So! It's late at night once again. I'm hot, sweaty, and exhausted. What better time to talk about something and raise a question! In the last eight months or so I've seen a pretty bad trend! Where people join an event, participate for a bit, but then completely stop posting or being active in it for one reason or another. Why is this? The only idea I've had is that the people participating got tired of how long the event took and decided to move on without finishing. That's just speculation though. So! I'd like people's opinions! Has anyone else noticed this trend? Been a part of this trend? What do you think solutions or problems could be? I'm curious!
This happens in DnD groups too, it is the age old 'scheduling' problem all groups face. Life is whacky and likes to throw curveballs into the most meticulous of plans, so even under the best of circumstances any event becomes very hard to finish the longer it is and then that is multiplied by the number of players involved. Use TL;DRs, agree ooc on the outcome of an event, get permission to NPC people, and keep things moving. Play by post when you can't do anything else or appoint a 2nd GM to pick up when life has you swamped with work or school or obligations, write paragraphs ahead of time you can edit later. Etc etc etc.
The cause is post delays. The event could be the best written thing in the world, but if it takes too long between posts, even the most attentive players will stop caring and disengage. I’ve been in events where everything is going great at first, but then I start having to wait for hours for my next chance to reply. For every reply. Snail’s-pace discord RP is incredibly boring, and breeds a feeling of “why did I sign up to this thing in the first place?” Too much time passes and you forget what your character was doing or thinking last post, and you don’t want to read up to refresh yourself because you know nobody is going to read your reply for hours. Maybe you feel a little burst of inspiration and make a good post, but by the time it gets replies that inspiration is just gone again. The main cause of slow posts, in my opinion? No session times (I think these should be mandatory for any big RP), and either a flaky player or GM. Either you have That One Guy who signs up to an event and then immediately stops replying, and the entire RP is halted waiting for them.. or the GM bit off more than they could chew, is mega burned out (it happens), but insists on dragging the event’s corpse around instead of cancelling or pausing it. Bonus points if the entire party is fucking limbo’d and can’t use their characters anywhere else. If a discord event has more than 4 people in it and it doesn’t have proper session times, it’s a race against the clock before it slows down and dies. If there’s hours between each burst of activity in an event, it’s already dead. Discord event GMs: Get a damn session schedule, make your players agree to it, NPC anybody who flakes out, and never start anything you can’t finish.
I wanted to weigh in more but Pink pretty much hit it with most everything I wanted to say. I've experienced this way too many times and still trapped in one that's been going on for months at this point. If we can all find time to do on server events then I would hope we'd all be able to dedicate that same kinda time to a discord event. Making an effort for session schedules along with fallbacks like what Cabbage suggested would go a long way to help reverse this in my opnion.
I'm actually going to add onto this, because while pink is being spot on about everything here- as to how events die and how they are turned into a fetid corpse of an empty Discord server, I want to share my thoughts as to what factor causes them. to. well. die. lol Urgency. It's fascinating how even the lengthtiest events that happen on server are resolved in one evening, and one-offs are dragged over days when it comes to Discord. And as such, I came to the conclusion that- Urgency does that. When I am on the server and I take part in something bigger, I know that there are chances that- if I won't be there fo the ending, I'll miss it out. I don't have Starbound on my phone. I don't have access to the game 24/7, where I can just look up what happened when I was gone. I can't go "Oh, I'll reply to that one on-server post when I'm done with my studies next day". I know that when tomorrow comes, and I log off, chances are- the plot won't be picked up again, and I won't gather everyone again to continue it. With on-server events, everyone is there. You know they're sitting in front of their potato PCs, playing a dog-ass game for infants, and they WILL reply- unless they go away for minor reasons, like the shitter or food. If they quit, you know they probably quit for good this evening and won't be back. With Discord events? Well, you don't have the chance to see everyone being active all at once. Out of five people taking part, three are sleeping, one is on a walk, and the last one is probably in the middle of a lecture about weaving baskets. There is no urgency of "here and now", it's more or less a view of "later when I got time". It's harder to commit to a server event. But it also makes it so, so much easier to finish it in one session. It's as shrimple as that.
I’m making a second post here to correct myself. I talked to someone in depth about this yesterday and I think I have to make an adjustment to my Scholarly Theory here. The benefits of session times cannot be understated, especially if you’re super rigid in enforcing it, but they do nothing for you if your players suck. Some people just don’t consistently reply to RP. I mentioned this kind of person in my previous post but I don’t think I realized just how destructive they can be to an event. If you have too many of them, your event is basically fucked no matter what you do. You can easily tell how bad a person is at replying by going into any event discord/chat and checking to see how many times they’ve been pinged. It’s only occasionally real life stuff that’s keeping them occupied too, mostly they’re just playing video games and don’t feel any motivation to reply… EVEN THOUGH THEY SIGNED UP!!! The most frustrating part of this is that these people are often friends with the GMs of the events they’re killing. If you sign up to your friend’s event, don’t reply consistently, and now they’re burned out and don’t want to host events anymore… you contributed to that problem. If you’re a player and you’ve done this, the solutions are simple: only sign up to events you KNOW you can stay interested in, and never put off event replies. I used to be a lazy replyer, and I still kind of am, so I simply don’t sign up to events unless I know for sure I can commit. Instead, I ask to spectate so I can still see the cool event that my friend is hosting. One of my friends was a lazy replyer and felt bad because one of the events they were in died, so they apologized to the GM and then actually made an effort to stay active in the next event they participated in. They successfully remained active in the event, and that helped keep it alive. If you make an effort, it goes a long way. If you’re a GM, session times are still key, but also maybe run a background check on some of the people signing up. If they have a bad track record? Don’t accept them. Yes, even if they’re your friend! And if someone keeps flaking out in your event? NPC them or write out their character entirely. Don’t wait for them. Get them out of there. If your entire party is flaking out, you can try to get them organized, but it might also be best to cut your losses and move onto something else— you can take the cut content from that event and repurpose it into something new. (This obviously doesn’t count if the GM was being super slow to reply. Can’t blame the players for being disengaged if the host is the one that slowed things to a crawl. There’s been a few cases where I’ve stopped consistently replying in events because the GM would take giant breaks from replying and I was sick of putting effort into something that was moving so slowly. A flaky player is bad, but a flaky GM is unrecoverable.)
