discussion When to SPEAK, when to THINK, and when to DESCRIBE

[Tortles]

When to think - I guess I'm going to break the mold here and say that internal monologue is okay. I'm really not sure why MMO RPers have such a stigma against it. Sure, we've all run into people who ramble on for paragraphs in thoughts we can't respond to, or who have used internal monologue to get in passive aggressive OOC inspired jabs, but people misusing the idea doesn't make the idea itself bad.

 

I absolutely love emoting thoughts, and I really don't get the "My character can't read minds!!" attitude that flies around. I think of roleplay as a collaborative story, and part of a story is getting glimpses into what's going on in the character's head. I'd agree, you need more in the most to work with than a thought, but mixing thoughts with actions or dialogue can express the character in ways that speech and action cannot on their own. Adds a bit of different flavor to the RP to mix it up a bit.

 

My approach, like Marcy's, is very "you don't have to play with me", and that's totally fine.

[Kilieit]

I think as long as every emote has ONE THING, AT LEAST that you can respond to, it's not so frustrating...

 

I've had it before when someone's spent a couple char-limit emotes elaborating what their character's thinking about, but there's no actions for me to respond to. Just thoughts.

 

So I either have to wait for them to give me something, emote my character doing something completely unrelated and hope they take the hint, or just... assume they made a face while thinking and have my character react to that.

 

The last is both the most effective and the most risky, since it's basically a power-emote, and if called out on that there's really no defence other than "then give me something to work with"... the middle is passive-aggressive, and the former is just passive-passive. It's much better if people make sure to include actions in their emotes to begin with.

 

Character thoughts are flavour, not substance, and they should be treated as such. Lemon essence makes cupcakes taste better, but you wouldn't eat just lemon essence, on its own, without the cupcake. Make sure you're remembering to include the cupcakes as well as your lemon essence and you're all good with me.

 

Can you tell I've been getting back into baking lately? >_>