I plant my banner proudly upon the 2 inch death hill of “I think a literary hobby should allow people to express their literary skill; if you don’t quite understand something yet then that’s actually all the more reason because you will learn new vocabulary and grammatical semantics along the way”.
I think that’s a perfectly average sized hill.
But it boils down to the room and your choice of RP partners. Some prefer it fast and snappy, and that’s fantastic, others prefer verbose and that too is fair.
And some fellas switch it up depending on the pace of the roleplay around them and they’re the best.
What if you’re eagerly waiting for your character to be brought to task but no one ever holds them accountable?
A Co-Operative hobby which should leave breathing room for your collaborators, account for varying skill levels/non-native language speakers, and not bascially ammount to OOC Main Character Syndrome.
If you want to flex your ‘literary muscles’ that badly you stray into ‘Cerulean Orbs’ territory, might I suggest Novel writing?
Long Emotes and actual Purple Prose are not the same.
Sometimes, especially for GMs, you need quite a lot, and that’s fine.
Make them do increasinly risky stuff to see just how far they can get
Someone went OOC because I was kicking up a fuss over something he did IC which again was super vile. A lot of people wanted his blood.
He said he never shyed away from accepting consequence and would gladly do so.
So I gave him and others a timeframe to finish this IC. To no ones surprise, he never logged but his character fled and to this day have not seen him or his character since.
edit this was back in Legion
I think “reading the room” when it comes to emote typing is my personal cup of tea.
A person taking 10 minutes to write emotes/conversations in a tense situation, or a back-and-forth between each character that should be quick but instead takes too much, can very well kill the mood for me.
But otherwise I am personally fine + enjoy well-written and long emotes, provided they actually add something I can use as a hook for additional RP, it’s all about the vibes.
It’s situational, I say!
Longest waiting time I ever had to suffer through was a 1.5h RP break in which the ambusher wrote the entire 16 paragraph emote in a word document.
But… why? I mean was an event or just wanted to make a detailed emote.
Random RP, they asked us to wait and then we assumed they fell asleep.
What’s worse, waiting 1.5 hours for a 16 paragraph emote or 15 minutes for a five word reply to a question?
1.5 hours, no contest.
The first one, as the second can just be a quick emergency afk. You can’t just afk 1.5h.
I have (and this was recent, as in it literally happened yesterday) AFK’d for twenty minutes without saying or doing anything but I was an idiot and forgot to hit enter on my message saying that I’d be gone for a while LMAO
It shouldn’t be at the expense of pacing, and especially not at the expense of actual action/content.
If your emote is your character pulling out a chair and sitting down there is no point to write a 15 minutes literary masterpiece paraphrasing Hamlet and referencing a Victorian English expression for sitting with sweaty buttocks.
Once again not at all what I was describing. No sparse time about it. No noble reason for why this is done, like a lack of time. No diminishing what I’m describing. All the time in the world. Chronically online and doing what I described. And now I feel like you’re bound to go “oh but that’s okay too.” And it is, but it is not ok for me. It’s not elitism, it’s standards.
I’m confused by this situation where someone is a stranger (that’s when red flags matter most, before you know a person) but also their real life is known well enough to know that this sparse activity is a full choice and not any sort of IRL consequence (because it’s determined they don’t have sparse time or anything holding them back IRL).
That feels so incredibly specific, I’m not sure how you would have this experience without having pre-stalked someone to know they aren’t held back. I have friends I’ve roleplayed with nearly daily for a year I have no idea the daily schedule of.
But, fair! We all have our little odd red flags.
P.S. It’s great that you understood exactly what I meant but still upvoted posts intentionally twisting and misconstruding my words.
I stand by those, I don’t like you.
I love long emotes, but good god you have to be someone that can just bang them out if you’re doing it. 1.5h is bleak.
Maybe showing my young age here, but I genuinely 100% credit WoW RP with turning my school grades around for the better when I was younger; ended up leaving high school with the highest possible grades for English Language, Literature, and History.
Roleplay unironically taught me how to use a semicolon properly.
And you’re 100% right. Like I said in my other post: read the room. If you’re roleplaying with other likeminded people, be as pretentious as you like.
I have a few friends super, super into their films (the sort of people that get flack on social media for being pretentious) but I really love listening to them talk about film, and I try to get involved when I can. Being super into something that oftentimes isn’t that deep is fun.
I’ll raise a glass to that as well. I actually started very young; though I was always into reading anyways but it did cause my late Primary - early High teachers to pull me aside a few times at first because they were concerned I was a few years ahead in terms of English and Lit. compared to others in my classes but behind in Mathematics and it made them suspect some form of mental disability or handicap . Brief, grim moment as 13 year old, sweat rolling down the forehead, exasperatedly tries to explain that they just really, really like reading.
It’s all about balance imo. Find the flow for the current narrative you’re in. A good writer/rper will know when to unleash the dreaded, verbose thesaurus and when to reign it in to allow for more curt, punctual sentences and remarks. I would argue this can actually bring a lot of vibrance to a character’s personality.