Nobilis, Chuubo's, and Other Jenna Moran Works

So, the Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine book has a concept called "fading", where, after an XP action, you retreat from the spotlight and let someone else take a turn at it. This helps keep the pacing of the game going; a scene can't just keep going from one topic to the next to the next, cramming multiple major plot developments into the space of a few IC hours, since time must pass between XP actions. But I've observed another distinction of pacing - one most obvious in Chuubo's, but visible in many other games.

The zoom level (as I will call it) is how many words or lines it takes OOCly to play a scene ICly. In a zoomed-in game, a scene might be an extensive exchange of dialogue going on three or four pages. But in a zoomed-out game, a scene can be established in as little as two or three lines of dialogue, where everyone agrees what happens and then everyone moves on.

Zoom level is not the same as how long each scene takes OOCly: a zoomed-out play-by-post game could have scenes of maybe five or six lines, but the scene might take multiple days; and two extremely proficient touch-typers might crank out an exchange of thirty or forty lines in ten minutes.

Most games are usually very zoomed-in, but briefly zoom out to establish "connective tissue" between scenes, such as how your characters traveled from here to there.

To be clear, this is not a dichotomy, nor is it a moral judgement! Whatever pace you play Chuubo's at is fine, so long as it works for you and your group. And the length of scenes is obviously a continuum; no XP Action Police are going to require you to finish a scene in exactly five or fifty lines. But I figured that putting this in words can help with expectation-setting.