Writer Words are Weapons

[Cadre]

Has this happened to you?

You're in a thread. It's glorious. The characters are clicking, the banter is flowing, everyone is having a great time.

Then your opponent's 600-word post arrives. Near the beginning, there's a little comment. A passing remark. A tiny insult. A perfectly placed bit of character-to-character sass. Excellent. You are absolutely going to respond to that.

Then, near the end of the post, there is the main conversation. A serious point. A meaningful exchange. A piece of dialogue that clearly needs a proper in-character response.

So now your next post has two jobs. First, your character has to fire back at the earlier insult, because realistically your character would never let that slide. That would be a crime against their nature. Second, your character has to respond to the bigger conversation at the end.

Congratulations. You are now fighting a two-front war. Because conversations are combat. We just don't always think of them that way.

If someone throws ten attacks, three feints, a dramatic flourish, and a surprise finishing move into one combat post, the other person's options are limited. They spend their entire turn parrying everything before they finally get a chance to do something proactive.

Dialogue works the same way. A conversation is a series of openings. Give someone too many openings at once, and suddenly they have to choose which ones their character can ignore. Sometimes the answer is: none of them. Terrifyingly, the answer is sometimes...all of them.

Of course, there are times for speeches. There are times for monologues. There are times when a character absolutely needs to stand on a balcony and deliver the dramatic villain speech while lightning crashes in the background.

But if it's a conversation, give your conversation partner room to actually converse.

Push the story forward. Throw interesting things into the scene. Just beware the dreaded split conversation.

Because today it's two conversations. Tomorrow it's three. And before you know it, your thread has become a hydra, and nobody remembers which head started talking first.

Feel free to tell me I am wrong in the comments below.

Also, this is not in relation to any specific thread or threads I am currently doing. I am not calling anyone out. Been doing this thing called RP for many years, and it is a common subject to which I return.

 

[Braze]

I see the problem, but I don't necessarily think every conversational opening creates an obligation to answer it.

Sometimes, but sometimes I just decide what my character will respond to and what they'll pointedly or deliberately ignore. At the end of the day, my character isn't always going to have an answer for everything…and I think that's okay. Honestly, I think it makes them a little more believable when they don't have the perfect response to every single thing thrown their way.

Some of my characters are overthinkers. They'll yap, and yap, and yap, throwing out a billion things or working through ten different ideas because that's simply the kind of character I want to play. Sometimes I do wonder if I've put too much into one post and made it harder for the other writer to respond, but at the end of the day, I figure they can respond to whatever they actually want to respond to. The rest can simply pass them by if they don't have a good immediate answer, or if their character simply wouldn't engage with it.

I love good verbal sparring IC, and it's surprisingly rare to find a character and writer who can really keep up with it. In that respect, I absolutely agree that conversation can become a kind of combat. I think the trick, at least for me, is letting that verbal sparring run for a handful of posts before advancing things further, rather than trying to cram the entire exchange into one enormous reply.

Where I find this much more difficult is in group threads.

If I'm in a thread and suddenly three to six different writers or characters are trying to interact with my character at once, it becomes considerably harder to manage. Now I'm trying to acknowledge everybody, keep track of several conversations, remember who said what, and still write an actual post rather than a checklist of responses.

I'm genuinely thankful that so many people want to write with my characters. That's a wonderful problem to have. But it can also get overwhelming when I'm trying to juggle that many conversations at once.

And weirdly, that's where I feel more pressure OOC than IC.

In a one-on-one conversation, I'm perfectly comfortable having my character ignore something. In a group thread, I start worrying that if I don't acknowledge what somebody wrote, the writer might think I overlooked them or wasn't interested in interacting with them. So suddenly I'm trying to make sure everyone gets acknowledged, not necessarily because my character would naturally respond to every single person, but because I don't want somebody on the other side of the screen to feel like I ignored their contribution.

That's where the 'conversational hydra' gets me.

 

[Meya Liefi]

Personally, I like both styles, whether that's multiple conversations playing out at once or focusing on just one, and I don't see anything wrong with either. My preference is to adapt to whatever my roleplay partner prefers, and I've encountered plenty of people who prefer either style throughout my years of roleplay. I've gotten to 10+ pages with one-on-ones in both styles and thoroughly enjoyed both.

 

[Cadre]

Meya Liefi yup. I roll with both. But do tend to struggle if the two branches of conversation develop different tones. Even then there is spectrum of severity.

No posts have stirred this anew for me, rather it has always been something I have pondered.

Years ago, different fandom, I did an RP where threads were created in board dms as singular posts to the board wide story. Each post was just an addition to the whole. It was written from one charavters point of view, so if you were not main character for that post, you only wrote actions and dialogue, usually a small paragraph or less. It read more like prose which was a fun and (for me) pleasing result.

But I have also play by posted for far more years. So nothing about the multi conversation is a deal breaker.

 

[Joy]

How would you rate my character(s) dialogue?

 

[Soundwave]

There's a time and a place for dialogue.
In regards to fights

Spoiler

The occasional quip while in the middle of a fight is great, because that is a thing people will actively do in a duel to agitate/goad opponents into making mistakes and then exploiting them. "Want to know how your family begged before I killed them?" good example of a dialogue being used to provoke your opponent; it's going to hurt as much as a saber hit is if they aren't emotionally fortified - it's a strategic and targeted jab. In that regard all is good. It starts to become a bit of a stretch for me whenever it extends beyond something that would be an attempt to provoke someone in the middle of a fight or if there's like a lot of history between the people involved.

If you flat out just start monologuing a whole 500 word speech in the middle of swinging a weapon or getting swung on is when I start to kind of look at you funny because realistically no one is going to let that go uninterrupted when you're in the middle of a fight, especially if it's a situation where you are actively trying to kill each other as opposed to a sparring thread or something. Some people struggle with the concept of how quickly things happen in a fight. In the three seconds it would have taken you to read this sentence, I would have realistically been able to swing at you twice with a saber. Unless you're like Palpatine speed blitzing people with a bunch of different actions/maneuvers then most often times as seen in Star Wars it's a combination of just swinging sabers and maybe the occasional Force power thrown in to try and take the opponent off guard.

If you punctuate your monologuing with actions to be performed while you're yapping, then sure, it gives me more opportunity to engage your dialogue with dialogue and actions of my own to react with, so that there's at least some semblance of a proper back and forth.

<Dialogue>, <Actions that can be performed within a reasonable time>, <More Dialogue> allows me to <React to initial dialogue>, <React to your action with either action and/or dialogue that would fit reasonably within that time frame>, <Action for you to react to as well as my own dialogue> and then you get a nice little back and forth going from there. It feels more natural and organic to me that way. My approach to PVP has always been <Opening Dialogue> <Action, Dialogue, Reaction if plausible> depending on whether I'm going first or second, simply to avoid overstacking my post with 10 different things and giving my partner the opportunity to do literally anything other than having to react defensively to all of them.

You know how much monologuing Vader does while fighting people? Minimal, if at all. Why? Because he doesn't feel the need to berate his opponent, nor does he feel compelled to answer them if they have anything to say. And when he does decide to talk it's because there's a temporary lull in the fight or distance between him has been created, an opportunity for something to be thrown out verbally.

TLDR = Save the monologuing or long drawn out dialogue for speeches or when you're not in each other's faces trying to kill one another. If you're going to fight, then at least write it in a way where your battling words and actions, otherwise 9/10 it's going to end up boring your opponent in my personal opinion or you just get post cut about 10 different times and nobody likes that. That's my 2 cents.

In regards to socials/normal conversations

Spoiler

Personally hate having to talk to more than one person in a conversation especially if it's all about different topics. If it's several people talking about one thing, sure that's great, I can fly with that.

If I am talking to someone about how their personal life is going and someone just comes out of the blue with "But what about the droid attack on the Wookies?", and then someone else decides to add on top of that to further detract me from the original conversation I was having? I am not going to go completely off the rails of the initial point of conversation unless it was so thought provokingly relevant that it actually requires my immediate response. It's basically the equivalent to having a conversation with someone and telling them to hold on a second while you take a call.

A good majority of the time that I have experienced a situation where dialogue from multiple people comes into play, it has always felt inorganic to me. I am going to politely thoughtpost about how I feel about it and then go back to my conversation rather than turn into the Whitehouse Spokesperson answering questions from the media. In that aspect, I am actively acknowledging that I have read the response, I have seen it, and told the people involved that I have reacted to it. Hopefully, that is enough to let the person know that I am not trying to actively ignore them OOC, but give them an opportunity to get something out of me even if it's not verbal.

Body language in posts I feel are so criminally underrated. My face contorting in disgust to a comment you off handedly made is a visible response that you can react to. It gives your character the opportunity to think "This is a sensitive topic for them, and this is how it made them feel". THIS IS IN NO WAY SHAPE OR FORM SUPPOSED TO BE A BIG OLD OOC FLAG SAYING "I DON'T LIKE YOU AND I AM CHOOSING TO IGNORE YOU", I am simply writing in a manner that is authentic to the character, and how they would actually react whilst also giving you the same courtesy.

I feel like as writers, we all should be on the same page of <How I feel IC is not how I feel OOC> because we should be able to differentiate and separate the character from the writer (It's called RolePLAY because clearly we are not magical space wizards IRL), so if people start interpreting your IC actions as a reflection of OOC intent, we're already going to have a problem both IC and OOC, and at that point you can politely tell the writer OOC "Hey I don't wish to write with you and would prefer you not engage me in this/future threads".

TLDR - If people interpret you ignoring them IC as an attack on them OOC, they can suck eggs and come back to me when they've learned to differentiate the two. If I am not actively telling you to buzz off over Discord, then I am A-Ok with you and have no beef OOC. I'll happily be trying to kill you in battle or in a conversation IC while being good friends with you OOC.

 

[Darth Kentarch]

Then your opponent's 600-word post arrives. Near the beginning, there's a little comment. A passing remark. A tiny insult. A perfectly placed bit of character-to-character sass. Excellent. You are absolutely going to respond to that.

Then, near the end of the post, there is the main conversation. A serious point. A meaningful exchange. A piece of dialogue that clearly needs a proper in-character response.

1. Fight Fire with fire.

If someone throws ten attacks, three feints, a dramatic flourish, and a surprise finishing move into one combat post, the other person's options are limited. They spend their entire turn parrying everything before they finally get a chance to do something proactive.

2. Post cut them, or write something solid but short. It's two tempos: attack, defend. They break that; it's on them.

Because today it's two conversations. Tomorrow it's three. And before you know it, your thread has become a hydra, and nobody remembers which head started talking first.

3. Stare back at them, say nothing. Then attack.

Don't let them lead you. You're not doing anything wrong, but if you're gonna let them control the tempo, they will control the tempo.