Imagine this: a new player walks into a busy room with five players and immediately see's one of them pose nine lines. She says "hi" and is told to wait her turn.

Two minutes passes of utter silence, then a nine line pose is made by one of the five prior players.

Nine minutes of silence, then an 8 line pose is made by another of the five.

Twenty-one minutes (literally, time-stamp verified) passes, then another three line pose is made by the first poser.

Four minutes later, another pose is made (by the second again) and the new player is told she can pose in.

From the time she entered until the time she got to speak, 36 minutes passed.

Actually, you don't have to imagine anything but the new player. This was an honest timing of a sample "busy room" where ultra-posing RP was going on. No new player came in (thankfully).

The slow-posing players seem to be enjoying themselves, even though they don't speak much. The poses have some really good writing in them (of course, some of them are terrible, but that's the nature of MU play too).

But, the play is slow, glacially slow. And to someone watching, who doesn't know the people involved, it's effectively impossible to join in without watching a few cycles of this. That would mean literally (in this case) around 32 minutes to see the first speaker speak again.

Worse, all the statements were made by only three of the people in the room. If the new player was waiting for everyone to speak, they'd still be waiting when I ended my observation.

People have accused me of exaggerating the long delays inherent in this style of play. I have logs and time-stamps of public play; this is no exaggeration. If anything, this was a better case than many I've seen, because not everyone took their turn. Had all five required a turn, it could have taken longer (though there's no way to know that the other two wouldn't have posed rapidly, so that's only a guess).

Obviously, this breaks no rules. There's nothing wrong with posing slowly and being verbose. But, it does effectively exclude players. Should someone enter and attempt to speak without waiting, they are asked (often publicly!) to stop, or to "pose in" or "wait until they have seen what's going on." That could be upwards of half an hour (in this real case). So, often, people simply leave. This isn't an exaggeration either; I've been the one on the receiving end of this more than once.

That people leave instead of play means that we lose players and don't convert guests to players. For instance, I always leave when I enter and the play is ultra-posing, because I don't play in that manner.

One can argue the merits of ultra-pose play; I don't argue them, I think they should play as they like. But I think that ultra-posing is best done on the message boards instead of in the MU rooms, because there's no expectation of interactive play. And whatever else you may say of ultra-posing, waiting 30+ minutes for a turn on a computer system isn't very "interactive." Not in this modern world of rapid response.

Of course, one can also ultra-pose simply over page!! Ultra-posing doesn't require gathering in a public room and effectively freezing time within that room from the rest of the players. Since the ultra-posers are offended by people coming in and "just typing in stuff without thought fast" the simple solution is to separate ultra-posers from those who want faster play.

So, if the goal is to do very long-delay play, please consider either not objecting when people play in the same room much faster (and living with the fact that slow-pace stories and fast-pace stories are independent of each other) or play in a private area where there's no public access. The ultra-posers are the ones who need the others to be silent to not interfere ... so they are the ones that need to restrict others in order to play. If someone else needs to be restricted, there's a problem.

The MU has a lot of shared places and features: those who can't share (for a variety of reasons) shouldn't try to use restriction to control public places.

Does that not seem courteous?

Keep the Light, Otter Chief Wizard