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| Tweet Topic Started: Jun 5 2009, 10:52 PM (75 Views) | |
| weji | Jun 5 2009, 10:52 PM Post #1 |
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I. Introduction (here) II. General (here) III. Character Creation (here) IV. Dueling and Combat (here) Edited by weji, Jun 12 2009, 02:30 PM.
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| weji | Jun 5 2009, 10:52 PM Post #2 |
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I. Introduction Anyone who stumbles upon a word of wisdom as it relates to roleplaying may add it to here. I will periodically compile all of the tips into this first post. Feel free to comment and discuss tips in a respectful fashion, as refined tips are more useful than jumbled ones. Feel free to add a new chapter, move a tip from chapter to chapter, add to an existing chapter, or modify an old tip. All contributions are welcome! |
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| weji | Jun 5 2009, 10:55 PM Post #3 |
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II. General Show, don't tell. Show don't tell, refers to describing things rather than outlining them, describe to the reader a facet of character rather than merely stating it. Rather than describing your character as weighing 140 pounds, perhaps describe her as tall and slim, not particularly muscular, though perhaps quite often seen in short shirts, a tee, and running shoes. Think fast, write slow. Think smooth, write rigid. Thinking can be referred to as a stream of consciousness, thoughts blending from one to another, actions following suit. Writing however, and most importantly to us, requires structure. Who did what unto whom? What was the result? Runons, while they make perfect sense in your mind, are flawed in two ways. They are difficult to followand the separate clauses used to make up a runon are wasted. Subjects get mixed up, verbs might lose tense, and the action may degenerate. Ultimately, stream of thought writing will make your readers lose interest, perhaps even make them skim rather than read, and even ignore your posts without realizing it. Read what is written. One of the defining features of a roleplay is the cooperation required for it to succeed. A roleplay is a story, written not just by yourself, but by several people. If you're not sure what exactly is going on, PM a player for more info. Stick to your own character. Metagaming is that elusive skill that everyone always tries and fails. Metagaming is taking over a roleplay for a turn, and drastically changing it. Bad metagaming is as bad as godmode, when a character ascends past the powers of all others. In a dialogue or a confrontation, let the other person play their part. Stick to one tense. The most common roleplay tense is past. Be consistent with your current sentence, your entire post, and the roleplay and the other players. The third is both for flow, readability, and courtesy. An exception to keeping tense is when using past tense, and including a character's thoughts. You as the narrator are describing what the character has already done in your mind, and you are quoting them in past tense. Pay attention. One of the most profound applications of this is to prevent open contradictions of others' hard work. It causes confusion and breaks down the story. If The more intertwined the posts in a roleplay are, the better the roleplay itself. By paying attention to details provided by others, it becomes possible to tie their loose ends together into furthering your own ideas for the roleplay. Do not assume. Do not pretend that because you can read another character's thoughts that they are allowing you to. Thoughts are kept personal. Unless you are confident that the thought might be expressed via unwritten body language, you must remember to keep your character and your knowledge as separate entities. Do not assume anything that could potentially subvert another player's thoughts, and always ask questions if you are not certain about another player's intentions. It's all in the details. Detailing a character's thoughts, actions, appearance, and background will help define your character as a dynamic being that others can interact with. Especially at the beginning of roleplays, many "loose" details can get used up to create relationships and engender action. While shorter, lmore active posts are appropriate for the core of a developing story, details define the success of a roleplay from the very start. Respect. Respect your fellow players. A roleplay is a cooperative effort, and no one wants to be pushed out of the fun. Give other players a chance, and if you have concerns and issues, discuss them in private and in a respectful manner. Stick with the times. Roleplays are often categorized by style and era, like SciFi, Real world, Fantasy, Modern Fantasy, etc. The premise behind this classification is to allow players who prefer a certain style or era to experience it without any of the garbage found in other styles. Output. Input. Everything, including magic, energy, strength, endurance, adrenaline, even dying moments seem to force a character into a supernatural state of incredible power. If you character has just used telekinesis to throw a boulder at the enemy, expect serious headaches, blackouts, and incapacitation in the near future. Everything has its costs, and as a courtesy to your fellow players, make sure that you pay those costs, whatever they might be. The end is only the beginning. It always seems like getting your post in and making it the best is the most important thing to do, but what would your post be without every one else's contributions? The best way to ropleplay is cooperatively, and for that every post needs to be a sequitur into the next. Why finishing up your character's thoughts and actions, don't forget to leave a few loose ends for the next play to jump into. Don't overdo it, but don't leave your fellows hanging because you just left them sitting useless. Lift the curtain. When you start a thread, try to set the mood from the very first paragraph, or even the very first sentence. At this point in the story, your writing style is probably going to carry far more weight in keeping the readers attentive and likely to join than the characters and events so far, so make good use of it. Keep away from focusing the plot on yourself. Write a story, not a monologue. Character development, while important, needs to be balanced with just about everything else. One character does not make a story, neither do two, three, four, etc, without developing the plot and the setting. You don't have to be perfect. Not all ideas that come to you will be perfect. But just because your idea isn't up to your improbable par, it does not mean that your activity in the roleplay needs to suffer! Start writing out even a bad idea when responding in a roleplay, and you might be surprised at how it turns into something formidable, by itself, or perhaps with another player's help. Writer's block is best overcome by simply writing, and your fellow posters would rather encourage you to overcome it, than to sit back and hope for en elusive spark of genius. Just make sure to proofread your work. Be Consistent. Always make sure your actions are plausible and realistic based on the the state of affairs created by yourself and others throughout previous action. Always make sure that others can also understand how your character gets into his new situation from his old one. Whether in a duel or in a freeform roleplay, Don't get lost amid your thoughts. Keep track of what needs to be said to make what you want to happen possible to happen, before you make it happen (Follow that? Read it a couple of times if not, then ask a question). Don't be the hero. While we ALL would like to be an important figure in any RP that we join in, it is very important NOT to strive for it. Why? Because roleplaying is teamwork. Don't focus on making your own character much more important than the others', as that may alienate the others and have them lose interest in the RP. Work together, and maybe even boost someone else's character into the hero spot! Consult your senses. Your senses are what define the world you perceive, so use them! Use them when you want to give detail to your background, your personality, and speech and action and interaction. You want to do something with your post and not just sit like a fly-on-the-wall until someone wanders over to forcefully include you, so make use of your senses when you are out of ideas. Everything your senses define can mean something in a post. So, describe what you feel, see, smell (opt.), taste(opt.) and hear. You want a colorful post rather than a bland one, but remember to keep balanced. If you focus on one sense or one element too much, you will have a post that has little impact or use. However, if you are balanced, your post will be rich in usable details for everyone to benefit from! Quality over quantity. Big words and long posts are some times the spice of life, but there is a point where more is not better. Take a step back, paraphrase. Maybe you can cut a paragraph here, a sentence there, to make every sentence mean something important, and to make the post easy to read. It might be short, but quality makes up for lack of length. Always take heed of the RP creator. In what situations would you want to be descriptive? There are no specific rules to apply to this question. Sometimes you should put a bit of effort into your posts, and in general this would mean fleshing out your descriptions. This isn’t always the case, though. At times, you may want to tone down your writing to avoid intimidating other players with giant blocks of text. At other times, drawn-out descriptions are simply not appropriate. Before you decide anything, however, you should always read the RP creator’s notes and comments. Use your surroundings. It is always nice to respond to variables in the environment. Doing so adds richness to your posts and makes them more enjoyable to read. In addition, bringing different details of the environment to attention helps clue your fellow players in to what is going on. For instance, if you and your party are entering an area for the first time, you would want to shed some light on your surroundings to stimulate character interaction and plot progression. If you want certain objects to be noticed and used in the action, you could also add those into your description. |
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| weji | Jun 5 2009, 10:55 PM Post #4 |
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III. Character Creation The character is not you. This person or being your playing, pretend that it isn’t you – change that mentality. Not only can you accept characters that don’t fit your idealized mold you might actually have fun with them. Also, it's interesting where characters turn up or what they do – because they’ll do things that you wouldn’t do given the opportunity. It means you can actually think of making an ugly character, putting him/her/it in a bad light, getting him/her in real trouble, and thus round out the character more. Personality first, history second, appearance…dead last. A character in a story is driven by its personality and its history, how that person looks is ancillary. I always think about this at length because it provides plot hooks for potential development, ideas for taking the storyline in some direction if the plot looks hazy and nebulous and it’s what the reader sees more in the narrative, speech, and how the writer presents the character. Looks are great, but I can just sum it up in a paragraph that will be forgotten in my first post and that’ll be it with that. Ugly is good. I’m never afraid to have my characters’ warts shown. Or for that character to be far from perfect. It makes a character interesting, gives you a chance to improve the character through the story, and generally humanizes the character. Also, if they overcame an “ugliness,” well that’s the stuff of many a story’s plots already. And I’ve found characters with flaws to be generally more entertaining than that Mary-Sue/Gary-Stu who seem perfect in every which way, even their damn flaws. Adjective grab-bagging. This is a mnemonic tool of mine to help me make characters. Can I describe this character in a series of adjectives, that isn’t about looks? Doesn’t matter if those adjectives are contradictory. Can I do it? And if so, how many adjectives can I list? I go for six-seven adjectives, with a third of them being bad traits to round off the character. And these tend to be the defining characteristics about the character More words for personality than appearance. This is related to Maxim #2. Basically, if you’ve written more about Appearance than that person’s Personality, you should think about your character some more. Little details go a long way. Think about that person’s eccentricities, their speech patterns, or their favorite items or topics of discussion. That adds to the character and makes him/her stand out. It fleshes out the character more and makes that character more notable. Also, these little details with a little work can actually factor significantly in plots. Outline your character somewhere. Character sheets are good for this! This way you have somewhere to turn to figure out how that character plays, which is especially useful if you are involved in multiple RPs or can’t focus on every RP you are in a single day. It helps, because if you make a character that is different or a little hard for you to play – then you have a ready reference to see. No character is static. All characters evolve and develop themselves over time. I personally don’t believe that my characters will forever be the same type of person/being at the start of the RP nor will they be forever chained by their character sheet. |
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| weji | Jun 5 2009, 10:55 PM Post #5 |
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IV. Dueling and Combat Healing and repairing is unrealistic. This is based on consistency, and should be enforced to prevent godmoding. If a sword is broken, the sword stays broken (however, for example, picking up something that has been knocked away but not actually broken does not count as repairing). If a character is wounded, no matter how skilled they may be in potionmaking or restorative spells, the wound will persist until the end of the duel. Metagaming ruins duels. Draw a line between yourself and your character, because the two of you are different entitites with different knowledge bases. Metagaming is often described as passing player knowledge to a character. This seems like it is perfectly normal, but is in fact a form of godmoding. If the opponent begins the duel with a certain sword dance, which the other player explains as a focusing technique, you cannot give this knowledge to your own character. If your character comes in, suddenly recognizes the technique as a focus technique, and immediately begins insulting the opponent to break their focus, your character had better have a well defined backstory which mentions their knowledge of that technique. If an opponent sets a trap, you are either likely to fall into it, or if you feel necessary, notice it by some unlikely accident, like a running squirrel or a falling leaf. Duelers are characters too. As mentioned in the previous concept, duelers are much like any other roleplaying character, and everything that is required for regular characters is also required for duelers. Much as a new character has a set of attributes, emotions, skills, weaknesses, and most importantly their own background and history, so must a dueler. Whether or not you explicitly post this character "sheet," you as a player must stay consistent with it throughout the course of the duel. A brute force ogre with a giant tenderizer is surely a good whacker, but games like World of Warcraft or Diablo II are much better suited for taking care of your whacking needs. Text based combat should result in similar character interaction and character development as a player strives for and expects from regular plot based roleplays. Losing is experience. Anybody can win a duel, but how well can you lose? In some cases, losing a battle, especially against a very good opponent, can be more of a challenge than winning it. If you've never lost before, then you clearly have something to work on! And just in case you're unsure about losing, remember that no one enjoys fighting a god. Join the ranks of the modest players who duel with honor, valor, and politess: win or lose, if you started out with the goal to enjoy the battle, rather than simply win it, your duels will be better, more interesting to write, and just as importantly, more interesting to read! Continuity is key. The wording in a duel is excruciatingly important. "He brought his blade down towards his fallen opponent" is far different than "He prepared to bring his blade down towards his fallen opponent!" Make sure to word your own actions as definite or as abstract as you want them to be, and make sure to read others' actions meticulously! Something like "prepared" give the other player many possibilities of what could then happen. The sword isn't coming down yet, so you can swipe at his legs to drop him as well! But if the sword is already falling, then accept the action and continue. Defend the blow, roll away from it... but it is no longer interruptible. Pay close attention to wording, as continuity is key! |
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