The trappings of posing

Duntada

Macros are still a thing... maybe one can add something to the +glance code?

Hit a button, it sends the command to the system, now if people want to see who is posing it appears next to their name under +glance.

The "posing" status is removed every 5 minutes or so so it only shows up for people who have recently remembered to hit the button?

Sparks

@duntada Absolutely no one will remember to hit the button. It would require changing years of ingrained habits.

faraday

@auspice said in The trappings of posing:

Discerning between 'who's posing' and 'who is chatting while waiting for others to pose.'
Figure that one out and you have gold.

Nope. The tricksy bit is that with the traditional telnet clients, not one iota of information is sent to the game until you hit enter (i.e. you're done posing, making the "I'm typing" indicator irrelevant). So you'd need a server-side "hey I'm typing" command that the client can trigger, then you'd need all the clients to send it if someone's typing, which of course would require people to update/switch clients, which... yeah, like @Thenomain said - never gonna happen. I'll refrain from re-iterating my various rants from the telnet thread and just point here.

Seraphim73

General spelling and grammar are important to me, but neither has to be perfect. Just easy to read. Accents are part of this--as long as the accent is easy to read, I'm totally fine with it. As soon as it gets difficult, I want out.
I'd like more than a line and a half of text, and less than two solid paragraphs, because I want enough to respond to, but I don't want to have to read a novel (and I want the opportunity for my character to butt in without negating a paragraph and a half of text).
As long as the poses come regularly and don't take 20 minutes, I'm okay. I'd prefer 5-10 minutes between poses, but as long as the RP is good, I don't mind 15-20 (I'll just start playing an Xbox game that I can pause in the background). I also don't want a multi-person scene waiting on one person for 20 minutes every bloody round.
Since I'm usually the person who posts the log, I love it when people put wiki codes in their poses, and I hate it when they put the -wrong- wiki codes in. Like, if you're going to italicize something, but only put a single slash instead of two? That's annoying. I also prefer things to be in a single paragraph unless it's multiple people acting (the PC and an NPC, or the PC and the environment, or whatever). %t annoys me.
I like strict turns up to about 4 people in a scene. From 5+, I want the 3-pose rule, with the addendum that you never pose before anyone you directly posed at has a chance to respond.
Headposing is alright as long as it's things that my character could reasonably catch: if you're posing about how this person annoys you, but in the actual descriptive part of the pose, your character is smiling and happy, screw you. If you're posing about how this person annoys you, and in the actual descriptive part of the pose, you mention how your character is smothering that annoyance and forcing a smile, you're awesome.

The most important one for me is pose detail. I want to get something back from at least every other pose. Okay, I lied, the most important one is being easy to understand from a spelling and grammar perspective. But to me, in a text-only hobby, that's table stakes.

Lithium

Simple rules:

Give me something I can respond to. That way the scene is collaborative and moves forwards.
Don't make me wait so long I either fall asleep, get bored, or lose interest after I waited a half an hour for a 1-2 line pose.

Fuck that noise.

Rusalka

Spelling and grammar: I don't tend to enjoy RP that doesn't have these. Sometimes it makes me cringe, but mostly I just find it diminishes my enjoyment.
Pose length: Meh, whatever. As long as they're giving me something to work with and aren't taking too long, I'm good.
Tempo: This is my personal dealbreaker: either someone who talks all over everyone else by posing once a minute or, much more commonly these days, someone who habitually takes 10-15+ minutes to pose. There's one person I simply won't RP with because he takes 20+ minutes for each pose. Not only does it feel like the MU* equivalent of texting during a conversation - he clearly isn't giving me anything close to his full attention - but it means nothing gets done during a scene.
Formatting shenanigans: I couldn't care less.
Pose order: As long as someone isn't posing all over everyone else, or holding everything up by being slow while everyone is keeping to strict pose order, I don't care.

mietze

Yeah I’m going to be annoying and say all of that honestly really depends.

Usually capitalization and punctuation and basic spelling are important to me in a regular play partner, but I have met people whom I love to death and they bend that stuff regularly. And I won’t not play with someone who doesn’t.

Pose order also greatly depends on who/how many. I’m a fan of 3-per (or 2-per in a 3 person scene), unless it needs to be structured (like a q&a or informational setting). It’s hard for me to focus in large strict pose order scenes esp with very very slow folks and also in rapid fire chaos...but if I have to pick I’d rather the more flexible moving the scene forward. I’m a slow poser (even with preloading) but I’d rather be the one accommodating and truncating or fixing my poses to fit in the rhythm of the scene than making people lose their steam waiting for me.

My only big pet peeves are passive aggressive meta posing and out of synch tense. One turns me off from wanting to play with the player, the other is super distracting.

I have patience for a mix of styles, lengths, speed, etc. with the right folks it just falls into rhythm and it’s so lovely. If it’s not, then at least I tried things out.

This is for non-plot rp. For plot scenes, my patience level narrows—I expect people to be timely (esp if an exception to group # has been made for them) and considerate to other players, and I expect them to have read other people’s and the ST’s poses. In a large social scene that’s a bonus because it can be overwhelming. But if you’re taking up ST time and attention when it could have gone elsewhere, be attentive and considerate yourself please.

Tributary

Something I've noticed playing Arx, in particular because there is a +firstimpression command, is that a lot of people don't actually pose enough personality in a scene for me to be able to say the first thing about their character. "Drinks and talks" is boring. It's hard to be engaged with someone who just exists in the room with you.

This has happened to me in other games, too, where I'm like, "OMG, I have no idea of what this person is like at all because they have only drunk things and talked at me. I'm just going to mark them down as boring."

So please, when you pose, write in something approximating readable English, don't take half an hour to do it, and please, please, pose some personality to your character, which is supposed to have character.

deadculture

@tributary In most games, I don't really grab a good idea of another character in the first scene, especially not if it's a bar/social scene.

I like the one-on-one kinds for that. Then you're directly seeing what the character is on about.

That said, here's something almost everyone hates, but that always gets to me: attempted persuasive/manipulative fluff on the pose to justify your character's speech.

Even when it's an evident manipulation.

Tributary

@deadculture I can get an idea of someone's personality if I meet with them at an actual bar, so why shouldn't I get some semblance of a character's personality? If anything, I should get a better idea, because I've got descriptive text (in theory) to tell me about them.

Maybe the problem is that people are playing these mild-mannered boring characters. I think that has a lot to do with it.

Seraphim73

@mietze said in The trappings of posing:

...out of synch tense...

Augh. Yes. This. SO many times this. If everyone around you is posing present tense, please do not pose past (or future) tense. If everyone around you is posing past tense, please do not pose present tense.

fortydeuce

@seraphim73 @mietze Thirding so much, per my response as well. I'll go even further and say that past-tense posing, unlike tabs or one-liners, is wildly inconsiderate of others. It breaks my immersion instantly as I struggle to figure out, "Was that a reaction to something earlier, a la 'While John was talking at length, Jane smiled. Now she's drinking her coffee'? Or is it occurring concurrently?"

I will avoid a person who doesn't pose tenses alongside the rest of the players. It's rude and distracting, and there's no excuse for it, unlike a metapose gone terribly wrong. It strikes me as a gambit for attention.

faraday

Long poses, short poses, inner monologue... whatever. I don't care as long as it's interesting. A good scene is like a tennis match - you have to serve something your partner can hit back.

For pose times, it's less about the individual times than the collective time between my turns. I tend to RP late at night. If it's more than 20 minutes between when I pose and when I get to pose again? There's even odds that I've either forgotten I'm in a scene or fallen asleep. And it's not very satisfying if turns take 60 minutes and you only get three poses in before bed. This isn't a general condemnation of slow powers, just a sad reality of my schedule.

My personal pet peeve is folks who try to put a bunch of things into one pose. It really makes the conversation feel unnatural. It's more common (naturally) in people who do longer poses.

Jane says X. Poses walking across the room and getting a drink. Asks if Harvey would like a drink. Says Y about some completely different topic.

Harvey overreacts to X, but then has to figure out how to reconcile that with all the other crap Jane just posed... or is forced to ask her to amend her pose.

This gets magnified tenfold in a bigger scene when multiple people start doing it and/or start responding to everything around them.

Jane asks Harvey a question. Says something completely unrelated to Greg. Smiles and nods to Tom, who just walked up.
~
Greg replies to Jane. Begins to engage Tom in conversation. Waves to Amanda across the room.
~
Amanda waves back. Says hi to Harvey.
~
Harvey now has to answer Jane's question, greet or ignore Tom, and acknowledge Amanda. And perhaps address two other parallel conversations (Greg-Tom, Jane-Greg) going on in his immediate vicinity. And heaven forbid if any one of those things causes a disruption that would have pre-empted anything anybody else posed. (like punching Tom as he walks up.)

That, coupled with the longer pose times, makes me avoid scenes if there's more than three people.

Side note - all the griping about tabs seems a bit petty to me. We're all entitled to our preferences, but "OMG you're the worst / I don't want to play with you" seems like an extreme overreaction to a formatting peeve. Maybe get a better log editor?

Tributary

@faraday When I put a bunch of stuff in one pose, I also generally describe my character as frenetic.

Also, if you're overreacting to the first thing I said, I'll just assume I talked over you at some point. That there was a natural interruption. That I did walk across the room enthusing about something random while you freaked out. Because this is something that people actually do. Especially high energy people who don't pay attention to things very well.

faraday

@tributary Yes, sometimes that can work. In general though? Often not. Not everyone is a high-energy frenetic person who isn't paying attention to their surroundings. (Most in fact aren't.) So it bugs me a little. It's not the end of the world.

brent

@fortydeuce said in The trappings of posing:

I will avoid a person who doesn't pose tenses alongside the rest of the players. It's rude and distracting, and there's no excuse for it, unlike a metapose gone terribly wrong. It strikes me as a gambit for attention.

Saying there's no excuse for it is a bit off because MMO RPers are anecdotally in my experience majority past-tense posers (possibly because of the crossing between RP on game forums, where forum RP in general is also historically a majority past-tense thing). So if you get somebody who got their start that way, past tense is likely going to be one of those habits in the same vein as pick-your-favorite-die-hard-MU*er-habit-here.

I've seen a few past-tensers on Arx (we get people from eeeeeverywhere) and just mentally rewrite it and move on, myself.

faraday

@brent said in The trappings of posing:

I've seen a few past-tensers on Arx (we get people from eeeeeverywhere) and just mentally rewrite it and move on, myself.

I had the opposite problem when I tried Storium. Everyone there does past tense and I kept having to mentally adjust. With MUSHing you don't have the luxury of editing your poses. If you're switching between environments, it's hard to bust ingrained habits.

And if someone is unfamiliar with MUSHing they're probably going around thinking: "WTF, why are all these weirdos writing everything in present tense?" because it's so uncommon in most other kinds of writing.

fortydeuce

@brent Fair point with the origins -- but the adjustment shouldn't be that hard, since we already know how to write in present tense before we switch to past tense. It still breaks my immersion just from grammar alone, and creates problems in the pacing/flow of a scene. To me, that's in the same boat as someone "p0sing n l33t sp33k" -- it's conventions that just aren't proper for the medium (well, that wouldn't have been proper back in 2000, when people still typed like that).

FirePuff

I think one thing that bothers me are people who pose second-person. Your character isn’t interacting with me the player, your character is interacting with my character.

This isn’t a deal breaker nor repulsive, but don’t be alarmed when I keep my side third-person.

Arkandel

@faraday said in The trappings of posing:

And if someone is unfamiliar with MUSHing they're probably going around thinking: "WTF, why are all these weirdos writing everything in present tense?" because it's so uncommon in most other kinds of writing.

Yeah, I agree with that. We're really used to the way we do things - but I'm not so sure we're not in the minority, and that we're not just holding our arbitrary way of doing things as the golden standard others should be conforming to.