Roleplaying Partners

Article number seventeen for me, but it will be the sixteenth that talks specifically about quality, since you can exclude my first post. I’ve talked a lot about that, really, and I’ll probably talk a lot more about it. There arises the question though, why should we care? I mean after all, isn’t this just my own little fantasy of elitism and personal tastes, so why should I be so audacious as to tell people how to roleplay? Shouldn’t roleplay just be from a fount of creativity? How dare you suggest something may be better!

Some people seem to think this argument is satisfactory, but I no longer think so. Our society has absolutely latched onto this notion that “What’s true for you may not be true for me” as if it were so simple. I personally find it quite lacking and more than a bit of a cop-out, especially for roleplay. Roleplay is, after all, a hobby that involves more than just you, so indulge me for a minute and understand it’s not just about your own little sphere of creativity where you can just act however you please.

Many are convinced there are not objective reasons for demanding quality (or a desire to reach quality) in roleplay, as many communities simply go, “This is what we want to see. This is our taste, respect it or leave.” That’s totally fine, but I think it can go further than that. In a lot of my articles in the past I’ve referenced one of these objective reasons I would argue matter: the enjoyment of your own roleplay. It’s a tricky one, but really, if you have more fun roleplaying, because you’re improving in quality, it becomes significantly more enjoyable. When the roleplay is more enjoyable, you tend to stick with it longer, hopefully not falling into that cycle of dipping in and out of activity.

This extends into a lot of areas, many of them relating to motivations to roleplay. For example, if you’re roleplaying simply to live out another fantasy and escape your own miserable dimensions, then your desire to roleplay will fluctuate alongside your own personal satisfaction with your life. If you haven’t figured that out, it changes a lot, so it’s kind of not the greatest thing to rely on.

But that’s just the recap of what I’ve talked about already. Maybe another time I’ll go into that stuff again more directly, but today I’m here to talk about something else.

Why should you seek to improve your roleplay?

Because you’re not the only person who has to put up with your own writing. Like most things I bring up, this SHOULD go without saying, but people seem to forget it a lot—myself included. Roleplaying is, by nature, a very social thing, and it should remain that way, else you should just go write fanfiction! But in roleplay, if you’re roleplaying with me, that means I must put up with what you’re writing. If you’re writing sloppily, out of character, and rushed, then it’s going to be a pretty miserable and uninspiring situation for me. Even if you don’t agree with anything else I say, this should be absolutely forefront in your mind.

When you roleplay, you should be giving the other person a good time. There are benefits to you too, and those are important as well, but since it’s a social interaction, it’s expected that a lot of the enjoyment comes from a mutual feedback cycle. That is to say, I inspire you, you inspire me, and so on and so forth. If you’re just going to get into this rhythm where you just plow through posts without a second thought of, “Am I making this engaging and enjoyable for the other person?” then you’re probably doing something seriously wrong.

So I’m going to try and give some examples or areas that people should pay specific attention to. Hopefully it’s fairly complete.

Communicating. A lot of people laugh at writers like Tolkien or Flaubert or Jordan for going into these incredibly long and excessive details about their books, scenes, characters, histories, or whatever. A lot of people write like that too, ironically. So keep in mind it’s not about length or depth, specifically, but more importantly about communication. When you’re in a roleplay, and you find that the other person is often misunderstanding what you’re writing or having to ask clarifying questions about it, then something’s probably not good.

Writing descriptions in great detail and having your audience see and interpret it as you do is incredibly difficult if not impossible. Even really amazing authors like the ones I listed often spend pages on pages of describing something, and you get to the end and you’re even MORE confused and disoriented. It’s not because they’re a bad writer, per se, it’s just… really difficult. I would argue, then, that it’s not as much about writing beautiful or detailed descriptors, but rather focusing very clearly on communicating what you think is important to the scenario so the other roleplayer can respond to that.

In fiction, the author in many ways has a distinct advantage for what they’re doing, because all they need to do is convey their image enough for you to follow the story. In a roleplay, you have to write enough so that the next writer can piggyback off what you’ve already written AND add their own content. That is, naturally, a lot harder. Thankfully in roleplay you have the advantage of (hopefully) less going on to balance this out, but be very careful here.

So what’s the solution? Firstly I’d say to be careful how much stuff you have going on. You can really quickly tank the effectiveness of your storytelling by flooding it with so much information that the reader can’t really distinguish what’s important. I mentioned this in my article on character biographies, but I’m going to use this idea to bounce into the next part: secondly, describe only what you need to describe. This is creative writing 101, but you don’t really need to describe that the barrels in the alleyway have grain in them, or that a shop is owned by your second uncle you’ve never really talked to, or that you have a gold watch on your wrist that’s three minutes fast. You should only be describing things you have an intention of using, otherwise it comes off as unnecessary and purposeless.

This is doubly true for roleplay when you have such a finite amount of space, and if you start going over the top with the writing, the other person will likely give up and simply play follow-the-leader, never really contributing but simply responding to what you’re doing. In a perfect world, this doesn’t happen. We do have an issue, though, that if you describe something, maybe YOU won’t be intending to use it, but what if someone else might? For this I would say you can add, sparingly, some extra scenery for people to draw on. However, I would say that to simply leave the canvas blank for someone else to add something purposeful is even more effective. Basically, keep it clean, keep it as sleek as you can, and do your best to be mindful of your conveyance with your fellow roleplayers.

They absolutely need to understand what you’re writing. If they don’t need to understand something, then you probably don’t need to be writing about it in the first place.

Pacing. This one is pretty important and missed a lot. The pacing of a roleplay is really important to how well it feels for both people in the roleplay, especially if you’re doing it sort of closed-ear and not communicating how it’s going each step of the way. If in doubt, taking a slower pace is ALWAYS better for the roleplay. If you feel things are going TOO slowly, you don’t need to do something dramatic like having bad guys crash in or having your character suddenly run into a bunch of old crazy friends or whatever. Just take it easy, keep it slow, and focus on my next point:

Character-focused. Okay, so this is roleplaying—we’re playing a role, and that’s what makes us very different from much of other fiction. One of our most powerful tools is our impossibly dynamic relationship between characters, because at least one of them is out of our control. When you feel the temptation to ruin the pace of your roleplay, focus instead on the character dynamic and less on the action. The nuances and the slightest actions can cause an incredible amount of interesting interaction between two characters, and it can help you get a much better feel for how the thread should be going rather than just blazing on forward.

And for goodness sake, quality control. This goes without saying, but you should always desire your roleplay to improve. With that, though, naturally comes the desire for it to have quality in the first place. You should be constantly criticizing your own writing and questioning its quality—even ask other people, if that ego of yours will let you. It’s important for you to get better, not just because you should want to in general, but because your improvements in quality will aid in your roleplaying partner’s enjoyment as well as a byproduct of your efforts.

So yeah, go out and have a good time and stuff, but remember that you’re not the only one who’s going to be affected by what you do. If you lose sight of everyone else and only focus on whatever you’re doing in the roleplay, you’ll miss out on the awesome potency that comes from being an RP partner to another person.