Feral Heart

I often use the 20000+ Names website and pick names that (supposedly) originate from the region their species usually lives in. Like, I use African names for lions, Native American names for certain kinds of wolves, etc.

Yo! I have a few tips about combat in freeform roleplay that might help you:

1. I find it useful to decide on the outcome with your partner ahead of time. That way, not only you can focus on writing an interesting fight, but having the same end goal your partner has makes it easier to know when you're going too far, lets you accurately judge what kind of damage your character can deal without going overboard and allows you to focus the scene towards a tangible climax. This approach is more focused on story building than the "game" aspect, as it's less spontaneous, but it's worked wonders for me.

2. If you use a novel format, don't write pretty in a fight scene. Write simple and fast. In creative writing, using simple, strong sentences and less description puts more focus on the action and "speeds up" the pace of your writing, both in style (by giving the frantic feel of combat) and output.

3. If you can get your partner(s) to agree, you can use online coin flips! You can use these to quickly and simply decide the outcome, whether or not hits land, etc. It doesn't involve complicated stats, so it might be easier to convince partners to adopt the convention.

4. Some RPers use  reply speed to determine what you can do, which is more... real time, I guess? Like, how many hits you get in or whether you can block is determined by whether you can post before the other player. But if you're on the slow side, like me, this convention... does not work. Heheh.

The important thing to remember in freeform RP is that communication with your partners is everything. Ideally, you should be able to judge how a fight would go based on what you know about the characters involved and write based on that. Freeform RP is a lot less like a game than RPGs -- it's closer to writing a story.

I certainly don't have a problem with people having different styles; I've seen lovely plays on words inspired by Wolfspeak! However, the excessive use of Wolfspeak, from a writing perspective, is prone to being counter productive for the same reason beating a thesaurus to death to force big words into a novel is; if only "the elite" can understand your writing, your meaning and message can only reach so many people. As roleplay-style writing relies on clear communication to be effective and fun, this can be a problem, depending on your audience.

As a general rule, most writers find that common, simple words are usually more powerful than high level, rare and/or elaborate ones. For example, the phrase "burning anger" has more punch to it than "ardent anger", since many of us have more vivid associations with the word "burning". In the same sense, the word "leg" has a more vivid and direct association to the body part we mean to describe than the word "pillar" is.

But if you really think about it, as long as your partners can understand you and you aren't a snotty grouch about it, it doesn't matter either way. 

I myself do not mind TLK roleplayers. It's as valid as any other roleplay genre. However,  I've never run into any good ones yet -- they've all been illiterate or powerplayers. XP

They surly aren't bad or annoying people, but I for one do not like when people take characters from books, movies, or shows because in my opinion it shows no creative and unique interest. Sorry if this offends ANYONE!!! I promise I am only saying my opinion on it, I love lion players. I have my own (Ryo) so I am not saying I dislike lion players.

 I don't know, I personally believe it is an excellent writing exercise to play as an existing character from books/shows/movies, taken you're playing in the character's established universe and not migrating them into original roleplays. It's a good method for putting consistency and character interpretation skills into action -- valuable skills for writers. Plus, it's fun! And despite enjoying and participating in fandom roleplays, I still create characters of my own with their own unique stories. So... that's that! XP

Excellent! It's awesome that you're being so detailed, too. And I'll change the color real quick, if it's hard to read -- I just really like blue. XD