- Invitation Status
- Posting Speed
- One post per week
- Slow As Molasses
- Preferred Character Gender
- No Preferences
Let me rephrase. I'll give everything an actual read-through at least once, but, if I'm just trying to manage everything as a GM and make sense of where everything is... I don't always have time to give everything a super-close read.Don't skim through the thread... read it. Every post makes part of the story, so just think of an RP as a book, and read everything, so you don't miss stuff. I'd hate to think we have people who "skim" through novels, just so they can read the parts that interest them. Miss so much that way...
Additionally, sometimes it is literally difficult to process the words of an IC post. At least for me personally. When I read books, I sometimes find that I have no idea what was said in the last two paragraphs, and I have to go back and re-read. I also -- funnily enough have trouble remembering where certain characters are and what they're doing.
That being said, I can also take my time with a book. Sometimes I might even decide to come back to it another day if I just can't concentrate well enough at a certain time. Also, my ability to follow what's happening in a book isn't nearly as important as being able to follow what's happening here, where everyone's ability to follow what's happening actually influences what happens next. The author of a novel doesn't get confused over where his characters are. And even if he does, he can always edit and rearrange. He doesn't have to communicate these things with other people in order to put words on a page.
Additionally, when it comes to posts for characters/groups that you're currently interacting with, then, yeah, it makes sense to give everything a good read and really enjoy it. But, in order to just make sense of what's happening... one shouldn't have to give the text such a close read in order to decipher that. At the very least, it leaves you wide open for easy mistakes, which then cause other people to make mistakes as they pass on false information, thus creating a whole chain reaction of problems that, sometimes, brings the thread to a complete halt as I attempt to sort through everything that happened.
I understand the value of giving something a post a close read and enjoying it just for its own sake. But most of the time, when I'm trying to figure this stuff out, I already have read a post at least once, and now I'm trying to quickly scroll through a thread and re-read to figure out what's happening. And it's easy for my brain to get lost in the details.
Ordinarily, I don't make such a big fuss about this sort of thing. But given all of the repeated problems that have come up in this thread in particular? We need a clearer and more concise way of communicating these kinds of things, so that everyone's on the same page about what's happening. My co-GM's and I have been trying some things, but it's a work-in-progress. And when things haven't been working as well, then, yes, I'm open to suggestions such as these which will make it a lot easier for someone to quickly get a basic idea of what's happening, so that they can then go back and closely read other posts, once they're not confused about the big picture.
Hell, give me a "tl;dr" version of any one of your posts, and I'll probably enjoy the real version even more when I go back to re-read it, because then I'm not getting lost in the details and failing to comprehend even the basic gist of it.
And, if I picked up a novel, for no other reason than wanting to find a specific passage in that novel, because I was planning on referencing that information for something else? You'd better believe I'm skimming to just that part, because at that point, I'm not just reading for leisure. I'm trying to figure out something specific. And being able to quickly and easily find the thing that I want makes that process much easier. It's why I wish it were somehow possible to do a ctrl + F on a physical book, and I'm probably not the only one.