The Obsession with High Casual?

[Izaka Sazaka]

Having returned to the guild in recent weeks after our tumultuous shutdown, I've encountered a growing trend which had piqued my curiosity. The evolution of the new sub-category known as 'high-casual' (which may or may not have existed since before I joined the guild) seems to have spread through most casual interest checks and it appears to me now that this is simply a moniker that gets tacked on to roleplays by OP's who really want the roleplay to succeed, but aren't actually asking for high-casual material. To put things more simply, it feels like the default categorization of all roleplays in casual is now high-casual, when really they shouldn't be.

Now, forward to a disclaimer before I continue: I don't presume to tell people which roleplays can or cannot be high-casual, I just feel that the abuse of the descriptor isn't very healthy for roleplayers who seek to discern upper-level play within casual itself without rising to the advanced category. To quote directly from the casual header, "Roleplay here if you enjoy writing at least a paragraph or two, character development, and some depth. Casual RP is more laid back and lighthearted than Advanced RP but more moderated than Free RP." It seems to me though, that most people who label their roleplay as high casual are only expecting 1-2 paragraphs to begin with, rather than a greater level of detail or length.

My questions then are thus. What exactly, in the minds of other guild members, are the expectations of high-casual and what constitutes a high-casual roleplay? A greater length or simply more story-telling depth within the expected 2 or so paragraphs? Is the term being over used?

[Ruby]

You may be putting too fine a point on the dimensions of Advanced, to begin with.

"But Ruby, Advanced means a page of wordy-jibba-jabba, at least!"

Yeah, no. It means an Editor wouldn't kick your RP's IC out of bed. Plot, setting, pace, even a little bit of art. (What some may call 'fluff' or 'padding' posts.)

Now contrast that with the Casual rundown.

Not TOO far off. More focus on the interactions, the characters, maybe setting, definitely storytelling. But there's no pressure to be novella worthy. But there are no RP police that come and put a black bag over your thread and hurry it away into the night if it says 'High Casual' but doesn't...whatever; met a length requirement, doesn't focus enough on storytelling, doesn't establish enough setting, or pace, or mood.

It's subjective. 'High Casual' is as much a declaration of RP intent more than it is a unit of measurement. If the observation is that it's 'over used'...well, maybe. But, again, it's subjective. To me? Yay it's being overused! They're all, Free/Cas/Adv, just guide lines anyway. =)

[Kestrel]

'High-casual' is redundant as a term to begin with. As a GM you're free to add rules and expectations to your games at pretty much your own wims, as long as it doesn't go below section-standards, which are all more than reasonable.

[Dervish]

I mainly used High Casual as a game descriptor to in a way weed out players who perhaps weren't on the same wave length for post quality and maturity, but it was something that was useful for attracting people who maybe wanted to try something that was approaching Advanced level without feeling like they would be expected to make massive posts. One of the stigmas (read; perceptions) about Advanced is that you're expected to write giant posts and collaborations while dealing with elitist writers, which isn't strictly true. It was kind of intentionally set out to be Advanced-lite where people could make their two paragraph posts or six paragraph posts without feeling pressured, and maybe using it as a way to test the water if they wanted to make the jump up to Advanced at some point to see if they felt comfortable enough writing at it. The fact that in this version of the guild I re-posted the gamed in Advanced kind of shows how much all the players developed. Game's been going for over a year now, with no signs of stopping.

Another reason for the High-Casual label is because Casual has by far the most traffic and number of RPs as well as players, and that's a crazy number. After a few hours, your RP can oftentimes find itself back 1-3 pages because of pure volume, and with that is a large range of what Casual is defined as. I've seen a lot of RPs that honestly belonged in the Free section lurking in Casual and plenty others that were barely meeting the requirements mixed in with some really solid ones with a lot of quality posts. People kind of needed a way to put up some kind of bar of entry into their games to keep things from being too jarring between writers. Imagine a game where you and a couple other players are always writing 2-3 large paragraphs a post and putting lots of effort into your characters and plot development, and then two or three other players are doing 1-2 really short paragraphs that don't really add much, or respond to what you and the others were writing about. It gets frustrating and can kill off an RP quickly if all the players aren't on the same wave length. It's not a bash against people who are happy with short, simple posts, it's just sometimes people expect more out of their writing without it necessarily being a proper game for Advanced. It's part of the reason I'm very picky with character sheets and the quality they write at, it's as much of a gauge for how appropriate the character is for the game as it is a writing sample from the player. A lot of RPs die because they let pretty much anyone who applies in and then run into problems almost right away. In the old guild, I often took a look at locked RP and kind of looked at what lead up to it to A) find out how to prevent that in my own games and B) identify bad trends and possibly players I should be aware of. Oftentimes, I'd look at the character sheets and see if there was a large deviance in quality, and it's usually there.

[ApocalypticaGM]

I generally stick to Advanced because of my time restrictions and RPs in that area are flexible with how long you have to post. That said, in my experience with RPG, High-Casual has been more-or-less a topic of conversation already engaged when I came around five years ago. What I have concluded is the following: 1) High-Casual is meant to draw more serious participators OR are meant to draw others too put off by Advanced, and 2) If the Advanced stigma melted away and High-Casual came on over, we'd have a wonderful, fresh, new population.

So basically, I have much anger toward High Casual. Advanced is not at all as intimidating as it might seem. How the RP goes is based on the people and you can easily shape that to fit you. I want people to aspire and reach for what they'd like -- no fear, no hesitation. I'm not sure where the stigmas arise, but they need to die. Free, Casual, or Advanced, we love to write and we should do it in whatever category we desire.

[HeySeuss]

ShonHarris said
If the Advanced stigma melted away and High-Casual came on over, we'd have a wonderful, fresh, new population.

Good luck, Advanced has been the target of ugly propaganda for years. I think a couple prominent players got kicked out of a roleplay in there once, and a few users were arrogant about it back in the day (like before a lot of users that perpetuate the myth ever logged on.) That's all it took to get the myth going. I can't recall ever personally meeting the stereotypical user that is rumored to lurk in Advanced.

[Blue Demon]

Advanced scares the you-know-whats out of me. I prefer to market myself as high-casual because of that. I look at advanced and go: "No way am I that good". And to be honest, everyone seems to agree with me. No one's gone, "Why don't you move up to advanced? You're good enough." I think if you want people to move up out of casual, you need to tell the people who are good enough that they can. Or else they just look at advanced a laugh. I don't think it's a fear of elitism, it's more of a fear of being told you're not good enough and having to suffer the shame of going back to casual. That, and more people are in casual so it easier to start something.

Disclaimer

And I didn't say this so everyone can tall me how wonderful I am. Please do not. I hate it. Thank you

[HeySeuss]

Okay, I'll be totally honest about what my standards in Advanced are -- I want an effort at grammar, punctuation and spelling, and that isn't hard because there are spell-and-grammar checkers embedded in most word processors.

Beyond that, two paragraphs or more a post (not two thousand words) is sufficient.

If you can move past that bar, you should be fine in Advanced. And I've never said, "Go back to casual." (because I don't necessarily consider Casual beneath anyone -- I've gone and played there before, and I bet that is not a unique opinion in Advanced.) I always say, "Good luck in other RP's" and that's only occasionally due to the spelling/grammar/punctuation thing -- it's usually more like someone is proposing a character that is unworkable or is that sort of personality where I can tell that I'm gonna never be able to get anything done without an argument.

No one should have to be told 'oh, you're ready for advanced.' They should go there, and if they see an RP they like, get involved without fearing some sort of nasty backlash from the monsters that reputedly lurk there.

[Gat]

HeySeuss said
Good luck, Advanced has been the target of ugly propaganda for years. I think a couple prominent players got kicked out of a roleplay in there once, and a few users were arrogant about it back in the day (like before a lot of users that perpetuate the myth ever logged on.) That's all it took to get the myth going. I can't recall ever personally meeting the stereotypical user that is rumored to lurk in Advanced.

Such a situation did happen way back in the guilds history, first or second year. advanced was more or less controlled by a handful of elitists who felt the need to tell anyone that couldn't make 6 paragraph posts every other day to bugger off.so many of us that disagreed with that approach fled to casual and coined the high-casual term. Eventually, after only a few months those elitists decided the guild simply wasn't good enough for them and moved on, made their own site I believe which promptly went through a number of problems before shutting down itself.

In short the High-casual term lingered, the original reasons for it didn't, though the event was enough to spawn the myth of advanced being this nigh unobtainable place for monolithic writers only. I frequently tried to encourage users of the high casual term to simply come on over to advanced, the high casual term is like a safety blanket these days and its really not needed in the vast majority of cases, people just need to take a step of faith outside their comfort zones.

[Mahz]

Blackfire, Hyzhenhok, and I bluffed hard when we wrote the "standards" for Casual and Advanced.

We knew we would never enforce them because that's a full-time job. But by using words like "moderated" and "strict", we decided to err on the side of scaring users away and created a mental barrier. Somehow the barrier still stands and Advanced is what it is.

"High Casual" emerged from users and is just a way of expressing a similar thing but within the Casual subforum -- the largest roleplaying block by design -- and with less of a barrier.

The main goal of the entire Free/Casual/Advanced strata was to give a dedicated subforum to the people on the edges of the bell curve (Free and Advanced). Any further subdivision of Casual would have to be entirely user-driven and organic. Hence, High Casual.

In the end, the distinctions are far more successful and have lasted far longer than we thought they would. After all, they were never actually moderated.

[Kestrel]

Blue Demon said
I don't think it's a fear of elitism, it's more of a fear of being told you're not good enough and having to suffer the shame of going back to casual. That, and more people are in casual so it easier to start something.

Advanced is pretty chill most of the time. As long as you do the two paragraphs, a spellcheck and don't spend your entire post in introspection, it's pretty hard to 'not be good enough' for advanced.

[HeySeuss]

Gat said
Such a situation did happen way back in the guilds history, first or second year. advanced was more or less controlled by a handful of elitists who felt the need to tell anyone that couldn't make 6 paragraph posts every other day to bugger off.so many of us that disagreed with that approach fled to casual and coined the high-casual term. Eventually, after only a few months those elitists decided the guild simply wasn't good enough for them and moved on, made their own site I believe which promptly went through a number of problems before shutting down itself.

Hah, thus always to elitists. They stuck around long enough to smear everyone else in the category with their doo, it seems. On the other hand, if players feel more secure writing in casual and want to stay there, well, that's more people writing. That in my mind, is the whole point.

Mahz said
In the end, the distinctions are far more successful and have lasted far longer than we thought they would. After all, they were never actually moderated.

It always seemed like it was designed to give people a general idea of where to go for the amount of writing they wanted to do and what style suited them best. It makes a lot more sense than subdividing by genre, for example, at least in my mind. If we did do the organization of categories by genre rather than writing standard, there'd actually be a lot more confusion over writing standards and probably a lot more conflict between users in the long run. It's easier to navigate the stuff short of having a hashtag system where users can self-categorize their RP's.

Kestrel said
Advanced is pretty chill most of the time. As long as you do the two paragraphs, a spellcheck and don't spend your entire post in introspection, it's pretty hard to 'not be good enough' for advanced.

It is. And that's why I said what I said regarding Advanced, As mentioned above, the reputation is often a misrepresentation of a lot of nice people that work hard on their stuff. Sometimes I feel the need to set the record straight. ;) By now, I've been in there for five years and know a lot of the people RP'ing in there. I feel, and I think a lot of people in there feel the same, that new blood is a great thing, and getting the essentials of what the standards are in Advanced, as opposed to the popular imagination of those standards, is the way to help bring some more people in.

[Brovo]

Generally speaking, the tl;dr to high casual as a tag.

High casual spawned a long time ago in an old guild far far away because of a schism back between 2007-2008 in the advanced section. You had a bunch of elitist twats and not-so-elitist twats and the elitists often bullied or picked on those whom weren't "at their level" of writing excessive, nonsensical, incoherent ramblings for posts. Eventually they left to start their own site and it failed hilariously, they took most of the elitism with them.

"Most" being the key word. It took another year or two before the poison was really ironed out of the system by the rest of us with common sense simply ignoring the pitiful pleas from others to kick people because they didn't spend fourteen paragraphs describing walking down a hallway. During this time high casual really became a thing as the interim between casual (which was swarmed with people who could barely surmount a paragraph) and those "exiled" from advanced (2+ paragraphs being their average).

Over the last couple of years high casual as a term has mutated into a synonym for quality and effort. The key word here being effort. Advanced requires things, high casual requests things, I suppose, is the main difference in thought between the two. One is inherently softer and makes a person feel more comfortable if they don't reach it, but really, what remaining elitism there is in advanced is mainly self-mocking: Egotistical twats like me tend to make fun of ourselves nowadays.

The reality of the situation now? High casual is a tag that is used to request quality role players. Since every GM in casual wants quality role players, de cream l'crop, the vast majority put it in there whether or not they understand the term or its historical connotations. Simply: High casual used to have a logical place. It no longer does really. Casual requires one paragraph or more, there are no limitations beyond that. You can write a fourteen paragraph post in casual if you want to, nothing is stopping you and unlike in Free, people will probably actually read it and admire you for the effort. Advanced requires two or more paragraphs with a good grip of the English language, though by "good grip" I've found junior high level or greater (basic grammar, intermediate literacy) tends to be passable, with high school levels being the normal level at which people write there.

The jump from casual to advanced is actually quite small now. It's basically one extra foot of water in the pool, though it looks so much scarier, in reality, it's not, really. I role play in both sections.

The real difference isn't particularly in quality nowadays so much as it is simply in style. Casual role plays tend to have a more games-like feel to them, many often incorporate classes and combat roles, or base themselves in action-oriented narratives. Advanced role plays tend to have a more novel-like feel to them, they push away the more gamey-feeling stuff to have larger and more complex plot lines with several cherishing character development and interpersonal relationships--and all the dynamics that come with that--over sheer action. You'll find more mystery plots here, or grand Tolkien-like adventures in which most of the story is not centered around combat, but instead around the evolution of the story and its characters as people and ideologies and nations collide.

The above paragraph is also self-demonstrating: The casual section gets to the point as quickly and concisely as it can. The advanced section likes to be long winded and wordy and artsy with mixed results.

EDIT

And yes. This is a tl;dr of high casual, believe it or not.

[Ruby]

I'll use the High Casual tag on a RP interest check as a means of trying to attract the larger block of Casual roleplayers to a (mostly) Advanced game.

In part to draw on the larger Casual numbers, but mostly because in the past I've had success finding Casual RPers that could (and in my opinion should) jump into some Advanced games by using the High Casual tag. Some never grow comfortable in the Advanced games, some do, I can't recall one ever strictly doing Advanced games after though.

I think I just called High Casual a 'gateway drug', but whatever. ^_^

[Dervish]

Ruby said
I'll use the High Casual tag on a RP interest check as a means of trying to attract the larger block of Casual roleplayers to a (mostly) Advanced game.In part to draw on the larger Casual numbers, but mostly because in the past I've had success finding Casual RPers that could (and in my opinion should) jump into some Advanced games by using the High Casual tag. Some never grow comfortable in the Advanced games, some do, I can't recall one ever strictly doing Advanced games after though. I think I just called High Casual a 'gateway drug', but whatever. ^_^

Oh my god, you're such a pusher.

[Ruby]

Dervish said
Oh my god, you're such a pusher.

And a snob.

Which means I only push if I think you're worth it.

[Izaka Sazaka]

Thanks a lot for all the responses and input. I've enjoyed reading through everyone's thoughts and experiences, especially the bit about the early guild. To try and sum up what has already been said, it seems to me that almost everyone is in consensus that high-casual as a collective term is advanced by another name, mostly without the stigma usually attached to roleplays devised within the advanced sub-forum. I believe this aptly answered my question as to the classification of high-casual: It's a mini-advanced within the more accessible casual sub-forum.

Also,

Mahz said
Blackfire, Hyzhenhok, and I bluffed hard when we wrote the "standards" for Casual and Advanced.We knew we would never enforce them because that's a full-time job. But by using words like "moderated" and "strict", we decided to err on the side of scaring users away and created a mental barrier.

Mahz you clever bastard. . .

[Dervish]

Ruby said
And a snob.Which means I only push if I think you're worth it.

And now I am an addict based on your awful (great?) influence. :)

[FortunesFaded]

I've found that I end up putting "high casual" somewhere in nearly all of the RPs I run as GM, and for me it's to determine depth rather than length - and (as others have said in this thread) to open up Casual players to what is, pretty much, an Advanced RP. The thing is, I hate setting up "minimum post lengths" above a paragraph or two, because often times I'm busy and will break my own rule. However, what I require in all of the things I GM is depth of Character and Plot. I'd prefer two well thought-out, story-driving paragraphs over ten paragraphs of 'fluff'. High Casual (for me) also implies that some may want (and are encouraged) to write five or six or seven paragraphs in a post, and can, while others can write a consistent (meaningful) two paragraphs, and both can be accepted just the same.

[Animus]

Kestrel said
'High-casual' is redundant as a term to begin with. As a GM you're free to add rules and expectations to your games at pretty much your own wims, as long as it doesn't go below section-standards, which are all more than reasonable.

I don't really feel that the term is redundant. Isn't it sort of naive to think all roleplays perfectly fit within the Free, Casual and Advanced archetypes? Some roleplays in Casual have 'lower' standards where most CS's are Mary Sues, incorrect grammar and punctuation and some posts so short that they're almost impossible to squeeze the word quality in. I'm not judging this, people roleplay for fun and some people feel putting in too much time and effort takes the leisure out of it.

However, some don't. If I spent time creating an original, detailed character and making quality posts, I would prefer being in a roleplay with likeminded people. It wouldn't be very fun for me to roleplay with dozens of Mary Sues who barely cared about character or plot progression.

'High Casual' has been associated with length simply because when a person bothers to invest time creating quality posts and character sheets, they tend to be longer. I agree sometimes posts are filled with fluff which make them painfully repetitive to go through but just take the average lengthy post and compare it to the average short post; its obvious which is of higher quality. People who bother to write lengthy posts also tend to be more committed and attached to a roleplay. Theres also less speed posting which is frankly quite a selfish thing to do.

Some 'High Casual' roleplays are more detailed with better use of english than some roleplays in advanced.

Some people do the "Then you just move up to Advanced." argument but the Advanced forum has a much lower population. OC spam and banter happens less and IC posts don't tend to be very frequent or consistent in posting time...