Mikjel
From Chronicles
My opinions
No one interesting cares about your background
Not your character. Your character's background story. It's boring. I don't care what it is, you could have been a magic kung-fu paladin fighting Splugorth in a dyson sphere made of human bones while reciting snappy one-liners and sleeping with an elven princess. It's boring. It's static. It's dead.
The only relevance that your background has to anything is how it affects your character right now. It should be a tool to inform your actions and the character's personality, but shouldn't grow into an albatross where everything interesting you did happened offstage. If you want to write cool stories about your character, write fiction.
Furthermore, as soon as your background is written, it's dead. As things happen to your character in the present, she should get more background. You should start realising that events happened to her to make her the way she is, start seeing patterns of behaviour and start putting them together. Great. Now reference those in your present actions rather than in your speech. Realise that, if your character has changed since then, she may misremember the specifics of events, or they may not matter enough to her for her to keep them straight. Or, alternately, she might not want to talk about them.
Silent loners with mysterious pasts deserve a mass grave in the woods
This isn't a single-person narrative structure. Playing a character that isn't remotely sociable means that you aren't likely to see much action. At best, your character is cool and badass nowhere but your own mind. More likely, you eventually realise that she's an agoraphobe sitting alone somewhere private.
Mysterious pasts and dark secrets are almost tolerable in fiction. When done extremely well. You aren't that good a writer. To make them work, other players have to care about your character's mysterious past enough to try and figure it out. This means that they have to care about your character. Who they don't have an interest in, because she's a silent loner.
Alternately, your secret is hidden so deeply that no one ever finds out about it, because they have no reason to look. In which case, your character doesn't have a dark secret. If it doesn't influence their actions right now, it's meaningless and might as well not exist.
Flexibility is more important than character
You should have a firm sense of who your character is and how they react to things. They should be consistent in their actions. To do otherwise is breaking character. Awesome. However, in the case of facilitating roleplaying happening at all versus staying firmly in character, the former should generally win. Warm bodies are better than no bodies at all.
Should you break character? Not exactly. However, peoples' convictions aren't exactly that strong, especially when it comes to trivialities. Try to find a possible explanation for why your character is in a dive in the bad part of town, despite it being beneath her. Actively look for a motivation to participate, rather than dismissing a chance to roleplay on trivial grounds.
The counter-corollary to this, though, is that flexibility is often a detriment when interacting with other players. If everyone agrees on everything and there's no conflict, the world stops turning and we all get boring.
Pose length is overrated
Anyone who poses anything approaching a full page of text is a jackass. That's the extent to which I care about the length of your pose. And the only reason I care there is because there's no way that your speech, internal monologue or set of actions went on that long without the other people in the scene doing anything at all. So, you've got a really cool, original speech that you think works perfectly, but is a bit long? Break it up into more than one pose. Otherwise, you're stating in bold capitals, THIS SCENE IS ABOUT ME AND ME ALONE. Don't.
On the other end, one-line poses are not the devil. By all means, avoid them, but there's a time for them. If dropped into a scene at a tense moment, they can create a sense of pacing. On the other hand, you just skipped your turn, so you had better have something backing you up.
Always respond to previous poses, always leave something to respond to
Before writing your pose, pick out things from the previous poses that you intend to answer in some way. Questions, actions, imagined slights. This isn't a debate, though. Pepper your pose with responses instead of getting caught in a pattern of replying, then acting. Also, you should always push the scene forward a little. If not by acting in some way, then by providing at least something for other players to respond to in turn.
You are your character, your character is you
Not your character's background. Not her likes and dislikes. Not her appearance. This isn't a way of saying that Mary Sue characters are awesome, or that we should all be playing ourselves in the future. However, you don't get the benefit of knowing what other peoples' experiences felt like. Therefore, when writing emotional responses to events and actions, decide how your character feels. Then remember a time when you felt that way. Then write that emotion.
The other half to this is body. You should know where your character's body is, where her hands are, what her stance is like. It's not going to be relevant most of the time, and poses filled with adjusting of characters' positions get, at best, boring. However, when it is relevant, it should appear in your poses, that way no one ever has to ask how, last time her position was described, she was standing on her hands, but now you're saying she's walking toward the door.
Your logs are boring
I'm never going to read logs of your RP. They're boring and I think that sharing them is wanky.
This means that all my knowledge of events, in a perfect world, stems from imperfect memories of being there.
Your character is more than the sum of her experiences
This is probably the easiest way to make sure that your character sucks. Define her by what she's done, what happened to her and what she can do. It's easy because that definition is pretty much what you've got once you have a background and character sheet.
Her parents were killed by a coalition death squad? Great. That says nothing about her. How did that make her feel. How did she react? How is she different from the 15 * 109 other characters whose family was executed by our resident pseudo-nazis?
Hint: If you said, "She hates them and she vowed revenge," shoot the character, start over. If her motivations were that simple, she wouldn't be cowering in a safe city, away from the front lines, away from places where she could get all vive la resistance on them. What if she hated her parents and was expecting the Coalition to take her on a princess fantasy? What if it taught her not to mess with them, and so she'll avoid anything at all that she might get in trouble for?
