Pacing

Hello players!

What do we all think of the pacing so far?

It's theoretically 1 game day per week (during scenarios, narrative time inbetween), changing on Friday/Saturday.

Thoughts appreciated - plus there's a poll! Not just pacing, but also the best day to change and anything else you can think of.

I think the pacing is right, but I'd prefer if the in-game day changed a real-life day or two earlier. Would work best for me, since as it is the day starts right on the weekend, where I am unavailable, and am hard-pressed to schedule things and keep people hanging.

It's a difficult balance to strike. My general concern is a number of threads carrying on past day switch. Some things doesn't keep up very well. On the other hand, too slow might make us loose the suspense.

I also think that the game could improve from some NPC's splashing about to add a better feel to the world.

Overall the pacing seems fine to me.

Individual threads can be another matter. When the thread is between 2 PCs or a PC and Reader, they tend to move at a fair pace.

The more PCs that are added, the slower the thread seems to move. I am not sure there is a fix for that other then players trying to keep on top of their threads.

I have no real problem with some threads carrying over after the Day change, but I think they should be cleaned up as quickly as possible afterwards.

I would also like to suggest that threads be locked when a scene is completed, or at least flagged or marked in some way that the scene is done.

I agree that it's a difficult balance to strike, but I'm going to say that for me personally at least, it's definitely too fast.

For example, at the moment, despite making efforts to try and avoid this exact situation, there's a Coldbrook-private situation going on that we have to figure out to avoid temporal paradoxes when dealing with the Marstens in the afternoon, which I have to deal with to avoid temporal paradoxes in my dealings with the Tullysons in the evening.

(So, yeah, part of the problem is that I suck at organising stuff. )

But even without that, there's a lot of times when I just feel overwhelmed with all the stuff I have going on, because I *always* have stuff from the previous week to finish up, and I do try and make my posts have more 'texture' than purely what I do and say, which takes time (and I'm not really willing to compromise on that. It's a key part of what makes it fun for me), and I have other stuff going on some evenings, and I don't really want to be spending the majority of my remaining time on just this.

I used to follow all the threads going on. Now I'm lucky if I can keep track of my own. (And yes, I do have an organisation thread in my forum with links to all my threads, organised by time. Somehow, it doesn't help.)

*However*, I will agree that this is because I'm rather disorganised, and don't have vast arrays of free time, and chose a pretty high-maintenance character, and to play them in a pretty high-maintenance way. So, I'll freely admit it's largely my fault, but that's the situation I'm in.

The only thing is we need to close all threads not of the current day to avoid some consistency issues, but that's just my idea. Locking finished threads is a good decision.

Daveth Coldbrook wrote:
I used to follow all the threads going on. Now I'm lucky if I can keep track of my own. (And yes, I do have an organisation thread in my forum with links to all my threads, organised by time. Somehow, it doesn't help.)

I have the same thing. It's the only way I can keep all the various plot threads straight.

For me, finishing one day in a week is too fast. I often have days where I can only post very late, and perhaps only once per thread even though Reader or the other players in the thread are available to continue. I have stayed up late a number of days to try and keep things moving, but this is ultimately untenable.

If we continue at the planned pace and disallow keeping older threads open, then I will have no choice but to cut down on my activity in general, and I am fairly certain that this will ultimately reduce Jon to a bystander in the game. Since there's not much appeal for me in that, I would probably have to retire from the game.

My preferred solution would be to extend playing time per game day to about ten days. This would also allow switching to the next day to occur mid-week (at least some of the time).

Ten days and keeping old threads open (with people being sensible to avoid weird time issues) seem sensible. At the very least the latter is easily doable, and we can vote on 7 v 10 days latter if we like

I'm a big fan of moving fast but understand people who might not have the same amount of free time.

10 days would be acceptable, and I would like to chip in my vote for closing the previous day threads, possibly archiving them as well.

10 days is not bad, but if you can close that day threads in that set time, it would be grand!

Yeah, I like the pace we have right now, but would not mind if we move to 10 days / day either, especially if this ensures we leave nobody behind due to pacing issues! (it also helps with my two week absence in mid-june with little to no internet access... :? )

I can manage a day per week, with the understanding that a few threads from the previous day can be finished up after the changeover.

Beyond that, I'm kind of in Jon's position. I can't babysit the forums all day, every day, so trying to speed things up would be problematic. Heck, even keeping this pace is somewhat problematic, but it's something I think I can manage.

I'm actually finding I run out of stuff to do a couple of days early, and I'm finding myself waiting around a lot, but it seems I'm in the minority. If it got changed to 10 days, I'd accept it because I want to stay, but I'd likely spend several days not having any free slots to do stuff and basically waiting for the trn days to roll round.

Both Day 3 and 4, I have been feeling largely useless for 2 days prior to the Day switch, and that's been frustrating. I don't feel I'm doing that much more or less than anyone else, so I don't know why it's happening, but I'm at a point currently where I can't do anything until Day 5.

I am aware that I am quite impatient, and have more free time than most though.

At first I was not having too much difficulty, in part because I rarely hfn more than one person in a thread at a time, and the threads didn't directly interact. Now, some conversations have many people in then, and the events in one thread can affect others happening at the same time. Ots not that the pace is too quick for me, it's that the content has gotten convoluted and takes more time to resolve.

Back to driving.,,

Jon Cobb wrote:For me, finishing one day in a week is too fast. I often have days where I can only post very late, and perhaps only once per thread even though Reader or the other players in the thread are available to continue. I have stayed up late a number of days to try and keep things moving, but this is ultimately untenable.

If we continue at the planned pace and disallow keeping older threads open, then I will have no choice but to cut down on my activity in general, and I am fairly certain that this will ultimately reduce Jon to a bystander in the game. Since there's not much appeal for me in that, I would probably have to retire from the game.

My preferred solution would be to extend playing time per game day to about ten days. This would also allow switching to the next day to occur mid-week (at least some of the time).

I basically agree with everything Jon's said. I tend to be very busy on some days of the week and can't really post (these days include almost all weekends) and I have to make up by spending a lot of time on the days when I do have more free time. Sometimes it seems like the pace is just slightly too fast to get everything done in time before the next day. So I'd definitely object to closing the older threads immediately after the new day. So I agree with the suggestion of extending each day to ten days.