So I’ve noticed a lot of players have toruble writing a coherent, sensible, well structured description that really shows players what their character is and why they’re so awesome.
Lets fix that!
Question the first.
You’re just an elites troll, ‘my’ art and five minutes of effort are good enough!
Well, that’s not a question and that’s not true. A picture may be worth a thousand words but pictures are rather restrictive when you factor in the profile system, this is going to be your main way to handle your character’s wardrobe so you need a good written description to base everything from AND inform other players about how your character looks, plus we can drop hints to the more mysterious aspects of our character that will make people want to approach us.
Question the second.
Writing descriptions is hard, why should I bother?!
A description is more than just a feature-list, it is the first impression you may very well have with other players. When you’re looking for play-partners the first thing you’re going to see is their name, followed by whatever they’re doing in chat which is probably what’s caught your attention. The third thing you’ll notice will be their description and that’s where we really need to shine!
Question the third.
What’s wrong with my description right now?
Let’s look at some example descriptions I’ve cooked up just now, we’ll just over the trends first and the minor mistakes later on when we build our own description from scratch.
These are inspired by mistakes I’ve actually seen whilst playing but they’re entirely fictional, no one’s character is being used here. (Unless you go and make characters with these descriptions, which honestly would be pretty funny. But don’t do it please!)
Toby Exampleface
“A 20 year old fox who loves having fun but is submissive and likes going to parties. He wears casual clothes and hates shoes but loves socks. His boyfriend is Iceheart twinkletoes. He is bisexual.”
Okay, where do we start? This is just a list of statements and reads terribly. It also doesn’t actually tell us very much about Toby that belongs in his description field anyway. A good bit of content here could safely be off-loaded to the “About” field instead so we can make a good start by moving it there and spacing it out with line-breaks. (Press the enter key, that’s a line-break.)
Another issue is that Toby has used very vague language for his clothes, there’s a missed opportunity there that we’ll capitalize on later.
Terry McBadass
“terry is a hurt soul who uses the power of bloodmagic which makes his fur black and red
his face has a big scar over one eye and he knows judo and karate
no one will ever hurt his friends because he will fuck them up!”
This one’s a hum-dinger and homage to edgy teenboys everywhere who just found out that anime exists. Evidently our writer doesn’t care for grammar but even worse is the utter lack of description in place of telling us how cool and dark the character is. We know precious little about how Terry looks other than the fact he can use magic and that magic has turned his fur the darkest and edgiest of colours.
Susie Special
“Age 18
snowy white wolf
total bitch unless your her friend.
likes pinapples and creme
hates poor people.”
Why build out when you can build up, don’t you guys have vertical displays? No, no we do not Susie. The main issue here is that there’s very little to clue us in about Susie, plus we have more stuff that belongs in the about section in the description section. Not only that, it’s a very unflattering first impression with Susie outright telling us the character is a bitch, presumably in both the figurative and literal senses.
Okay, so where does that leave us?
We need to build a better description that will help us do three things.
- Tell people what we look like.
- Drop any hitns that we’d like people to pick up on.
- Express our characters to their fullest potential so we can stand out.
Enter Clover DeRabbit. Clover is going to help us build a description that will make people want to play with us. As we expand on our initial description I’ll highlight the new additions or changes in bold.
The first thing we need to do is give people looking our way a brief overview.
“Clover is a rabbit.”
Hmm… It’s a bit too basic though. Let’s spice it up with a few descriptive words.
“Clover is a cute rabbit with cream coloured fur like flowers in bloom.”
Soppy, but sometimes a little purple prose is nice even if I personally hate it. Let’s give a fuzzy idea of how big clover is though, since she’s a small herbivore she won’t be particular large so we can work that into our opening paragraph. We also don’t want to just call her cute when our words can say it for us instead. Lets expand!
“Clover is a petite rabbit with cream coloured fur like flowers in bloom. She has the body of a strong runner even though larger predators tower over her.”
Okay, so we now know that Clover is athletic as well as short, since predators “tower” over her, meaning they’re reasonably larger than her. We could always plug in an actual size later if we prefer but keeping things somewhat fuzzy can be helpful. We’ve also switched to calling her petite, which means small and small fuzzy things are usually cute so we don’t need to use the word itself. Let’s expand some more.
“Clover is a petite rabbit with cream coloured fur like flowers in bloom. She has the body of a strong runner even though larger predators tower over her. Her almond eyes are bright and never scornful, matching the braid of her hair.”
So now we’ve pointed out in a mostly flowing way that Clover has brown hair and eyes and that she keeps her hair in a braid, we also pretty much stated that she’s friendly. If we use profiles to give her different outfits we’ll have to come back here to adjust that, but that won’t be an issue since it’s neatly up-front and prompt! Lets add some clothes so our poor bunny isn’t naked, and we’ll clean up the mention of her being a runner to make it flow better, we’ll use our first line-break since the clothes are not the bunny, they’re a separate thing.
*"Clover is a petite rabbit with cream coloured fur like flowers in bloom. She has the body of a strong runner because larger predators tower over her. Her almond eyes are bright and never scornful, matching the braid of her hair.
The lapine is dressed in a yellow summer dress with green buttons and brown shoes."*
Good? Heck no! this is a terrible description of clothes because it doesn’t flow well and doesn’t tell us enough about the clothes, plus it reads in a stilted manner. Let’s fix that!
"The lapine is wreathed in a flowing, light sunny dress secured between her modest breasts with shiny green buttons, brown wooden sandals padded with cloth protect her pawpads from the roughness of the ground."
We’ve pretty much rewritten that part and it tells us a lot more now, that the dress is lightweight and yellow and that the buttons tie it on her securely. We also know that Clover has smaller, more pert breasts and still has soft pawpads since she protects them with padded sandals. This helps reinforce that we want Clover to look small and cute like a bunny ought to be.
So from the top.
“Clover is a petite rabbit with cream coloured fur like flowers in bloom. She has the body of a strong runner because larger predators tower over her. Her almond eyes are bright and never scornful, matching the braid of her hair.
The lapine is wreathed in a flowing, light sunny dress secured between her modest breasts with shiny green buttons, brown wooden sandals padded with cloth protect her pawpads from the roughness of the ground.”
Doesn’t Clover just sound lovely to have a cup of tea with?
So what now?
Take everything you’ve learned from here and have fun with it. We can further improve our description by using drop-down segments for particular body parts, made in the game by putting a title between
[[double brackets]]
And the text we want to show on the very next line-break.
This lets gives us an excellent place to put our clothes descriptions as those can get quite purple-prose heavy. If you have a character carrying equipment you could also list that in each piece’s own individual drop-down segments. If for some reason you need to put line-breaks in a drop-down box that’s handled as so. Take note of the fancy brackets I’ve marked in bold.
[[My totally radical drop-down]]{
Cool stuff!
Even more cool stuff!
THE COOLEST OF STUFFS!
}
What about all the other stuff?
Drop-downs, drop-downs for days! There’s not much there that should be hard to fit in at the bottom or the top as pertinent information though.
Information like history and player preferences belongs in the About section of your character, this is the stuff that doesn’t change day-to-day and a quick “Who are you and what are you doing” is intended filler. Use drop-downs to keep it neat and uncluttered and you should be good to go!
Please do! The rest of ‘who I am’ that I want people to see… I try to exemplify in my day to day interactions and public roleplay. n_n If someone wants a more intimate description of Raeth, well… they’ll have to get close to him and slow him down long enough to examine. 