The following are general rules on what is considered good writing and good roleplay.
Remember: Your character is not invincible. Give them some weaknesses alongside their strengths, some smaller quirks to make them more relatable and believable. Nobody can sympathize with a Mary Sue or a Gary Stu.
And unless you know what you're doing, don't EVER roleplay PTSD/shellshock without having a CLUE as to what people who suffer from that go through. I will personally bonk nerds on the head for doing it awfully wrong.
Bottom line: Have fun, but make sure you focus on making it fun for everybody else you're roleplaying with. Make your story fun, but also fun for others to read about. Don't willingly give details out about your character, it's not fun if everyone knows your character because you bragged in OOC!
Dea Tacita wrote:Flavor Text:
What it is: A configuration option that’s available (But not required) in the character creation menu. It’s grown quite popular since it has been implemented a few years ago, and even got a new face with the update allowing for limb-specific texts. It is used for ‘objective’ physical descriptions of a character.
What it isn’t: A place for background information, descriptions of specific clothing, or ‘emotion-forcing’ to other characters.
Writing a flavor text
The point of a flavor text is to give a person the ability to look at your character and ‘see what you see’ in-so-far as your character, going beyond just “Oh, a 2D spessman”.
A decent flavor text contains any important physical features of your character. Such as height, hair, facial features, tattoos, scars etc. What I generally do is ‘go down’ a character's body, starting at head and working my way down with the description as this is generally how someone will notice you, head then everything else.
A critical part of writing a F.T. is an understanding of the correct type of tense to you. I’ve seen people use 1st. person, which is incorrect and should be replaced with the more correct 2nd or 3rd person, like “This is a short, asian woman”, or “You see a short, asian woman.” instead of “I am a short, asian woman.”
The most common error I see is a subjective description instead of the more correct objective description. What I mean by this is “They are a beautiful woman”. By doing this, you are forcing a train of thought into another character's head. Another good example is “They look scary” or “They look like a badass” avoid these.
Instead of “They’re the prettiest girl you’ve ever seen” actually describe their physical features and leave it up to the players to decide if they’re pretty. Beauty is subjective, not everyone looks at one specific type of facial feature as “beautiful”.
Another thing to avoid is putting how your character moves or talks in your flavor text. Instead of writing this off and demanding everyone hear your “Thick space-Russian accent” actually RP a Russian accent to the best of your ability. Use emotes and the ‘me’ verb to show how your character moves. A good way to look at this is, it’s perfectly possible that someone might see your character while they’re seated, or sleeping in the dorm. How would they know how your character walks, talks or moves?
An issue that’s rarer than most of the rest of these is the inclusion of clothing and or gear into a flavor text. Your character will not always been wearing these particular pieces of clothing and that’s generally something to be avoided. Vague references to how your character wears certain things are permissible however, such as “Their hands tend to hover around in their pockets”
