How to do Good Roleplay -..

[Kipps]

How to do Good Roleplay -..


I made a post in the General Discussion forum. Unlike most of my posts there, which are deleted without warning for being too dumb, this one remained up. It contained advice about what good roleplayers do, so I’ve expanded on it here in the Guides forum.

Some people will now be saying, “Kipps, you are a dogshit roleplayer. Why are you writing a guide about anything apart from getting forum banned for being a stupid asshole?”

This is a fair comment, but I’ve tragically been roleplaying for more than ten years and I’ve encountered a lot of people who are really good roleplayers in that time. I also enjoy writing and learning about what good writing looks like.

Finally, I’m of the view that if you’re going to spend years pretending to be a virtual biker or nightclub owner or gang shot caller in Grand Theft Auto, you may as well try and do it well.

With that said, here are some numbered points about how to be good at roleplay:

 

1) Write convincing character dialogue.

I hate trite and cliched dialogue. I like people who can write mobster characters who don't immediately remind you of someone from The Sopranos. Try to avoid sounding like a pastiche. You can write an intimidating mobster who doesn’t say shit like, “you’re gonna be sleepin’ with duh fishes, kid, cos I run this town. Madone.”

I like high ranking criminals who actually feel intimidating in the way they speak - because you don't run a continuing criminal enterprise without being able to affect a very intimidating threat of violence in your speaking. (Some jail and prison roleplayers are really good at roleplaying inmates who are genuinely scary presences in a scene.) Pete Postlethwaite's character Fergus in The Town is a fun example of an extremely menacing character who knows exactly what to say to intimidate somebody. Chris Browning’s shot caller character in Felon and Jeffrey Donovan’s in Shot Caller are good examples too. Instead of just dispensing trite scary criminal dialogue, these characters tailor their threats to the person they’re speaking to. You get the sense they are used to what they do.

I like people who can write good accents, lingo and local vernacular in their dialogue. This just involves a lot of research and a real attention to the words your character is using.

Ask different people who’re already roleplaying what you’re interested in for input. Ask if certain slang is in use. Find interviews to see how people from specific areas speak so that you can get the sound right. YouTube has endless videos on people from specific areas talking casually. 

2) Avoid purple prose.

No one cares. Really. If your character is swigging from a beer bottle, then just say that - don't dedicate three paragraphs to the process. Good roleplayers say what they need to and they do it succinctly. They use as many words as necessary. They avoid tired or clumsy metaphors. They can turn a phrase when it's needed, but they also show enough restraint to keep a scene moving. If you’re going to include multiple actions in the same emote, ensure it reads well. For instance:

“Rodney Roleplay digs around in his property box for a few moments. He retrieves a shabby textbook on human anatomy which he dusts off and then presents to Matthew.”

This is fine. You could split this over three separate emotes but sometimes writing in this way avoids spam and makes following a scene easier. Some people have a real aversion to including more than one sentence in an emote and will instead just write really long sentences with lots of commas. These appear bloated and tend not to read well.

(OBVIOUSLY: If there’s a chance another character would react to one of your emotes, give them that chance – don’t write an emote describing your character punching somebody five times when it’s more than likely they’d in some way react after the first punch.)

Not every emote needs to be beautifully phrased. I would argue that, a lot of the time, roleplayers should see themselves more like reporters than novelists – reporters tend to write clearly, concisely and efficiently to keep up with the news cycle. Roleplayers have similar time pressures which are best answered by this approach to writing.

3) Have an actual character.

Real people have motivations and histories that shape their motivations. Real people are conflicted and complex and messy. They're prone to mistakes. They have regrets, some fleetingly but some that linger. All of this complexity needs to be brought into your characters. And then the good roleplayer will allow it to seep into the roleplay over time - rather than unloading a character’s entire backstory with all their motivations in a single expository scene. Real characters aren't always sad, happy or guarded - even if they might tend more towards some feelings than others. Supporting characters in movies serve a very specific function, so they often don't have the depth you'd need to bring them into a roleplay setting. Better inspirations can be found in TV series like The Wire - where you spend hundreds of hours with characters and get a much clearer sense of what they're like in all manner of circumstances. Your character should have their own motivations and thoughts that don't necessarily neatly fit with their faction's. (So try not to make characters who just exist to serve a faction's interests - employees normally have interests that don't fully align with their employers.)

4) Know your characters.

Good roleplayers don't need scripts. They have a sense of how their characters will react to certain situations and can improvise with them. This is hard and it really just requires practice to ensure you are responding as your character and not just as yourself. Get to know your character, familiarise yourself with their backstory and keep note of what events they’ve been privy to that might affect their outlooks in different scenarios.

5) Know how to use grammar and spell.

Seriously. I am so glad we got rid of '-..'. Use punctuation properly. Try and spell properly (I invoke Muphry's law at this point). Use words you know the definition of to avoid confusing people. It’s very obvious when people are using obscure words for the sake of it. It's pretentious and it's not good writing. Get people to check your faction threads, not just for issues with spelling, punctuation and grammar but for issues with syntax too. If you're writing a faction thread in the style of a news article, make sure you understand the way information in these articles is usually ordered and arranged.  

 

6) Appreciate that characters change over time.

Think about how a character might change based on what they experience – and appreciate that these changes will often be subtle and gradual. Having a character who adjusts based on their engagements with others is very satisfying for those other players. The longer you play a character, the more grounded they will become in the world. They’ll experience all sorts of events that will shape them in different, often conflicting ways.

Some players obviously can’t wait to reach a certain point in their character’s "story", and they will fast-forward development to get there. There is an excellent screenshot from another server of a character meeting a new roommate and then within five minutes disclosing apropos of nothing that they are a Japanese assassin who needs help killing people. This is plainly an instance of two players wanting to speed past the boring introductory bullshit – but if the roleplay is that dull, just start from a point where both characters already know each other and avoid a ludicrously contrived """"development"""" scene. Don’t roleplay a teenager if they’re going to become an adult within three weeks, because the necessary development of years of teenhood can’t be stuffed into that time frame. No one enjoys very awkwardly rushed """"development roleplay"""" for development roleplay’s sake. Some of the best development is subtle and not just Look Now I’m Not a Teenager Anymore roleplay.

 

7) Try and learn proactively.

No one will ever be perfect. Good roleplayers ask questions about what it is they're roleplaying and about roleplay generally. They reflect and they self-criticise. They seek out feedback and respond to it. They don't just plod along unthinkingly. Most of the other points in this guide require you to reflect on what it is you’re doing in specific detail.

We aren’t roleplaying in a setting with a finite amount of lore; there will always be more information on jail systems, gang activity, law enforcement, West Coast cultures, etc, etc. Reading this stuff is not just helpful for ensuring that your portrayals are realistic and modern, it’s also helpful for providing ideas for keeping things fresh.

The amount of time somebody’s spent roleplaying says very little about their roleplaying ability if they haven’t been proactively working to improve in that time.

Conclusion

These are seven of many more points about what good roleplay can look like. It’s more effort to treat roleplay this way but it’s more rewarding too. You can call people nerds for wanting to do all this shit instead of just driving a sports car and E-sexing their brains out, but I think everyone should at least consider trying to follow these points to see how it goes.

As noted, this isn’t an exhaustive list and I welcome other people’s points, comments, discussion, criticism, etc.

Edited July 29, 2022 by Kipps

[Sergi]

this guide helped me get in the bellomo crime family back in the day, 10/10

Edited August 2, 2020 by Sergi

[Tank]

This is great advice. I think dialogue is especially overlooked and one of the most difficult things to pull off right. In my opinion, and it's something most people don't do, writing a character background story helps you role-play your character. You infinitely become more interesting and avoid sounding like a bumbling idiot whenever you're asked IC where you're from. This also helps outline your motivations and how you should act in certain situations.

[liq]

/salute

 

 

 

[Halcyon]

Solid guide. 
 

can we also get rid of “as he” as a replacement for “then”?

[VelveteenRobot]

This is a super helpful guide. It’s very hard to not over describe your actions sometimes out of fear of being looked at as a poor role player. I’m speaking mostly for myself since I’m new and I have a hard time judging how much I should write to keep the RP going.