Roleplaying Guide

This article is to contribute to roleplay so I've taken it upon myself to perhaps encourage and teach the members here of roleplaying. As a roleplayer myself for nearly 3 years, I've had experiences in roleplaying, managing roleplays and teaching others of the roleplay styles; though this is only a brief tutorial, it covers everything you'll need to know.

I hope you find this good reading, and have fun!

Introduction

Welcome boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen of all ages. This article will explain to you how you can roleplay to a more "professional" or "reader-friendly" standard, as well as the stanrdards on the majority of other roleplays, though not limited to, forums, wikias and other text based formats. If you know how to roleplay... what the hell are you doing reading this? shoo! go make a character or something! If you don't know how to roleplay, or you wish to improve upon your roleplay standards, then this should be the first thing you read. Well, getting the introduction out of the way, let's move on.

The Basics

The basics of Roleplaying is first making a character. Simple enough. After making your character, keep note of his/her/their Biography and his/her/their Personality; this is what makes your character who he is/she is/they are. Whenever you go to roleplay in a topic be it with yourself or others, act, behave and talk as though you were your character. An example would be that your character is clumsy, arrogant and full of himself/herself/themselves, you can make him keep tripping over himself, but still maintain a prideful personality about himself/herself/themselves. This is just about getting to grips with your character, however.

Constructing a Roleplay Post is the next step. If you're good at writing stories and such, you'll find this bit easy. The beginner way is to make brief sentences, with a bit of description, keeping with a coherent style of writing. When I first started out, as well as others I knew, we established a scripted way to roleplay, like this;

Example: Short-hand or Script-based Roleplay 

Having nowhere to run, Luna attacked swiftly alongside Lucy.

Luna: Get ready!

Lucy: Don't worry about me!

That was how we constructed our roleplay posts. However, when you get more experience and you really wanna show off, you can construct story-like posts, adding a lot of depth and detail into your post. This is the best way and the most recommended way of doing things; more description, especially in your actions, will give your opponent, as well as other people in the current roleplay as well as the reader, a better understanding of what's going on and get a feel of the surroundings and action, just like in an actual novel or comic. This will lead to a less-likely chance that an argument will break out and so forth; yes, arguments do break out because of someone's posts being too vague.

Fighting in a Roleplay

When fighting, there are a few things you have to follow; taking hits and overpoweredness. Be sure to take hits, even against someone who's severely weaker than you. You can act like you didn't take a lot of damage, obviously. However, if someone is the same strength as you in terms of powers, abilities and such, don't act like you're God and you don't even flinch. When in a fight, take hits and take damage depending on your power of your opponent's attacks; an opponent who's power is relatively greater than yours is gonna hit you harder and have a more likely chance to dodge your attacks, but again, keep it reasonable. Overpowererdness is exactly what it is. If you have a low power level don't act like it can blow up a planet. Because it won't do. Overpoweredness is pretty much just acting like you're God, though a farmer with shotgun could probably take you down.

General Rules of Roleplaying 

Now that you have the general understanding of how to roleplay, here's some general rules/ettiquette to follow;

- Golden rule is to never control your opponents actions or hit them; the opponent must be given a chance, and thus they say whether you hit them or not. However, after posts and posts of no one getting hit, there's obviously something wrong. Best way to deal with this is to take hits, and if your opponent doesn't take hits, it's obviously a fault on their part, not yours. However, if the opponent is like over nine thousand power than you, it's expected.

- Out of Character talk should be kept to a minimum; however, OOC talk that is relevant to the roleplay is acceptable e.g. you're fighting against another member and you question his actions. However, try to solve it quickly and don't break into an argument. If an agreement can't be solved, please keep this out of the roleplay, namely in the Forum section or discuss it among your discussion pages.

- No Godmodding. This is when you are not getting hit, noselling attacks as though you were unharmed, hitting your opponent instantly etc. Basically what the last paragraph just talked about.

Well that's all for this Guide. Hope it helped you roleplay! Have fun!