Role play posting styles

[Bhaern Quel]

Over the years different players have learned different posting styles that is leading to some confusion. I am not asking any to change their style, just to understand that there are different styles.

My ply style comes from one of the older schools and rules.

*text* = actions and thoughts, descriptive actions (like language used).
~text~ = telepathy communication, silent mind to mind speak with no sound (also called Mindspeak)
text = spoken communication

Some of the more recent versions include
"text" = Spoken communication (in the past the use of quotes was a charater that a user could not use)
text = descriptive actions.
bold = spoken communication (which also was not an option in the old days)

There have been other styles I have seen as well, too many to list. Some were custom to the player trying to show individuality, others customs develped though interaction within one of many chat rooms/forums and on IRC.

I do not believe I have misread any of the posts of others here on the other side or here, however I am seeing things my characters think being replied to as if spoken.

It should not be that much of a problem to identify individual role play style and custom. If needed I can of course try to remember to follow posting style that the High Priestess decrees. I do not find a set format in the FAQ.

[Shir'le E. Illios]

In forums I tend to take a novel-style to roleplaying; that is using normal text for descriptions and actions and such and putting spoken text between double quotes. After all, in these forums you tend to write a lot more per ‘action’ than you do in more dynamic roleplaying (such as chatrooms or NWN) and I feel that, in a way, it’s almost like a sort of collaborative writing effort.

As such it’s probably more natural to approach roleplaying in online forums as writing a book.

In other online roleplaying (chatrooms, NWN, etc) I tend to reverse that… making spoken text normal text and putting emotes between escape characters (like ‘**’ or ‘<>’ as I’ve also used quite a bit). This is, I think, because in these mediums talking is the more natural thing to do (they’re called [i:2zwh6cmj]chat[/i:2zwh6cmj]rooms for a reason ). Even more so in a game like NWN where a lot of the actions and descriptions come from the game itself; you don’t have to describe how the room looks when you first enter it, because everyone can see it with their own eyes.

Of course, things can get a little confusing if different people employ different styles in the same medium.

But I don’t have any set format for these formats. I don’t want to dictate to people how they should post and I think that trying to enforce any such rules would just be a major headache (and sooner to drive people away than to attract them).

It probably doesn’t matter that much anyway. As long as it’s fairly clear to people what’s what and as long as each individual stays fairly consistent in their use within a single thread it should be fine. And if everyone can make a little effort to try and follow the general style employed in a thread so much the better.


Love -x-x-x-

Shir'le

[Velve]

I do things pretty much the way Shir'le discribed. I tend to read many books, and so it seems more natural to me to write that way. When I'm on something where what I would say is mostly what I would write, like on any OOC discusions like here, I put anything I'd do between, *Points to the thingys on either side of this writing* those. But almost anything IC I will write as I would a novel.

I usualy am too lazy to change any of the font, but I'll sometimes change a colour to suit a character better, which IMO also helps separate the bits I'm writing when playing many characters at once.