Please, do us a favor and cut the length of a role entry to what you, as a staff, would like. It is the logical thing to do.

I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Your empowering/tattooing imm is the only person who 'has' to read it.

Other than that, the ideal length and writing style is by subjective opinion.

I wouldn't imagine that having a two or three line role describing your motivations is enough to gague your roleplay as having 'depth' to award XP and edges mind you. It's a good way to get a mere nod and move on.

But it's still enough to justify some rather interesting decisions that may or may not come up depending both on how 'colorful' your role is and the obvious trappings of everyday life in CF.

Play the game, rewards are as much a matter of luck, timing and guesswork as they are preference of the rewarding Imm. If you're persistent and don't intentionally write a role that burns through your CON, you will probably get some attention even if it's in uneven amounts.

Likewise if you RP and write roles in such a way that implies you do not want attention, then you will also not get it in that case, save for the negative impact of bad RP or IC blasphemy.

I mean cut the physical length allowable for each entry so it can be read in manageable chunks, with no need to hit ENTER. The role can be as long as you want, but the chapters will be shorter.

Note: Multiple entries for one chapter is fine. Just point it out in the role subject via something like "Such and Such, Continued..."

Especially since the PBF clips long role chapters anyhow.

How about a thirty line max length for a role chapter? Should fit
most windows out there and makes for easy reading.

But this sounds like it'd be a total slut to code =(
As awesome as it would be, I'm terrible bad about making my role chapters mega long, and would totally give this idea 2 thumbs up!

Having found myself disliking reading exceptionally long role chapters, I now write my roles in word and break them up before I add them in easily chewable chunks. I end up with 6 chapter roles instead of 1 or 2 but I think it's muc easier on the reader. You don't need code to do this, just try and be a little more cogniscent (however you spell that word) of the reader.

Personally, I like roles that show up neatly on one page of my monitor. Try and think about what your scroll size is and set it for that. Also, don't be afraid to break up huge blocks of text with spaces between paragraphs. I saw someone trying this the other day and putting a space between chunks of text, but they were doing it randomly in the middle of sentences instead of around paragraphs. Call me picky, but I don't think it had the desired affect.

The point is, at the end of the day, you want xp for your role. You want recognition. Many times, I've gone to look at roles (because it's a never ending job) and seen one that was seriously long and skipped it, thinking..."Twist can do that one." Or "I'll leave that one for Kasty, he loves reading." On the flip side, I've seen roles that were just a few lines long, and while I'll usually mark them as ok, I don't tend to give out much xp for them if any. You want that nice middle ground that tells a story but not in such a verbose manner that the reader has to spend a half an hour getting through it. I check who has roles several times a day and there's rarely less than 10 on the screen, usually closer to 20. If I had to spend a half an hour reading 20 roles five times a day, I'd never do anything else.

I'll consider that.

Sometimes when we're complaining about roles we're saying that yes, a chapter is too big and unwieldy. This we can possibly fix.

Sometimes we're more complaining that the person takes twenty pages of text to convey backstory elements that no longer affect their roleplay in any way. This there's no fixing. :)

Descriptions cut off automatically at 80 characters or whatever it is, any chance you can make it so role and notes do also? I always like to keep them nice and tidy so they don't wrap ugly, but it's annoying to always have to check how long I have when I write it up. Not horribly so, but it seems like the code's there to tidy things up already, so figured I'd ask.

n/t

Each succeeding role chapter told half of the story remaining, each one saying less and less and never quite reaching the end. :)

"All stories, if continued far enough, end in death" -- Ernest Hemingway

When your character completely misses the point of anything any female character, imm or not, says to him. Because there's a rack and a pair of thighs in front of him.

Those roles are fun, but best used sparingly if at all. Fully half of the god-like female deities, past or present, in their proper element would miss the joke or ignore it.

I quit reading at book 9 or 11 or what ever. They just made a huge portal to attack the white tower.... Did he ever finish the story? If he did, I MIGHT buy the last five or six books I'm sure he wrote.

But what "I'VE" always been curious about is what is the proper line length before you should put in a hard return. Cause I got a big ass screen, pre-flat screen popularity, but still it's big and I find there's no text on the mud that won't fit on my screen(except for tells and they wrap just fine). But if I have the window to notepad set too big then my description gets cut, my roles get cut, all kinds of stuff gets cut. So without typing 12345.... how many characters can you fit on a line and how many SHOULD you fit on a line?

There doesn't seem to be a preferred standard in the areas either... but I usually use whatever area I'm standing in at the moment as a guide.

80 characters is a good length.

The way I write do this is a tip I think I saw Valg give out. I use notepad and at the top I write:

01234567890123456789...

I do that eight times then make sure all my text is no longer then that 80 characters. Works for me anyway.

Remember to use Courier or other font in which all the characters are of same size. Otherwise you can't use the line tactic effectively. These days, I'll use the 1234567890.. only if the wrap chop at Dio's is not available(it's been down a bit too often for my liking these days).

Robert Jordan died.

He spent the last few months of his life dictating storylines and plot points and such to his wife and son.

They plan on publishing the last book, though it will take longer than it would if Jordan was alive and well (that's saying alot, seeing as how he would take years between books).


He said in interview often, that the next book (12) would be the last book. Period. If he had to make it 1500 pages, it would be the last book, he just couldn't see a way to break it up into more books.

The last book will be called "memory of light"

No word on release date yet. He died about a month ago or so. Anywhere from mid 2008 to late 2009 is believable.


One thing I suggest for those who liked the early books, but got turned off (like you seem to have been) is to wait for the last book to come out, then get the audio unabridged versions of the books you have not read.

The reading, both male and female readers, is phenomenal. I'm a confirmed audiobook junky, and I don't think I have heard any readers to such a good job (with a possible exception of some of the stephen king book readers).

Then, read the last book right when you finish the book 11.

Oh, and to keep this on topic...

cf....

trib sucks....

paladins are overpowered....

rot sucks....

full looting sucks....

Graatch sucks....


heh.