Xcards, pacing and norms

As we have more characters joining the worlds I've been pondering emote pacing alongside different styles. Being 10% awake these days I am unfortunately a little more overwhelmed in scenes and may xcard more at times. I also wanted to mention that xcard's exist as a system as well as the helpfile for them in game can be found under in game 'help xcard' or 'help safety tools.' Searching the wiki I only saw mentions on an update, and a little on the rules page http://songofavaria.com:8080/mediawiki/index.php?title=Rules

I'm posting a snippet of, but if any players may have wondered what in the world seeing the xcards, this some of the information regarding:

    GREEN means: I am fine, but need a moment to think.
    YELLOW means: This is getting uncomfortable. Please dial it back whenever possible.
    RED means: I cannot tolerate this discomfort. We need to retcon.
    CLEAR will clear all currently-active cards in the room.

    It's possible to add an optional note in parenthesis, such as:

    Example:
        xcard green (AFK five minutes, keep playing without me!)

I will use the xcard if I'm stepping away, need more time to think, or got distracted. I may also add distracted into my emote too. Sometimes I may say or emote in character something like 'emote remains quiet for a time thinking on their words' or emote furrows their brow and replies, "I need more time to think on this." 

The times I feel like my writing may become a too large a post, I will do something like, emote talks for a while "Blah blah blah wordsalad," then takes a deep breath to resume speaking further unless interrupted.' This splits my potential text into two, gives space to be interrupted, or gives others the knowledge my character has more to say.

Are there any methods anyone else likes to use for this?

I've also been thinking on this more reading of the norms section on the rules page. I was wondering as a community what sort of pacing may feel good for timing/emote lengths. On that note, if I ever am replying awfully fast in a scene, I don't want someone to feel pressured to reply super fast. On the flip side being unsure if someone is going to reply or is distracted, an xcard can help end some of the limbo if housemates or family have bad timing having conversations/calling. Life entirely happens, or when I attempted to play from my phone a call dc's rudely. I give permission to others to ooc contact me on desired pacing 1 to 1.

I tossed together a quick poll which lacks any choices on emote lengths, only timeframes. I mildly assume shorter time goes with shorter text and that we balance say/emote lengths paired with the timing in between. I tend to reply a little faster, and depending on the player character may do one longer post, or two varying lengths of two posts. In larger groups recently I have struggled a bit to keep up with my replies so my character listened more than spoke. 

Finding a happy medium individually and as a community as we grow. I welcome suggestions and ideas for a follow up poll as well.

Tricky subject. A lot of it comes down to game design and what SoA is trying to be. The devs have mentioned in the past that in general, they envision a faster-paced environment for the game.

For me (and from what I've seen across almost two years of play), it's context-based, dependent on both the content of the scene and the number of participants. If it's an action-packed scene, then emoting faster can help to make it feel more punchy and lively and 'real'. But if it's a low-key scene with only a couple people involved, it's immersive and compelling to take the time to be a bit more descriptive, and to really fill out and deepen your character's portrayal. It's a story game for people who love stories, after all! Generally, larger groups necessitate shorter emotes for the simple sake of parsing, but less frequent emotes too -- you don't need to respond to absolutely everything that's happening, just what your character would pick out from among it all.

This opinion is based purely on my own personal experience, so take it with a grain of salt, but: I feel that it's not really feasible to set a single blanket standard across any meaningfully-sized population of roleplayers without pushing people out. We all process input and produce output differently. I think that a healthier play culture is to simply sit back and allow players of similar speeds to naturally gravitate toward one another. This allows for comfy groups to form and co-exist during day-to-day RP, which then more deeply mingle and blend when stitching together broader game events. That way, everybody has their space to occupy and can take part in the game, be they slower or faster.

More personally still, I tend to prefer and perform better in slower scenes with fewer participants, as I get easily overwhelmed and freeze up if there's too much happening too quickly. For that reason, I take zero issue with getting left behind in faster scenes -- I don't blame anyone but me for that. But I do also enjoy the challenge of those situations and like to have the opportunity to try to dive in when possible.

Alternatively, if it's decided that you *have* to be fast to play Avaria, then you're essentially saying to someone like me 'this game just isn't for you.' Which is fine! My heart would heal! But I just think there's a better way than potentially excluding a whole chunk of passionate storytellers.

I like scenes good and slow, for a lot of reasons. My own energy levels; longer and more in-depth emotes; multitasking-friendly, as I largely play while also working from home. But generally I agree with Rakim - the right pace for a scene depends entirely on the nature of that scene and the preferences of the players within it. If you made me choose a blanket answer, though, I'd rather have 10 minute waits for thoughtful and detailed paragraphs than 2 minute waits for one-liners. 

So, I'm brand new here and definitely on the slower end of the emoting quadrant at my peak proficiency, but particularly slow right now because everything is new and so half my time is spent checking the wiki or game commands or just having to stop and read room descriptions or character description or item descriptions between emotes - so I accept that there is some bias in that I think the whole concept of asserting an "emote speed norm" is a bad pratice, but I'll throw my reasoning out here all the same!

My main argument here is that there is nothing to be gained and only morale to be lost by setting such an expectation. In general, being more patient is going to be more inclusive. Some players will have preferences in how long they are personally willing to wait for others to emote, and that's totally fine! If you're feeling bored or antsy in a scene because the other player(s) aren't emoting as quick as you'd like, then just move along and play with someone else!  No harm done! Similarly, when someone like me is in a scene with people who are whipping things out faster than I am and throwing out 2-3 emotes each while I'm writing one, I can leave and find other people to play with who are more patient or slow paced, or I can just hang around and throw things out when I have the opportunity - and those other people can realize they're bowling me over and adjust, or not!

But to have any official documentation in the game telling people you expect them to churn out a reply in some number of minutes is going to make a lot of people feel like their emoting style or their writing/reading capacity isn't welcome here.

Just to put the staff perspective in here, SoA will largely continue to foster a culture of moderately paced RP in most scenes -- not ultra-fast one-liners with little emotive or descriptive content, and not lengthily composed huge-chunk-of-text multi-action-at-once emotes. And, great news: this is just what we tend to see!

There's definitely room for both faster and slower paces within that range, and different kinds of interactions can encourage different paces. Sometimes people may be focusing more on conversing, having an argument, or engaging in witty banter, and then having faster-paced dialogue and less description may serve. Other times they might be having a really dramatic or in-depth or emotionally intense scene, where they want to put more careful thought into the nuances of a character's speech and behavior, or just creating atmosphere. Both of these things are okay!

Being able to adapt to some degree to the kind of scene you walk in on is helpful. But you don't have to pare your naturally descriptive emotes down to the bone if you enter a faster-paced scene, nor do you have to heftily pad up your ordinarily more spare emotes if you enter a slower or more detailed one. I think most of us are capable of adjusting our natural styles a little bit to fit whatever happens to be going on at the time. 

Generally I prefer to see things move a little faster in a multi-person off-the-cuff scene, letting things flow and feel dynamic rather than everyone having to wait a very long time to allow each person their "turn". In smaller or one-on-one scenes, a slower pace can sometimes be more enjoyable and allow players to really express a lot of depth and detail in RPing their characters. In my interactions with PCs I've done both, and had a lot of fun with both. And of course people just write at different paces; I'm not always the speediest emoter myself (or, let's face it, the most eloquent either).

That said, if you're slow just because you're distracted, please do let people know that with a green xcard, and if you have to leave for any reason just make a quick IC excuse and log off -- everyone will understand!

I think the most important thing is -- whatever you're RPing, just give people a chance to respond. Don't barrel through with a ton of emotes or says so rapid-fire that you don't give people around you any chance to react to them as they come, and alternately don't cram so much into a single emote that people can't respond naturally to whatever you wrote at the start of the emote because you've completely moved on by the end. And yes, all of us do one or the other (or, let's face it, possibly both if you're me XD ) of these things at one time or another, so it's really just a courtesy we're all trying to aim for.

But to conclude, I don't think there's any need right now for anyone to start feeling bad about emoting either too fast or too slowly, or about whether they're doing things "right". Everyone seems to be RPing just fine from what I've been seeing, and I have enjoyed the interactions I've had with everyone lately, old and new! So please just keep going out there and having creative fun together. :)

Wanted to tangentially mention for anyone who’s new here, especially since we have a lot of folks who seem to prefer a slower pace, that there’s also a great cutscene system available. It’s intended mostly for low stakes things, and while it’s obviously not a substitute for the delight of in-game shenanigans, it is a really good option for scenes you want to be super long form. For cutscenes that aren’t public (or ones that are, with a forum post alongside them), I’d just recommend setting an expectation for when you hope to conclude. It's also helpful if IRL time constraints are being troublesome. 

I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting most of the lovely, lovely new faces yet (RIP laptop </3), but since we’re sharing -- I am a slow emoter. My brain just doesn’t absorb and return at a worthwhile speed, no matter how hard I try to will it. I blame my mom for eating too much Taco Casa while pregnant with me.

Anyyyyway, as Mistsparrow said, I’m sure you are all doing great!