Role-playing refers to the changing of one's behaviour to assume a role, either unconsciously to fill a social role, or consciously to act out an adopted role. While the Oxford English Dictionary defines role-playing as "the changing of one's behaviour to fulfill a social role", the term is used more loosely in four senses:
- To refer to the playing of roles generally such as in a theatre, or educational setting;
- To refer to taking a role of an existing character or person and acting it out with a partner taking someone else's role, often involving different genres of practice;
- To refer to a wide range of games including role-playing video game, play-by-mail games and more;
- To refer specifically to role-playing games.
Therefore, roleplaying is where you create a character and have your character interacting with others. The term "roleplay" is commonly abbreviated as "RP", especially in chat rooms and message boards. These are instructions on how to create a well written RP.
It is important for a first time RPer to work hard on his or her first RP. Bad RPers, also called "newbies" or "noobs", are looked down upon. If you give people the impression that you are indeed a noob, then hardly anyone will want to roleplay with you in the future.
STEPS
- Create a character. Before you choose to RP anywhere, you should write down the general information on your character first. Here are some things that you should keep in mind when creating your Character Sheet:
- Follow the "skirt rule" when developing your character. Basically, your character sheet should be "Long enough to cover the essentials, short enough to be interesting." Don't spend too much time on every single little detail of your character, but at the same time, don't make them a skeleton.
- Make your character believable. In the RP world, perfect characters, called Mary Sues or Gary Stus, have a notorious reputation and are extremely frowned upon. As a plus, if you make a character with both good and bad traits, you are much more likely to have a lot of fun with him or her and the other people you are roleplaying with.
- Most Character Sheets require a history. Here, you need to explain, explain, explain. Include everything you can think of, don't skip things to save time. Include descriptions of parents, places where character grew up etc.
2.Start RPing. If you are on a good RP site, there should be absolutely no text talking! Use full sentences and good punctuation and grammar. Use quotation marks when your character is talking. Otherwise many people get annoyed and you are made to look silly.
- Never post one-liners! This is usually just one sentence of what your character is doing. Posting dialogue is not an excuse for a one-liner. The people who you roleplay with may not like it at all. The occasional one-liner is fine (barely) but do not make it a habit to where everyone else has the brunt of the roleplay. You are there too, so make the attempt to write longer posts.
- Use description! Don't just say "Jane walked into the room and sat down on a chair" Where is Jane? What does the room look like? How did she walk in? How did she sit down? How was she feeling? What was she thinking as she walked in? Where had she just been? You need to think of all these questions whenever you RP. Instead, you could say something like, "Jane briskly walked into the waiting room at the doctors office, wrinkling her nose at the sickeningly strong smell of antiseptic. She glanced at the medical posters on the walls, and the magazines by the hard backed chairs lining the walls. She went, and quickly sat down in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs, folding her ankles properly." Now do you see what you're aiming for?
TIPS
- RPing may seem like hard work, but you can really get into it and have a lot of fun. Following these suggestions above will help you have a great time, and make others on your RP quickly appreciate you.
- Don't be afraid of adding too many details. The more details, the better off the roleplay will be. But don't add too much detail about one thing unless it is the main subject.
- No one liners. They do nothing to advance the story. Most people do not like them as they do nothing for the roleplay, unless your thread starter says that one liners is okay, always assume if it is not mentioned that one liners are not permitted. They are allowed if you are just talking of course.
- There are 2 ways to RP: One is to talk in third person, like: "Jane mercilessly tackles Jim, pinning him to the ground." The second one is to talk in first person, like: "I mercilessly tackle you, pinning you to the ground"
- Some might make further distinction between referring to the other players in the second person ("He tackles you") and in third person ("He tackles Jim").
- There are many conventions regarding writing styles, mixing different styles may or may not be acceptable depending on the tastes of those involved.
- Some people prefer to write it like a book in a natural flowing description ("The pizza delivery guy walked, in proudly asking for the person that ordered the large sausage.").
- While others prefer a more structured style, like an informal play script, making clear the distinction between actions (also called emotes) and things the characters themselves say. For example, for some simply adding a dash in the beginning of speech lines suffice, while others prefer to mark the different things by surrounding the parts in different characters, such as using asterisks for actions and descriptions, and quotation marks for speech(for example: *The pizza delivery guy walks in and proudly asks:* "Who ordered the large sausage?"). But in some sites and services certain characters are interpreted as formating commands, like for example making the text between asterisks bold; in such cases different characters or even different writing styles should be used.
WARNINGS
- Don't god mod: god-modding is when you control someone else's character. For example, if you said, "Jane briskly walked into the waiting room at the doctor's office, dragging Joe beside her. Both of them wrinkling their nose at the antiseptic smell. She glanced at the medical posters on the walls, and the magazines by the hard-backed chairs lining the walls. She went, and quickly sat down in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs, folding her ankles properly. She watched Joe walk up to the pretty nurse at the front desk and talk to her." Here, you are not only controlling the character of Jane, but also the character of Joe. This makes it hard for others to RP, and should almost never be done.
- Godmodding can also be:
- Dodging everything that is thrown at you without reason. Ex: *dodges* or "My shield is unbreakable; I'm immortal"
- DO NOT get sick ALL THE TIME. People will end up trying to avoid you and stop wanting to role-play with you. Only make your character sick a reasonable amount of the time. Sickness is not interesting after you've acquired the "WORST AND DEADLIEST DISEASE" 500 times in the past year. Just...no. One caveat is that the roleplay can be about you being sick.
- Make sure that if you are a baby who should have no teeth, you aren't talking, walking or running unless you're about the age of 2 or 3.
- Do not attack anything randomly or say "That's what she said", it gets really annoying after a while.
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