. @krmbm and I will sometimes go an hour between poses during work-slow times which is a-OK with me.
I don't like scenes to last longer than a day, maybe 2-3 days, but that is about my max for interest. I can't do scenes that take weeks to finish and I'm not really able to stay in the right mind-set for scenes that only pose 1-2 times a day, but it's cool that other people can do that.
When I GM, I want my scenes to go no longer than 5-6 hours (and really, 3-4 is my comfort zone). That means I go fast and I'll say upfront: poses every 15 minutes unless you need more time, please keep things moving. But again, this is all my preference and hey, it's not for everybody and that's awesome because Ares.
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@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Pacing in Ares Scenes:
Also, what do people think a good 'standard' is for Open/non-Limited scenes, if one is having a standard?
Forgot this part. I think each game should set their own 'conventions' about the general expectations, and when players should use Limited tags or content warnings to advise people to expect something different.
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I have only played on a couple of ares games, but it was all over the map. I tend to gravitate towards real time for scenes with people I don't know or first time scenes. Beyond that I find that if all things are usual I like to at least have a couple of poses a day. But for awhile when I am at the worst trough in my depression I have been grateful for people willing to deal even slower or who wanted slower, because it allowed me to enjoy what I love even if my energy is super low.
The one thing I find worrying is when a slow scene seems like it might be fading, but there's no clear indication and the poses seem to hint otherwise but it just stops. I worry that the other person is bored of my play or doesn't like the scene but doesn't want to be the one to wrap. But i think ending a scene can sometimes be challenging even in real time, so its not surprising that it does this in slower ones.
I do find that I do not hold concurrent time overlap well (for some reason significant time differences, like flashbacks into older history, ect, are perfectly fine and easy for me to keep in my head). So if a slower scene is now eclipsed by the actual mush events moving forward to make it obsolete i find it exceptionally difficult to stay engaged.
That seems to happen more on Ares games than elsewhere in my limited observation, because of the ease and medium lending itself to people engaging in multiple paces of scenes taking place in the same time period, and for whatever reason my brain can't cope.
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@mietze
Yeah, I tend to need to maintain continuity more than I need a particular pace, but it really weirds me out if I've been in a scene for like days/a week and am continuing to RP in a more 'regular'/real-time fashion. I also tend to enforce times of no more than 4-5 hours if I GM something, but expectations seem to be pretty variable depending on the player, hence the question. I don't think it matters if there's a clear cultural expectation but between games that seems to vary a lot right now. -
It depends. If I specifically say: Hey lets start up a somewhat slow web-scene. It could be every couple of hours or even days between poses. I appreciate this ability to almost play-by-post with my NPCs on Euphoria because it means that I can keep working on jobs while slowly pushing plot out to people. Or I can still get into interesting social scenes with my PC while not having to just only focus there.
However, if I'm running and event or I look for RP in game with the +RP Requests channel, they I probably want a live scene with quick poses. Especially in the place of events I'm ST'ing. I am putting aside time that I could be doing +jobs or writing theme to run a plot. I want people posing quickly.
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I'd prefer 5 minutes and doing scenes 'live'.
However, I'm on European time, and the people I play with tend to be asleep when I am awake, or at best, at work. So I tend to consider myself lucky if I get a pose a day -- though sometimes, I manage to have a bit of time overlap and get maybe a handful of pose rounds in with someone.
So I voted for the last option because that's what most RP I can get is like.
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Would prefer 5 but couple hours, couple times a day, us all good.
But it needs have a point where it ends. 12 days RP with 50-odd poses on sipping tea? Probably can draw that one to a neat conclusion.
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I didn't read the poll as "What do you PREFER," but rather, "What is the most common expectation that should be assumed unless specified otherwise." They're two very different things. I read it as an overture of "What would be the best way to set game standards and expectations to that different RP preferences can coexist in the most seamless way possible." Because a lot of friction just comes from different expectations.
There's a lot of "I'd prefer" in the responses, but I don't think that's what was being asked.
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@Cobaltasaurus said in Pacing in Ares Scenes:
It depends. If I specifically say: Hey lets start up a somewhat slow web-scene. It could be every couple of hours or even days between poses. I appreciate this ability to almost play-by-post with my NPCs on Euphoria because it means that I can keep working on jobs while slowly pushing plot out to people. Or I can still get into interesting social scenes with my PC while not having to just only focus there.
However, if I'm running and event or I look for RP in game with the +RP Requests channel, they I probably want a live scene with quick poses. Especially in the place of events I'm ST'ing. I am putting aside time that I could be doing +jobs or writing theme to run a plot. I want people posing quickly.
Ares slow scenes for meetings >>>>>>>>>>>>
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@Roz Always best to clarify that right there before the scene even starts. And yes, approaching someone and asking if they want to do something only to have them bail the instant they realise that I'm not on US time is pretty common -- but at least it's less disappointing than having them abandon the scene three poses in.
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I don't think there is a "normal". As most people have said here, it depends. I had a scene yesterday that lasted a few hours and poses came like gang busters. It was a mix of players both on the web and on the mush.
I've had scenes start with a brisk pace on the MUSH and then revert to a slower pace when someone had to bow out but we didn't want to end the scene or kick them from the scene. So we just transitioned it to a web scene and the posts came every few hours till we were done.
The other day a RP partner and I decided to wrap a "scene" not necessarily because we were done but because we realized the "scene" had been going on for 2 RL weeks. The scene itself was just a place for us to sit and pose maybe two or three times a day. Super causal scene that transitioned from one place and time to another. We tend to keep one of these private scenes going just so we always have something going on though it's not uncommon to break from that "scene" as we focus on other scenes or even other games.
That's the great thing about the web portal, it's like Burger King in that you can play it your way. It also helps breach the timezone gap. I RP with a few people from the UK and a lot of people from the West Coast of the US and this helps us out a ton.
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My assumption is that unless someone says, "I'm going to be slow, is that cool?" that posing will happen in real time, with poses taking place every 5-20 minutes. If someone doesn't tell me that they'll be slow, but just goes silent for an hour or two at a time, I will be quietly irritated, because if I don't know that's going to happen, then I'm sitting at the computer, watching for a pose, and thus not really concentrating on anything else. If I know things are going to be slow, then I can tab away and do other stuff.
It's not as much about the pace itself (although it's hard to sustain any sort of real emotion with one pose a day), as it is that I only have so many hours in the day, like most MU*ers at this point, and it's courteous to tell me whether I need to be attending to the scene with my full attention, or if I can faff off for a while.
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If we are talking about what should be considered normal, I don't think ares games should be any different from games on other systems. If you are in a public, open scene and there's no agreed upon limitation (work slow, etc) then poses should be anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes. It's just a normal scene like in any other game.
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Where 'normal' does indeed depend on what side of the planet you're on.
Yes, I'm wildly envious of people who get to consider 'live' scenes normal.
