My opinion is, almost every roleplayer fancies themself as an actor or a writer. The creativity just goes with the hobby. Unfortunately, writing and roleplaying are two very different things and should, in my opinion, stay that way. A good RP scene is very different from a good written scene.
I have noticed it in a lot of roleplaying done over text-based mediums, probably because it feels more like writing than face to face roleplay, which is more like acting, and you often get people starting to mimic their character's physical traits and speech patterns.
I think, a certain amount of "narrative" can help get across emotion and personality in text-based RP, to make up for the lack of tonality and body language. It needs a careful balance, however, because not everyone has the patience to read paragraphs of description and character exposition in roleplay. I know I don't 
Some things are natural, if certain characters didn't speak in Purple Prose, they wouldn't be convincing; but RP does tend to be a step above RL in terms of action, so I'll forgive the occasional slip. 
I've never fully understood the term, possibly due to a lack of interest in discovering what it actually means, however, the basic facts gleaned from the previous posts lead me to make the following statement:
People can be as flowery and litterate as they like, but if it takes twenty minutes of faffing about to produce text I'm going to skim for actual content, then they're wasting their time, and mine. It destroys the flow of the session and by the time they've responded to you, or stood there for 5 minutes typing their (truly shakesperean) opening paragraph, you start to wonder if their client has crashed.
Generally, I think it's better to break up these superflously long paragraphs and perhaps add continuation marks, especially since the chat input line is really naff for editing those perfectly crafted descriptions. That way, people may maintain an interest in what you're going to say next.
That said, I'm also not a fan of the person who types six words... then another six words... and another... and you keep wondering when they'll stop so you can get a word in edgeways.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, type what you like, but if you find yourself running out of space to type it more often than not, have some consideration for the others involved.
Disclaimer: The above may be humerous, or at least may be an attempt at humour. Try reading it that way.
Posts are OOC unless noted to be IC, or in an IC thread.
Exactly, Birdy. Flavour text and stuff is nice, but the term "less is more" should apply.
Personallly, beyond basic facial expressions or directions of glance, I don't use it... Some do to good effect, like Aisla and Lief Roar, but generally.. meh...
@FloatingFatMan
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Shades of purple.
For anyone who wants to know what purple prose is 
.
I personally only started purple-prosing with a character I created yesterday, and that's because I've based his personality on Hank McCoy/Beast from X-Men. Whic involves me trying to think of how to add the longest words possible to a sentence, even if they don't *quite* fit. 
[ QUOTE ]
Shades of purple.
For anyone who wants to know what purple prose is .
[/ QUOTE ]
I know someone who writes horrendously awful fiction (often fantasy or sci-fi-ish stuff, sometimes with hints of romance) in that sort of style. He thinks he's a fantastic writer, too. He also RPs, I believe in much the same style. I appreciate the fact that he does have a much better-than-usual volcabulary, especially given he's been writing like that since he was in his early teens, but he overdoes it.
As a writing teacher of mine once told us to do, cut out the [self-censored] adverbs! They're very often superfluous, and make writing (and yes, RP) sound cliche. That teacher actually had us take an assignment we'd done, and go through and remove every adverb we'd added, then re-read it, and see how most of them were completely pointless, and just sounded like we were all trying to be better writers than we really were. Being wordy doesn't bother me in the least, if the words are needed... but being very wordy purely for style's sake works for so few people. Especially because so many people, in doing it, actually end up misusing words and writing really poor sentences.
One must sedulously eschew excess obfuscatory hyperverbosity in ones prose, and always, always, always remember that one should very definitely, definitively, try to be concise.
Oh, and avoid cliches as you would the plague.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
[ QUOTE ]
I know someone who writes horrendously awful fiction (often fantasy or sci-fi-ish stuff, sometimes with hints of romance) in that sort of style. He thinks he's a fantastic writer, too. He also RPs, I believe in much the same style. I appreciate the fact that he does have a much better-than-usual volcabulary, especially given he's been writing like that since he was in his early teens, but he overdoes it.
[/ QUOTE ]
Syn's not that bad
[ QUOTE ]
Personallly, beyond basic facial expressions or directions of glance, I don't use it... Some do to good effect, like Aisla and Lief Roar, but generally.. meh...
[/ QUOTE ]
Gabbleduck's purple?! Aw, man, I was so sure he was red.
On a serious note, though. Purple prose isn't the same as descriptive text (although it is typically descriptive text that turns purple.) Purple prose is prose that's filled with pointless euphemisms and indirections, long run-on sentences, needless details, thesaurus abuse (Paging doctor Montoya. Paging doctor Inigo Montoya), tired, overused idioms and, in particular, descriptions that are baroque and flowery to an excess. It's not only style before substance, it's bad style before substance.
A good example of purple prose in the fantasy genre would be the infamous The Eye of Argon.
[ QUOTE ]
The weather beaten trail wound ahead into the dust racked
climes of the baren land which dominates large portions of the
Norgolian empire. Age worn hoof prints smothered by the sifting
sands of time shone dully against the dust splattered crust of
earth. The tireless sun cast its parching rays of incandescense
from overhead, half way through its daily revolution.
[/ QUOTE ]
50-75% adjectives... *shudder*
[ QUOTE ]
Some do to good effect, like Aisla and Lief Roar, but generally.. meh...
[/ QUOTE ]
Now, Aisla glared at me balefully when she read my comments above, for she knows that, while I consider her grasp of English to be excellent, I also think that she spends far too long typing in RP situations. And, just FYI, she's a lot less likely to produce a forty page essay these days than she used to be.
I don't care what you write, so long as by the time it actually appears on the screen, you aren't alone because everyone else got bored waiting and left.
There's also a quote from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle regarding adjectives and adverbs which may explain some of the existance of 'purple prose'. It goes something like: "Thank the lord for adjectives, for togetehr with adverbs, they expand the word count." In those days, you were paid by the word...
Disclaimer: The above may be humerous, or at least may be an attempt at humour. Try reading it that way.
Posts are OOC unless noted to be IC, or in an IC thread.
[ QUOTE ]
I don't care what you write, so long as by the time it actually appears on the screen, you aren't alone because everyone else got bored waiting and left.
[/ QUOTE ]
With this, the "I'm typing" afk message works wonders...
Untill people start to emote without hitting the enter first. So you get:
/e sighs "I am now making a statement that requires a lot of text and so I will do so."
Personally, I've started to adobt a slightly diferent style:
<sighs> I am now making a statement that requires a lot of text and so I will do so.
While I still keep:
/e the description of my action outnumbers the of words in my speach when I say "ok, that's fine"
Also, I often (not always but often) hit enter before emoting.
@ShadowGhost & @Ghostie
The Grav Mistress, Mistress of Gravity
If you have nothing useful to say, you have two choices: Say something useless or stay quiet.
[ QUOTE ]
With this, the "I'm typing" afk message works wonders
[/ QUOTE ]
It helps, but you need to remember to set it up on every alt, and you need to remember to trigger it, and you mustn't click away while typing, and sometimes it goes down for no reason... and all of that is more likely to happen the longer you spend typing.
And beyond that, when I've been watching someone with the afk-typing message up for ten minutes and no results, I start to assume client crash, or the person has actually gone afk and isn't paying attention. (Of course, sometimes you look at the afk-typing for ten minutes, and then the toon says "Okay, bye then" or something else which didn't take ten minutes to type. 
)
Being really blunt, if I spend ages waiting for a reply, even if that reply consists of stuff William the Bard would have considered better than his own work, I start to wonder how I can get the last 5 minutes of my life back. Roleplay has got to be really stunning to support speeches that require a degree in Literature and Patience to be able to handle.
And, for the record, about the only toon I have who produced large quantities of verbiage was Jason Caine, and even he just used long words. His sentences tended to be quite short.
Disclaimer: The above may be humerous, or at least may be an attempt at humour. Try reading it that way.
Posts are OOC unless noted to be IC, or in an IC thread.
Hello all! This is basically a "your opinion" thread, as I'm always interested to hear what hardcore roleplayers think of these things.
Purple prose - it has always annoyed me. Back in the days when I used to forum RP (sadly most of my favourite scenarios died out), I always came across one or two people who had a well above average grasp on English and then mutilated it by attempting to mimic Shakespeare*.
I realise with quickfire RPing, purple prose comes up less. For instance, if your character were sitting in the yoga position, you wouldn't need to launch into a ten minute long descriptive paragraph explaining how far apart his feet were.
But my question is this: is there any situation in which you think purple prose can be used effectively? When explaining a character's feelings, perhaps?
Do you like purple prose? Or do you abhor it?
I'm not going to be adding up results or anything like that, just wanting to hear the good/bad points of PP
*I'm a big fan of Shakespeare, but he really was one of a kind. I've never come across anyone who's managed to immitate his style well.