Guide: Role-Playing in ADA

[Imzadi]

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Enter the Demon

The Role-playing Guide

First and foremost, be aware that WWD and the respective covens are one big Battle RPG. While fighting is a very important aspect of the game, so is the character you play. This guide is designed to help you through creating a character as well as playing it.

Creating a Character


- Getting Started -
Before anything else, you should thoroughly think about what kind of character you want to play. It is very important to try and not play yourself x 1000, but actually create a role for yourself. Later on that will make it a lot easier for you to come up with plots and ideas for your character. This way you aren't bound by your own personality but only that of your character, which you can form and mould more freely.

It has become apparent that when playing yourself rather than a character made up from scratch, one is more likely to reach a dead end sooner or later. It seems to limit the level of originality that can be put into a character.

- The Biography -
In order to be promoted to Level 1, you are asked to create a biography for your character. This biography gives other members a quick sum up of your character’s details, like their past and how they found their way to the Academy of Demonic Arts. The most significant part of the biography is the history.

It should be a text written in prose, a minimum of 3500 characters in length, and fluently explain why your character is who they are. It is highly suggested not to rush into things. Make sure you like your character the way it is, that the species fits it and that you can maintain your own storyline easily in ADA-every-day-life.

There is one important thing to keep in mind while creating the biography, and that is not determining every last detail about your character. While giving the key elements and describing them thoroughly, leave yourself enough room to let your character evolve while you play it. You will meet many others in ADA that your character will interact with, and you may want to play through storylines that have their roots in your character’s past. To implement such things there needs to be space for that in your character’s past, if you don’t want to edit your biography with each new plot twist you act out.

Maintaining a Character


- Personality and Appearance -
As a rather small part of your bio, the personality’s significance is often overlooked. The history usually gives the background that provides a logical base for your character’s personality traits. It does occur quite often, that when playing a character members completely forget what they have stated in this section.

While the history is your character’s past, personality and appearance are their present and therefore just as important. Make sure you keep those aspects in mind whenever you're acting in character in ADA or the WWD.

- Playing -
You are probably aware of the fact that the Academy of Demonic Arts is the evil side of the game. Therefore all members do play a demon, warlock or a demonically challenged character. That means that in character they are most likely to be evil, nasty and backstabbing. Don’t expect to get a handshake or anything along those lines when you make your way into Hellfire or a ‘Free for All’ thread in the Arena. Quite the opposite. You should be prepared for a punch to the face, a *****y comment or a kick in the behind.

Other characters treating yours in such a manner is not to be taken personally under any circumstances. It's a role they play, and it has nothing to do with the player behind it. Acting this way is actually expected from members of the ADA when interacting with other players.

[Imzadi]

80]Acting it out: The Posts
80]

The practical side of Role Playing
There are uncountable formats to use for role-playing posts. However, one has proven to be the most effective and easiest to read: Prose. This format also allows for a better way to describe actions, thoughts and speech, and therefore grants the reader the possibility to visualize the scene you’re playing out.

Step 1: See it
The best way to start off before beginning to type a post is to visualize the scene. Read through the post you want to react to, and imagine it like a movie before your inner eye.


Step 2: Your character
Remember the corner stones of your character’s bio. History, personality, appearance. Tap into it and let your character tell you what will happen next.


Step 3: Let it run
Go back to the scene you visualized before, and let it continue. How would your character react? What would they think? What would they do? Why would they do it?


Step 4: Get typing
Now it’s time to punch those keys and write the scene you see down. Try seeing it from a point of view of an author who is telling a story, and include what the reader needs to know to follow what your character is doing.

The Writing
It’s much easier to judge role-playing skills than to be a good role-player yourself. However, everyone can do it, and everyone can be good at it. All it takes is a bit of patience, the will to improve and knowing a few things that should help in the process. It does not matter whether you think you do not have a natural gift in writing, what matters is whether you want to learn.

Ever thought about the criteria you use to distinguish between role-playing you like and you do not like? Well, let’s look at a few that you may have used to categorize, aware of it or not.

Criteria 1: Fluent text
This is where we come back to the suggested format. Prose. Admit it or not, but concerning the flow of a post nothing beats good ol’ prose. Using punctuation or mark up to distinguish between speech, thoughts and action may work, but bottom line, it is good for only that: to distinguish. Where paragraphs are an unavoidable must to make posts easy to read, using empty lines and punctuation interrupts what the inner eye sees when reading.


Criteria 2: Wording and Structure
Reading a post that is all but main clauses that start with the character’s name each time makes for a text that is very hard to read and follow. Let alone, readers usually don’t enjoy it. There’s uncountable ways and means to make a text interesting if looked at from a grammatical point of view.
Another aspect here is the wording. A verb or noun usually has quite a few of synonyms that should be used to try and vary your expressions.
This may seem like a rather hard task especially to those members who do not have English as their native language. However, those members should be aware of that it won’t be held against them. ADA can actually be a great way to improve your english if you make use of websites like dictionary.com and thesaurus.com or any dictionary that translates your language into English and vice versa. Take the time to read through other member’s posts to get inspiration and find phrases and vocabulary you could use in your own posts.


Criteria 3: Typos, Spelling mistakes and what not
A mistake here or there usually is no big deal. However, if there is one in each sentence or in every third word, a post quickly gets hard to read. The brain needs to make the extra effort to correct the word while you read it, which tends to interrupt the reading flow significantly. There is numerous spell checkers out there, if you do not have english spell check in your copy of Microsoft Word or whatever you use. Just google for ‘Spellchecker’ and a few should come up.


Criteria 4: Tenses
Where this would actually belong to grammar, proper use of tenses is significant enough to give it its own criteria. Ever noticed how hard a post is to read, when the author jumps between tenses? You get confused about what is happening at the moment and what is meant to be in the past.
Whether you use present or past tense in your posts is clearly a personal choice, however, once picked, stick to it. Starting a post in past tense and then switching to present or vice versa to describe things that are happening at that very moment, is most likely to confuse the reader.


Criteria 5: Action, Thoughts / Feelings, Speech and Details
Inevitably what a role-playing post is made of. It quickly gets boring if you miss just one of them. If you think about it, they are part of your every day experiences even though you are mostly unaware of them. While you do something, you feel a certain way, think about or say something and you take in those details around you. Your character is no different. He or she cannot act without what’s going on inside and around him or her.

Actions, feelings and details of surroundings should always be described in third person perspective. Speech, as in what your character says, should be in quotes (i.e. “You see? Like this.”) and in first person perspective. Speech of other characters can be quoted (make sure you make it obvious that it isn’t your character saying it. Wrapping it in tags is the easiest way) or explained via indirect speech.
Thoughts can either be stated in italics and a first person perspective (i.e. Or I may just kill you. or you can describe them (i.e. He thought that he would just kill her if she continued talking crap). How you state thoughts it completely up to your own liking, usually either version is picked though concerning whether it fits the scene or not.


Criteria 6: Make it come to life
Adjectives and adverbs are your friends. Usage of them plays an important role concerning the mood and overall feel to the post. It makes a difference whether someone just ‘inhaled’, ‘inhaled deeply’ or ‘inhaled deeply, feeling his pulse throbbing in his ears’.
Rhetorical devices are helpful ways to make your post a lot easier to picture for the reader. Try google, and search for ‘rhetorical devices’. You may use some already without even knowing, there’s actually a term for them.
And no, you do not need to become a full fledged writer, or know each of the devices by heart. This is just meant to give you pointers of what you can make use of.


Criteria 7: Don’t overdo it
It’s one thing to be descriptive and make a fluent post others enjoy to read. It’s another to lose yourself in unnecessary detail and lose the reader’s interest.
There’s one cardinal rule: If a detail does not further the story, leave it out.
It’s nice to explain what shade of blue the sky is, or what kind of clothes your character is wearing, but be aware that hardly anyone is interest in just how many diamonds were worked into a necklace. Usage of details and explaining them should always further the story and support what you want to bring across with a post.
To give an example:
If you want to say how your character feels lonely, it does help when you explain how bubbly-happy a place was when your character isn’t. How many people were there, when your character doesn’t feel like he or she belong. Opposite to that it’s of no concern when you character basically just enters to leave again.

[Imzadi]

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80Acting it out: The Fighting
80]

Stay Focussed
Fighting is a part of roleplaying in ADA. Promotions are mainly based on your performance in fights and tournaments. However, fighting does not work without role-playing. You still do play your characters, and you still do need to keep the criteria named above in mind. However, strict fighting posts have a slightly different focus.

As stated above, Detail is vital here. At times it determines whether an attack is valid or not. A wrong word in the right place can render a splendid attack useless. Therefore it is vital to make sure your explanation of the defence or attack works flawlessly with what your opponent did. To give an example, a level 3 TK blast can fend off 3 projectiles sent at your character, however same TK blast would be useless against a level 6 wide range tornado.

You need to be familiar with your own powers, and read up on your opponents if needed be. The power tables of all species and talismans are available to all members at any time. To come up with a good counter attack, it proves to be efficient to know the exact range of your opponent’s attack.

The “Don’t overdo it” criteria applies here just it applies to general In Character acting. It doesn’t matter how much jewellery your character wears unless it is meant to distract your opponent.

Focus on your moves, power usage and that of your opponent. That alone usually makes for a good 3 or 4 paragraphs of post. No use typing up 6, if the defence / attack gets lost in information that is insignificant to the ongoing battle.

Be Specific
While being careful with excess information, it is still important to be as specific as you can concerning attacks. It does make a difference whether you just attack someone hurling a fireball at them, or if you specifically target a certain body part.

Be aware that omitting this kind of specification usually results in your opponent assuming where the attack was meant to go. So for example, if you lift someone into the air with TK and mean to also restrict their movement, you need to state it. Otherwise the opponent will only be suspended in mid air, but is still able to defend themselves easily.

Therefore you should always try to describe your moves and attacks as carefully as you can. The degree by which this is applied usually decides whether your opponent can avoid your attack or has to take it.

Be Quick
Be aware of the fact that even if there are hours or maybe even days between posts in a fight, the fight itself happens in real time. If done in real time, moves and even entire posts tend to only be a few seconds long - even if you wrote ten paragraphs.

As much as you allow your own character to react with a rather high level of agility and speed to counter attacks, other players will do the same. So if you have your character continuously talking and preparing a "Final Fantasy"- style summoning to launch an attack, expect to be cut short by an opponent.

When coming up with attacks, try to design them so there is no opening for your opponent to counter and therefore render most of your post obsolete.

Do the Mark Up
This mainly applies to "Free for All" threads in ADA and the WWD. Attacks are easily overlooked in long posts. Other members usually only skim them to see whether their character's name is stated somewhere in fast moving threads. A way to help this problem would be to mark the opponent's name in bold.

Bring it all together
Ok don't get confused. At one point it's said not to add too much unneeded detail, next paragraph you are advised to determine every aspect of your character's defence / offence. What you need to do is find a good middle ground. Especially in fights detail concerning the move is needed and asked for. So you should make sure you say how much distance is between you and opponent or whether you grab an opponent's arm or exactly where you grab that arm. Unnecessary would be how your character's hair flows in the wind (of the tornado unleashed at you) or how your character's little toe is twitching. You get the idea. ;)