After reading through and participating in the Rp for a bit, I've decided to put up some pointers to help you guys along the way. I don't like sounding mean, but some of you have posts in which it would take me a good five minutes to read . . . when it should only take about one. So without further ado . . .

~ Seperate your dialogue. When some of you have dialogue, you bunch it in with everything else, like this:

Quote:
Nina spotted Chris a short distance away. "Chris, how are you?" she called, running towards him.


When you start having larger posts with lots of dialogue it starts getting massively confusing. If you read books or novels, you'll notice that authors start dialogue and conversation in a new paragraph. So the previous would turn into:

Quote:
Nina spotted Chris a short distance away.

"Chris, how are you?" she called, running towards him.


See? Now I can tell where someone is talking. It's human nature to like things spaced. Think about if you're reading a wall of text (like in school textbooks) and when you're reading something that is nicely spaced (like those picture books or a simpler novel). You tend to get more information out of the text that has smaller paragraphs than just a bunch of words and letters jammed together, right?

~ Add detail. Okay, hate to break it to you people, but a LOT of you have posts that are WAY TOO SHORT. I keep seeing:

Quote:
Mitchell ran towards the Akuma.

"Innocence activate!" he yelled.

Mitchell used his weapon to hit the Akuma.


Err . . . Okay. I think I felt myself DIE a little inside. It sound like a child's book. "Franklin went to school! Franklin gave his teacher an apple! Franklin learned his ABC's." ERGH. NO. I'm pretty sure that everyone, including myself, is NOT 5 years old. We don't NEED to read stuff that we could read if we took our baby sister's Dora the Explorer or Teletubbies book. You can safely assume that everyone here is at LEAST 13. Which means we can read things like:

Quote:
It's okay, it's okay, he thought to himself. You can do this. It was his first time, facing an Akuma. He'd trained so hard for so long, but practise can only do so much. Mitchell swallowed hard, and tried to stop his knees from shaking. Okay, let's do this! Yelling wildly, the young Exorcist charged towards the Akuma, his heart racing.

"Innocence! Activate!" he roared.

The Anti-Akuma weapon in his hands flashed, transforming into an impressive blade. Still yelling, still charging rather recklessly towards the enemy, he swung hard, the sword humming as he brought it up to cleave the demonic machine.


Oh. My. Gosh. Look at that! I just turned a THREE sentence post to a TEN sentence post! What did I do? I let people into Mitchell's mind! He was thinking, remembering, feeling emotions. I added details to create an image. Role-players are artists of words. When we type up posts, we want to paint a vivid image of what we see in our minds. And guess what? WE CAN'T READ YOUR FRIGGIN' MIND. However much you want us to, we CAN'T. So don't expect us to know immediately what you're imagining.

The solution? TYPE IT OUT! We WANT to see that breath-taking sunset, where the sky is splashed with crimson, vermillion, and gold, where the clouds are fringed with pink and lavender! We WANT to see that exciting battle scene, where, despite the overwhelming odds and the blood oozing from the multiple wounds on their body, the character hefts their weapon and charges bravely into battle as the faces of the friends and family they want to protect flashes through their mind! We WANT to see what you see! So ADD DETAIL!

~ Flesh out your character. In conjunction to the previous tip, I find a lot of your characters very two-dimensional. There's no feeling to them, no sense of "This is my character. They're fictional, but I want you to treat them like an actual person!" You have to remember that even though we have profiles for the characters, we CAN'T connect to the character like you can! Only YOU understand the character best because YOU made it! Remember what I said before?

WE CAN'T READ YOUR FRIGGIN' MIND.

And because we can't read your mind, we can't understand the character until you tell us what they think and feel! Your character is MORE than just some words and maybe some lines and colours on paper! When you role-play, you in the most basic sense BECOME your character! We don't see YOU in the role-play, because you're not in that setting. Your character is! If you don't infuse depth and emotion into your character, if you don't put effort into shaping them into a PERSON, we will only see that character as a bunch of words and maybe some lines and colours on paper.

Think about it this way: let's say your character is a friend of yours, and you're totally hyped about introducing them to us. But if you just go, "Oh yeah, they're so-and-so, and they're nice and stuff, and they look cool, and . . . yeah", we're not going to be impressed. But if you tell us, "Oh yeah, so-and-so, they're incredible! They love cracking jokes, and they're really friendly! You'll get along with them so well! And you know what? They have a huge passion for this and that! They enjoy lazing about, and sometimes they do the weirdest and randomest things, and they're a little hot-headed, but they're really cool!" then we're gonna be as hyped to meet them as you're hyped to show them to us.

Would you rather be friends with someone who's about as interesting as a rock, or would you rather be friends with someone who acts like a human?

There will be more to come, when I think there are anymore things that could do with some nippy-tucky. Keep in mind, you don't have to listen to me, but if you want people reading your posts like it's in an alien language . . .