Roleplay Guide

by kendori#5116

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Everyone starts somewhere when it comes to Role-playing, let it be on a video game then you transitioned onto Discord, or you still do use both and are more adapt to the smaller scaled chat boxes in your games which causes you to write less. Either way, this guide is meant mainly for Discord Role-plays (but don’t let that limit you, since this might help you in general literature and the like) and that will remain to be our focus throughout this.

There’s many people who struggle with not being able to write more than a sentence or two in Role-plays, along with having overly repetitive wordings and punctuation issues which leads to confusion. One lining can cause either rule breaking or the inability for your partner to properly respond within Role-play sessions, which definitely isn’t ideal if they lose motivation to continue. Along with that if you haven’t written much, you’re response may look sloppy and like you don’t want to Role-play! This guide is meant to help better your literature skills when it comes to Role-play, hopefully you learn and grow from what you are going to read.

Commonly Seen Issues

(looking back on the screenshot, my autocorrect corrected male to female for some reason so make that mental change please ,_,”)

Would you look at that, we already have so much more here written in comparison to our first post. If you’d like to write more than one paragraph that’s great! I’ll tell you how to, but if you think that this is great enough for you then you do not need to read anything beyond this point when it comes to one-lining.

Now that we’ve had the ‘entrance scene’ let’s try adding detail as to how our character is reacting after their greeting, simple things describing posture, facial expression and their vibe can really set a mood for your character; and don’t forget their way of speaking is also very important! But that’s for you to figure out in correlation to your characters’ personality traits, plus this isn’t a Character Guide.

(again, auto correct changed male to female for some reason so, make that mental change please ,_,”)

This isn’t an extreme amount of text but it's definitely an amazing start in comparison to one-lining everything, there’s so much more to respond to and it just gives our character a lot more life! Don’t forget that you also shouldn’t restrict yourself to responding to your Roleplay partner, add in your own things so they have an equal opportunity to respond just like you have.

Lack of Diversity in Wording

Surely you’ve seen someone use the same word over and over again, perhaps it was the word « and »? Maybe something else, like their usage on their Character’s pronouns constantly being there instead of using the name or just avoiding it completely for the time being. It’s even a possibly that you are that person, if this is the case then keep on reading and you’ll see the main gist of how to stop this from happening!

There’s a lot of words in the English vocabulary, not all you need to know in order to create an amazing paragraph or even a simple sentence. Of course there’s also the obstacle of not knowing how to spell something which is completely fine; in fact, I have the perfect website which can help you with this and the next topic: Grammarly. If you’re a mobile user that is also going to work

Punctuation and Spelling

Something which truly helps out with not only making a sentence non-run on* is punctuation. Many people fail to properly place commas where they should be, of which does cause confusion and the like and that isn’t a great thing to have during Role-play since you want everything to flow fluidly without constant out of character chatting to clear the confusion. Let’s get into it.

As you can see, absolutely no punctuation and you can just barely get the understanding for this. When you’re talking, you’re not going to take in one deep breath and go on and on until you turn blue, so try to put a comma where you think you’d pause to take a breather during speech or where you see it should be placed. Yes sometimes punctuation looks out of whack with how many commas you may need in a bigger paragraph but it’s all good! Try using full stops as well to truly divide things up as seen with the below.

See? Looks much better than the former image. Now that you’ve been given all the main issues in Role-playing, I hope to see successful Role-players who enjoy literature almost as much as I do! Good luck and don’t be afraid to refer back to this document if ever desired, I’ll feel quite honored if you do.