The trappings of posing
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I've been wondering, when it comes time to pick your scene for the night or even your regular RP partners , how important is their posing's "form factor" to you?
I'm not talking about characterization, OOC personality or any of those things here. I'm purely focused on the trappings of posing itself. So namely, how big a deal are the following to you:
- General spelling and basic grammar
- Pose length and detail
- Tempo - posing regularly at whatever time interval you prefer
- Personal peeves (wiki codes, %t tabs, whatever they might be)
- Pose ordering such as not using (or using) three-pose rule over round-robin, etc
And anything else I forgot, of course.
How important are such things to you? Would any of them cause you to not want to play with someone even sporadically? How about for a regular companion?
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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I desire basic spelling and grammar in any RP partner. I can't help it. I can understand and ignore some stuff, but if I have to sit there and try to figure out what you're saying, nope.
Length and detail aren't really a thing for me. In fact, long and too-detailed poses when unnecessary make a scene drag, in my experience. I want the action, not the minutiae.
In general, one-on-one, five minutes between my pose and the other person's is about right. If it takes more than ten, I start grumbling, unless I was forewarned they'd be slow, in which case, I am also usually doing something else and will occasionally also take a while.
Too much %t drives Manu cray-cray. I use it sometimes when I am trying to do something stylistic (same with colors) often when I'm storytelling, but otherwise, I prefer they not be there. I just don't like them. I prefer double carriage returns.
I always am playing 3-pose rule unless there's initiative involved. I don't even ask, which some people might think is rude, but I have been at this long enough to not care. And if I am playing with close friends who know me and play with me often and we have meshing styles, I'll skip all the fuck over the placed, I do not even care.
Key to playing with me is knowing that I put as much effort in a one-line pose that I do in a long paragraph, because often the brevity of the pose says something in itself. Also, I don't like to be kept waiting and I don't like to make people wait.
Also, key in any scene, is to know when the scene is over. It is perfectly all right to say "I think we can wrap this scene up ehre" and then go play with someone else if you want.
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General spelling and basic grammer - important, so much so that I probably won't RP with you regularly if you can't do that right.
Pose length and detail - Don't care, as long as you give me something to work with. Witty quips and their rejoinders don't need a 4 paragraph post wherein they're hidden, but it also depends on the scene. As long as we have hooks and are interacting I don't care as much about pose length.
Tempo - Also don't care, I can always do jobs between poses if you're super slow.
Personal peeves - accents. Please don't. Will RP but makes me sad and probably not on the regular. %t - I won't stop RPing with you but I will grind my teeth every. single. time.
Pose ordering - eh. Round robin so no one gets left out, but once we hit 5-ish? 3PR works better anyway.
And from @Coin - yes. when a scene is over, let it be over. We don't need a marathon 5-hour session every single time. I promise.
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@darinelle said in The trappings of posing:
Personal peeves - accents. Please don't. Will RP but makes me sad and probably not on the regular. %t - I won't stop RPing with you but I will grind my teeth every. single. time.
I am okay with accents if they are SUBTLE. Like, some southern drawl, or "shite" instead of "shit" for an Irishman, or even a Russian leaving out articles--all that is fine. It's subtle, gives flavor.
But then you got people who go all out and their fucking dialogue is more apostrophes than it is anything else and they can go right to fucking hell.
Except this one dude on a game who was playing a Pikey, I think (dude was actually from lower-class England) and he basically said, "My character is like Brad Pitt in SNATCH, you're not supposed to understand him" and we all had a lot of fun just interpreting WHATEVER and then laughing post-scene when he translated. But that was a specific character for whom not being understood was a thing and he did it in a way that was entertaining. If you're just posing a heavy accent just'cuz, please don't.
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I hate pose order. For me, nothing kills conversational flow faster. If we're in a scene of 2-4 people? Pose when you dang well want. If it's more than that, 3pr is reasonable.
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@kanye-qwest said in The trappings of posing:
I hate pose order. For me, nothing kills conversational flow faster. If we're in a scene of 2-4 people? Pose when you dang well want. If it's more than that, 3pr is reasonable.
As a fast typist I don't care. But I've seen people complain because they can't keep up, and the scene is moving faster than they're able to pose - by the time they squeeze out their greeting to someone walking in and taking a seat, that person has been punched in the face, gotten up and broken a bottle over someone's head, and he's currently being carried out the back by the local thugs.
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Basic spelling and grammar.
3 paragraphs +
20~40 minutes per pose is perfect
Wiki code at will. %t makes posting logs harder
3 PR = I'm out. Can't get any char dev out, can barely keep up not being an English speaker, and it just feels like a waste of time.
If you are metaposing, give me insight on your character's mindset, even if I can't pose about it with my own char. I like to understand the thought process of characters, and really love when my partner puts thought into that. If you are metaposing bitchy shit or flowery stuff just to pad your pose, RP gets harder.
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@arkandel said in The trappings of posing:
General spelling and basic grammar
This one is kind of big for me, but like... not directly? So, good spelling and grammar tend to also be hallmarks of general literacy and education, which also tend to be pretty good predictors of a lot of other things I find important, like creativity and outside-the-box thinking. So I could deal with typos and misspellings if the other stuff is there, but... it so rarely is.
Pose length and detail
Honestly, I tend to like shorter things as long as there is something there to keep the conversation going. "Oh yeah? I can't imagine that went well." Perfectly acceptable. And easier. For both. Just don't let it stagnate.
Tempo - posing regularly at whatever time interval you prefer
Eh. I can go either way. We are all busy people, and I have a million other things I can be doing in between screen flashes. It's not like I'm sitting there pining while I stare at the blackness of the screen. Substance and timing go hand in hand. If it is one line with little new substance? Seriously, that takes less than a minute. If you make me wait 15 minutes for "I can't imagine that went well," I will choke you. 15 minutes when important questions are asked, or alternatives considered? Cool.
Personal peeves (wiki codes, %t tabs, whatever they might be)
Tabs. They look great on screen. And they fuck up wiki logs. They have to be stripped out. Don't make me do more work than necessary, man. Just leave them out. Double carriage returns for the win. Wiki loves them, and they still keep things clean.
Pose ordering such as not using (or using) three-pose rule over round-robin, etc
There are times when I wish it flowed more like a book. Two or three characters exchange short ideas in sequence.
Suzie: Where have you been?
Jim: We met the queen.
Joe: It didn't go well.
Jim: I wouldn't say that. She only tried to kill us twice.
Joe: She ate the horses. Saddles and all. I got hit with a hoof.
Suzie: Shit, dude. Okay, Plan B.Give everyone a chance to react. Don't be a dick. But don't be afraid to throw in quick reacts as appropriate, and don't be married to the idea that everyone is just going to keep talking in the same order.
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@sunnyj said in The trappings of posing:
3 paragraphs +
20~40 minutes per pose is perfect
Wow, and I thought I was all hardcore about this.
I admit that, while I like long poses anything over 10-15 minutes starts grating on me since the scene just starts to move a bit too slowly for my tastes, and it won't get far in the 3 hours or so I tend to allocate to RP when I'm actually playing.I mean it's just numbers, right? In a scene with 3 people each of whom take 20 minutes to pose that's 1 pose from each an hour.
That's just my preference though. Even bringing it back to 10 minutes, that's 3 poses an hour per person, so the scene can flow a bit more.
If you are metaposing, give me insight on your character's mindset, even if I can't pose about it with my own char. I like to understand the thought process of characters, and really love when my partner puts thought into that. If you are metaposing bitchy shit or flowery stuff just to pad your pose, RP gets harder.
Metaposing should probably warrant an entire thread on its own but we can host it here.
I'm torn on it, personally. Sometimes it feels hand-feeding this stuff in my poses feels a bit like cheating - I should be conveying things in a more ambiguous way, opening them to interpretation (and even better, misinterpretation) but on the other hand there are notions I've love to unveil about my character now and then which might not have an obvious venue to use for it otherwise.- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@arkandel I feel metaposing is a great way to feed others why your characters are doing what they doing, and letting your partner use that information thematically. If they realize my character is doing X because they are afraid of rejection, they can then guide the scene to approach that theme, instead of assuming my character is a dick because WoD bruh!
Also, although I like to give others metainformation on my characters, I rarely hand over the core of these issues or why they as they are on poses. That is earned through RP.
As a matter of time, if I had less time I might feel more strongly over long poses, but as is, I work while I RP, so 20~40 minutes lets me get a lot of stuff done.
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People who obsessively use %t/[space(5)] are a large part of why I refuse to log.
I won't name names, but y'all know who you are. And you need to stop.
I metapose to an extent. Partly to tell story (it is a narrative!) and partly to help flesh out why my character is doing what they're doing. I can't perfectly convey expression or body language, but the metapose might help get some more of that across. So I try to balance a line. I won't ever get into the passive aggressive snarking at other peoples' characters in it (and I loathe when people do!), but I might use it to expand upon why my character is behaving a certain way. Why they're standing stiffly, why they're lounging noodle-limbed upon the sofa... because there's intricacies to form that we can pick up on IRL that may not always make sense in simplistic text without the other details.
So while I know some games of yesteryear were very draconian about NO METAPOSE, I use them because I feel they help expand upon why my character is doing what they do and I trust my fellow roleplay partner to be an adult and play to what they know (or could reasonably pick up on) and what they don't.
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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I like short paragraphs for poses, sprinkling in sometimes very brief commentary and quips as a pose.
If I'm going to throw out a multiple paragraph wall of spam at someone, you know there's a damn good reason for it.
Another thing that is lost in translation that I've found very few close friends are comfortable with us doing is adding into our poses the assumption that the other person is going to cut us off. In real life we talk over each other all the time. It's not something that translates well into the turn-based text format but when reading a log of where it happens, it gives it a more natural feel.
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General spelling and basic grammar is important. It's language and we need to be able to understand what you're trying to do/say. I also do most of my MUing from a phone so get occasional autocorrect silliness.
Pose length and detail... I'd prefer Neil Gaimen over Stephen Erickson. If someone's pose takes up the entire buffer on my phone I can and have made an excuse to leave the scene.
Tempo - whatever works. I've done scenes that took all day with an hour sometimes between poses. One advantage of phone RP, goes with me. If I am going to be slow (which I usually am) I do give a warning though
I prefer round robin pose order unless it is a really big event. In an every day scene once people go 3pr I excuse myself and leave.
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@pog said in The trappings of posing:
I like short paragraphs for poses, sprinkling in sometimes very brief commentary and quips as a pose.
If I'm going to throw out a multiple paragraph wall of spam at someone, you know there's a damn good reason for it.
Another thing that is lost in translation that I've found very few close friends are comfortable with us doing is adding into our poses the assumption that the other person is going to cut us off. In real life we talk over each other all the time. It's not something that translates well into the turn-based text format but when reading a log of where it happens, it gives it a more natural feel.
I'll interrupt you all you want, Pogeleh. >.>
"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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@coin I've megaposed cutting you off so many times over the years that you probably just expect it by now.
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@pog said in The trappings of posing:
@coin I've megaposed cutting you off so many times over the years that you probably just expect it by now.
Pretty much. But then, we're both pretty permisive, too.
"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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@coin (Also I can spell metapose, really I can.)
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@sunnyj said in The trappings of posing:
@arkandel I feel metaposing is a great way to feed others why your characters are doing what they doing, and letting your partner use that information thematically. If they realize my character is doing X because they are afraid of rejection, they can then guide the scene to approach that theme, instead of assuming my character is a dick because WoD bruh!
Also, although I like to give others metainformation on my characters, I rarely hand over the core of these issues or why they as they are on poses. That is earned through RP.
As a matter of time, if I had less time I might feel more strongly over long poses, but as is, I work while I RP, so 20~40 minutes lets me get a lot of stuff done.
I have to admit that all of this is in strict and strident opposite to my preferences, especially the metaposing. 20-40 minutes a pose just means that I won't see someone out to play, but that kind of metaposing will make me actively avoid them. If a character acts like a dick, then they get to be treated like a dick, and it doesn't matter what kind of tragic backstory or motivation gets posed in the narration my character can't read, and I am definitely not going to try and 'guide the scene' based on it.
As to the others: Basic spelling and grammar is good, but as long as I can read it and it's coherent, I don't worry too much about it. Pose length can be variable, as long as it flows with the scene - I do kinda have peeves about sticking to third person present tense, but I can over look it. Pose detail, I really only care about if the other poses are a) interacting with my character and the world in a coherent way, and b) are giving my character something to react to in turn. Tempo /is/ important. If I have to wait more than ten minutes on a pose on a regular basis, then I'll usually avoid that person in the future. It completely kills my investment in a scene. No real preferences regarding wiki codes, spacing, or pose order - I prefer a more natural flow than strict pose order, but I can usually go with whatever.
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@sunnyj said in The trappings of posing:
If they realize my character is doing X because they are afraid of rejection, they can then guide the scene to approach that theme, instead of assuming my character is a dick because WoD bruh!
I like these misunderstandings though! Unless it's something really subtle, in which case I can ask for an empathy-type roll and provide the information afterwards, I would love for people to mistake my character's awkwardness or insecurity for arrogance and borderline hostility or some such. It's part of the fun, because then you get the big reveal somewhere down the line when he breaks down or lets them into his head.
I guess it's the same hangup I have about OOC communication while I'm playing. I know some of y'all like this but I don't talk about my PC on channels or even over pages if I have to; it sounds like too much exposition, telling you about what he's like instead of showing you.
Also it feels a bit like bragging.
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@auspice said in The trappings of posing:
People who obsessively use %t/[space(5)] are a large part of why I refuse to log.
I won't name names, but y'all know who you are. And you need to stop.
I agree, though for somewhat different reasons. I do log a lot of the time, and that indent in people's poses means I have to go through the log myself and fix all the indents before I add the log to any wiki. Which in turn, makes me less inclined to log.
"If you stand for nothing Burr, what will you fall for?"
-- Hamilton: An American Musical
