by Kaet
Before you start the application process, it's important to understand the logistics of how we roleplay. Steelsings is a real-time roleplay; it is not conducted on a forum or though journals or letters. Game play takes place in a chat, where the characters interacting with others are in a designated area or space. When you start to roleplay, it's crucial to get into the habit of paying attention to what is going on in the room as a whole; the inn has many different rooms, and if someone wanders from one to the other, your characters should react accordingly.
In the chat, players -- the people behind the characters -- often talk to each other in what is called out-of-character conversation (OOC), as opposed to acting as your character, or in-character (IC). These interactions must go in brackets of some kind. It's how we distinguish between what is going on in the inn and what is going on in the chat. If someone accidentally forgets brackets, it's entertaining and confusing! You end up with mental pictures of your friend suddenly running around in the Inn. However, it does happen, and all it takes is a quick apology and roleplay can go on uninterrupted. OOC conversation should look like this:
[Nicole] (Ugh, school just got out. It went forever today! Does anyone want to RP?)As you can see, correct grammar and punctuation are required in OOC. The one thing that we're more lenient about is capitalization; some people prefer not to capitalize, and that's generally okay.
[Gordon] [Hey, Nicole! I'll RP! I'll get Alexander. I haven't played him in a while.]
During actual roleplaying, members use the third person in the present tense to describe their character's actions. These statements are set off from the character's speech with asterisks, and usually don't include the first subject pronoun. In addition, it isn't necessary to capitalize the first word of an action; you might think of your character's handle being the beginning of the sentence. The end of the action is usually not punctuated, and to be honest, the actions themselves tend to turn into run-on sentences fairly frequently. However, if a sentence ends in the middle of an action, and another picks up, it is customary to capitalize that second sentence.
Wow, that was a lot of information. Don't worry — it's a lot less confusing than it sounds, and in just a bit you'll see it all put together.
Character speech is the only thing in the chat that should go outside of brackets and asterisks. Your character's speech does not go between quotation marks, or any other punctuation mark, and it must be correctly punctuated and capitalized at all times. We aim for succinct but descriptive posts — a good post should include both action and speech.
So, if we put all that together, an acceptable post is as follows:
[Alexander] *walks into the common room, looking around before going to the bar to get an ale* Anyone here? *called into the kitchen. Raises his eyebrows* Anyone at all?
Something that is often passed over in roleplay is the importance of the adverb. In roleplay, describing how your character does something can be invaluable. Look at how the above post can change in two different ways, solely by describing how Alexander did what he did.
[Alexander] *walks slowly into the common room, looking around tiredly before going to the bar to get an ale* Anyone here? *called boredly into the kitchen. Raises his eyebrows* Anyone at all?
Or, alternatively:
[Alexander] *walks quickly into the common room, looking around with annoyance before going to the bar to get an ale* Anyone here? *called irately into the kitchen. Raises his eyebrows* Anyone at all? *sounding irritated*
The original post was improved immensely with the description of how Alexander did his actions. Using adverbs and extra descriptive words is a simple and incredibly effective way to add to your post.
Another small detail that can make or break a post is the addition of emphasis, usually by using italics. In our chat, regular html tags are how to do this — if you're not familiar with html, all that it means is to put < i> at the beginning of the section you want italicized, and < /i> at the end, but without the spaces. This becomes < i>this< /i> becomes this.
Now you know the basics! The rest will come as you read more of the tutorials or enter the chat, but now you know enough for the tutorials to make sense.