Cutscene Etiquette

So, I come from a Mush background where typically you link up with people or toss out a line on an rp request channel or put up an open scene and tell people hey this scene is open if anyone's looking.

The cutscene system is something that i want to start using but I'm unsure the proper etiquette of it. For a public, anyone can drop in cutscene that seems self explanatory. Just make it and if anyone sees it on the list and wants to hope in, they can.

But if there's a specific person or set of people i wanted to do a cutscene with that's where I'm struggling. Should I send an OOC mail first? Or do i just make the scene and add them to it? Any guidance would be really helpful!

Thank you!

For PCs, I've personally always sent an OOCmail first, just asking, "Would you like to do a cutscene?" And if they confirm, I then set it up. I prefer doing this as I'd be caught off-guard by a random cutscene myself. I think an exception to this for me personally is like... just a leaving them a note in their cabin/hammock cutscene as that requires no time commitment on their part. 

For NPCs, I just toss out the cutscene and realize they may or may not respond based on staff availability and inclination, etc. 

You can just start the scene and invite them. The system will send them a notification that they've been invited. You can make it public or private, either way. And if there's something you want to say through OOC, you can put it in the OOC messages box for the cutscene.

If you're worried about a thought like "but maybe so-and-so does not really want to cutscene with me"... try not to worry (I know that's hard with anxiety, but most people do want to roleplay, that's why they're playing this game)! If they don't want to be in this scene, or would not be in this scene for some reason, they can just not post. If the scene is only with them, they can click End Scene and it'll be gone within the next five hours. When the cutscene log shows up in their logs, they can just unsave it, and it'll get purged along with all other logs that were unsaved or never saved.

It's fine to end a cutscene or not post without much need to communicate it -- just like in-game interactions, sometimes a person does not have the time, or sometimes a person cannot be found easily.

There is one particular cutscene etiquette that I'd like to mention though...

It's fine for a cutscene to move as slow or as fast as necessary for those involved, HOWEVER: Please take into account the ongoing plot of the game, and try not to awkwardly overlap time. Here's an example: Jerembeli has a friend named Josaf and a friend named Jalladin. Josaf usually plays evenings, Jerembeli plays mornings even though they are evenings for him due to timezone differences. Jalladin plays pretty much all the time. Jerembeli wants to tell Josaf and Jalladin, together, something important before the RPT in three days (Sunday). It's Thursday, and on Saturday morning, Jerembeli and Josaf will both be playing in-game.

Let's say the cutscene starts and is pretty slow because the three OOC friends are carefully taking turns and writing long interesting play-by-post style blurbs. We get to Saturday morning. Jerembeli and Josaf are both online. Maybe they want to play with each other. But they feel awkward about it, and awkward about playing with Jalladin too, because ... they're in the middle of a scene that theoretically started three days ago, but is unfinished. Who knows what happened at the end of that scene?

Or let's say that the RPT comes up. They still haven't finished the cutscene, and Jerembeli hasn't been able to tell his friends the important thing, even though he really had multiple opportunities.

Because of this discrepency between cutscene-time and in-game-time, we need to be cognizant of time frames when using cutscenes.

It's fine to quickly close out a cutscene with a summary post like: "Hush!" exclaims Jerembeli in frustration. "Look, I gathered you both to tell you something important! The doomspawner will be descending from the sky at noon! I had a dream about it! You can believe me, or not!" Jerembeli turns and runs away. And then end scene. It's fine to post "out of turn" in a cutscene. It's fine to have short cutscenes too.

Some cutscenes might be ongoing things, like ... a doctor, checking on a patient every day, and every few posts it's a new day. In that case, if the patient sees the doctor between one of those posts, they've really just seen the doctor between checkups, and the previous checkups can exist in the memory of the patient. And maybe the cutscene only ends when that small plotline ends, or when there's enough of a shift in the routine that it deserves a new log.

But for cutscenes that are a single scene, like "Jerembeli sits and discusses the doomspawner with his friends", it would be awkward during in-game time for Jalladin to be telling his other friend, Jamarla, "Jerembeli said he had an interesting dream." and Jamarla goes, "Oh yeah?" and Jalladin is like "Yeah but he didn't tell me what it was..." And then in the next cutscene post Jerembeli explains the contents of his dream, and at the end of the chat with Jamarla, Jalladin says, "Oh yeah, Jerembeli told me his dream now, the doomspawner will be descending from the sky at noon."  Like... when? When did Jerembeli say that? This sort of thing creates a parallel timeline issue that we want to avoid. So for these single-scene cutscenes, either don't roleplay about the fallout until the scene has finished, or don't consider the scene to have taken place at all until it is finished.

Because of this rational stipulation, it's nice to be aware of fellow-player's time-based needs in cutscenes and try to finish them off in a tidy fashion. The cutscene system is very flexible and this is probably the only etiquette I'd consider to be important -- to try to take the timeline issue into account, and be careful with it. During my attempts to play async MUSHes, my main difficulties in following the story have been this timeline issue, so that's why I'm emphasizing it here. Song is a story focused game and we want the story to make as much sense as possible. 


Edit: Took me a long time to write this post (through some RL distractions) so I didn't see Zahra's post up there. Of course, it's not necessarily against etiquette to send an OOCMail if you are worried or if you just feel more comfortable doing so. But it's not required to do, and I don't want it to feel like a cultural requirement to ask people to roleplay.

Thank you both for the input! That helps!

Thanks for this thread... I was just feeling awkward about logging in because a cutscene I unexpectedly found myself in had not resolved and I didn't know whether the events therein had "happened" or not!

Sorry for replying to myself but I have another question about cutscene etiquette: 

Regarding the public cutscenes taking place in public places, is it reasonable to consider topics discussed there to be public knowledge? Is it in bounds for my character to know that Jalladin and Jambelli discussed seeing Janarla coming out of the post office after midnight, even if my character was not part of the scene? This is assuming of course that this conversation took place somewhere vNPCs could be expected to be present at all hours, etc.

Yep, it is! If your character was in the general zone of said post office and it'd be reasonable to overhear such a thing from NPCs, that's fine. 

For (current) example, there's a cutscene that completed recently where Briddim-Rhua initiated an interaction with Hektor, the ship's crewmate, and got Hektor to agree on helping find some spices. Nobody else joined this cutscene, but it was public, and posted to RP logs on the forums at the end. Who knows what will happen with that situation, or if Hektor even actually understood the assignment? But as Esfandiar is on the ship, it'd be reasonable for him to have heard of this interaction through the grapevine in whatever way you want that to be (within reason as always). Reasonable, but not necessary.

"It's fine for a cutscene to move as slow or as fast as necessary for those involved, HOWEVER: Please take into account the ongoing plot of the game, and try not to awkwardly overlap time. Here's an example: Jerembeli has a friend named Josaf and a friend named Jalladin. Josaf usually plays evenings, Jerembeli plays mornings even though they are evenings for him due to timezone differences. Jalladin plays pretty much all the time. Jerembeli wants to tell Josaf and Jalladin, together, something important before the RPT in three days (Sunday). It's Thursday, and on Saturday morning, Jerembeli and Josaf will both be playing in-game."

What is the point of cutscenes, then? They seem to be a way to play out things outside of active gaming, but the commentary here feels like you want them to move as fast as in-game RP. Why do they exist, if those who are, for example, outside of similar timezones, are not able to move fast? 

I second Dalila on this ^

I'm on Aussie timezone so cutscenes are definitely a lot slower with me + US-based players, but I thought that was the point.

They don't necessarily have to be resolved quickly, because I'd assume that the majority of cutscenes would be primarily for low-stakes situations.  However, it's a very flexible system that can be used for a variety of things. Sometimes people may roleplay about plot-related elements over cutscenes, because there are a lot of potential reasons for starting a cutscene -- wanting to roleplay slowly while not in-game, or wanting to roleplay with someone in another timezone who you hardly ever see. These sort of plot-heavy cutscenes may be time-sensitive, and the main etiquette that I'd recommend for using asynchronous roleplay (especially when using it to resolve plot) is just to be aware of that time-sensitive content, and try to be respectful of other players' story timelines.

That recommendation shouldn't be interpreted as "cutscenes must move at in-game speed". My example was using three days to roleplay a plot-intensive scene that could probably happen in fifteen minutes in-game. I'm baffled that my meaning came across so wrongly, but probably I'm also not the best communicator. If only the Mistsparrow would swoop in to save meee.