Roleplaying writing styles

[Autumn]

@Tempest said in Roleplaying writing styles:

When I hear 'brevity' I just picture those Elysium-sort of poses we're all familiar with. Or people who will just pose "She smiles." or some other 2/3/4 word action in every pose they write. Yes, we all abuse those small gesture, but like...give me some flavor please. "She laughs and flashes a cocky smile at Jane after the woman's comment." Not just "She smiles."

For me, brevity in RP is aggravating if the person isn't posing quickly and frequently. You know the kind -- the person we've all played with where you wait 15 minutes for a one-sentence pose? That will not stand. My best experiences with people posing briefly have been those who respond quickly, and usually more than once every time it's their 'turn' in the scene.

I suppose you could make the argument that if someone's outputting half a dozen one-line poses in two minutes, then it's no longer 'brevity' per se, it's just a stylistic quirk of using multiple lines to convey something that someone else might use a single long paragraph for. And I'm not sure I'd argue otherwise.

@Ganymede said in Roleplaying writing styles:

My style changes distinctly when you're involved. You know what I mean.

You ... you mean you aren't like that with everyone? blushing

[surreality]

I have always tended to stick to roughly around the length others are using in the scene. Sometimes I'll get a little longer. Some people I can't keep up with on length.

Not being able to keep up is an issue for me in two ways: if I am going to address any one thing with anything more than a half-assed hand-wave of attention, crowds are hard. Similarly, someone who has a long-ass pose that is full of ten different things going on at once (often when someone is posing for themselves and NPCs also doing things and the environment needing some kind of response), I will burn out on a scene at record speed. It's an embarrassment of riches kind of problem, but like too few hooks to respond to, too many is also incredibly difficult, because I no longer feel I am writing creatively at all, but going down a checklist to address everything that's being flung at me, and that's pure response -- it doesn't feel like I'm adding anything back after a point, or able to provide hooks in return, because I'm drowning in the deluge. I can deal with boring and hook-less far better, because I tend to be creative enough to come up with something someone will be interested in responding to sooner or later, and usually it isn't terribly hard.

I cannot stand second person ("you") posing. I know some perfectly lovely people do this, but it feels incredibly personally invasive. I cannot quite grasp why, when the typical standard otherwise is to use third person, people skip right into this without even asking.

I will pose out of a scene if someone does this without checking/asking at this point because it's become so much of a discomfort factor when people suddenly thrust this in my face (because it feels like they are thrusting something in my face, not my character's) and it's too jarring for me to be able to remain in my character's head at that point. It doesn't matter who the person is, friend or foe, great writer or awful. It is an instant '...and just like that you've lost me', which isn't a factor of elitism, but a factor of... you just knocked me right out of my character's brain and back into mine. Like any other distraction, it takes me a while to recover from that, and the less comfortable I am about something? Yeah, the less likely it is that headspace is going to recover with any speed at all. And, you know? If I am playing a character, I probably don't feel like being entirely in my own head right now, thanks. It's called escapism for a reason.

I tend toward longer and flowery with weird details. (Or... did. Maybe I will again some time, but nothing current.) By the same token? I don't believe in endless self-aggrandizing purple prose bullshit text masturbation. While I don't keep some one for one checklist about such things, if I'm going to mention a noteworthy trait of my char in a pose, I am going to try to make sure it's: 1. relevant; 2. I remark somehow on a noteworthy trait of someone(s) else in the scene as well. I played on Shang far too long to not be burned out on the 'I am going to spend half of my pose telling you how gorgeous my character is' style of posing, which is a huge ball of bleah to me. If you're going to masturbate to the sound of your own ego, I do not feel like being the audience to the display of thesaurus-flogging; it is not my kink.

I am also bitter as hell lately, so take tone with a grain of salt, please. My filters are kinda off, so tact has left the building. <cough>

[Misadventure]

Addressing poses to "You" cannot be specific between I the player, and I the character. And so it vaguely triggers both.

[saosmash]

I tell a lot with body language etc. rather than thought poses, and use meta primarily to crack jokes at my own character's expense. I'm usually about a paragraph, but will write shorter or longer depending on the mood of the scene.

I CANNOT STAND SECOND PERSON.

[faraday]

@surreality said in Roleplaying writing styles:

...someone who has a long-ass pose that is full of ten different things going on at once (often when someone is posing for themselves and NPCs also doing things and the environment needing some kind of response), I will burn out on a scene at record speed.

Yeah this is my biggest pet peeve and the reason I tend to run away from crowd scenes. OK, I've nodded at Joe, asked Pete about his dog, followed up on a question to Sarah, and boggled at the spilled glass on the table. Whew - did I miss anything? It's just insane.

People also do it in 1-1 scenes, which I just find baffling. It ends up with the most bizarre narrative flow - almost like you're ping-ponging between two separate conversations with the same person.

I also get frustrated if the other player doesn't give anything to react to. Give me a hook. "Hi, how are you?" "Fine thanks." "So do you come here often?" "Sometimes." Gah. It's supposed to be a story scene, not an interview.

You-poses are creepy. IC/OOC boundary issues.

I love metaposes as long as they're not passive-aggressive jerk poses. We can read body language in RL a heck of a lot better than we can in text, and I often struggle to describe body language in a way that gets the point across. They can also be a good way to subtly inject things that the other character should know that the player might not. Like "Fara's been moody ever since she got back from Trappist-I last week."

[Sparks]

@Arkandel said in Roleplaying writing styles:

This reminds me. How do you feel about revealing things about the character through narration and not in any visible ways? For example: "Bob sits down and grows silent. Ever since he returned from the war he's been reserved in social settings with people he doesn't know well. He lifts his glass and...".

If I'm playing with someone who'd have IC reason to know my character well but doesn't necessarily on an OOC level (new to the game, to the character, whatever), I'll throw things in to try to give them background cues as to something they might know, and why they might know it.

"X rubs at the bridge of her nose idly as she listens, an almost reflexive tic that those close to her know all too well as a sign that she's distracted and stressed."

"Y grimaces as he's handed the plate of greens; his hatred of kale is well-known to those who've ever had the misfortune to share a buffet with him. But tonight, for politeness' sake, he remains silent. (Albeit with visible effort.)"

Etc.

[Ganymede]

@surreality said in Roleplaying writing styles:

I have always tended to stick to roughly around the length others are using in the scene. Sometimes I'll get a little longer. Some people I can't keep up with on length.

When it comes to length, all I have to say is:

MY ANACONDA DON'T WANT NONE UNLESS YOU CRACK PUNS, HON.

[Arkandel]

@surreality said in Roleplaying writing styles:

I cannot stand second person ("you") posing. I know some perfectly lovely people do this, but it feels incredibly personally invasive. I cannot quite grasp why, when the typical standard otherwise is to use third person, people skip right into this without even asking.

I don't even remember which I used when we played. But see, I first learned how to roleplay on a MUD, right? So we had 'socials' - the same kind MMORPGs use these days. So if I was in a room with @surreality and @Ganymede and I typed "grin ganymede" then Ganymede would see "Arkandel grins at you." but surreality would see "Arkandel grins at Ganymede.".

So the etiquette for us there absolutely permitted the use of second person if the scene was just between two people. You'd pose using 'you' if it was the case otherwise of course it would be their name. In fact until somewhat recently (2-3 years ago?) I hadn't even realized anyone was peeved by it; I simply watched how people posed and used the same convention.

These days I wouldn't simply because it is a peeve and... well, I don't care either way, so why piss people off for no reason?

[surreality]

@Arkandel Yeah, MOO had that, too -- a pose command that you'd .verb at <target> with that never bugged me. Games that have that coded, the coded versions are just what the code is. I don't fault people for that. Those things still fucked with my 'no, no, it isn't me, it's a character'-ness and broke headspace some, but were much less invasive than longer stuff -- especially if it was particularly emotive, involved sexual anything, or was something traumatic like torture or something.

In OOC I don't mind it for casual stuff or from people I know -- like, if some friend was like "Bob waves at you," or "Jane hugs you!" one on one (provided I didn't mind Jane being huggy... ) is no worry. But I am that person that gets pages like "Creepy Asian Lesbian Schoolgirl wonders what you taste like... " when they're probably talking about my character but are using the 'you' and I'm all the fuck no to that, just as a 'excuse me?!' Nothing will get me to nope out of interacting with someone than something like that.

And you were all third person from what I recall of the time! For what it's worth. (OMG that was... 10 years ago now, I think?)

[Arkandel]

@surreality said in Roleplaying writing styles:

And you were all third person from what I recall of the time! For what it's worth. (OMG that was... 10 years ago now, I think?)

If so I guarantee back then it was because you posed in the third person and I was just going along with it.

And it can't be 10 years ago, that would make me old. Don't be silly.

[surreality]

@Arkandel Wellll... it's been 8.5 years since I met the control freak ex who didn't let me play with anyone, and there was a year between running into him and when I stopped playing back then, so...

...it started more than ten years ago, since all the chaos there was over a year in the crazy with the faction and all. <point-laughs> Welcome to being old like the rest of us. Pull up a rocker, your shotgun to chase the kids off the lawn can be picked up around back in the ominous, dusty old shed.

[SG]

If I'm playing with one or two people, I can go off the deep end with engaging, setting filled poses. Once there are three others, I find myself being less and less inclined to put in effort as the wait for pose order gets excruciating, and I'll go from almost ten line poses to maybe 2 or 3.

Unless I'm running a plot, I really don't like scenes with more than 3 players involved, and if I'm running a plot, I prefer under five.

[mietze]

I try to match my length to what's around me, as well as being respectful of intent of the scene. If it's an info dump scene someone is trying to get through, I am not going to give them and everyone else multiple screens of my textual masturbation when what they WANT in is the relevant information. I do have several people I can totally vomit purple prose with--in small/private scenes. It's fun, I enjoy it, but it's rude in many circumstances.

I detest snarky meta. As well as people who constantly have to babble in ooc during a scene if it's in a group. I dislike people who are rude to the ST, and people who can't be assed to even bother to read the basics of others' poses.

But I will RP with anyone at least once, and often multiple times. I do not have to like them as a person to enjoy RP, and there are many people who I don't like their RP that I adore oocly.

But for me, courtesy is tops. If I see someone being discourteous to others habitually (even if it's not me) then I'm not inclined to invest in them in the future.

[lordbelh]

@mietze said in Roleplaying writing styles:

I try to match my length to what's around me, as well as being respectful of intent of the scene.

This.

And the courtesy thing. I can forgive a lot of writing flaws from people who are easy going and treat me and my time with respect.

[surreality]

I think the courtesy thing is a good point, definitely.

I will almost always tell people if I need to AFK, for instance, even if I know I will only be gone for a minute or two. I don't expect others to be that anal-retentive on courtesy, but if someone is fucking off for an hour to do something else, if they don't tell me, I am not going to be the happiest of biscuits.

I don't mind if somebody multi-scenes on me if people are giving equal attention to both scenes, or if sometimes that one is busier and sometimes mine is -- but if I think someone is constantly phoning it in with me while lavishing tons of attention elsewhere, eventually, I am going to get very tired of that, in the same way that I'd feel similarly put off on someone (and a little offended if not a lot offended) if the moment their current shiny object logs in, I simply cease to exist and don't event warrant an, "I'm sorry, I need to go, the thing I'd rather be doing just came along." I mean, damn, people, what's with that? The honest approach is still shitty but the 'you don't even warrant being told you don't matter worth a damn' is shittier by a factor of umpteensquillion.

I cannot, personally, multi. Not unless it's something like OOC chat, running something for others, or basic staff work on one window, personal character RP in another. I admire people who can multi effectively among multiple character, I just can't. I'm too ADD.

I put a lot of 'how does my character think?' into my writing, and to some extent, that means tweaking my thought patterns a bit toward 'how I think they would think re: what is occurring'. That's already two heads to be in; that's my personal maximum.

Once I split off further from there, the characters will start crossing over into each other in ways I dislike. Others may not notice -- though sometimes I would hear something like 'huh, she's acting kinda weird, are you OK?' or similar -- but it falls below my personal standard of what I want to be able to 'give' in a scene, so I avoid it at all costs. It isn't just a matter of the attention paid to the scene or the other players in it, since I'm usually watching something or working between poses, it's a matter of 'the other people here are giving me the gift of their time, time and attention are something to be valued and not taken for granted, they deserve the best that I can give in return.'

It probably sounds a bit much, but it's how I try to approach everything. I don't like doing a half-ass job if I can help it -- even if that means I end up whole-assing something else (like a scene that needs to be postponed to another day on an alt, or limiting myself in terms of opportunities to do more things) -- in the process. If something is worth doing at all, it's worth doing right -- and I'd rather give up twenty things done in a half-assed fashion or that aren't up to my personal standards (which are so much higher for myself than they are for anybody else, believe it or not) than have something slapdash and crappy out there, unless that's really the best I can do. (At which point, criticize and think I'm crappy away, really -- at least I know I did my best.)

[Seraphim73]

I came from the same RP MUD that @Arkandel did... 20-odd years ago. I remember a time when two-line poses were awesomely wordy, and RP through socials was the norm. Thankfully, my style (and that of most people I interact with) has improved since then.

After that, there was a character-limit (350ish, I think) on poses. That was interesting. But really, I think that a pose should be as long as it needs to be in order to get across the words, the actions, the emotions behind them, and the character behind them.

Yes, that's a wishy-washy answer, I don't care. I like to make sure that all of my characters pose differently, at least to some degree. Whether it's an accent (don't kill me, I haven't really done it in years now), particular word choices, different curses, this is easy to do with what the character says, but I think it's equally important that the rest of the pose be unique to the character also.

For example, my character Gray from The 100 was a bit of an asshole, and frequently made bad choices and assumptions, so I snarked like hell at him in my poses. Dog, from Generations of Darkness, was so loyal that it hurt (what do you expect, he was a clone trooper), and so I did like to mention when he was being naive or flat-out wrong in my poses, but I didn't snark as much. Termiane, from Cuendillar, was more of a wish fulfillment character (I'll admit it this much later), so I was a lot more serious with his poses.

I have definitely come to prefer either a single paragraph of text in a pose, or just single carriage returns between paragraphs if you've really got to be wordy or are NPCing multiple people, but I prefer not to have multiple line breaks in someone else's pose, because I think it looks messy in a log. I very much prefer it when people put wikicode in their poses--makes things a lot easier on me, since I usually take care of the log.

As several people mentioned: god please don't pose in the second person, it's creepy. Also, please pose present tense, not past or future.

As for providing a look into my character's head, I agree with several of the other posters -- I want to make sure that my character's intentions are clear (if they're supposed to be clear), but I also don't like putting too much of my character's mind into my poses, because I would prefer to put in gestures and expressions.

Most importantly, however, I want the people I'm RPing with to respond to the hooks I put out there, and to offer hooks for me to respond to in turn.

[EMDA]

I tend to gravitate toward medium-sized emotes that often as not get progressively larger as a scene goes on, but I've always admired people who write concisely but manage to keep their posts engaging. I've found that the type of character I'm playing tends to change the length of my emotes a little, and the nature of what's going on, too. If there's a lot of action or description or combat/etc going on I'll write a lot more than if I'm engaged in dialogue. That's largely becauuuuse...

I hate the long, diatribe-esque rants that conversations turn into when people thread in an extra conversation point every emote/pose and it's like you're discussing 5 things at a time. It seems completely unnatural and unnecessary, and if you just told me about why some demon is about to eat my neighbor I'm not going to be sitting here listening to you keep going on about your potential journey next week into the forbidden wood to get a faerie charm for this other thing, please, I'm still processing the demon. Then it winds around to my turn to respond and I've got to just machine-gun through all these disparate things that have come up or drop some of them, and it could totally be avoided by holding your horses and ending your turn a little sooner. Obviously not everyone that writes long emotes is subject to this, but more often than not they are.

There's a nonverbal equivalent too, but I don't find it as prevalent.

I don't like thoughtposing at all, but I think that's largely because I'm used to MUDdy environments with cultures that your emotes are about describing what your character does, what they say, the environment they interact with, and nothing else. If I'm playing a game I'm doing my best to get into my character's mind, so during RP I try my best to ignore your existence and focus entirely on your character. Meta comments or thought poses undermine that a little bit, and since they don't inform my character at all I don't really want them to change what they'll be doing, either. I think there are some reasonable places for them in the RP culture I've run across on most MUSHes -- things are less grid-oriented and sometimes you might feel you need to be more blunt/less patient with hooks, but I still don't like it. I'd much rather tease out some grim veteran's reticence in a bar through a few different meetings rather than have it be dropped on me OOCly at first blush.

Thoughtposes and metaposes can be lazy, too (that doesn't mean they always are). I've run into people that use them to either skip explaining the physical things their character would do to betray that sentiment, or to sort of OOCly explain why their character is doing something, which ends up robbing their writing of any real payoff for me.

For a simplified example:

A) Carl approaches Rick and asks, "Where were you on the night Christy was murdered?" It's clear he's not letting Rick move a muscle until he's satisfied.

B) Carl approaches Rick, sidling around to stand between the other man and the nearest exit. Crossing his arms, he asks, "Where were you on the night Christy was murdered?"

I'd want to play with the Carl in B way more than the Carl in A.

I guess the tl;dr is let me respond at natural breathers and let me try to pretend you don't exist but your character does, and I'm happy. I know these thoughts run contrary to some of the other stuff said here, but I'm not trying to say anyone's wrong or anything. They're just my two cents.

[Auspice]

I saw MOO 'socials' referenced a bit earlier. The verbs used (like 'hug <name>' or similar). In my experience (my first few years in the hobby were primarily MOO), those were always used in an OOC context.

So if a good friend logged in, I might type 'hug <name>' rather than 'p <name> :hugs!'

I, personally, never saw a game that used them as IC things because only the two people involved saw them and they weren't isolated to being in the same room (like Arkandel's MUD example).

I do use metaposing to supplement body language. Something like 'her shoulders round and tighten, in an almost defensive gesture.' Because similar body language can have different meanings... but while you'd be able to tell the difference IRL, explaining it in text is harder. So it's easier to give the context that someone would read 'in person.' I do also crack jokes (often at my character's expense) in poses.

My scene sets can be long. I know there was a joke at one time, 'Page long set? Must be an Auspice set.' 90% of the time it'd be in situations where an RP Room was being used and thus there was no desc, or the room we were in represented a very large area (such as 'The Park' but the scene itself was being done around a specific fountain). And no, it's not one page sans line breaks. I use line breaks, don't worry.

After the set, though, most of my poses tend towards the 5-8 line sweet spot... But it does depend on others in the scene. Mind, that usually only angles me to shorter poses. I generally can't be arsed to keep up with massiveposes for long at all.

...unless it was a gdoc with @Ghost. I don't know what it is about our RP, but we would have some long, descriptive poses. It was fun, but no one draws it out of me like he does. That bastard.

[Quibbler]

@Arkandel

I try to start my pose with my character's name in a big scene so it's easy to see who the hell is doing whatever my character is doing, but I'm not a slave to it.

[Arkandel]

@Quibbler said in Roleplaying writing styles:

@Arkandel

I try to start my pose with my character's name in a big scene so it's easy to see who the hell is doing whatever my character is doing, but I'm not a slave to it.

On the MUD I was on what we had - and I still think is a good idea - is pemote. It's essentially the exact same thing as @emit, but it put [Arkandel] at the very end so it was always obvious who did what.

It was originally implemented that way to prevent abuse (we thought people might use it to fake other people's poses or insult others anonymously) but it kept large scenes sane. Saner.