Hello, and welcome to the RPC!
Seems most folks have you covered on lore and background feasibility, so I'm going to supplement what Faye said above re: graphics and "roleplay style" (which, in your case, seems more a matter of roleplay speed). I had a jarring transition when I jumped from play-by-post forum writing into MMO roleplay, so I know how rough it can be at first.
To start us off: no one is going to be happy waiting thirty minutes or more for a single response.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it for you. That's awful in a live environment where responses can take as few as ten seconds. Even "para RP" (which stands for paragraph roleplay, which is exactly what it sounds like) does not take quite so long, and usually averages anywhere from five to ten minutes, perhaps longer, depending on the roleplayer. If you're going to make roleplayers wait thirty minutes to an hour on average per response, you are going to lose them, and you are going to lose them fast.
What it comes down to is that a MMORPG is a live environment. Your fellow roleplayers are expecting responses so fast that they resemble real-time interactions in daily life. They won't ever be as fast, of course... but that's the first step in adapting to roleplay in a Massively Multiplayer Online game. The first step is to shift from thinking of this as writing to thinking of this as social interaction.
There are, thankfully, two relatively minor and easy-to-implement shifts in writing style that can drastically reduce your response times from minutes to seconds. They are as follows:
1. You do not have to describe in text what you can let the graphics describe for you.
Example: You, Character A, are facing and looking at Character B. Instead of describing in an emote how you turn away from Character B and cease to look at them, you can instead turn your character, deselect them so your character is no longer looking at them, and proceed to type only the words your character would say aloud.
So this...
Osric turns away from Sky reluctantly and rests his hands on the Quicksand's railing. He looks out over the establishment's patrons and sighs.
"Liselotte, you'll get better. Just takes time."
...becomes this...
"Liselotte, you'll get better. Just takes time."
Looks a little jarring here on the forums, but in-game you would see in the latter case my avatar turn away from yours and look out over the railing at everyone else. In this particular instance, I've cut down on the number of characters used, and therefore cut down my response time, by better than half. What's really happening here is that you're shifting from typing out everything that happens to typing out speech, allowing the avatar to describe your character's physical behavior for you, and resorting to emotes only to capture and convey what the game engine can't.
Now, mind you, later on when you're more comfortable with in-game roleplay and you want to start recording logs of your scenes, you'll want to get back into the habit of describing everything so that it gets captured in text. But that can wait; for now, the priority should be cutting down that response time to something reasonable for a live environment.
2. Treat Dialogue as "Real Life" Speech
One of the most fundamental differences between roleplay in forum writing and roleplay in-game is that the latter more closely resembles "real life" speech. You might have a thought that you'd like to share, but before you can get it out the conversation has moved on. Someone might choose to interrupt you during a speech. These are things that you won't see happening in forum writing unless both collaborators have agreed upon it happening and pre-arranged it. With in-game roleplay, this sort of thing happens naturally and it happens often.
It's best to keep in mind that when we speak to others, there is no guarantee that we will be speaking uninterrupted for as long as we wish. Furthermore, people don't naturally speak in long, uninterrupted stretches. Conversations are instead populated by short bursts of dialogue.
This is a bit of an exaggeration, but you won't see this happening often in real life...
"John, I think we need to go to Subway today. We can't afford to spend too much eating out, and the closest fast food restaurant is McDonald's which is ten miles away. That's too much to burn on gas, we need to save that gas so we can drive to and from work this week."
"Okay, Mary, you're right. Subway it is."
...instead, you'll see this...
"John, I think we need to go to Subway today."
"Why?"
"We can't afford to spend too much eating out."
"How about McDonald's?"
"Too far, we'd burn too much gasoline."
"So?"
"We need that for getting to and from work."
"Okay, Mary, you're right. Subway it is."
Let's take another example. Let's say someone asks your character a question, and you want your character to provide reasoning.
This...
"Yes. Let me tell you why. *cue lengthy explanation that you have to type, during which someone might cut you off with their own response and therefore make yours look awkward and out-of-place when you finally finish typing it out* "
...doesn't work quite so well as this...
"Yes."
"Let me tell you why."
" *cue lengthy explanation that your fellow roleplayers will wait on* "
The difference between the two is that the latter is just the former broken into three shorter, faster responses. The first response provides the answer, the second lets everyone know that you have a third, lengthier response on the way, and that buys you time to type out the third response.
I hope this helps!
Seems most folks have you covered on lore and background feasibility, so I'm going to supplement what Faye said above re: graphics and "roleplay style" (which, in your case, seems more a matter of roleplay speed). I had a jarring transition when I jumped from play-by-post forum writing into MMO roleplay, so I know how rough it can be at first.
To start us off: no one is going to be happy waiting thirty minutes or more for a single response.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it for you. That's awful in a live environment where responses can take as few as ten seconds. Even "para RP" (which stands for paragraph roleplay, which is exactly what it sounds like) does not take quite so long, and usually averages anywhere from five to ten minutes, perhaps longer, depending on the roleplayer. If you're going to make roleplayers wait thirty minutes to an hour on average per response, you are going to lose them, and you are going to lose them fast.
What it comes down to is that a MMORPG is a live environment. Your fellow roleplayers are expecting responses so fast that they resemble real-time interactions in daily life. They won't ever be as fast, of course... but that's the first step in adapting to roleplay in a Massively Multiplayer Online game. The first step is to shift from thinking of this as writing to thinking of this as social interaction.
There are, thankfully, two relatively minor and easy-to-implement shifts in writing style that can drastically reduce your response times from minutes to seconds. They are as follows:
1. You do not have to describe in text what you can let the graphics describe for you.
Example: You, Character A, are facing and looking at Character B. Instead of describing in an emote how you turn away from Character B and cease to look at them, you can instead turn your character, deselect them so your character is no longer looking at them, and proceed to type only the words your character would say aloud.
So this...
Osric turns away from Sky reluctantly and rests his hands on the Quicksand's railing. He looks out over the establishment's patrons and sighs.
"Liselotte, you'll get better. Just takes time."
...becomes this...
"Liselotte, you'll get better. Just takes time."
Looks a little jarring here on the forums, but in-game you would see in the latter case my avatar turn away from yours and look out over the railing at everyone else. In this particular instance, I've cut down on the number of characters used, and therefore cut down my response time, by better than half. What's really happening here is that you're shifting from typing out everything that happens to typing out speech, allowing the avatar to describe your character's physical behavior for you, and resorting to emotes only to capture and convey what the game engine can't.
Now, mind you, later on when you're more comfortable with in-game roleplay and you want to start recording logs of your scenes, you'll want to get back into the habit of describing everything so that it gets captured in text. But that can wait; for now, the priority should be cutting down that response time to something reasonable for a live environment.
2. Treat Dialogue as "Real Life" Speech
One of the most fundamental differences between roleplay in forum writing and roleplay in-game is that the latter more closely resembles "real life" speech. You might have a thought that you'd like to share, but before you can get it out the conversation has moved on. Someone might choose to interrupt you during a speech. These are things that you won't see happening in forum writing unless both collaborators have agreed upon it happening and pre-arranged it. With in-game roleplay, this sort of thing happens naturally and it happens often.
It's best to keep in mind that when we speak to others, there is no guarantee that we will be speaking uninterrupted for as long as we wish. Furthermore, people don't naturally speak in long, uninterrupted stretches. Conversations are instead populated by short bursts of dialogue.
This is a bit of an exaggeration, but you won't see this happening often in real life...
"John, I think we need to go to Subway today. We can't afford to spend too much eating out, and the closest fast food restaurant is McDonald's which is ten miles away. That's too much to burn on gas, we need to save that gas so we can drive to and from work this week."
"Okay, Mary, you're right. Subway it is."
...instead, you'll see this...
"John, I think we need to go to Subway today."
"Why?"
"We can't afford to spend too much eating out."
"How about McDonald's?"
"Too far, we'd burn too much gasoline."
"So?"
"We need that for getting to and from work."
"Okay, Mary, you're right. Subway it is."
Let's take another example. Let's say someone asks your character a question, and you want your character to provide reasoning.
This...
"Yes. Let me tell you why. *cue lengthy explanation that you have to type, during which someone might cut you off with their own response and therefore make yours look awkward and out-of-place when you finally finish typing it out* "
...doesn't work quite so well as this...
"Yes."
"Let me tell you why."
" *cue lengthy explanation that your fellow roleplayers will wait on* "
The difference between the two is that the latter is just the former broken into three shorter, faster responses. The first response provides the answer, the second lets everyone know that you have a third, lengthier response on the way, and that buys you time to type out the third response.
I hope this helps!
![[Image: 1qVSsTp.png]](http://i.imgur.com/1qVSsTp.png)
