If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP

Tinuviel

@egg said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Tinuviel I'm used to it. Doesn't mean I have to like it...

You don't have to, that's the rather wonderful thing about communities. They'll adapt to new circumstances whether one likes it or not.

Ghost

@egg Before I start, I think @faraday nailed it. Having said that...I will add my 2 cents.

I don't think there's a silver bullet answer to your questions, but here are a few reasons...

The OOC Factor: There are players who get itchy around players they can't validate. For good or bad reason, there are a number of players who, when confronted with a player and they don't know who they are Oocly, try to figure out who the person is. This could be because it was some guy with a Colin Farrell PB some 10 games ago pissed them off, or because they want to vet that the person isn't one of their stalkers. To put it shortly: For a number of reasons (good or bad, I will abstain), many players like to focus on players they know.
Part three on Thursday: I know a lot of players who RP these mega-long scenes. At one point when I mushed I was logging in for some 2 hours for maybe 6 total poses that accounted for 1/15th of a scene. A lot of players pair up or set time aside from some very specific RP with people that meet their #1(see above) comfort level.
Time, Effort, Focus: Again, I'll abstain from my own personal opinions, but a lot of these mushers aren't new to the hobby. Lots of old blood. Lots of old blood with old friends and private cliques who likely feel that risking 4 hours of gaming with an unknown entity could result in 4 hours of wasted time. I know a lot of players who don't usually engage in "random Senate" because they don't want to waste their time with a bad roleplayer (see next entry) or end up getting tagged as a target for some creeper (see #1).
Judgy: Take a look at the Hog Pit. People be judgy. People complaining about how people role play accents, making fun of people's descriptions, a bucket of Peeves makes for a bucket of tripwires that newer (note: there are far fewer youngblood mushes than there are oldguard) mushers will probably trip and never be informed ICly or Oocly that they've done a wrong. Not everyone is judgy, but some 10,000+ posts about peeves doesn't lie.

Having said that...

There are also a lot of good roleplayers out there who are inclusive. The key is to be friendly, collaborative, and be mindful of personal boundaries. Being a nice person and being approachable will never lead you astray. (Caveat: Don't take this advice if you're in the CIA and are infiltrating the cartel. For your health, be a bastard). There are games out there with many people that I would tag as being very friendly and interested in spreading the love, because I think they ultimately understand that with this hobby expansion needs to be a constant. If you're only RPing with the same 2 people for years, ideas get stale and rehashed. Fresh perspectives are important.

Really, what you're looking for is the right sandlot where nice kids are playing baseball and are always looking for more players. The Average Joe's gym. Not GloboGym.

So, with that imagery in mind there are a few players who have always been kind and fair to me, and most importantly I've always seen them kind and fair with others. If @faraday @Ganymede or @Pondscum recommend a place, then I'd go with their suggestion because I'm 99% sure that if you're generally a delight to be around wherever they suggest might be a good spot to try.

Oh, one more thing. Try to read logs and take interest in what other people are up to/into. A little bit of recon to choose an active faction with content you're excited to be a part of often warms groups to the new kid.

egg

This post is deleted!

Auspice

Ghost

@Auspice

Auspice

@Ghost said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Auspice

always sunny lawyer

Ghost

@Auspice NOBODY LOOK. NOBODY LOOK.

Coin

@Auspice said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Seraphim73 said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

there's very little more annoying than someone coming on RP Requests to say "Hey, anyone want to RP" and then when you say "Sure, what did you have in mind," they say "Oh, I don't know. You want to go to a bar?"

Yes, I honestly hate this v much.

Person: 'Anyone wanna RP?'
Me: 'Sure! What did you have in mind!'
Person: 'I dunno. What do you wanna do?'

...Please don't put the onus on me, Person! You tossed out the idea to RP. Gimme a hook. An idea, a place, something. This is the entire reason why I'm hesitant, sometimes, to respond to such vague queries, because these days it's become more common than not that if I reply...... I'm suddenly the one who has to come up with everything. The location. The idea. The scene set. I feel like I'm their sole source of entertainment rather than a collaborator.

Also good:

A: Anyone for RP?
B: Yeah, what did you have in mind?
A: Not sure, let me check your wiki and see if there's something that could be fun for both of us.

I mean, you don't have to have an idea right away, but be willing to put in the effort once you have full context.

@faraday said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Derp said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

Always have an actual plan when it comes to RP, and don't make others pick the venue/purpose. Offer concrete examples. Be flexible to negotiation. You'll find that this isn't nearly as hard as it seems.

One thing I haven't seen much of, but wonder how it would fly, is something like... "Anybody want to RP? If you're interested I'll pitch something specific to our chars and we can figure something out." That at least shows that you're willing to meet them halfway on doing the pitch work, but allows you to do something more targeted than "random scene in random public place."

Like that. I do that all the time.

Auspice

@Coin said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Auspice said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Seraphim73 said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

there's very little more annoying than someone coming on RP Requests to say "Hey, anyone want to RP" and then when you say "Sure, what did you have in mind," they say "Oh, I don't know. You want to go to a bar?"

Yes, I honestly hate this v much.

Person: 'Anyone wanna RP?'
Me: 'Sure! What did you have in mind!'
Person: 'I dunno. What do you wanna do?'

...Please don't put the onus on me, Person! You tossed out the idea to RP. Gimme a hook. An idea, a place, something. This is the entire reason why I'm hesitant, sometimes, to respond to such vague queries, because these days it's become more common than not that if I reply...... I'm suddenly the one who has to come up with everything. The location. The idea. The scene set. I feel like I'm their sole source of entertainment rather than a collaborator.

Also good:

A: Anyone for RP?
B: Yeah, what did you have in mind?
A: Not sure, let me check your wiki and see if there's something that could be fun for both of us.

I mean, you don't have to have an idea right away, but be willing to put in the effort once you have full context.

Right. If someone is willing to put in the effort? Awesome. Even work with me. But how often have you had it go the following:

You: What did you have in mind?
Them: I dunno, what do you like?
You: Well, we could go to the park?
Them: Oh, no, my character wouldn't do that.
You: What about the cafe?
Them: Nah, that's not really my character's style.
You: All right, what about <local splat hangout>.
Them: I don't like going there, it gets too big.
You: Well, uh-

Times when they offer to check out your wiki, work with you (via pages, chan, whatever) on what locs might work for you both... Those are awesome. But when all they do is shoot down anything you offer because you aren't naming their Goldilocks location? BOOOOOOO.

Ganymede

@egg said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

I'm used to it. Doesn't mean I have to like it...

Of course not. But some people do.

Yesternight, a player and I were discussing how to bring another player's character into the sphere, and we came up with an arrangement that made IC sense. Was it a breach of the old "OOC BAD FOR IC STUPH" doctrine? Sure, but it will likely result in another player getting more RP in-roads, and I think this is a good thing.

Then, later, another player offered to RP with me for an hour, and I took them up on it. It was a bit of a struggle trying to figure out why my studious, introverted, Snape-as-a-lady character would interact with a mere mortal, and the scene wasn't what I'd consider up to a Gold Standard, but it was a start, and I enjoyed the struggle and notion that I might be helping another person into the game.

There are a good number of people who are RP facilitators, and every game has them. Those people will bend over backwards to try to get you into the game with minimal effort. These sorts of people helped me get into Requiem for Kingsmouth and The Reach. Finding them can be tough, but they are good to hold onto when you do.

I suppose my point is that if you're the sort of player who works all day, and wants to chillax at night, there are people out there who want to interact with you and bring you into the game. The work is simply finding them.

Lisse24

So, I feel as if this is where I preach the 'We Need Better Tools' sermon again.

Yes, culture has changed, and to accommodate that changing culture we need a better way of connecting players. I'll be honest, I love Ares. I love what it is doing so much. I thought I'd be salty about the move away from grids and to scenes, but I really, really like RPing from my browser. The only struggle I have? I have NO CLUE how to find RP on that system.

The only tool provided to players to find people willing to RP is the RP Requests channel. This is a struggle for me because I generally log in for the evening slightly before every one else (about 30 minutes or so). So my typical experience on Ares is I connect and get situated, then I ask on the RP Requests channel if anyone is down for a meet. Because there's not a lot of people on yet, I don't get much of a response. I then have a dilemma. If there is a specific person I know I need/want RP with, I can page them directly. If not, I can either wait until someone else asks for RP (typically when it's too late for me to reasonably start a scene) or ask for RP every 5 minutes on channel, risking sounding like an overexcited dog.

Twenty years ago, when games were more grid oriented, I typically used +where as my find-rp tool. With a single command and quick scan of my screen I could typically tell:

Who was already in a scene and whether that was a scene I could join.
Who was not in a scene but was open to being approached by pretty much everyone, plus what that scene might be about.
Who was on, but was being a bit more exclusive in who they were going to RP with.
Who was on, but was just on for boards, paging, and chat.

+Where was a bad tool for that purpose, but over decades of building up MU culture around how to signal for RP, it worked reasonably well for a long time.

We need a tool that provides that information to characters so that people wanting to RP with each other can do so. The +wantrp command on some games starts to get there, but it doesn't convey a sense of what a scene may be about. In the past, I've proposed a simple change to the +wantrp command that would add a list of suggestions. So something like:

+wantrp on=My character totally just got beat up and has plot info I totes wanna pass on!!!! (plus some healing RP, plz)
+wantrp on=Looking to meet criminal-types and get my char involved in that sphere.
+wantrp on=Setting up at the Cafe for random meets and maybe a philosophical convo on the role of God in magic.

That with +scenes could give players looking for RP a pretty good start.

You could also provide a tool where players flag themselves available for certain scenes or types of RP. The point being: Yes, finding RP is hard. Yes, it will always be hard, but right now its harder than it has to be, and we should be looking on how to remove some of that friction.

mietze

I really like the idea of including desired content. That would def help people who love or dont mind certain things being able to RP that, and those who maybe aren't so interest not jump in and then get grumpy. (Like a rescuing someone/tending to them scene, I find people have a varying enjoyment of those depending on how often they have had to do that with that person or that week in general). I am sure targeted content will piss someone off but I think it would be great. Light getting to know you social, plot info about x, rescue me, be pickpockets by me, gossip about x situation, ect. I think it might encourage some people to get out and about if it wasnt such a random grab bag.

Auspice

Ares does provide these tools, to an extent! The scenes code lets you set the type of scene (/types has social and event by default in the system and you can add more: Notion added 'duty' as a scene type, for example). Then, you can also set a summary of the scene.

Then, when people type in 'scenes' they can see: who is in the scene, the location of the scene, the scene type, and a summary (if the summary is set in advance: I admit I'm not yet used to doing that and am remiss in doing so a lot of the time). So a lot of what @Lisse24 is talking about is something @faraday was thinking of (I think!) when she designed it.

Lisse24

@Auspice.
I agree. +Scenes does give you some of the info you need, but not enough to be able to find RP reliably. It tells you point 1. Who is already RPing, and whether or not you can join that scene, along with a sense of what that scene might be about.

It does not tell you 2 - 3. In other words, you have no clue who's on and isn't RPing but wants to be and what those scenes may be about. So on Ares you need another tool to work in conjunction with +scenes to fill that gap.

Auspice

@Lisse24 said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Auspice.
I agree. +Scenes does give you some of the info you need, but not enough to be able to find RP reliably. It tells you point 1. Who is already RPing, and whether or not you can join that scene, along with a sense of what that scene might be about.

It does not tell you 2 - 3. In other words, you have no clue who's on and isn't RPing but wants to be and what those scenes may be about. So on Ares you need another tool to work in conjunction with +scenes to fill that gap.

It does tell you what those scenes are about (/summary) if people fill it in. The details in scene info can be filled in at any time, but most of us only do so at the end because we aren't yet conditioned to do it sooner.

The same issue would come up of the +scene command you're proposing. It's still new. The more we get used to it ('scene/summary <whatever the scene is about>' at the beginning of the scene), the more that will be useful to anyone looking at scenes. But it'll take time. It's still brand new!

You are correct that there isn't anything there to provide for someone LOOKING for RP. But the other issue (summary) is resolved by Ares' scene command, you just gotta give us old dogs time to learn the new trick.

Tinuviel

Do we really need special tools for this, or simply to adapt ourselves to asking about, and for, RP better?

Sparks

I mean, I've also had trouble finding RP on an Ares game, but I've realized if I would do +wantrp on=So I have a magic spear now, apparently, which we're all supposed to use together. Want to come stare into an espresso (alcohol isn't recommended with magic weaponry in the room) and help figure out what the heck we should all do with this thing? I can instead just open a scene—without anyone else being yet present—and put something like that as an initial summary (probably to re-write before sharing the log), write up a set pose, and settle in, leaving it open. If someone glances at the scenes list now, they see a nice ready made scene of what I'm all ready to do, all waiting for them to just click join. And if no one does show up, well, eventually you close the log and let it go to the great byte void when the server reaps the unshared log after a while.

Tinuviel

Just because a tool exists doesn't mean it gets used, or that it gets used immediately or by a wide swathe of people. Tools are pretty, but adapting is better.

Arkandel

@Sparks As @Thenomain often repeats like the cranky old man he is, code can't solve social issues.

The code facilitates, that's all.

Tinuviel

@Arkandel said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

code can't solve social issues.

Yes it can. @lock/pagelock me=!*Arkandel