[X] My Assistant

[Ceilni]

I don't mean specifically me, but i mean what can i do which MANY PEOPLE have made errors on before which may help me improve.

What kind of things should i do or look for to help me improve my posts if anyone has any suggestions. I have dialogue down, Umbrae said something about that i think. But is there anything else which everyone/I could do to improve post quality?

[Living Arrow]

For me, there are two suggestions that I like to give everyone:

1. Use a Spell Checker.
2. Save your post into Word or something like that before you post it. When it is finished, leave it an hour and read it crefully again to pick out any silly errors that a spell checker misses. Also, test how well it flows and see if you can add in more descriptive text if appropriate.

~LA

[Ceilni]

For me, there are two suggestions that I like to give everyone:

1. Use a Spell Checker.
2. Save your post into Word or something like that before you post it. When it is finished, leave it an hour and read it crefully again to pick out any silly errors that a spell checker misses. Also, test how well it flows and see if you can add in more descriptive text if appropriate.

~LA

Hm. Yes, that would help a lot. I'll try that sometime.

Anything else anyone?

[Master Houndoom]

This is also a general one ( I suspect you have a general intent for this to not only be for you, but for everyone. You sly pup, you!)

Discuss with your RPmates! Discuss, discuss, and then discuss some more. This doesn't mean you have to plan out details, just a general flow. Then, if new ideas come in, you can try to work them into the general plan or decide if the entire plan needs to change. The best way to do this is a group e-mail, or something like FaceBook.

Don't be afraid to change your plans! Some of the best stories come from spontaneous ideas that slam you into new directions.

[Ceilni]

This is also a general one ( I suspect you have a general intent for this to not only be for you, but for everyone. You sly pup, you!)

Discuss with your RPmates! Discuss, discuss, and then discuss some more. This doesn't mean you have to plan out details, just a general flow. Then, if new ideas come in, you can try to work them into the general plan or decide if the entire plan needs to change. The best way to do this is a group e-mail, or something like FaceBook.

Don't be afraid to change your plans! Some of the best stories come from spontaneous ideas that slam you into new directions.

(Teehee! **)

Alright, discussing more! That's a really good one! Gotta remember that one!
Feel free to change, huh? That's also a good one, thanks! ^///^

Anything else? **

[Umbrae Calamitas]

I will have more later, I'm sure, but for the moment, here's a very important one:

Know. Your. Character.

For me, I'm a writer by trade, so this is second nature. For the rest of you, we'll convert you yet!

Now, by know you're character I mean know them. You won't use half of the stuff you know in your story/posts, but you'll know information about your character that directly affects his/her subconscious actions, or oddly enough, contradicts them.

For instance, Tuesday, my character here in PANE, hates the color pink. Unlike most little girls, she has always hated pink. She favored the color light blue when she was little, and when she was nine, her favorite color changed to red (Dante's coat color).

There is no end to the information you can know about your character, but some questions to ask:

What is his/her favorite color?
What kind of bed does he/she sleep in? (This might seem irrelevant, but your character may be forced to sleep outside on the ground at some point. If they're accustomed to a water bed, this is going to be a stark contrast.)
When they were little, what did they want to be when they grew up?
What do they want to be now?
Favorite food?
Favorite pokemon?
Allergies? (These can make for some interesting circumstances.)
Are they afraid of any pokemon? (Bug pokemon, snake pokemon, spider pokemon, Feraligatr... :P)
Why?
Why?
Why?

Question your characters endlessly. Eventually, you will know them so well that you will instantly know how they would react in a situation. They will tell you. Your characters will become a living force inside your mind and they will "speak" to you.

Well, there's my rant.

[Spearow]

I have two!

1) Go with the flow, and think/care about your partners and their characters. Now it's not really a hard and fast rule in this context, but if you're familiar with improvisational comedy you'll have heard the advice, "Always say yes." I for one think that's pretty applicable to roleplay, especially for beginners in a freeform environment. I mean, if you already have a basic outline for the course of your roleplay, that's cool. But if you have a very rigid plan for your character's development that centers around them and only them - well, it's not very fair to your partner is it?

The best solution is to think of things that can happen that involve all the characters in a roleplay, or as many as possible. Focus on getting something out of the other players, create motivations for your character in relation to their characters - maybe your character wants to figure out what makes this other boy tick, or make friends with him, or prove that he's better than him. Be proactive about moving things forward, and accept twists and opportunities as they are offered to you, rather than waiting for people to come to you and behave the way you want them to according to your plan. It just makes it more fun for everyone involved. I think you'll find that the more you concentrate on other characters, the more smoothly your RP will move and the more you'll learn about your own character in the process! RP is a team exercise, after all.

2) TAKE YOUR TIME. I come from a partial background of real-time, chatlike MU* roleplay environments, where actions, dialogue and narrative description are compressed into shorter "poses", four or five lines on average. It makes for very fast-paced, fun storytelling. Obviously, in forum RPing standard length expectations are a little different. But please, don't think that you have to post pages upon pages of useless information in order to "pad" each post to match the standard. Just say what you need to say about what's happened and what your character has done, and to advance the action as necessary.

Of course one-liners generally aren't workable in a setting like this, but at the same time don't give your partner too much to react to - don't have your character do something, say a line of dialogue, do something else, say another line of dialogue, go off somewhere, come back, say yet more dialogue, and then expect your poor partner's character to react to all of that. At worst, it results in a weirdly paced, temporally staggered interaction, where two characters have multiple threads of conversation/interaction going on at once. It's just not that pretty. So take your time! Do something, wait for your partner's reaction, and move the story along efficiently but reasonably.

[Red Kitten]

I have some stuff to contribute, and I'll add more when I think of it.

1.) To expand on Umbrae's suggestion, I found a website a while ago with a bunch of character developing questions. Some of them are really in depth and some seem sort of pointless, but answering them will really help in getting to know your character.

http://charactercreator.blogspot.com/search/label/character

You have to scroll down to get to the actual questions. They start out really broad, such as name, age, gender, then start going into a lot of background/personality stuff. What I like to do is copy and paste the questions into a word processor and type in the answers, so I can save it and look back on it later.

I recommend that everyone who RPs has one of these for their character, and heck, maybe some of their character's Pokemon. Hmm, I think perhaps I'll fill one in for DC today, seeing as I haven't done one for her yet...

2.) I highly recommend Firefox as a web browser, to anyone that doesn't have it. Built in spell checker FTW! Or just get any browser with a built in spell checker. I don't know which have them and which don't. But I do know it is highly helpful and convenient to have one, especially if you are lazy and don't want to copy paste everything into a different spell checker. And also that without Firefox spell checker, I would have just spelled "convenient" wrong. XD

3.) And here's another really general suggestion: Make stuff happen. Seriously, in a lot of RPs I've participated in, some players don't contribute anything new or interesting to the RP plot. They just wait around for everyone else to make the plot move and then go along for the ride. This is a huge pet peeve of mine.

4.) Thesauruses! Find a good online thesaurus, like thesaurus.com, and bookmark it for your reference. It helps improve your RP posts immensely, so you aren't just using the same words over and over (big, small, happy, etc). And it also improves your vocabulary, so you can sound intelligent. Yay!

[Toogee]

I like that link . When I make a link page, I'm totally going to steal it .

I'll back up the use of a word processor. I usually work on posts over the course of several days (or throughout the day if there isn't anything going on). I start with a brief outline of what I want to say, then elaborate over time. Also, you can save the post in case the Internet fails you .

[Umbrae Calamitas]

Always save the post, because after the best ones, the Internet always bugs out.

A note on thesauruses. A very good idea to have one around, I agree, but don't go synonym-happy. While the thesaurus is good for uses in finding similar words, the two words usually don't have the exact same meaning. Use a dictionary, too, and know what the word means before you use it, else either your sentence will look ridiculous/unprofessional, or it just may have a different meaning than you intended.

I use Firefox, partially because of the awesomeness of a built-in spellchecker (it's also faster than Explorer).

For some people, the outlines don't work, so some may benefit greatly from making some other, and for others, it may stifle their creative juices (too much pulp, not enough juice). A word of advice I read in a book on writing: "Know more about your character than you will ever use." Whether you write it down or not (which I do - mass amounts of outlines), know everything about them.

And I second on the making stuff happen. Don't be a sheep. Be proactive.

[Ain Skalie]

Contribution :

Well, for me. Don't post a "Lot of Time-consuming(RP Time)" post. I mean, seriously, if there is a post that took the Rp time about an hour, it will be annoying for us to catch up.

Try to keep active all day. It happens to me, When I was Rp-ing Life as a Pokemon, I can't catch up with the Rp speed. Tommorow it's already 5 pages, Are you diligent enough to read that a lot? Also, if you skip these page, you may do something that it wasn't supposed to happen.

[Toogee]

Contribution :

Well, for me. Don't post a "Lot of Time-consuming(RP Time)" post. I mean, seriously, if there is a post that took the Rp time about an hour, it will be annoying for us to catch up.

Try to keep active all day. It happens to me, When I was Rp-ing Life as a Pokemon, I can't catch up with the Rp speed. Tommorow it's already 5 pages, Are you diligent enough to read that a lot? Also, if you skip these page, you may do something that it wasn't supposed to happen.

Not sure what you're saying in the first part, but I will wholeheartedly disagree with you on the second point. RPs in PANE and Uprising very rarely get multiple pages in one day. More likely than not, you'll be waiting a couple days for the next post (sometimes weeks). We all have lives outside of this RP; no need to sacrifice them to have an enjoyable experience.