Babylon System is the Vampire wrote: ↑Thu Jul 13, 2023 10:45 pm
Dr. B wrote: ↑Thu Jul 13, 2023 8:34 pm
What should influence RPR then?
Long flowery prose, proper spelling and punctuation, these things wouldn't mean anything to me if again I were making the decisions on rpr.
All that being said, it's not my call so...what I wrote above and a quarter would net you 25 cents.
What counts as good writing is genre-dependent. Here the genre is an online RPG. In that genre, long prose that takes several minutes to type is poor writing. Excellent writers can be descriptive and expressive without being lengthy. Constantly writing long paragraphs slows the flow of roleplay and is tedious and annoying for other players. This is but one example that shows how your choices and abilities as a writer can affect the enjoyment of those around you for better or worse.
"Flowery" prose is different from descriptive prose. One is meant to show off whereas the other makes a character lifelike and believable. Players whose goal is to show off their grandiloquence are also not writing well with respect to the goals of the genre. This is usually the case in any kind of writing. If your aim is to show off how good of a writer you are then you're already writing poorly.
Involving other players in your characters' life is necessary but not sufficient for good roleplaying. Generously inviting everyone to go on a mindless circlegrind with me involves other players but there's an absence of roleplay, because roleplay on Arelith is impossible without writing. When you invite other characters to roleplay with you, the thing you're involving them in is essentially a collaborative writing exercise.
Helping other characters' stories involves writing. Those players need to write things to tell their story, and so you're essentially inspiring them. Helping them develop their characters' personalities also involves writing. They need to write to describe their characters' personalities. It's perplexing that you mention "stories" several times in your post but don't think being able to write well is important. Is the whole story being told through the emote and voiceset menus?
Here is another thought about consideration for other players: most writers write for an audience. Here your audience consists of other players. When you think about how to make the game enjoyable for other players, you're considering audience. This is also, largely, a writing skill. As they write, good writers are bouncing their words and ideas off of a hypothetical reader and thinking about how that reader would interpret and respond to what they're writing.
While your decisions as a player are part of the equation as far as roleplay quality is concerned, a great deal of this comes down to using text to create a character that is vivid, expressive, believable, and enjoyable to interact with. By necessity, that's a writing task that can be done well or poorly.
Consider some examples:
Okay! [For a split second, a smirk tugs at the paladin's lips, but she quickly replaces it with a pleasant smile]
Okay... [The faintest shadow of a smirk comes and goes, leaving only a pleasant smile]
Okay [quick smirk then smiles]
In a way, all of these examples describe the same events: the character says "Okay," smirks, then smiles. But the word choices and description clearly showcase different things:
In example 1, we're clued in to the fact that the character feels she is remiss for smirking. We're given this context with the mention that she's a paladin, someone who tries to be polite and virtuous, and that she "replaces" the smirk. "Tugs at her lips" emphasizes that the smirk is involuntary and not something this character is predisposed to do. On the other hand, example 2 shows us that the character might be considering something devious (the word "shadow," which has an ominous feel to it, helps to emphasize this), that the smirk reveals something about her true motives and character, and that the "pleasant smile" that comes afterwards is an act.
Punctuation, which you mention in your post above, can also be important. Here, the punctuation marks affect the way we hear the dialogue. The first might be read as chipper and cooperative due to the exclamation point, the second as devious and malevolent due to the ellipsis. Notice that the emotes don't have punctuation marks because they're unnecessary. This is fine.
This is what I meant by descriptive, expressive dialogue. All of this is done in reasonably short sentences.
Example 3, on the other hand, tells us very little about the personality we are interacting with. We don't gain much sense of who this character is, and the absence of any punctuation makes it hard to interpret the tone of the character's speech. After a while of interacting with the characters in 1 and 2, one would get a sense of what their personalities are like. They would feel lifelike and, ideally, interesting. Not so much, I think, with the character in 3.
