My emotes are always short and not very descriptive. It has been like this for many years, and whenever I see someone with a big awesome poggers emote it makes me feel inadequate. I am not good at PVE. I am not good at PVP. RP is fun and seems to be easy, but I can’t do that either. What am I good at? NOTHING? I do love RP though so how do I, then, improve?
7 Likes
As long as you can get your point across that is all that matters! Many of us prefer short and to the point emotes rather than drabbles that go on and on and use random words from a thesaurus; those are annoying if anything.
18 Likes
Read books.
A lot of them.
17 Likes
One thing to avoid is using would in your emotes. It’s jarring, grammatically incorrect for emotes, much like past tense, and you can achieve the exact same result with keeping your actions open-ended.
Goresail would swing his axe in a savage arc at his opponent’s unarmoured neck.
vs
Goresail swings his axe in a savage arc at his opponent’s unarmoured neck
The recipient in both instances have the exact same chance to respond, nothing is forced on them and in the latter case the flow of emotes doesn’t get broken up with a broken would-if structure or having to interpret what is going on.
On the note of interpretation it’s usually extremely beneficial to not go into insane purple prose in your emotes (/say can be whatever you want) because your character’s actions and movements aren’t like speech. You aren’t narrating as a character, you’re describing what your character is doing in the present. An uncultured peasant or peon can see and understand how you swing your weapon or how you dodge a blade and you’re basically playing with zero IC context or knowledge at this point, only OOC. This is something that should be acknowledged and facilitated, not dismissed.
thanks for attending my ted talk
26 Likes
This is a misconjunction of tense, so in your sentence you’re shifting between past and present. It should be:
Goresail swung his axe in a savage cleave aimed for the un-armoured neck of his opponent.
Goresail swings his axe, in a savage cleave aiming for the etc etc
2 Likes
I actually forgot to put an at in that sentence. The use of aimed at sth is not a past/present misconjunction either, it’s something that’s used in present tense.
I’ve checked for a few examples and the cambridge dictionary site provided them:
- The talks are aimed at finding a mutually agreeable solution.
- The talks are aimed at furthering detente between the two countries.
- The negotiations are aimed at achieving a lasting peace between the two sides.
- Talks aimed at bringing a lasting peace to the region broke down last night.
- The latest discussions involve a plan aimed at ending ethnic violence in the province.
Or going to the Free Dictionary:
- His water balloon is aimed at you! Run!
That’s regarding the past/present tenses at the very least. I’ve corrected my bit either way to make it more pleasant to read 
I prefer not to go too in-depth with emotes, convey the message in a well-written but compact way. Aim for a good dialogue instead.
You’ll come to find that having an engaging conversation is more interesting than reading emotes that span over paragraphs.
10 Likes
Read books.
A lot of them.
This.
Good emotes are short and punchy. They’re not these multi-paragraph things egotists pump out. (Sorry egotists.)
If you’re punching, punch hard. If you’re tripping, be subtle. If you’re shouting, be loud. If you’re whispering, do it quietly. But most of all… if you’re trying to do something, make it sound very reasonable, very agreeable, and very much like an attempt.
Edit: I read your post back through. If you want to ‘be a better RP’er,’ I can only suggest you attempt to service other people with your time, my man.
It’s not about your writing skills, or making yourself seem like the bigger/more popular person. It’s about how you can add something to the community.
Ask yourself, how can your character do something nice for others, more often? (Blacksmithing, haircutting, cooking, essential services, to name a few!)
2 Likes
Within ten posts people have already hammered down the main points really - read a lot of books, and don’t worry about length.
Would is not inherently grammatically incorrect, just the many ways beginners overuse it is. It’s a conditional, so you need an if as well, e.g.
‘Bob stares at Martha warily. If she began to approach him, he’d draw his sword.’
Another suggestion I can make is on top of reading, you should also try your hand at writing in general. Write stories about your character, involving other NPC characters in them, write their dialogue, etcetera. It’ll help you practise writing emotes in real time, especially with coming up with emotes on the spot. In the end, lots of RP experience just means lots of practise, so many roleplayers have gotten the hang of writing, including their style and so on.
But as Barbour said, emotes alone do not make a RPer great. Great, clever ideas and themes can add to a RPer, on top of how accommodating they are to others, but in my opinion adhering to lore is the most important factor of all. You can be a great writer, but I would not want to RP with you if you said you were Varian’s secret son or Anduin’s personal foot-washer.
In general - more or less as a rule, I’d say avoid connections to important characters in the lore (with few exceptions, like Tyrande and Black Moon army for example).
8 Likes
This is entirely personal preference; some people enjoy a to-the-point, no fuss emote, but I personally prefer using emotes as a further means to characterise a roleplay character.
“Dave walks across the room” has the same impact as “Dave jovially saunters across the room, every step a small bounce” in terms of action and narrative, but one of the two gives an idea of how the character appears when doing the action, better serves to describe the action itself, and paints an image of the character.
Being descriptive isn’t always purple prose; “Grunt swings his sword” may be easy and waste no words, but it’s also frankly boring. This is a text medium, where the stories we tell are told entirely through descriptions and dialogue. There’s no shame in using emotes to characterise your character, and in fact I’d encourage it.
It’s also about knowing your audience. My guild are quite “heavy” in the sense we all love writing and so our emotes are usually several paragraphs long; but, if your company is using one line emotes, it’ll come off as boorish to suddenly drop four paragraphs after the gang’s been waiting for ten minutes for you to respond. Likewise, if I type a good paragraph describing an attempt at stabbing a guy in an emote, and his entire emote back reads as “Dave blocks it”, then I’ll be a bit peeved.
Both styles of emoting are valid; purple prose is only purple in the wrong company.
3 Likes
Practice and take inspiration from the roleplayers around you (whose writing you enjoy). But remember: less can often be more. Flowery prose and lengthy paragraph emotes are not inherently better at conveying meaning; they can obfuscate the point too.
My preference is generally to find a middle ground – eloquent and descriptive, but not long-winded / rambling. You want to catch the reader’s eye, but not bog them down in too much detail.
14 Likes
As a nice Thai lady once said to me during a very expensive cooking class, ‘‘BALANCE!’’
4 Likes
I’m the enlightened centrist of descriptive writing
Pumping out parallelism by the prose-load…
P-p-p—
I only write long emotes when the action in question is long.
like, if I am gonna cast a spell i’ll write the surge of power and the release of the arcane force.
But if I am channeling a spell while also dodging and shouting a command, my emote is naturally gonna be longer to fit in all the actions I am performing
Short is often sweeter.
If you’re describing some epic event, whether that’s cracking a complex arcane lock, duking it out head to head with an NPC boss or something like that, sure, go for it!
But (personally) it tends to lose it’s impact if every action you describe is two paragraphs long. It just gets bloated and a slog to read through (again, imo).
Then again, I’m a bit biased; I’m a massive fan of Sir Terry Pratchett’s work, and he had a writing style that flowed incredibly smoothly.
5 Likes
Generally try and start writing short stories off your character perhaps that helped me alot. I am no master off English but as long as you have fun and get the point across it shouldn’t be to much off a problem that your emotes are short.
But the one tip I could give is try looking for repeats like say for instance
‘‘Would swing a sword at you’’
Try to not use ‘‘would’’ again and think of an alternative path which might be harder but it will widen your word choice in emotes
‘‘Grabs his sword firmly his hand holding it tightly as he swoops it over his head swining it down on the bandit’’
Something like that could come out. In general it doesn’t matter to much I would just have fun rping no one minds you doing small emotes just make sure you touch on what the other person does in your emotes if you do rp/pvp or emote fights in rp.
Good. Stay that way.
4 Likes
Honestly true. A to-the-point and concise writing style is something I can always appreciate.
2 Likes
For me personally reading/listening to online guides on story writing has helped improve my emoting on top of reading books like suggested by others, by opening my eyes to different ways of delivering an effect in text form in general. I’m the kind of a shapeshifter that can write several paragraphs if the other person is also into longer form of roleplay (though I’m not a fan of purple prose where the focus is on making the text so ornate and flowery that it kills the flow), but I also easily fall back into short form when in a group setting, attending public events or when the other player seems to prefer keep it very snappy. Flexibility and awareness of your surroundings is important I think.
Why do some people enjoy longer form of writing in roleplay? I can’t speak for others, in my own case maybe because I’ve roleplayed since Ultima Online and longer form offers some refreshing variety, after years and years of seeing the same things written time and time again a lot of it feels “been there, done that”. I mostly like it in unhurried one-on-one scenes though where you can take your time delving deeper into the character and building an ambience together with someone else. But length in itself isn’t what people should strive for because that’s when excessive fluff enters the stage, and regarding the OP’s opener don’t worry, nobody should feel inadequate if they prefer very concise approach.
I think this is a matter of preference and circumstances. When it comes to quiet character types who keep much to themselves verbally, emotes can sometimes convey much more about the character than dialogue and help keep the ball rolling when the other character is provided something to react to in the absence of words.
Length =/= purple prose
Length =/= High quality roleplay
High quality roleplay = subjective, discover what you enjoy, what inspires you and go for it. It can even shift from company to company and moment to moment when some guy’s one-word emote comes at the right time and place making it the most memorable moment in forever.
13 Likes