RP Timing/Pacing

[Ghost]

So it's been a while since I've been involved with forum RPs but I've got the itch to start one again so I've been thinking about possibilities. I think I am possibly interested in doing an RP with survival elements, meaning more specifically that characters have needs they need to find ways to meet (food, shelter, etc) and have to face threats (wild beasts, monsters, natural disasters, etc). I think I've got a pretty good idea of how to manage the threats (gradually introducing them, scaling them to be challenging but surmountable, etc) but when it comes to the 'meeting needs' aspect... I am a little more unsure.

I think this element would require the RP to have a consistent and established time progression, and I know there are RPs that do this, but I've not ever personally participated in any.

So I'm hoping to get some feedback from other rp-ers (especially any who have participated in RPs with set time progression). I'd like to hear people's opinions in general, what worked and what didn't, and I have a few more specific questions if anyone feels up for sharing their experiences/opinions.

I'm going to probably write a bit too much after this point, so if you want to skip the rest and just share your thoughts please feel free too. I can be a bit too talkative sometimes and if anyone wants more detail it's here, but I will not be in any way offended if they don't care to read all of it. I appreciate any input regardless.

What do you think would be a good time scale? (as in how much out of game time is equal to how much in game time?) In the past I have usually set low posting requirements on my RPs but given people the opportunity to do more if they want to/have the time. Doing an RP with set time progression seems like this may force things to be a bit more rigid. I'm worried about setting the time progression too slow, or too fast.

What do you think should happen with threads once the in game time period they take place in has passed? As in [Thread X] takes place on [Day] but the [Day] has ended. I've considered a few options, but I'm not sure what would be best.

Option 1, threads are closed after the time period they take place in has passed. I worry this option will either result in some players being bored because the time scale has been set too slow for them and they don't have an interest in going into that much detail on a particular time period, or some players who do want to go into more depth feeling rushed through content they would have preferred to drag out more.

Option 2, threads are soft closed after the time period they take place in has passed. This would mean that people who haven't been participating in said thread would no longer be allowed to join in, but that those who are already involved in the thread can continue until they reach a conclusion they're satisfied with. Kind of like a restaurant that doesn't accept new orders after a certain time, but allows those who have already ordered finish their meals at their own pace.

Option 3, threads are left open. This would mean that the rp would likely have several time periods going concurrently, and members would need to be asked to bear in mind the time period of a given thread and stick with just what their character had/knew at that time even if they have/know different things in the RP's "present". I think the benefit of this would be that people might be less likely to feel like they "missed out" on threads they weren't able to get to in time, but that it may also lead to people feeling disappointed if they respond to an older thread and no one else is interested in going back to that.


That's all the specific questions I can think of at the moment, but if you have any questions for me I would love to hear them. Thank you for reading, and thank you in advance for any feedback/input.

[Kami]

Time Scale: Honestly I generally hate "Real Life" correlations to in-game time. I would personally go by when the canon plot needs to move (have they reached a particular point in the story? has a major event ended and it's a good time to move foward? etc) and give your players a week or two to wrap up their current plots. The reason I'm not a fan of real-world time correlations is because I am a busy person. I may not be able to play every day, so if X amount of RL days is Y amount of game days, that obligates me to play to a specific schedule as opposed to playing when I am available and turning the RP into stress rather than a source of relaxation and fun.

The only way I can see a set time progression working is if you're fairly generous with it. I tend to go by seasons, rather than days, so players are free to engage with liquid time within a set season (eg: 3 RL months is a season, and within that "season" anyone can play as long as they keep their own timelines straight).

Currently I run a canon RP, so we're going off of # of episodes in the show; the first arc of the forum will end after we reach the events of the middle episode of the season, and so on.

Threads after the period has passed: I lock and archive. But I also have a "past" board for my players, so they're free to create a new thread to continue a particularly juicy plotline should they desire. That said, in my years of experience on RP forums, I would actually say that most people would be 100% fine with moving forward and would use any "past" boards to RP things like childhood memories or past loves etc.

[Ghost]

Aug 18, 2020 12:47:26 GMT -8 Kami said:

Time Scale: Honestly I generally hate "Real Life" correlations to in-game time. I would personally go by when the canon plot needs to move (have they reached a particular point in the story? has a major event ended and it's a good time to move foward? etc) and give your players a week or two to wrap up their current plots. The reason I'm not a fan of real-world time correlations is because I am a busy person. I may not be able to play every day, so if X amount of RL days is Y amount of game days, that obligates me to play to a specific schedule as opposed to playing when I am available and turning the RP into stress rather than a source of relaxation and fun.

The only way I can see a set time progression working is if you're fairly generous with it. I tend to go by seasons, rather than days, so players are free to engage with liquid time within a set season (eg: 3 RL months is a season, and within that "season" anyone can play as long as they keep their own timelines straight).

Currently I run a canon RP, so we're going off of # of episodes in the show; the first arc of the forum will end after we reach the events of the middle episode of the season, and so on.

Threads after the period has passed: I lock and archive. But I also have a "past" board for my players, so they're free to create a new thread to continue a particularly juicy plotline should they desire. That said, in my years of experience on RP forums, I would actually say that most people would be 100% fine with moving forward and would use any "past" boards to RP things like childhood memories or past loves etc.

Thank you for the input! Your response is so thorough and I appreciate it.

As to time scale I agree with a lot of what you said. The RPs I've run in the past have had very fluid timelines, generally along the lines of moving things forward in line with the plot. The problem though is that I'm not sure how I could make that kind of timeline work with the survival elements I'd like to do. In an rp where resources are limited, and characters must obtain and use them to survive, if time is fluid like that, how do we determine when characters need food, for example, without putting too much burden on moderators?

I'm basing some of this off my experiences with tabletop games such as d&d, where food and sleep are things your character needs, or they face consequences. In tabletop games, time progression can still often be fluid because the DM is usually only dealing with a very limited number of players (typically only playing 1 character each) and the characters are usually together in one or two locations and progressing at the same pace. The DM can adjust the time flow to that limited group and thus adjust the needs appropriately.

But with a forum based rp, which in my experience tends to have more players, most playing more than one character, and often spread across many threads/locations, I think doing an 'adjust needs as we go' method for this kind of rp would get pretty chaotic pretty fast and be more of a hassle for mods to manage. It's more straightforward to be able to look at the set in game calendar and say 'your character hasn't eaten in 2 days, they're weakened and heres how that effects them' then to have to look at all the threads a character may have been in and try to determine how much time has passed in each one in order to calculate how long it's been since that character last ate/slept.

I'm not sure I'm explaining this effectively so if I can clarify please let me know? I'm trying to combine elements from two very different rp styles, so I know this is something that ultimately may just not work, but it's a problem I'm having fun trying to solve.

And thank you for sharing your experiences with past threads/boards. I really like the idea of having a specific place to rp stuff taking place in the past and I might implement that.

[Kami]

I run TTRPGs too, so I feel what you're saying. (: Feel free to chat about D&D normally haha.

I think the biggest issue is, how are you intending to scale TTRPG mechanics with what you've planned out? It's very rare that a campaign will have more than 10 players in any given session (larger campaigns may be split up into multiple groups), whereas with RP forums you have a higher number of potential players + as you mentioned a higher number of potential characters per player.

At the end of the day, TTRPG mechanics aren't scaleable to open forum RPs -- say you get 100 active individual users, and each of them has 2 characters; that's 200 characters that you would need to moderate for whether or not they've had a long rest versus a short rest, moderate their HP, moderate their food, moderate their carrying capacity, moderate their encounters, moderate their gold.... to me this sounds like a full time job micromanaging two hundred people, not a fun game to run or to spend passing what free time I have.

Also, by and large, most RP forums are writing focused, rather than min/max and stat focused. Most people who incorporate stats only do so very sparingly -- HP and MP, abilities, and inventory -- while giving players the freedom (and trust !) to be reasonable players who don't exploit the system.

My personal recommendation would be to have a set system in terms of number of in-game days. Say, 2 days in-game have passed, and the character has not eaten. Under the honour system, whatever "two days" means for their threads, they'll need to own that debuff. If you do it based on any sort of RL time correlation, or # of posts correlation, I can nearly guarantee people will not want to roleplay. Imagine if you and I were partners in a thread and it took me a day to respond to you because of my work -- what, so now an entire day has passed between the first sentence your character said to mine, and my character's response? RP wise, this doesn't make sense.

I think something you'll have to let go is the micromanaging aspect of TTRPGs. Use the honour system and set up clear guidelines as to the consequences of certain actions, and have the members look out for each other to make sure they're being respectful of the guidelines.

There are a few plugins you could incorporate as well to automate some things (eg there's creature hunt, event on post, npc profiles) but by and large recentre your thinking on what would be fun with a play-by-post system.

[Ghost]

Aug 18, 2020 14:01:34 GMT -8 Kami said:

I run TTRPGs too, so I feel what you're saying. (: Feel free to chat about D&D normally haha.

I think the biggest issue is, how are you intending to scale TTRPG mechanics with what you've planned out? It's very rare that a campaign will have more than 10 players in any given session (larger campaigns may be split up into multiple groups), whereas with RP forums you have a higher number of potential players + as you mentioned a higher number of potential characters per player.

At the end of the day, TTRPG mechanics aren't scaleable to open forum RPs -- say you get 100 active individual users, and each of them has 2 characters; that's 200 characters that you would need to moderate for whether or not they've had a long rest versus a short rest, moderate their HP, moderate their food, moderate their carrying capacity, moderate their encounters, moderate their gold.... to me this sounds like a full time job micromanaging two hundred people, not a fun game to run or to spend passing what free time I have.

Also, by and large, most RP forums are writing focused, rather than min/max and stat focused. Most people who incorporate stats only do so very sparingly -- HP and MP, abilities, and inventory -- while giving players the freedom (and trust !) to be reasonable players who don't exploit the system.

My personal recommendation would be to have a set system in terms of number of in-game days. Say, 2 days in-game have passed, and the character has not eaten. Under the honour system, whatever "two days" means for their threads, they'll need to own that debuff. If you do it based on any sort of RL time correlation, or # of posts correlation, I can nearly guarantee people will not want to roleplay. Imagine if you and I were partners in a thread and it took me a day to respond to you because of my work -- what, so now an entire day has passed between the first sentence your character said to mine, and my character's response? RP wise, this doesn't make sense.

I think something you'll have to let go is the micromanaging aspect of TTRPGs. Use the honour system and set up clear guidelines as to the consequences of certain actions, and have the members look out for each other to make sure they're being respectful of the guidelines.

There are a few plugins you could incorporate as well to automate some things (eg there's creature hunt, event on post, npc profiles) but by and large recentre your thinking on what would be fun with a play-by-post system.

ah this is all such great info! I feel like I'm learning so much and its really helping me think about things i had not previously considered.

I'd say that the idea that I am trying to achieve is more like a forum roleplay with just a few limited elements/inspiration taken from ttrpg. The setting is supposed to be low magic/humans pc's only and the plot starts with trying to establish a new settlement/town in a remote/dangerous location.

While some characters might go on adventures around the area, its not so much intended to be an adventuring story (at least not the way I typically see in D&D, with characters going out on quests and stuff like that).

I don't really intend to make players rp every little thing, I think some activities should be things they can flesh out with rp if they want to but the level of depth they go into is up to them. This would be mundane stuff their character is competent at such as, feeding their chickens, chopping firewood, etc. Everyday stuff that their character would probably do but wouldn't necessarily be fun to play out every time, rather than stuff that may be a bit more unique or fun to roleplay (like social interactions, exploring a new area of the woods, etc that would have a higher roleplay expectation). I think the expectation/assumption would be that characters do these tasks with a reasonable level of competency (and a calculated amount of time/effort) 'offscreen' unless the player decides they want to play it out/that for whatever reason their character did not do those things.

My plan is that some of the mechanical aspects will be handled by mods, but a lot will be handled by players following set guidelines, with mod involvement mostly being on the front end for like, if a a player wants to do something new/different and we don't have established guidelines for that yet, and any situation that may be more complex or otherwise need outside adjudication (combat and conflicts between pc's come to mind as examples).

I honestly have no idea why I didn't consider having the players keep track of their character's daily needs like food/sleep, but it really didn't occur to me. That's an excellent idea.

I think in that case, establishing a timeline/in game date would be good, so players can be clear about stuff like "my character moved here on this date, the storm happened on that date, I have to work on this for three days so it'll be that date when it's finished, etc" but it doesn't seem like that would need to be tied to a out of game time/date so that would be great I think.

Thank you so much for all this input and help, I feel like I've made a lot of progress in sorting things out. And thank you for the plugin suggestions, I will definitely be giving those a look.

[Kami]

Hey, no problem! My 15 years worth of RP admin nonsense isn't useful to anyone else but other RP admins so I might as well share the wealth right?

My biggest advice to you, courtesy of my IRL job, is to be player-focused. I think sometimes admins (myself included) get really bogged down in the mechanics of things and how they'll accommodate their ideas of the "perfect" realisation of their vision, without thinking about how it'll impact the players.

For example, this part: some of the mechanical aspects will be handled by mods

In theory, a solid plan. But... what if your mods are busy with other players? What would happen if, worst case scenario, your mods quit en masse or are all simultaneously unavailable like during holidays? And, scalability: what happens if you don't have enough volunteers out of your players to fill the numbers you need for mods? What is the player impact and experience then?

Obviously, some things will need to be handled by staff and that's just How It Is. But, from my perspective, the fewer things you micromanage for your players, the better the player experience will be in the absence of built-in automated game mechanics. In D&D terms, imagine playing phone tag with your DM and having to conduct everything through voicemail. That's what waiting for mods to complete GM tasks is like for a player on an RP forum.

Empower your players to make decisions for how their character moves through the story. Yes, there will be some micromanage-y aspects you'll need, but always think about it through the lens of the player (especially NEW players who have no context behind your decisions or the history of the forum). Would an existing member find this change useful and easy to adjust to? Would a new member find it easy to jump right in, or are they going to have to read 398793872837 documentation threads first?

You see what I'm getting at?

So obviously gameplay mechanics are fine. But always remember to think about the player experience and put that context on every idea you get. (:

Also if you just want to shoot the breeze about gaming (forums, TTRPGs, video games (I see that gengar icon)) please feel free to PM me.