Hello, I'm pretty new here and I was wondering how people have decided which level they should write at? I see a lot of IC's specifying certain levels, but I've no idea how to level myself. I've read a couple of the blurbs but I'm still quite clueless. Is it based on a word-count? Knowing the difference between a superlative and a comparative? How often you can post? How many players are required? (Though I see people looking for different level 1x1 as well and I'm always unsure whether I'm the right fit). Changing forums is more complicated than I expected it would be. I didn't expect to feel like such a noob again *hangs head in shame*.

Free is typically one-liner posts with very little attention to grammar, worldbuilding, or deep characterization. There is no standard to follow, and as such, most of the people writing on Free have little time to devote to big RPs, are just starting to RP, or are -- to be blunt here -- just not the greatest writers. RP here if you don't want to worry about an application being rejected.

Casual tends to be a mixed bag of people who would be just as comfortable in Free or Advanced. For this reason, Casual is the only section where people use "High" or "Low" to describe the level of writing they're looking for, so you'll see a lot of "High Casual" tags and things like that. In my experience, this makes the level of content you'll find a crap shoot. The posts on Casual are usually much more fleshed out than Free posts, but not as in depth as advanced posts. RP here if you want to tell a story without going into fine details.

Advanced has the most worldbuilding, characterbuilding, and so on. Typically 3-4 paragraph posts, despite the board's two paragraph minimum suggestion. The posts here have the most detail, the history of the world you're using is usually described in some way, and people will call you out if your ideas don't mesh with the setting. RP here if you want the most immersive, in-depth storytelling.

1X1 is for two people to RP with one another, which tends to fall into one of two categories; People whackin' it and people falling in love. The levels here can be anywhere from Free to Advanced, depending on what the OP says. Arena tends to range from Casual to Advanced, whereas Nation is almost always Advanced.

Not sure how useful this is, but I go for the plot and pay little attention to which section it is in, for the most part.

Reading the GM's first OOC post or interest check will usually give you more precise information than what section it's in. Or you could just look at a few underway RPs in each section to get an idea for what you need.

Well first I draw a line on the floor with non-iodized sea salt. Then I cap the ends of the line with the skulls of small rodents. From one side of this line I throw over-ripened tomatoes at the neighbors. Depending on how much I drank at the time I gauge the rating difficulty of an RP by how hard it is to hit the neighbor dog during any given sunny evening between the hours of 3pm and 5:48pm. I use the following rule:

Free - I'm doing this from the neighbor's garage and a food bowl is right there, or I got a clear site-line to the food bowl in the kitchen.
Casual - I'm parked in my backyard facing their property and I'm waiting to see the dog
Advanced - I'm parked in the front yard facing away from the neighbor's property while trying to hit the dog in their backyard
Nation - I was playing Crusader Kings 2 or Age of Empires at the given time of the ritual and the fermentation of the Roleplay

Most often it's the later.

@MissFlick I definitely go for quantity because it's easier to fathom.

With this kinda comes the expectation that longer posts are also better quality but that isn't always true, so be careful with that. In general, I find the '2 paragraph' rule for advanced silly because advanced writers typically write much much more.

If anything ask yourself 'how invested am I' and if the answer is 'eh, I just want to do 1 afternoon of quick back and forth' it's probably free, if the answer is 'I want to reply back and forth every day but with more to read, more to write and generally not as fast' then it's probably casual and if it's 'I sometimes take a month to write a reply, but it's often really long and well thought out, edited multiple times and then spellchecked by two professors that teach English' then it's probably advanced.