Post by Tales on Oct 7, 2015 7:10:47 GMT
Introduction
All right, listen up folks. This is a guide designed to teach you how you should be participating on our site. It doesn't matter if you're a barely literate six-year-old or an award-winning novelist as long as you can live up to the standards I am about to lay out. If you feel intimidated about all of this, cope with it, because this isn’t designed to frighten you away. It’s designed to help you. Now, if you're sitting at your computer with a smirk on your face going This guy has no idea what he’s talking about and I don’t frankly care what he says, then you're asking for it. So stay there and listen up.
Basics
First, it’s important to know what type site we are, and exactly what sort of literary expectations we have. We are an intermediate, textbased, online, role-playing website. Basically, this means we’re in-between the super casual one-line approach that some sites take, and the ultra perfect novel sites. We demand good writing, but we’re fairly tolerant in other words. Now, the average post length (i.e how much we’d like you to write in a single go) goes from around 100 to 500 words. Seems like a lot doesn’t it? Well, for some of you it might be, but it’s unfortunately something you’ll have to work on in order to be successful here.
So how would you go about achieving that much writing? Well, I have one word for you – description - which seems obviously simple, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to forget about. For example, you could say a cat slept on the mat or you could say the peaceful Persian cat slept soundly on the warm, fluffy mat. The second example not only appears more impressive and gives you a better picture of exactly what’s going on, but it also happens to be nearly twice as long as the first example.
Another very important method of improving your post size is focused around responding to what your fellow role-players write in the posts before yours, so make sure (and I cannot stress this enough) that you read the posts before yours carefully in order to figure out exactly what’s going on! Failing to do that just leads to major confusion which could simply be avoided by a few minutes of careful reading. Back to the previous point – what exactly do I mean by responding to other people’s posts? As an example, Bob, your fellow role-player, has just stepped into a bar. You’re in the bar of course, so you should respond to what Bob has done. You could Ignore the newcomer and continue drinking your lemonade or perhaps you would glare over your shoulder and examine the newcomer before hunching back over the bar. Either way, you’ve responded to another’s post and when a thread can have three or four people in it at once it can all add up rather quickly.
Now, whatever you plan to do in your post should involve writing about what your character thinks, says, does, or tries to do. This will probably be the last stage of your post and with it you should have enough words to actually post onto our forum. Anything you want your character to do must be written down in order for him to do it. If you want to stand up and open a door, you're going to have to type out that your character has stood up and opened the door. Please note however, that you cannot affect another character in your posts – you can only try to affect another character – although that will be covered more in the combat section.
Another very important aspect of text-based role-playing is variety. It’s all very well saying he does this and he does that, but it can get repetitive and very boring very quickly, so you’ve got to make an effort to mix things up and keep your writing interesting and imaginative. If you wanted to say you’d killed someone, for example, you could use the word 'kill' like you’d done in the last sentence. Or you could say you’d dispatched, slain, murdered, assassinated, slaughtered, butchered or massacred the poor guy. After that mouthful, you may be a bit worried about your vocabulary. Well, two things that can really help in this department are a good dictionary and a thesaurus (both of which can be found online), and while they can be annoying at times they are nonetheless valuable tools when you can’t quite find the perfect word or synonym you want to use. Though, please be sure you at least have some clue what the substituting word means. To type out He masticated his beer will not win you any favorable points.
On another note, please be mindful of your grammar as there is nothing more annoying in the entire world than a person who cannot properly construct a sentence. Always proofread your work – aloud if necessary – and see if it makes sense before you go to post it on the boards. Make sure you’re using capitals, commas, periods, brackets, hyphens, parentheses, quotation marks, question marks, exclamation marks, colons and semicolons to the best of your ability. Unfortunately, I am neither qualified to teach you how to use all of those, nor do I have the time, because – quite frankly – if an English teacher spends hour upon hour telling people how to do it right, I sure as hell can’t condense it into this article.
Now that you know how to write a post that’s not only long enough, but also good enough for our boards, you’re going to need to know how to format them so they’re easy to read as well. Most importantly, there is paragraph structure you should follow. Ideally, a paragraph should be between four and nine lines in a good word processor. Sticking to that limit will ensure your writing is easy for everyone to read (trust me, huge blocks of text do no favors for your eyes or ours).
Now, italics inside of a role-playing post are used to denote character thought. This is you're character “thinking aloud”, and while the other role-players will be able to hear your character’s thoughts, their characters cannot and as such they can’t normally act on such information.
Within a role-playing post “quotation marks” are used for character speech. Anything within them can be heard by someone else (as long as it’s reasonable, of course – a whisper cannot be heard from over a mile away unless that person has a demigodly good sense of hearing or is using a hearing-enhancement jutsu).
Combat
Brutal and vicious displays of violence appear to be a common occurrence on boards like this. So, it is incredibly important that you know exactly how to fight someone else in a clear and fair manner. Now, the NUMBER ONE MOST IMPORTANT RULE is ideally, under no circumstances, for any reason whatsoever do you GODMODE your character. Apologies for shouting, but it’s something that must be said. So what is godmoding? Godmoding is basically an impossible or illegal action typed up and submitted as true.
Godmoding includes moving someone else’s character without their permission (you can’t pull another character along and neither can you swing a sword at someone and lop their head off. It’s all the same so don’t do it). Godmoding can also be defined as the impossible or the unfair. To not godmode in combat requires you to know the limitations of your character and strength of your opponent. If someone moves to punch you, can you get out of the way? If you’re fast enough to do that then you have no problem, but if the other person is ten times faster than you are, and yet you still dodge the punch, then something is probably going wrong (barring extraneous circumstances of course).
The hardest part of knowing your character is knowing at what point you start to slow down, become tired, or get backed up into a corner. If you make a mistake you have to live with it, and most people can’t keep fighting forever. If an enemy’s attack has a very good chance of hitting you, it is probably proper to take the hit and describe the effects thereafter. Also, cunning plans on both sides of a fight can dramatically swing an encounter one way or another, and under no circumstances should you godmode to get out of a particularly ingenious trap because – after all – you’d want your foe to treat you in the same way (not that I’m saying you can’t get out of a trap like that. Just don’t godmode out of it).
In combat (more than any other place), you must be completely sure of what your opponent is doing, so read his posts very carefully (notice how this ties back to an earlier point). Every action your foe can see you take should be written down and stated. Be sure of what his character can do as well. If you can create illusions you don’t have to tell your foe that they are illusions unless his character has a way of knowing what they are for real. Still though, it’s usually considered good sport to drop some hints here and there if there is any chance of them detecting your carefully planned strategy. Not that you have to make them obvious hints.
Now, as you may have noticed, we don’t implement a stat system here, and the most important thing you must remember about that is this is not a the higher rank or strongest jutsus are the be-all-and-end-all of fighting. In general, there is a degree of leeway before the characters should really notice a difference in their abilities.
Out of Character Etiquette
Being Out of Character (hereafter abbreviated OOC) is a special case within our RP. Basically, it refers to the comments that are made within a roleplaying post that aren't technically a part of the RP. It is mostly used to drop comments to the other roleplayers in the thread (for example if you were clarifying something in your post), although generally it would be better if you commented outside the RP (through private messaging or an instant messenger). Nevertheless, if you do employ it, use the particular format detailed below.
OOC << This OOC sign is bolded at the bottom of your post so people know it's now out of character.
((Note the use of the double brackets. These are used when you're commenting to other people like I'm doing now. Don't put a space between the OOC sign and any double bracket comments you have - keep it flush so the next section is clearly separate. Other people prefer to bold their OOC comments or use a different bracket, which is fine as long as we can tell you're not in character.))
All right, listen up folks. This is a guide designed to teach you how you should be participating on our site. It doesn't matter if you're a barely literate six-year-old or an award-winning novelist as long as you can live up to the standards I am about to lay out. If you feel intimidated about all of this, cope with it, because this isn’t designed to frighten you away. It’s designed to help you. Now, if you're sitting at your computer with a smirk on your face going This guy has no idea what he’s talking about and I don’t frankly care what he says, then you're asking for it. So stay there and listen up.
Basics
First, it’s important to know what type site we are, and exactly what sort of literary expectations we have. We are an intermediate, textbased, online, role-playing website. Basically, this means we’re in-between the super casual one-line approach that some sites take, and the ultra perfect novel sites. We demand good writing, but we’re fairly tolerant in other words. Now, the average post length (i.e how much we’d like you to write in a single go) goes from around 100 to 500 words. Seems like a lot doesn’t it? Well, for some of you it might be, but it’s unfortunately something you’ll have to work on in order to be successful here.
So how would you go about achieving that much writing? Well, I have one word for you – description - which seems obviously simple, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to forget about. For example, you could say a cat slept on the mat or you could say the peaceful Persian cat slept soundly on the warm, fluffy mat. The second example not only appears more impressive and gives you a better picture of exactly what’s going on, but it also happens to be nearly twice as long as the first example.
Another very important method of improving your post size is focused around responding to what your fellow role-players write in the posts before yours, so make sure (and I cannot stress this enough) that you read the posts before yours carefully in order to figure out exactly what’s going on! Failing to do that just leads to major confusion which could simply be avoided by a few minutes of careful reading. Back to the previous point – what exactly do I mean by responding to other people’s posts? As an example, Bob, your fellow role-player, has just stepped into a bar. You’re in the bar of course, so you should respond to what Bob has done. You could Ignore the newcomer and continue drinking your lemonade or perhaps you would glare over your shoulder and examine the newcomer before hunching back over the bar. Either way, you’ve responded to another’s post and when a thread can have three or four people in it at once it can all add up rather quickly.
Now, whatever you plan to do in your post should involve writing about what your character thinks, says, does, or tries to do. This will probably be the last stage of your post and with it you should have enough words to actually post onto our forum. Anything you want your character to do must be written down in order for him to do it. If you want to stand up and open a door, you're going to have to type out that your character has stood up and opened the door. Please note however, that you cannot affect another character in your posts – you can only try to affect another character – although that will be covered more in the combat section.
Another very important aspect of text-based role-playing is variety. It’s all very well saying he does this and he does that, but it can get repetitive and very boring very quickly, so you’ve got to make an effort to mix things up and keep your writing interesting and imaginative. If you wanted to say you’d killed someone, for example, you could use the word 'kill' like you’d done in the last sentence. Or you could say you’d dispatched, slain, murdered, assassinated, slaughtered, butchered or massacred the poor guy. After that mouthful, you may be a bit worried about your vocabulary. Well, two things that can really help in this department are a good dictionary and a thesaurus (both of which can be found online), and while they can be annoying at times they are nonetheless valuable tools when you can’t quite find the perfect word or synonym you want to use. Though, please be sure you at least have some clue what the substituting word means. To type out He masticated his beer will not win you any favorable points.
On another note, please be mindful of your grammar as there is nothing more annoying in the entire world than a person who cannot properly construct a sentence. Always proofread your work – aloud if necessary – and see if it makes sense before you go to post it on the boards. Make sure you’re using capitals, commas, periods, brackets, hyphens, parentheses, quotation marks, question marks, exclamation marks, colons and semicolons to the best of your ability. Unfortunately, I am neither qualified to teach you how to use all of those, nor do I have the time, because – quite frankly – if an English teacher spends hour upon hour telling people how to do it right, I sure as hell can’t condense it into this article.
Now that you know how to write a post that’s not only long enough, but also good enough for our boards, you’re going to need to know how to format them so they’re easy to read as well. Most importantly, there is paragraph structure you should follow. Ideally, a paragraph should be between four and nine lines in a good word processor. Sticking to that limit will ensure your writing is easy for everyone to read (trust me, huge blocks of text do no favors for your eyes or ours).
Now, italics inside of a role-playing post are used to denote character thought. This is you're character “thinking aloud”, and while the other role-players will be able to hear your character’s thoughts, their characters cannot and as such they can’t normally act on such information.
Within a role-playing post “quotation marks” are used for character speech. Anything within them can be heard by someone else (as long as it’s reasonable, of course – a whisper cannot be heard from over a mile away unless that person has a demigodly good sense of hearing or is using a hearing-enhancement jutsu).
Combat
Brutal and vicious displays of violence appear to be a common occurrence on boards like this. So, it is incredibly important that you know exactly how to fight someone else in a clear and fair manner. Now, the NUMBER ONE MOST IMPORTANT RULE is ideally, under no circumstances, for any reason whatsoever do you GODMODE your character. Apologies for shouting, but it’s something that must be said. So what is godmoding? Godmoding is basically an impossible or illegal action typed up and submitted as true.
Godmoding includes moving someone else’s character without their permission (you can’t pull another character along and neither can you swing a sword at someone and lop their head off. It’s all the same so don’t do it). Godmoding can also be defined as the impossible or the unfair. To not godmode in combat requires you to know the limitations of your character and strength of your opponent. If someone moves to punch you, can you get out of the way? If you’re fast enough to do that then you have no problem, but if the other person is ten times faster than you are, and yet you still dodge the punch, then something is probably going wrong (barring extraneous circumstances of course).
The hardest part of knowing your character is knowing at what point you start to slow down, become tired, or get backed up into a corner. If you make a mistake you have to live with it, and most people can’t keep fighting forever. If an enemy’s attack has a very good chance of hitting you, it is probably proper to take the hit and describe the effects thereafter. Also, cunning plans on both sides of a fight can dramatically swing an encounter one way or another, and under no circumstances should you godmode to get out of a particularly ingenious trap because – after all – you’d want your foe to treat you in the same way (not that I’m saying you can’t get out of a trap like that. Just don’t godmode out of it).
In combat (more than any other place), you must be completely sure of what your opponent is doing, so read his posts very carefully (notice how this ties back to an earlier point). Every action your foe can see you take should be written down and stated. Be sure of what his character can do as well. If you can create illusions you don’t have to tell your foe that they are illusions unless his character has a way of knowing what they are for real. Still though, it’s usually considered good sport to drop some hints here and there if there is any chance of them detecting your carefully planned strategy. Not that you have to make them obvious hints.
Now, as you may have noticed, we don’t implement a stat system here, and the most important thing you must remember about that is this is not a the higher rank or strongest jutsus are the be-all-and-end-all of fighting. In general, there is a degree of leeway before the characters should really notice a difference in their abilities.
Out of Character Etiquette
Being Out of Character (hereafter abbreviated OOC) is a special case within our RP. Basically, it refers to the comments that are made within a roleplaying post that aren't technically a part of the RP. It is mostly used to drop comments to the other roleplayers in the thread (for example if you were clarifying something in your post), although generally it would be better if you commented outside the RP (through private messaging or an instant messenger). Nevertheless, if you do employ it, use the particular format detailed below.
OOC << This OOC sign is bolded at the bottom of your post so people know it's now out of character.
((Note the use of the double brackets. These are used when you're commenting to other people like I'm doing now. Don't put a space between the OOC sign and any double bracket comments you have - keep it flush so the next section is clearly separate. Other people prefer to bold their OOC comments or use a different bracket, which is fine as long as we can tell you're not in character.))