I personally do not see this as a bad thing at all. And it’s a direction I tend to sway with my emotes as well, only on purpose. In my opinion “Attempts a horizontal slash for Character name’s gut” is a lot better than the same thing, just stretched out into 2 paragraphs.
1 Like
kind of like the demon hunter class
True… I am so pleased to see they are not the PvP meta right now.
2 Likes
I saw a “[Character] would smile.” and I died inside.
2 Likes
/e would one shot you with [The Hunt]
Does it even still happen? From all the DHs I faced this season, none of them got even remotely close to 1-tapping me or my partners with The Hunt after the nerf to it. Maybe if they used it when you’re half hp already…
There lies the answer then…
But yes, don’t use would for everything. Emotes are often better short but well written, but also sometimes more flavour can bring depth. Depends on your companions in the RP.
For myself, it tends to scale with who I RP with. If you are sometimes lost in how to emote it by base, can imagine yourself in a storytelling PoV, yet an active one, which brings rooms for attempts and such.
1 Like
Most if not all the replies on this topic care about how to write or which length your emote is or which tense to use.
And I’d chime by saying instead of trying to write an emote for writing an emote, try to convey an intent and write your emote for the players around you. Role-play is interaction, the best emotes (to me) are the one that let other players use them in return.
So you ask yourself those questions:
- Is my emote just of pure description and eye candy?
- Do I give a hook for the characters around mine?
- If another player reads it, what can they make out of it?
With this I don’t really care about how much I write or anything else, I know people that will read my emotes will have food for thoughts.
As examples I often see myself writing:
“Some text here” she says in a cheeky tone.
Snow looks like she’s quite annoyed, her ear visibly twitches when X says Y.
Snow directs a smile to X, visibly she likes what she hears.
Snow strides quickly toward X in the goal of doing Z.
And all those emote do carry some intent.
If you write:
Snow smiles. or Snow smile of her best smile, it appears at the corner of her lips and she looks super seductive and this description is surely the best you’ve read on the forum.
You can add more text, there is zero intent in why she smiled and those emotes serve usually no purpose other than just flaunting your vocabulary.
They are great still, but don’t forget the intent, and by doing so people will find your emotes great because they’ll know why you write them and what for.
It’s my two cents, but I had a lot of players finding my style pleasant and inviting and I suppose it’s because I write for them first rather than for myself (or at least not just for myself).
Cheers.
2 Likes
- The max number of characters in a chat message is 256. Consider this not a limit, but a guideline. You should always have an EXPLICIT reason why your emote runs over that limit.
You can eliminate a lot of fluff from emotes with a single sweep of an editor’s broom.
A good example here to eliminate excess words and retain meaning.
Kelian approaches under his attacker’s guard. As the sword skirts overhead, he focuses his Chi and drives his palm for a brutal strike at his foe’s ribcage.
- Use emotes not to convey detail, but to convey character. Your goal shouldn’t be to detail a specific motion or swing as much as you can; allowing a fair “wriggle room” will make it easier for the other to react and not push them into a corner where they feel like their roleplay is railroaded. At the same time, bringing character to your emotes changes a generic swordfight into a conflict of characters.
If your character is cocky and boisterous, have them make daring attacks, and don’t be afraid to emphasize this in the emotes themselves.
- Don’t. Do. Purple. Prose. Don’t do the five-senses-role-call. Don’t “remove all adverbs”. The usual “top 5 writing advice” articles are written on blogs of unpublished authors for writers who read blogs instead of actually opening up a .docx and writing. The advices you should keep: avoid very, keep things simple, read a lot.
Refer to my BIG post on the armour/HEMA thread. There /will/ be people more familiar with big words than you. They will either call you out on it in-character, note it OOC or just acknowledge you as a big-brains wannabe.
Not applicable to quite a few of us 2nd or 3rd language English speakers in certain cases. God; I had some weird misconceptions about word meanings for a while. I learned the rule-of-thumb: unfamiliar, don’t use it. Enough to deal with not understanding the words /others/ use.
- Avoid elegant variation in prose. Most frequent writing mistake I see new authors make in their material. It’s about newcomers seeking to elude repetition of specific terms in their finished product so much that they start to mix in unusually elaborate synonyms and parallels in their text. Long way into their paragraph these aspiring word-churners can turn their passages silly.
There was a good article somewhere that dug into the history of this phenomenon and listed some of the wildest examples. Believe it or not, a newspaper journalist once felt they repeated the word “banana” so much they used “elongated yellow fruit” instead.
Most of the time you can skip repeated reference wholly, other times you can replace it with an “it” or “they”.
Don’t think this applies to your writing? How many times have you used/seen “sword”, “blade” and a specific type of sword’s name used in an emote to avoid repetition?
Some misc notes
Present or past is personal preference. I am not bothered either way; I’m a past-tense roleplayer because I view RP as a drama being told like any other tale. I used to write some prose in present tense (hnrgh you can even dig up some on the internet still) but have since re-written everything in past. Just feels better.
For past tense, you have the room to play around with tenses. And an obligation to. Sorry Anglobros, you should /know/ your language. Past perfect exist.
For present tense, too much continuous breaks pacing and leaves an emote monotone. It’s generally why I switched to past tense.
“Would” emotes are merely a result of people correcting new roleplayers, but not showing them the right way to do stuff. A newcomer does a power-emote, then they are told to /imply actions/ and not power-emote them. Their solution? Flick a “would” into the power-emote.
Solution is, of course, to create implication through verbs used and sentence structure.
“Anton strikes Jacob at the shoulder” re-written as “Anton would strike Jacob at the shoulder” - but could also be written as “Anton aims a strike at Jacob’s shoulder.”
1 Like
Less is more imo.
1 Like
Can we get a short version of this thread? Too many paragraphs
3 Likes
Hankson asked.
Jera snorted and continued to grin stupidly for the rest of the day.
2 Likes
write good
2 Likes
Also, nothing wrong with taking a break and writing two short sentences if you want your emotes to be “longer”.
Sam closes her book. She then stands up and places it in the bag.
They’re both short and not too elaborate, but give a better flow than if it was one single run.
If you want it to be more poggers as you say, think of adding a single adjective somewhere.
Sam closes her tailoring book. She then stands up and places it in her woolen bag.
Just think of it as if you’re writing a story for your character. YOU are describing what he’s doing. And if it’s straight to the point? As long as you’ve made your point, it doesn’t matter if it’s not embellished with extra adjectives or prose. Tell your story the way you see most fitting.
2 Likes
Pretty pog thread right here tbh
I see a lot of would-bashing in here, and it reminds me just how much i do it, just because my old, German, realm hammered into me that any offensive Action emoted without written, signed and scientifically proven chance to counter/dodge is godemoting.
So say
Lytania somehow actually manages to stab a binch
was godemoting, whereas
Lytania somehow would actually manage to stab a binch
was not. All under the common consensus of “if successful”
1 Like
Yeah that’s kinda what I meant when I said that it’s just well intentioned, halfway useful but ultimately not that great advice being given out re: would-ing
In a perfect world people will get over themselves and not freak out if there is no series of written qualifiers in an emote.
/e thrusts her sword at Jimmy’s shoulder
is forever superior in comparison to
/e would stab jimmy’s shoulder
9 Likes
As most others have already said the crux of it I’ll just go over my own personal rule (which admittedly I don’t always adhere to but I do try) when it comes to writing in general.
Never go over four lines of text in one message, it just makes the text hard to read and makes it look like a bad Kindle formatted e-book. If possible try to keep it to three lines but a fourth line doesn’t hurt.
2 Likes
RP with me more often you will get rly good
4 Likes
Just write comfortably. It becomes very obvious when someone is trying to push themselves further than they are confident with. Try to avoid over repetition BUT it’s not the end of the world if it happens. I often try to imagine an action in my head, and then I contemplate the little details and consider if they’re worth adding. So instead of just “Swings sword at X”, which can be difficult to respond to because there’s so many variables, things like what hand you’re using to hold the sword, what height, what you’re aiming for, are you doing anything with your feet and hands, are you leaving any openings or making any obvious errors. So suddenly it could become “Takes his sword in his right hand, swinging it in a downwards arc aimed at the left thigh, intent on debilitating his opponent.” which gives the person on the other end of your sword and emote more information to work with and paint a picture, which allows them to give you more in return.
2 Likes
I had only a quick skim through, so I may of missed this suggestion if it has come up before but all the same!
Whether consciously or otherwise, it can sometimes really help to think of your character then consider what sort of words and vocabulary best ascribe to them. If you’re aiming to keep it short, you can sometimes imply plenty with very little just with a few choice words.
My vagrant is a nervous soul, so I try and use language that best evokes that.
- Twitching, shaking, uncertain, apprehensive, rattling.
My street-doctor’s big thing is his age, so it’ll be things like;
- Frail, bent, gnarled, worn, brittle.
You can imply a lot just by picking a word from your ‘palette’ as it were.
“Wretch extends a hand.”
To instead.
“Wretch extends a frail hand.”
It can help just think of the character as an ensemble, right down to the words you use for them.
7 Likes