Comprehensive CRP Guide

Comprehensive CRP Guide
By Coffee


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Section 1: Quality of Roleplay
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The first important element of any RP situation, whether it be CRP or your every day interactive roleplay, is the quality of your roleplay. Placing an emphasis on detailed emotes, proper grammar, fluent sentence structure, and adherence to a standard format will particularly impact your quality of CRP.

Part 1: Punctuation
Punctuation can help you stand out as a better and more experienced roleplayer. It shows that you put time and effort into crafting an immersive and enjoyable experience. Not adding correct punctuation for a majority of your emotes can be seen as low-effort.

Example of poor punctuation:
Johanna threw her weapon before removing a knife from its sheath and running towards the creature and stabbing it

Example of good punctuation:
Johanna threw her weapon! She then removed a knife from its sheath. Running towards the creature, she charged at it and stabbed.


Part 2: Capitalization
Capitalization can make your roleplay stand out from other, less experienced roleplayers. Much like punctuation, capitalizing your sentences can create a more immersive, high quality roleplay environment.

Example of poor capitalization:
nyx moved towards the battle that raged on the horizon. with her sword in hand, she decided that despite the odds that appeared in the enemy's favor, she will move forward to aid. as her mind was now made up, she began forward.

Example of good capitalization:
Nyx moved towards the battle that raged on the horizon. With her sword in hand, she decided that despite the odds that appeared in the enemy's favor, she will move forward to aid. As her mind was now made up, she began forward.

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Section 2: Detailed Offensive and Defensive Emotes
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A common mistake for players new to CRP is the lack of detailed offensive and defensive emotes. When you are attacking, or defending yourself, it is important to write quality, detailed emotes. What is your attack? How exactly are you attacking? What are you aiming to do to the person? If you’re being attacked, how have you been hit or not hit? How has this hit impacted your stance? What do you do to attempt to deflect this?

All of these questions are particularly important when participating in CRP, but they are also often forgotten. To improve your quality of RP and CRP, you should attempt to write your emotes with as much clarity and detail as possible.

Part 1: Offensive Emotes
When attacking another character in CRP, it is imperative to state clearly what you are attempting to do to the other character, how your character is moving, and where you plan to attempt to hit them. Not doing this makes the roleplay unclear, possibly confusing, and does not add the level of detail you want in your experience, both for you and the other individual.

Example of a poor quality offensive emote:
Ryia takes her sword and hits towards the undead.

Example of a good quality offensive emote:
Ryia removes her sword from its sheath. Crouched slightly, she slashes down horizontally left to right, attempting to strike the creature in its midsection.


Part 2: Defensive Emotes
Similarly to offensive emotes, the quality of a defensive emote is important. To improve your roleplay, practicing adding things such as character movement, bodily impact, defensive pose, and defensive movement is important. Remember, you are not invincible to being moved, pushed, stumbled, and so on. In fact, adding elements such as how you are moved and how you respond will improve the quality of roleplay and create a more immersive environment.

Example of a poor quality defensive emote:
Feanor blocks and hits back.
Example of a good quality defensive emote:
Stumbling slightly, Feanor lifts his shield higher upon blocking the hit. His heels dig into the dirt below his boots. With his rightmost hand, he pulls his sword free of its sheath, ready to strike his opponent.


Part 3: DM/Environment Emotes
When creating an environment as a DM, or GM, it is important to clearly state what your environment and creatures are doing to the player. Oftentimes, these details are not thought of and create a less immersive, sometimes even confusing situation. Both in the case of controlling creatures and NPCs to challenge and interact with the players, and producing an immersive environment are extremely important to the quality of the events you are creating.

Example of a poor quality environmental emote:
The group wanders through the forest, it is dark.

Example of a good quality environmental emote:
As the group of explorers move through the thick brambles and bushes of the forest, they notice the sun beginning to slowly dwindle as the overhead branches and leaves block it out. The atmosphere shifts, the group beginning to feel wary and on edge as they’re cast into darkness.

Example of a poor quality hostile NPC emote:
The bees attack the players in the front.
Or
The bees try to sting (player 1) and (player 2)

You will notice that the DM did not explain how the bees are stinging, what the impact of the sting will do to the players, or where on the body the bees are attempting to sting. These details are very important!

Example of a good quality hostile NPC emote:
The disturbingly over-sized bee rushes towards (player) and attempts to jam its stinger in (their) upper arm! If successful, it would feel like a white-hot needle in (their) arm. The other bees begin to move forward, swarming together and getting prepared to attack . . .


Part 4: Knowing your weapon and attack style
In a world full of characters being played by other individuals, you want yours to stand out as unique and engaging. Two ways to do this are to ensure that you know how your character’s weapon/magic works, and to know how your character would attack if given the option. What is your character's style? Are they more offensive or defensive? Do they rush into a battle head-first? Are they an archer who is particularly skilled, or just beginning? In what way would they attack? All of this should be considered when participating in CRP.


Example of a poor quality weapon emote:
He pulls out his sword and strikes towards her upper torso.

Example of a good quality weapon emote:
The man reaches for his longsword. He shifts slightly back, and adjusting his grip on the hilt, he moves his sword in a curve upwards to attempt to slice the woman’s upper stomach.

Notice that detail is added about the weapon and the position he needs to be in to attack with the longsword. His attack style doesn’t seem particularly aggressive, though he is aiming for a vital part of her body. You can also tell he probably has training as he knows his stances and his weapon well.

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Section 3: Reactive Emoting
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Something that is very often done in CRP, especially by the less experienced individuals, is not acknowledging attacks. It is important to state in your emotes how the attacks are impacting you. Do they push you back? Do you stumble? Does it hurt? Remember that, even if you are in armor, being attacked in the chest with a mace will hurt. There is nothing wrong with being hit in combat, stumbling, emoting that you are hurt or have been hurt, or that you are weak or tired. These concepts ADD to your roleplay rather than take away from it, and it adds depth to your emotes and the roleplay experience for you, and for others you interact with.

Example of a poor quality reaction emote:
Hue takes the hit. He hits back, swinging his mace towards the creature's chest.

Example of a good quality reaction emote:
As the skeleton slammed its massive fist into Hue, he stumbled back, wheezing. He backed up, gulping a few breaths in. Upon being able to breathe again, he adjusted his grip on his mace, then swung it upwards two-handedly towards the creature’s ribcage.

Again, remember that there is nothing wrong with taking a hit. You can see that the second emote has much better quality, as well as being more immersive and realistic.

OP (Over-powered) Characters:
These are never fun for anyone, including the roleplayer of the OP character. Nothing will keep good RP away from you quicker than playing a character who always has to win or take center stage. While it's always a good feeling to have your character be victorious over someone or something, keep in mind that everyone generally wants that, but we don't always get it. Just like in real life, characters have limitations, and they make the roleplay more interesting in the end.

That doesn't mean you lose every time, but that you can take hits and damage as well as dole it out. On the opposite end, playing a non-powerful character can often bring unexpectedly amazing roleplay that you would have missed out on otherwise.

Powergaming in Roleplay:
Powergaming is something you'd like to avoid in CRP, and in general throughout your roleplay experience. Powergaming is giving yourself an unfair advantage through disallowing your opponent to emote reactively to you, and/or declaring your attack was successful immediately.
Examples of Powergaming:
Using "power phrases", like he bashed his shield forward flinging his opponent's sword away from them and into the grass. This removes the other player's choice of what would happen when the power-gamer thrusts his shield forward.

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Section 4: Not relying on Roll-Play
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Something often seen on servers that use rolling to determine whether you hit an enemy and whether they hit you is that they simply forget to continue working on their quality of roleplay and adding detail to their emotes because of the use of rolling. For example, if you roll an 18 on a D20 and are able to hit the creature, it is important to still emote hitting the creature, what it does, and how you hit it. Don’t allow rolling to entire replace roleplaying in CRP.

Example of replacing CRP with rolling (Roll Success):
DM: The undead attacks (player).
DM: Rolls a D20, gets a 2
Player: Rolls a D20, gets an 18
DM: You block the attack, and take no damage.
Player: Moves on to hit the next enemy.

Example of combining CRP with rolling instead (Roll Success):
DM: A triad of undead move forward and attempt to smash their swords into the nearby players. One attacks (player), aiming to hit (them) in the upper torso!
DM: Rolls a D20, gets 2
Player: Rolls a D20, gets 18
DM: You block the attack, please emote accordingly.
Player: Valerie lifts her shield, adjusting her stance to block the creature. As the undead’s sword glances off the shield, she angles to the left side, aiming to bring her sword down horizontally to slice into the creature’s shoulder!


As you can see, one version is extremely vague, does not detail the attack or the defense of the attack. It is hard to tell where the undead is attacking, how they are attacking, and it is all ignored because the player has rolled higher and avoided an attack. People tend to get the habit of ignoring the situation and moving on. This also applies to a situation where the player fails the roll, and is attacked.

Example of replacing CRP with rolling (Roll Fail):
DM: The undead attacks (player).
DM: Rolls a D20, gets an 18
Player: Rolls a D20, gets a 2
DM: You are hit, and take 2 damage to your overall HP.
Player: Moves on to attack once more.

Example of combining CRP with rolling instead (Roll Fail):
DM: A triad of undead move forward and attempt to smash their swords into the nearby players. One attacks (player), aiming to hit (them) in the upper torso!
DM: Rolls a D20, gets an 18
Player: Rolls a D20, gets a 2
DM: You are hit, please emote accordingly.
Player: Valerie attempts to block the hit, though, instead appears to not move fast enough and the creature’s sword slams into her leather armor in the upper-torso area and slices through. She stumbles back, grimacing. Ignoring the pain, she lifts her shield in order to attempt to block the next attack.

In the good example, you can see that even though she has failed the roll, she still reacts and emotes to that particular hit and recognizes it instead of ignoring it and moving to the next roll/attack. This is important for immersive roleplay and something players tend to forget when rolling comes into play.

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Section 5: Understanding your skill level
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As mentioned earlier, it is important to gauge your skill level within your character and roleplay accordingly. Not every single person within the world is incredibly skillful, strong, and overpowered. In fact, you definitely should not be unless you are both skilled at CRP and your character has a backstory and/or experience with combat for some time and has worked to get to the skill level they are at. It is highly recommended to roleplay as a new individual at combat if you are one. This both adds more immersion, and is more realistic.

Example of a character just starting combat: Alaric held the grip of the sword in a wobbly manner, attempting to gain his balance. His feet were unsure, his grip unsteady as he aimed to swipe the practice sword across his opponents chest.

Example of a skilled character: Alaric held the grip of the sword with a practiced hand, grip steady and sure. His gaze was alert, studying the opponent's movements. He sliced outwards, from lower-right to higher-left - putting strength behind his swing.

There is NOTHING wrong with being new!
There is a notion in CRP that everyone must be strong, able-bodied, and suited for combat when realistically this is nowhere near the case. Some characters should absolutely be not good at combat, some should be new to it and still learning. You do not need to be a huge, muscled Chad with god-like capabilities. If your character is not good at combat there are ways to go about this - such as being a healer, staying in the back of the group, or bringing able-bodied friends. In fact, a skinny, wobbly individual who tries and fails at combat is much more interesting than someone who is made to be overpowered immediately and has no learning curve.

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Section 6: Conclusion
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In conclusion, combining all of these elements will make a more immersive, fun experience for yourself and other players, and make you stand out as a unique and experienced roleplayer rather than providing lower-quality experience and rushing the situation/event. CRP is meant to be enjoyed and have the same or even better quality than your average, every day RP. This is meant to be a Guide that is directed towards normal players, and DMs!