Does size matter? What about duration?
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@SkinnyThicket
I wouldn't call MUSHes mechanics light. When it comes to points where time is important (combat) they have can have it mapped out pretty close if they use a TT system.
you mentioned a table top background MUSHes really work like that in regards to a lot of things. In most tabletops the GM does not keep track of exactly how long it takes the PCs to cross town to talk with the mayor or exactly how long that convo lasts.
Though if they are going to the mayors office to stop a kidnapping attempt the Gm does make not of how much time is passing in much more detail, and then when they fight the bad guys time is definitely tracked rather closely.
MUSHes are like this too. No one really concerns themselves with how long the scene were you meet with Billy and find out he is a wolf too and talk with him about joining the pack, but when you and Billy go out to fight the murder spirit that is possessing hobos and turning them into killing machines you would handle that round by round like in a table top. -
@SkinnyThicket said in Does size matter? What about duration?:
How do MU*s try to handle this disconnect between individual character narratives and the more global.... time-fabric?
On the MUSHes I've been on, time is generally synchronized to the day. So you'll see logs tagged as 2015-05-26 and can keep track of events that way.
Within a given day, time is more flexible and you're just kind of expected to keep your own internal timeline consistent. So if you've already RPed a lunch scene on Tuesday with Jane, you normally wouldn't then go backward and do a breakfast scene with Bob. But you could do dinner with Bob.
There are occasionally times when you break this rule and do a "backscene" that happened in the past. This only works well when the scene is completely inconsequential, or the events have already been agreed-upon in advance. After all, if you backscene a breakfast with Bob on Tuesday and die, it would cause a paradox with your lunch scene with Jane on Tuesday.
Clear as mud, huh?
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I wasn't aware! Is it just combat that MUSHes go turn-by-turn for? Burning Wheel comes to mind as a system that treats duels-of-wit with the same narrative gravitas as duels-of-sword.
Cheers for the insight. That's a great framework. And of course narrative paradoxes would occur, but it's apparent that they would stand separate. I suppose if a game were to try to cater for all diets, the question would become how this system handles scenes that extend longer than a day - or insert timebox here - ala PbPers.
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@SkinnyThicket said in Does size matter? What about duration?:
And of course narrative paradoxes would occur, but it's apparent that they would stand separate. I suppose if a game were to try to cater for all diets, the question would become how this system handles scenes that extend longer than a day - or insert timebox here - ala PbPers.
Yeah, continuity problems crop up now and again, but you can usually just handwave them away or work it out somehow.
You're absolutely allowed to play fast and loose with the timeframe. You can do backscenes, forward scenes, scenes that span a three-day period... whatever. But you always have to keep in mind that the rest of the game is following the day-by-day timescale. If you're doing something weird with your timeline, the onus is on you to figure out how to work that into the global timeline. It can get tricky, but it is possible.
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Duration is more of a dealbreaker than an advantage - I don't care too much if you pose in two minutes or four, just keep it to single digits. Please.
Size... my preference is for more detail. But it's not a thesaurus contest either, stuffing as many words as possible doesn't make a pose better, it just makes it longer. Make it good.
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I prefer less dialog and more feel/detail as well. That's still something you can respond to and is often, when some well, very very responsive to what others are doing in the scene. Some pcs are more talkative than others though. If they are, I have found that if I put a lot into non verbal, I will get that back too (normally along with the dialog, which is fine). :). Or sometimes it just depends on the night.
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Less dialog can be good, nonverbal action can be good. But where can I officially register my peeve for poses that attempt to answer to four other people's poses in the same scene. Their character's head will be whipping around smiling, smirking, winking and nodding like an understudy in the cast for the Exorcist.
Sometimes I think mu*'s need more of a formal convention of moving the spotlight to one or two PCs in a big group scene. Of course everyone's got bit in the ass by drama kings and queens hogging the spotlight so the gut instinct is to avoid that at all costs.
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@Kestrel said in Does size matter? What about duration?:
I have a personal preference which I think makes me pretty weird, and is the opposite of how most MU*ers think: I dislike emotes containing too much dialogue. Spare me your character waxing poetics and serving up all their philosophical and political views on a platter; rants and rambles feel inorganic and unrealistic to me. I would so much rather read a paragraph detailing your character's body-language, the way they move, the way they meet my character's eyes, the tone of their voice, and for this to breathe life into their one-sentence, even one word verbal retort. I wish more people loved writing body-language and actions as much as I do, as it's so much more immersive than reading a screenplay. C'est la vie.
For a wordy-as-hell person, I agree completely. I would rather see a character screw their eyes shut, clench their fists and jaws, and then snarl "No" than scream for three paragraphs about how angry they are and how they won't take the evil high lord up on their evil offer.
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@Ide said in Does size matter? What about duration?:
Less dialog can be good, nonverbal action can be good. But where can I officially register my peeve for poses that attempt to answer to four other people's poses in the same scene. Their character's head will be whipping around smiling, smirking, winking and nodding like an understudy in the cast for the Exorcist.
Sometimes I think mu*'s need more of a formal convention of moving the spotlight to one or two PCs in a big group scene. Of course everyone's got bit in the ass by drama kings and queens hogging the spotlight so the gut instinct is to avoid that at all costs.
It's a somewhat unfortunate side-effect of MUSH turn-based posting conventions. Real conversation usually consists of fairly short sentences that are rapidly exchanged between participants, however when done by text that just leads to everyone talking over eachother (see every chat ever).
So instead everyone says/does something substantial in turn, but now when you're the fourth person to do something, you're now in a position where you can either address one of them(which can be taken as ignoring everyone else), address them as a group(which can be tricky) or do the exorcist impression. Ultimately it's just another reason that small scenes work better then large scenes.
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@Ide said in Does size matter? What about duration?:
But where can I officially register my peeve for poses that attempt to answer to four other people's poses in the same scene. Their character's head will be whipping around smiling, smirking, winking and nodding like an understudy in the cast for the Exorcist.
Yeah, absolutely agree. Just because you're in a scene with five people it doesn't mean you should try to respond to everything they do. It's a hilarious thing to even visualise!
My only issue here is that during such spam it's easy to miss something which was meant for you. I usually have SimpleMU highlight my PCs' names for this reason but for example if I posed wearing a hat and you say something addressing 'the dude with the hat' as the screen scrolls it's trivial to miss it.
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I'm super flexible.
I find that I tend to accommodate myself to my partner's times, but this can have deleterious consequences. For example, if you take between 10-15 minutes to pose, then I'm going to take around 10 minutes to pose. Because while I'm waiting for you to pose, I'm going to do something else (watch something fullscreen, read a comic book, check out a blog, whatever) and I'm not going to just stop every minute to check and see if you've posed. I'm going to let the scene finish, or finish the issue, or the article, or whatever.
If you like big flowing paragraphs, you're shit out of luck with me for the most part. Oh, sure, if you're posing flowery long stuff, you'll get it out of me more often than not--but by and large, my poses are anywhere between a single line and 6-7 lines. I don't get longer than that unless there's a real need. Usually I stick around somewhere between 3-4. This isn't on purpose. It's just how it comes out. The only time I really concentrate on how I want them to seem is when the writing style is meant to convey something about the character--I played a character who was based on Hemingway recently (again, shocker right?) and his poses tended to have very little exposition and they had short, to-the-point sentences. He liked to talk, but he didn't talk overmuch. This was because that's how I wanted him to come off. In contrast, I played a character who didn't talk at all, and refused to use sign language or lettered communication--he was one of my most popular on The Reach. Everyone who bothered to mention it told me they loved playing with him. I had Interdisciplinary Specialty: Body Language, and I posed the hell out of it--but it was still just 3-4 lines a pose. He got his point across. I know at least one person found him frustrating, but they just didn't play with me much. No skin off my nose.
I really like it when dialogue takes the front seat, in contrast to some other people here. Some of my favorite scenes have been pretty much just dialogue--I even have had some partners with whom I could drop to just dialogue, without any dialogue tags even. Just the speech--back and forth--bam bam bam bam--rapid-fire comments, entire conversations that happened almost in real time. It's only possible in 1-on-1, of course, but still!
I hate pose order. I understand the need for it; I still hate it.
I also know some people fistshake at me because I pose too fast ( @Sunny, @Gingerlily). #sorrynotsorry.
If I am having a lazy Saturday or Sunday devoted to RP, I can do the same scene for hours and hours. I once had a scene on a comic book MU between Superboy (me) and Nico Minoru that lasted eight hours and by the end we were both like--you know we should probably stop because we need to eat and maybe do other stuff today. Not because the scene couldn't continue. But in general--in general--I largely prefer my scenes to last around 2-3 hours; and if they can be shorter? Great. I see scenes as scenes, not as long drawn out interactions. Start the scene with something significant, end the scene when something significant concludes. I hate (and this happens a lot, and that's okay, but I still hate it) when scenes sort of peter out. I love scenes that start almost in media res and end before they conclude.
Devlin and Phineas start a scene on a plane--they jump out of it! WHEEE! They land in a field of ostriches. Oh shit! They run around for two hours of RL time, having fun-finally they escape the ostriches. But they need to get back home! Oh, look, there's an expensive car on the road with no driver and Phin says, "I just found our ride." End scene.
Maybe we pick up with them already half-way home, speeding down the highway in their stolen car. Maybe we just assume that happened and tell the story to someone else later on. But the scene was the ostrich field. Not the car ride. Two separate scenes. If more people were able to cut scenes this way, I would be so much happier.
In direct contrast, in plot scenes--omfg, storyteller, move it along. A "plot event" does not need to only comprise itself of a single scene that happens in a single place. Fade in! Introduction! Crossfade! Next scene! Crossfade again! Next scene! Crossfade to climax! Fade out! Storyteller goes to bed, and the players play out their epilogue or whatever. Keep it movin', yo.
Anyway, rant.
As for time management: man, fuck continuity. Fucking television shows don't give a shit and millions of people watch and enjoy them. Don't give me this "but I don't know if my character can do this because this and that" crap. Either keep it nebulous, or make sure you know what the fuck your character is doing all the time. Argh. So many scenes that petered out into nothing because half the people RP a lot all over the place and the other half don't--so some have a lot of conflict and others don't. /tableflip.
Also, you wanna make me happy? Like, really happy? Storytell. Not events, not PRPs--just storytell. Introduce complications. Make it weird. Have something happen. Man, I will help you out. There is this misconception that all great scenes have one ST. No, many scenes have more than one. I will sit at my chair and roleplay with you all fucking day if you storytell with me. If you collaborate and make the setting come alive with me, and I see this so little that I barely do it anymore, either. A bar fight should not be an event, guys. A bar fight should be a random backdrop in an otherwise random scene. Karaoke night should not be a scheduled +event; karaoke night should be every Tuesday, from 7EST to 11EST, come rain or fucking shine, for anyone who wants to show up, which sometimes means two people and sometimes it means thirty.
God, karaoke. The first public MU I ever played in was Devilshire, a Buffy MUX. Shoshana Swann had a place called The Penalty Box and they had karaoke night there every Tuesday, like fucking clockwork. One of my alts worked there. Sometimes I participated. Sometimes I didn't. But I knew that if I showed up in that build on a Tuesday night, the roleplay would have a backdrop of karaoke. I just knew it. And it was fucking awesome. It didn't have to happen every Tuesday. Shoshana wasn't even there half the time--sometimes it was just players, none of which had alts working at the business, who still did karaoke RP on Tuesdays, because that was the activity there on that day. And sometimes Tuesdays had a lot of people and we used places code; and sometimes it was just four of us and we injected some plot--vampires loved karaoke night and we loved staking them while someone sang Voltaire's Vampire Club into the mic off-key. Whatever. It's Buffy.
Anyway. Yeah. I went completely off-topic, I think. Sorry.
<.<
(notsorry)
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
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@SkinnyThicket said in Does size matter? What about duration?:
I wasn't aware! Is it just combat that MUSHes go turn-by-turn for? Burning Wheel comes to mind as a system that treats duels-of-wit with the same narrative gravitas as duels-of-sword.
That all depends on the MUSH and what if any system they are using, MUSHes run a large gamut of styles from Superhero games with no real system to things like WoD and even Champions which have RPG systems of varying complexity. RfK for example had downtime systems that handled things like improving territory and controlling domains.
As far as the duels of wit mechanically getting played out it is possible if you find others who want to go into the same detail on that matter. I have on NWoD games played out with full use of the social rules in the game scenes where my PC and another were each trying to convince the other to switch sides on an issue, this was pre-GMC but even the base NWoD books had rudimentary rules in that regard. With the newer stuff it goes more in depth with the Doors system.
To tie into the original topic of this thread, it tends to be about individual game culture much like posing. The are some games that I tend to pose longer on due to the fact that that is the accepted norm and even a few I have found where the excepted norm was shorter then I preferred, mechanics use on a MUSH is the same way, there are some games where I wish people would use the dice a lot more or at all. (Mostly the Superhero genre) And some that use the mechanics frequently, which is my preference. (I have yet run into a game culture the used +roll to a point where I thought no this is too much.) -
@SkinnyThicket said in Does size matter? What about duration?:
I wasn't aware! Is it just combat that MUSHes go turn-by-turn for? Burning Wheel comes to mind as a system that treats duels-of-wit with the same narrative gravitas as duels-of-sword.
Noooo. You are opening the floodgates. [puts on his rubber ducky floaters]
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I want the appropriate pose. Depending on the scene, that could be a one line pose with a two word sentence. It can also be a multi-paragraph monster.
As long as the person (people) I am roleplaying with are actually putting in effort and not making me bear the entire burden of moving the conversation**, I don't care how long or short their poses are.
**I hate being in a scene with someone where they answer your questions/statements and give you nothing to build off of going forward. It puts the pressure on me to come up with a 'new' conversational or physical angle in every pose, and it's exhausting.
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I agree that in super large especially purposeful scenes, they do tend to be focused on one or two people at a time (for court scene, Prince and each speaker in turn, for example).
However there are a lot of tone deaf people who use wordiness or escalation to make /every/ scene all about them, and don't seem capable of paying attention or helping others share in it at all. It's something that's easy to avoid on large games but it's really frustrating and demotivating of small ones. Or, frankly, even in large games where you are then (as i mentioned before) turned into a captive audience, because you need to be there for plot purposes or information sharing purposes, and some jackass has to make sure that everyone in the room knows how much of a special asshat they are). There does always seem to be at least one in every group.
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@ThatGuyThere said in Does size matter? What about duration?:
Is it just combat that MUSHes go turn-by-turn for? Burning Wheel comes to mind as a system that treats duels-of-wit with the same narrative gravitas as duels-of-sword.
That's one of the reasons I don't like generalising on what the cultural differences 'MUDs' and 'MUSHes' are, since the lines aren't that fixed at all. We necessarily discuss ranges rather than fixed implementations.
For example I coded/played for a RP MUD. It had coded combat - where you went around and killed mobs, got XP/items/gold... all that stuff. However we very quickly discovered it wasn't applicable to roleplay; you couldn't pose the actual fights since coded combat lasted for under 30 seconds or so, it was affected by factors we didn't consider appropriate (lag for example - this was the 90s, too) and the first attacker tended to win since if you're in the middle of posing or go to the bathroom mid-scene you could come back dead. It made no sense.
So we decided combat should either need to take place before the roleplay which led to practical issues (what if your character begged for mercy, decided to run away, offer a bribe etc in poses?) or it'd have to be turn-based. We were in the middle of coding a proper system for that which would allow you to target specific body areas with different effects - the torso for more sheer damage, legs to reduce mobility, etc - but by that time the playerbase was dwindling so it never got finished.
The point is, if the MUD is supposed to facilitate RP and unless I see a coded MUD system that's superior to turn-by-turn I don't know of a better system for either MUDs or MUSHes.
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I don't like being posed at.
I like being posed with.
I like back and forth, walk and talk, witty repartee.
I like interrupting and being interrupted, backhanded remarks behind the conversation, the sense that anyone can jump in and change the direction of the scene by force of character will.
I like it organic.
It's rare I get this feeling when someone is composing their personalized paragraph in a larger book. I'm utterly kicked out of the mood when I have to wait ten minutes for the purple prose. I hate waiting knowing that I have absolutely no chance to make it more natural.
I have played against people who are so good at this that their every pose looks like an invitation to a wider story and I find myself writing paragraphs. People like @Emmahsue. They are the exceptions that prove the rule for me.
My poses tend to be short, but I try to make sure that they are packed, efficient, and evocative.
"You know you are done not when there is nothing more to add, but when there's nothing more to take away."
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I tend to care about three things when it comes to posing:
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Does something happen? A pose should move the scene forward in SOME way. EVERY pose should do this. If someone asks you a question, don't just answer it (or refuse to answer it), but then add something new, or take an action that progesses the scene.
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Is there a flow? This is more about the back and forth of poses - this is partially a function of time, but also a function of paying attention to what's out there. Each pose should FIT IN to the scene in a logical sort of way, rather than changing it just to change it. Also, this is where slow posers tend to irritate me, because it's very hard to hold flow when you have to wait 15-30 minutes for the next pose. Sometimes it's worth it. Usually? Even when the pose itself is GREAT, the flow of the scene is broken.
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Is there chemistry? This is not romantic chemistry, although that can be a subtype of it. It isn't even just chemistry between PCs - you can have a feeling of chemistry between PCs and the plot, as well. Chemistry, in this sense, is a feeling of shared inspiration that comes from the INTERACTION of the players involved in the scene - these characters or circumstances fit together and become something greater than the sum of the parts.
All of these things are tangential to size of pose or even objective quality of writing - some of the scenes I enjoyed most were with a player who typically gave one liners, and who could not really spell all that great. But that player paid attention to what was going on, made sure their contributions were relevant to what was happening AND moved the scene forward, as well as playing off of other people in a way that made the whole scene more enjoyable. Sometimes, "Jason flinches at the sound of fist hitting flesh. He jumps forward to try and grab Suze's arm. "Stop, you goddamned lunatic!" is so very, very much more engaging than something that scrolls the screen and takes forty minutes to type.
Regarding how long the scene, in RL, should last? These days, An hour or so for a low-key, character development scene. Three to four hours for a plot scene. That's pretty much all I have, and all I WANT to have - there's too much competition for my time, with both work and other leisure activities. Now, sometimes, that magical chemistry happens, and you look up and it's five hours later, and you don't regret that at all. But more scenes need to be okay with...ending when they're done, in my opinion. Without people getting bent out of shape about, "Oh, you just closed this scene so you could go play with X." Nah. I closed the scene because we ran out of things to talk about or do. Doesn't mean I don't like you or the character; it just means that scene ended.
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@Pyrephox I always thought chemistry existed between players primarily. Which isn't to say I haven't had rapport with someone but we just couldn't make it work for our particular characters because it has happened, but it's very rare - I can't think of a case at least - to have solid chemistry with another PC but not their player overall.
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@Arkandel said in Does size matter? What about duration?:
@Pyrephox I always thought chemistry existed between players primarily. Which isn't to say I haven't had rapport with someone but we just couldn't make it work for our particular characters because it has happened, but it's very rare - I can't think of a case at least - to have solid chemistry with another PC but not their player overall.
Happens to me all the time! Some characters just "click" better than others with each other, and then sometimes PCs just don't have much in common or of interest to one another. Of course, part of that is that I don't make an effort to track the player behind a character in most cases, and there are definitely people who I've come to know as players precisely because our character seem to mesh more often than not, so we end up chatting more. But even there, there's usually been at least one combination of PCs that just...didn't want to have much to do with each other, even as rivals, and that was okay.
