Author Topic: Paragraph do's and don'ts  (Read 3563 times)

Offline FlyingGrass

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Paragraph do's and don'ts
« on: May 29, 2017, 05:42:25 pm »
You'll see many literate roleplays requiring paragraphs, so here's a tutorial on paragraphs!

The staff may feel free to add any info that I missed, just as long as others know what the staff wrote.

A paragraph in FH is a sentence that is more than three lines long. It describes your character's actions in detail(You describe your character ONLY! Don't take over the characters of others!). One example of a paragraph is:
Amelia's optics thoroughly scan the area for small
critters to eat, her gaping mouth watering intensely
as she looked around leaving no stone unturned. >

A rodent suddenly emerges from behind a rock and
runs away from the hungry fae who was determined < Normal length for paragraphs, but since the character is doing more than that at the moment the post continues.
to catch the small meal. She finally exhausts her >

prey and takes it to her den where she devours it.<


When typing a paragraph you can use either Present Tense and Past Tense(But when combining the two, never put Past Tense after Present Tense), but Future Tense is rarely/never used in paragraphs.
Every literate roleplay requires a different amount of sentences in a paragraph, Ask the group leader how long your paragraph should be before you join a roleplay.
I don't type in Wolfspeak very well.



Don't take over someone else's character!

For this example let's say your character's name is Amelia, and you're roleplaying with another person's character named Mark. You don't post "Amelia approaches Mark and Mark lashes out at her with sharp claws, Amelia strikes Mark and he winces in pain shortly before surrendering. Mark's fur was tinted blood-red as Amelia let out an evil cackle."

So many things are wrong with taking control of another's character:
1: Mark may not have sharp claws. Even if you knew all about Mark's attributes, you don't know exactly how he uses his attributes. Some roleplayers gradually reveal stuff about their character and they should do it themselves, you should not decide what attributes the other characters possess and how they use their attributes.
2: The person roleplaying as Mark should've had a chance to respond the way Mark would respond, in his/her own post. if someone has 'Very aggressive' listed in their bio, that doesn't exactly mean they will react aggressively to every situation.
3: That rp sentence above is portraying Mark as 'Weak and very likely to surrender', that's offensive to the person roleplaying as Mark.
4: The person roleplaying as Mark may be yelling "Mark's blood is not red!" or "Mark doesn't bleed!".
5: The person roleplaying as Mark will have facepalmed a thousand times at the post, since it gives everyone wrong impressions about Mark such as 'He lashes out too much' or 'he surrenders too much'. Taking control over another's character causes everyone to picture that controlled character as 'Has that personality' or 'Has that attribute' and no one likes unofficial info being tossed around the rp. You don't know everything about the other characters.

So don't list what another character does!




If you've joined a literate rp, then you might have seen symbols at the end of some posts(> -c- < -d-).

Well, they're not put there as spam, they're here for a reason.


> or -c-
Those symbols mean the poster is not done writing their paragraph yet and is typing the next part.


< or -d-
Those symbols mean the poster is done typing for now and it's the next person's turn to post.




Paragraphs can also contain some amount of Wolfspeak, there are tutorials for Wolfspeak on the forums.
« Last Edit: June 16, 2017, 07:28:12 am by FlyingGrass »

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Offline Wyldercat

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Re: Paragraph information
« Reply #1 on: May 29, 2017, 06:20:16 pm »
A very helpful tutorial! I could definitely use this to get my roleplaying skills back up again. [+floof for ye!]

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