Hi, community! I’m new to RP and have been getting out there, having fun, and learning. I read a few different guides, all of which say to avoid including your character’s thoughts while emoting. This makes sense to me. It creates opportunities for discovery and even misunderstanding, which can be frustrating but it’s also realistic. However, in the RP I’ve done so far, absolutely everyone includes their character’s thoughts, emotions, and sometimes even backstory (including references to characters not present) in their emotes.
I figure there isn’t really a “wrong” way to RP, but the discrepancy is confusing. Plus, it makes it harder to RP because my character can’t actually respond to that information, right? If your character, who my character has just met and doesn’t know, emotes a big sigh “because they’re feeling sad about their sick mother,” my character can’t then ask what kind of illness she has because she doesn’t know your character’s mother or that she’s sick. I’ve also had people whisper me OOC with questions about my emotes, asking me to explain and give context for why my character did X, as though I should have provided this information in the emote. But wouldn’t the other character not know why and, thus, need to ask about it? I’m not sure why this extra, unknowable information is expected.
So I guess my question is … what up with that? I figure it’s just a personal preference, but why is it so prevalent? Or is it the exception and I just happen to have RPed with some of the few people who do this?
I personally avoid this kind of RP. I find it jarring, but that’s only one opinion.
Here’s the thing: People play this gig differently.
I enjoy RP where the two characters meet like strangers. When Meri meets someone, she doesn’t know their name until they tell her. She doesn’t know all the stuff in their about section like a clairvoyant. She knows “young, middle aged, or old” by general appearance. She only knows their origin if the glances mention an accent.
That’s another thing. Glances.
I use glances for what I can see, smell, or otherwise feel. Any other glances that talk about the inner emotional state or previous work history, etc…Meri won’t acknowledge that until it’s come up in conversation.
That’s how I like to handle it.
Other players do things differently.
True. It’s why walk-up is very much a game of figuring out who and what kinds of activity you want to walk up into.
I handle this kind of discrepancy by saying, “You seem distracted,” or, “You seem upset,” after they emote…giving them the opportunity to TELL my character rather than assuming she can intuit that this perfect stranger she’s never met is deeply struggling with inner turmoil over a particular thing like the loss of a parent.
People who are new to RP.
People who are new to writing altogether or new to writing dialogue.
I have not RP’d with more than a handful who do this, but I am also a little specific in what I’m looing for when I initiate a walk-up. I look for people who are “doing something” I can comment on like smoking or holding an injured limb or singing. I also target people and read their TRP glances to see if they have a character who is bleeding, or otherwise giving a visual cue that even a stranger would see and want to get involved with (either helping or attempting to stop them or whatever).
I typically steer clear of long expositional speech stuff when I see it because that’s not really my personal bag.
Ideally, you want to find some individual characters that your character can tell stories with and about. I have been very fortunate to recently walk-up with and subsequently get really involved in storytelling with another character. After RPing together for HOURS, there are still many fundamental things that he does not know about Meri and she does not know about him…because it hasn’t come up yet. The discovery! That’s the fun for me (and it sounds like that’s what you’re after, as well).
Just look for it and the more you do this thing, the more you’ll start to notice certain key identifiers in the TRP that will typically signal the kinds of players who RP the same way you do.
Edited to add: The emoting detailed information that has not been spoken thing.
When you see this, you’re looking at a player who is trying very hard (but likely doesn’t have the experience to navigate it with elegance) to communicate something they wish to RP about.
I respect that and try to guide the conversation in a way that Meri could engage with to that subject. So if they
/e growls with anger because their husband has cheated on them
I know that’s what the player wishes to engage about.
I don’t just automatically say, “Okay, Meri read their mind,” but I do say something like, “Are you alright? You look about ready to murder someone.” This usually prompts the player to actually enter the conversation. So, I’ve honored what this person clearly wanted to RP about without changing how I do things with Meri. I just try to meet people halfway.
There used to be a tendency with some RPers to offer a comeback as a thought emote that couldn’t be replied to, so that’s probably what has prompted this suggestion. If you’re RPing and someone hits you with:
/e didn’t really like your wine, anyway.
instead of
/e takes a sip of the wine that was offered and makes a face.
You can only react to one of those. A lot of times, players would also use the first type of emote in IC arguments so they could purposely say something that was rude or insulting but the other RPer couldn’t say something back. It’s kind of crossing an IC/OOC wall at that point, and most people frown upon it.
It sort of goes back to the old adage, “Show Don’t Tell”. An emote like:
“I don’t know,” Bob said, thinking about how he was a badass crime syndicate lord and could easily destroy everyone in the room.
Doesn’t come across as artfully as something like:
Bob glowered at the other people in the room, his fingers slid around the glass in front of him with cool prepared confidence. “Couldn’t say, mate,” he muttered, shifting his stance slightly in a manner which left him prepared for the worst to happen at any moment.
Even that’s got some “tell” in it, but it’s implication, interpretation. That midway point maybe laced with some light thoughts is what I usually go for with especially closed-off characters that otherwise would just sort of be a silent wooden plank in the corner to give them some nuance.
It’s not like it’s completely verboten, it’s a style, but it can also come off like unnecessary padding if it’s a post that doesn’t really call for introspection or insight. Like one of those recipe blogs that launches into paragraphs and paragraphs of personal stories before they get around to a 12-line recipe at the very bottom.
When people start getting really passive-aggressive or egregious with thoughts in their emotes I usually can’t help but throw in one of these, though.
I think Kirsy has it most correct, there are situations where that kind of emoting can be very annoying to be on the receiving end on. Even if it’s not specifically a dig, what jumps to me is that when someone emotes like that they’re not offering anything to “yes, and” off of, basically.
There’s a school of thought that anything you use in an emote should be actionable by the people you’re role playing with. Descriptions are good, but if you rely to much on it you’re just padding out your word count for emotes without offering anything for people to react back to. The same goes for including things like thoughts, or passive reactions.
There’s a kind of action economy in role play, where you don’t want to waste too much time or screen space on white noise. The consequence is that you waste people’s time or energy, either eating up the night on empty prose or forcing people to hyper focus to sift out what they need to be reacting to through large amounts of heavy posts.
Or to put it even more succinctly, brevity is the soul of wit. Heavily including your characters thoughts into emotes doesn’t actually bring anything to the table, especially when those thoughts can be conveyed instead through actions that become stepping stones for people to further interact with your character off of.
Of course no one should throw a fit if you do it on occasion, I’m certainly not the role play police. But it is a good idea to avoid when possible.
i prefer drinking the glass of wine rather than emoting it. there are plenty of libations in game you can drink instead of emoting that you drank.
i dont really emote much, and i dont really have long flowery prose to tell what i am thinking. i would need to tell you or it should come naturally in conversation
but thats just me. i find it hard to find people who do it that way.
Keep it short and simple, nobody talks in long drawn out paragraphs IRL unless they’re a public speaker, that’s not how normal folks carry on a conversation.
Now I do sometimes like to break the 4th wall as Herne or some other wacky She-Hulk/Deadpool Looney Tunes type stuff, but that’s IC.
I’ll weigh in favoring the other end of the spectrum that sometimes it is necessary to add additional context that cannot be shown but must be told due to the extraordinary nature of Warcraft as a setting and that not every part of a post needs to be actionable.
To be critical of my own style of RP I tend to ramble on and abuse flowery prose because that screams high fantasy to me, that and it acts as a great comedic foil for how staggeringly stupid Bel can be at times. Then again if the scene is supposed to be tense and “punchy” I’m also willing to trim the fat for more actionable and reactive writing.
For a “Real World” I specified that Bel was remembering a lesson she learned from her Sifu and it wasn’t an original thought when she spoke. Yes there is technically no way that most characters would know that, nor is it actionable in most situations unless another player wanted to hope on that fact and have it be a lesson they were also taught by their master. How ever it gives some insight and context to what the purpose of her saying that. In that same night, I didn’t write on and on about her internal monologue and emotional state because it was far more important to just see how tense and agitated she was.
So I think there is a time for big walls of needless text that is really only there for the sake of the writer, and there are times when the point of the post should be what the reader gets.
And of course it goes with out saying that working in personal snipes and jabs into character action because you dislike your scene partner is needlessly petty. Just whisper them OOC and dismiss yourself from the scene if you really don’t want to act with them.
