Roleplay Ettiquette 101

...cough, cough, ok never doing that voice again.

We're gonna focus on the important details while skimming over some less-important bits, so if you leave this confused, feel free to ask for followup from any of the mods or other server members.

What the hell is an RP?

So what does one actually do in a Roleplay? You take your own character that you've made to your liking, and interact with other people's characters.

You can do a big party, or a small intimate moment, or punch eachother in the face. As long as everyone involved is cool with it and it makes some semblence of sense, it's all peachy.

Now how does one roleplay? You write a story together, one message at a time. Each person, when they think that it's appropriate, describes a little more of what happens in this moment in time. Everyone involved can describe the setting, how things look, what background characters are doing, and so on, but each person has full control of what their own characters do. You can't write someone else's character for them, unless both parties agree to it beforehand.

Person A can't go "and then Person B's character GROVELED beneath Person A's character because they're so awesome and cool" because it's kind of a dick move. You're working together, not against eachother.

How Am Write Goodly?

Because we're all writing the same story from multiple different computers, we need to set some sort of common rules for how things are written down. Otherwise it's hell on earth to realize what is even going on: one person is writing in 1st person, another in 3rd, someone else is sending comics, the fourth person is doing interpretive dance, and absolutely no one knows what is even going on.

So! What are them rules?

• If you're writing dialogue, you should use quotation marks (").

  "I got a new pair of boots I can shove up your ass."

• To describe or narrate something, like a character's thoughts, actions, or the enviroment, use asterisks (*).

  He entered the shoe store, only to leave with a new pair of boots a few minutes later. No ass will be spared.

• If you're writing text messaging or other electronic communication, you can use an angle bracket ( > ).

  > omw to shove 👢 up ur ass

• If you want to say something out-of-character (OOC) to your roleplay partner(s), use parentheses ( () ).

  (wait, why is your character so adamant about shoving boots up people’s asses??)

  Note that you can delete these out-of-character messages once the conversation's over to make whatever you wrote reader to parse through later, but it's not required to do so.

There's many other formatting tools discord allows us to use, and you can use those aswell whenever you deem relevant.

Now you have the basics to get started. You could stop reading right now and have yourself a pretty decent RP, and if you're getting bored reading this, I'd recommend you do that.

If you want to know a little bit more before diving in, so you'll be able to have a pretty good rp rather than just an ok one, then we'll go over some more tips and you'll be ready to party.

These tips aren't hard rules but rather rules of thumb - there's occassions where ignoring them is fine, but you'll want to stick to them in 90% of cases.

What Should You Do?

Set Up Motivations. When you start an RP you might be tempted to just go "fuck it" and not have any plan whatsoever. As fun as this is, you can very quickly run into the problem of "what the hell does my character even do?"

If your character has no motivation to act, it'll be difficult for you to think of a good reason why they aren't just leaving the room the RP is happening in. As such, when you start an RP, think of something, whether big or small, that the involved characters want to get done.

Set Up the Next Events. Roleplay is a team effort, and it works best when the team works in unison. When you send a message, try to leave something for the other person to work with. Mention some behaviour that's unusual, toss in a statement the other character can inquire about, do something that the other person can work off of.

At the start you'll need to consciously do this, but it'll become second nature with time.

Take The L. Your character has flaws. If you think they don't, I have news for you - they are probably inheriting whatever flaws you, the IRL person, have. As such, they'll probably not be perfect in every situation they're in. They'll get into unfavorable situations, lose, or just be disliked by other people.

This is fine. It's expected, it's a good thing. Having flaws means your character has something that they can improve at, something that can inspire situations and strife for them to overcome. A perfect character is a boring character, don't be afraid to suck.

Separate Character from Author. An extension of the previous point: sometimes other characters are going to be giant dicks. Sometimes, not even in a fictional villain sort of way; maybe the other character will just straight up be a giant fuckwit. This is also fine.

You should avoid taking to heart what is done to your character by other characters, because despite being your character, they aren't you. Conversly, just because someone is good at playing an asshole it doesn't mean they actually are one.

What Shouldn't You Do?

Write a Script. In the previous section, we warned you to not under-plan. Following this, you might be tempted to plan every part of the RP that's about to transpire. This is also a bad idea.

Roleplaying is a form of improvisation, and the fun part of improv is being able to freely choose what transpires and build a story in real time. If everyone's reading from a script, they're not doing improv, and they're not really roleplaying. This is not necessarily a bad thing, however, you just want to write a story instead of an RP.

Act for Someone Else (aka Godmodding). A variation on of the former point is describing the actions that someone else's character is making. This is a really big no-no. You have your character, and they have theirs. For the same reason giving them a script to read is a bad idea, limiting their behaviour in the middle of an otherwise flexible RP is even more frowned upon.

Metagame. You, as the author, know more than your character does. You are omniscient to the events transpiring in the halls of the academy, which can make it very tempting to think "...but why shouldn't my character know something they didn't until now?" They shouldn't because it makes it impossible to have an in-universe secret that not every character instantly knows about, and removes an opportunity from you to write out how your character comes to find out this information.

Refusing to Lose (aka Powerplay). Powerplay is the extreme version of refusing to "Take the L", as we explained above. It's writing your character as being invincible, or just better than everyone else. It can manifest as your character being able to outdrink the school drunk, or being able to perfectly dodge every attack in a fight.

Not only does this lessen your ability to make an interesting character, it limits the other person's ability to act. If your character constantly 1-ups everyone else, everyone else now needs your implicit approval to be allowed to have a cool moment.

Undo Events & Actions (aka Retconning). This is not a hard rule, but you should try to avoid undoing things that already happened. The heart of improvisation is being able to take what someone did, and go "sure, let's keep going." Even if doing something different would have resulted in a more interesting situation? It didn't. Accept what happened and move on.

Finally, we use something called Tupperbox in order to make our characters look a little cooler. This is a discord bot that allows you to send messages that look like they were sent by fictional discord accounts (typically, ones named after a fictional character).

If you want to understand how to use it, there's a short explanation pinned in the bot channel, and a longer guide on the Tupperbox site.