Actually reading people's posts.

[Mokley]

<Snipped quote by Mokley>

That's actually a really interesting point of view. However, it'd also mean said people would miss out area type events. For example a big fight happening in a classroom but they never noticed it because their in a conversation and they they didn't read the posts of others.

@Animus

This is where the GM comes in. In this case, as GM I'd mention that "Shouting and crashing in the next room drowned out their conversation," and then maybe quote some pieces of the shouting characters' posts that the eavesdropping characters would understand through the wall.

In one RP situation, for example, there was an intercom system with input/output in multiple rooms. Virtually no one heard anything that PCs said over the intercom until the GM repeated it all at once, loud and clear, for everyone to hear. PCs immediately acted upon it.

This is essentially the GM repeating what the players have already posted, formatted and reworded in a way that relates to each individual character. Logically you might think that the players would ignore each other completely in this case, but I've only seen them pay MORE attention to each other's posts when they see how much each character's actions affect the scene and story.

[TJByrum]

I dislike it when people don't read all the posts, but I'll admit I've been guilty of this.

At one point I was just busy and didn't want to be bothered with RPing, but I still made an effort so as to not ruin the experience for others. But I only read the posts pertaining to my character and his situation. I just had other things to do than read several other posts.

I've also stopped reading a person's post simply because of the way they typed stuff. It was annoying and hard to figure out what was going on, and reading it would just confuse me so I ignored all of his posts.

I'm a little better at things now, and I try my best to read posts as they come so as to not get overwhelmed, and then re-read them if I ever have time.

[Gowi]

If you are in a role-play where you are not reading the posts in the IC… then you are frankly, a bad role-player. That’s the end of it, there’s no middle ground. If you are not aware of the events occurring from your co-writers and peers then you shouldn’t be in that role-play or perhaps in a role-play at all. Understanding concurrent events, actions, and dialogue/thoughts are central to writing with people – otherwise as someone said before: don’t bother and go write your own prose by yourself. Nothing frustrates me more than someone who skim-reads but to learn that a lot of people here have admitted to NOT READING THEIR WRITING PARTNERS MATERIAL is downright unacceptable and blatantly disgusting.

[Vilageidiotx]

If you are in a role-play where you are not reading the posts in the IC… then you are frankly, a bad role-player. That’s the end of it, there’s no middle ground. If you are not aware of the events occurring from your co-writers and peers then you shouldn’t be in that role-play or perhaps in a role-play at all. Understanding concurrent events, actions, and dialogue/thoughts are central to writing with people – otherwise as someone said before: don’t bother and go write your own prose by yourself. Nothing frustrates me more than someone who skim-reads but to learn that a lot of people here have admitted to NOT READING THEIR WRITING PARTNERS MATERIAL is downright unacceptable and blatantly disgusting.

@Gowi

Exactly. There is something ridiculously vain about RPing but not reading posts. Are the posts too long? Fine, join a casual or free RP. Does it move too quick for you? Fine, join slower RP.

But the implication of writing posts but not reading everybody else's is that you think the show is about you. Because, why else would you be in an RP if you don't enjoy the communal aspect of the thing? If you want everyone to give you attention but are completely unwilling to reciprocate, then you are behaving quite poorly indeed.

[tsukune]

I rarely encounter such problem since I'm more of an 1x1 than a large group roleplayer, but here's my two-cents:

RPing isn't like writing fanfictions or original novels/shorts where you're in full control of the whole story and all the characters - most importantly, writing to yourself - but you are sharing the control of the story with the other players equally, in terms of the main character role. It is frustrating when you encounter those who join a RP but showing signs of ignorance, and often this snowballs into cases where it can mess up the rhythm of the whole game due to conflicting events introduced by such players.

So, if you don't like to read posts by the rest of the players, then don't roleplay with other people, period. RP is not a solo game.

On the other side, if you wish people to read your posts, then you have to put in effort to make people read it. Let me ask: how do you feel reading a long post full of typo/spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, awkward sentence structures, and my greatest pet peeve of all, horrible paragraphing just to make your posts look beefy? It's even more irritating when you're expected to response to such a crappy post ASAP. You're making the other players doing the job you should have done before hitting the 'Post Reply' button.

Proofreading.

No one wants to be a Grammar (or Language as a whole) Nazi, but that doesn't mean you can be lazy about making your posts easier for the others to read - and whether English is your native tongue or not shouldn't be an excuse (English is not my first language, but you can't tell until I explicitly tell you this, right?). In the beginning people can be lenient, but as the game continues you can't expect others to keep giving in the whole time. Don't blame others for not bothering to read your posts because you are the one who drove them away with your horrendous writing. Don't waste people's time deciphering your gibberish when that can be spent more fruitfully to keep the RP going forward.

To conclude my rant, reading the posts of others and proofreading your posts to make it easier for the others to read go hand in hand. Just like how in a RP you need to communicate with the other players in OOC, in IC this is how you can hold on to that connection.

[Ellri]

Aye. If you don't read posts, especially before posting in the IC, then you don't belong in RPs. We've had a problem in one of our RPs where one guy neither read IC nor OoC before posting IC. Suffice to say, his posts did not mesh well with the RP, and he did not take it well when he was told to clean up his mess for the sake of the other players. When someone reacts with "TL;DNR" to IC or OoC Posts with length, then they clearly aren't in the right RP.

[NuttsnBolts]

You'd think this would be the norm.

I really dislike it when people skim through posts so they can focus on their own. It's really obvious when they repeatedly miss details that they would have noticed if they actually bothered to read it properly

@Animus

Haven't read through the thread yet, but just wanna say yes. I had an rp where another person called my character "Boy".

My character was twice his characters age... =__=

[The Harbinger of Ferocity]

I have not readily encountered this issue here on the Guild, per say - all of those I have had involvement with here paid due attention for the most part to everyone - but I am well aware it exists. It more or less damages the flow of any coherent and cohesive narrative of a roleplay, which is fairly crippling by itself; huge gaps of important information just get lost or dropped. A majority of it seems to stem from pure laziness more than ego from what I have witnessed in the past, the sort of mentality along the lines of "Oh, your post is too long and detailed. Let me skim for the parts I think I want to care about."

But... I have also heard, as well as seen in topics of which I was not involved, places where personal ego eclipsed both characters and story. There's at times a line between heavily lore laden posts where a person works on character development and their finer niches of personality and where someone flat out treats another participant, not even the character, as if they fail to matter at all and or are outright inferior.

I admit I play favorites, but I will still read the posts of people and characters I might not like or feel connected to. They do not deserve exclusion on those grounds, and to my fortune I have yet to have that sort of reaction to anyone on the Guild.

[Jig]

I'm currently running a(nother) mystery game in which I've just realised that since there will be clues everywhere, but I won't flag them up in the OoC, if players don't read each others' posts they will literally not know what to do.

[Vilageidiotx]

I'm currently running a(nother) mystery game in which I've just realised that since there will be clues everywhere, but I won't flag them up in the OoC, if players don't read each others' posts they will literally not know what to do.

@Jig

Good luck.

[VarionusNW]

You'd think this would be the norm.

I really dislike it when people skim through posts so they can focus on their own. It's really obvious when they repeatedly miss details that they would have noticed if they actually bothered to read it properly

@Animus

Yea, doing this killed was probably what killed my biggest RP ever. We had like 14-16 people in this crazy casual pair-based RP. Because there were so many people, I skimmed through most of the posts. Doing this caused the best writer in the RP to drop, and eventually helped the RP stall and die.
Suffice to say, I no longer skim.

TL;DR

SKIMMING KILLS, READ ALL POSTS ALL DAH TIME.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and in this one RP, EVERYONE ignored a super important post in which I shot at like 3-4 other characters. All of them ignored it. I ended up dropping since my character could no longer logically interact with those guys.

[Fillet]

Coloured dialogue is one of my biggest pet peeves in this forum and the primary reason why I would skip an entire post by someone. IMO there is no good reason for it. Books don't need it. Major sites with stories don't need it. The writer and the reader should be able to tell which character is doing or saying what and to whom. If the writer needs to keep track of what's going on in their own post, thus they use colour, do it in their own word doc or on whatever they note their stories down.

I do like when posters use the @username function to draw attention to a possible interaction. It's like forming a thread that makes the divergent storyline easier to follow.

[tsukune]

Coloured dialogue is one of my biggest pet peeves in this forum and the primary reason why I would skip an entire post by someone. IMO there is no good reason for it. Books don't need it. Major sites with stories don't need it. The writer and the reader should be able to tell which character is doing or saying what and to whom. If the writer needs to keep track of what's going on in their own post, thus they use colour, do it in their own word doc or on whatever they note their stories down.

@Fillet

I agree to this to some extent, because it does make sense that if the writer is able to put across the exchange between characters well the reader should be able to differentiate the dialogues without the need for color-coding.

Personally I don't care much for colors but I get irked when some rpers bunch dialogues of different characters into one massive text dump in order to give their posts a faux Advanced level look - I get that some would feel pressurized by the GMs' "number and size of paragraph" requirements, but color-coding is NOT an excuse to get away from horrendous paragraphing.

I do like when posters use the @username function to draw attention to a possible interaction. It's like forming a thread that makes the divergent storyline easier to follow.

@Fillet

In a large group RP I admit this is pretty useful, but in 1x1 I prefer my partners to refrain from doing this - not only will this clot up my notification tab and it's really unnecessary (it's only 2 people!), the other reason is similar to what you have said about colors - you don't "tag" anyone or anything in the book and on most other writing sites. Especially if it's in the middle of the IC, it breaks my reading flow and pace.

[ayzrules]

I agree with you-I think it's kind of impolite to just not read a post, you feel? I will always read posts, even if I think they're badly written or whatever

I also read all the character sheets

Coloured dialogue is one of my biggest pet peeves in this forum and the primary reason why I would skip an entire post by someone. IMO there is no good reason for it. Books don't need it. Major sites with stories don't need it. The writer and the reader should be able to tell which character is doing or saying what and to whom. If the writer needs to keep track of what's going on in their own post, thus they use colour, do it in their own word doc or on whatever they note their stories down.

I do like when posters use the @username function to draw attention to a possible interaction. It's like forming a thread that makes the divergent storyline easier to follow.

@Fillet

eh I don't really mind color-coded posts, but I'm not going to go out of my way to color-code mine. I'm just way too lazy to look up the color code every single time

[Ganryu]

Eh, I'll admit it and not even feel bad about it. In a large RP, where things are well separated, I read post that are related to the area where my character is, and relate to his character. If a post is in some distant land with a character I've never interacted with, and probably never will interact with, and is a different group we're not fighting, I just skim it for important information. I chose a following of characters anywhere remotely close to mine, or people's I just plain like to read in depth.

Now in smaller Rps, I wouldn't even imagine doing that. Everyone is just thirsting for a chance to interact, it'd be unfair to do that.

[Makky]

And this is why I don't do group.
Or another reason.

[PrivateVentures]

I came into this late, but sometimes I write up purposefully self-absorbed characters, who can literally just tune certain things out. It's just part of the character. Generally, I'll say "blah blah blah didn't notice blah blah blah"

[The Elvenqueen]

I came into this late, but sometimes I write up purposefully self-absorbed characters, who can literally just tune certain things out. It's just part of the character. Generally, I'll say "blah blah blah didn't notice blah blah blah"

@PrivateVentures

there's a difference between that (which at least acknowledges that you as the writer/rper have read the post!) and just not saying anything of the sort and making it clear you didn't read the post properly o.o which, granted, happens from time to time...I've done it before when I'm tired and such, but if you're gonna do it all the time that's kinda douche-y :(

[SleepingSilence]

Helps if people are writing about something interesting, or try to be funny or like have conflict and also don't outright suck at writing. Because being honest nobody wants to read, especially if it's long, if it has no conflict. Meandering is not fun to read about, no matter how pretty your purple prose is. It also helps when people are on the same page. Don't do page long collabs if you don't tell others what it's about. But yes people should read the posts if they join a RP. Especially the GM. :/

However, somebody mentioned failing to miss a detail or not respecting the CS. So I may offer a counterpoint...if it's something minor and can be easily roleplayed out of, or is something maybe understandable for their character to not know. (player knowledge and character knowledge should be different.) Don't start whining about it. Doesn't do anything but waste time. I've seen so many unnecessary rules (or straight out unwritten rules) for CS's that constantly get selectively broken anyway. That when I see someone nitpicking about it, they almost always come across as a hypocrite. Personal experience.

I've seen plenty of unnecessary nitpicking that would drive me crazy in most scenario's. Fake example of something I've seen something like it several times. A character tells a 2nd character whose eating "I see you're eating chicken, I like that too." If you wrote that you ate lettuce in your last post. You don't need to bitch incessantly in OOC that you're character is a vegetarian and they should know that (they don't, the character just met you.) and blah blah. Just write "Need to check you're eyeballs, this is lettuce" 2nd character said. Crisis averted.

[BrokenPromise]

Reading everyone's posts is something you should do period. You aren't going to understand the story down the road if you only pay attention to what's happening around your character. Like, duh.

...But if you're going to complain that you did something in a room with ten other characters and most of them didn't respond to it, I think you're being unreasonable. I dislike (but will read) a post that does nothing but parrot what everyone else already did. Yes, you can write what a few characters were doing prior to interacting with them, or before you have some sort of reaction to them. But there's really no point in mentioning the actions of every character as they happen around you. If my character throws a pencil at another character, and there are 8 other characters in the room, I'll be okay if the players controlling those 8 other characters do not see a need to personally narrate my pencil throw. I also think in a room filled with 10 people, there's a chance some of them wouldn't notice what was going on because of other activities. Not everyone has perfect situational awareness.

A character tells a 2nd character whose eating "I see you're eating chicken, I like that too." If you wrote that you ate lettuce in your last post. You don't need to bitch incessantly in OOC that you're character is a vegetarian and they should know that (they don't, the character just met you.) and blah blah. Just write "Need to check you're eyeballs, this is lettuce" 2nd character said. Crisis averted.

@SleepingSilence

I would love to agree with this, but...

Some people actually feel that if your character hates their character, you are actually hating them. So by telling them that they need to check their eyeballs, that could be seen as passively telling the other player that they aren't being observant. This stirs up the OOC drama that you were trying to avoid. That's not to say this method doesn't work, but you need to be careful with the wording, and who you use it on.