How do I write a 'winning' Orc role...Most of my orc roles seem pretty "decent" from my perspective but I've gotten only 500xp on 2 of them now and generally I'm in the 1-2k bracket with every other role I've ever written.

This makes me think that either the staff hates orcs (unlikely) or that, I am not good at writing orc roles (more likely)

Most of my roles revolve around murder/stealing/cowardly orc crap

Toss me a bone IMM's. Where do orcs really...fit?

You need to hit all the points.

1) What's your religion?
2) What's your sphere and how does it play into your behavior?
3) What sort of personality traits do you have that will distinguish you for another orc?
4) How do you feel towards the different cabals and races, with bonus points to having some specific traits here that distinguish you from every other orc ever created.
5) How would I know, by looking at you, that you're playing "you" and not just "faceless orc #247"?

If you can establish all of those things and tie them together then you will get more than 500xp. If your role is "Me orc, me hate elves, me kill everyone except who I can't kill" you will get 500xp.

orcs are simple minded creatures that live in the moment. Growing up in the clan you learn to stay out of the way or do as stronger orcs commands (or you get squished) and to bully/lord over those that are weaker than you. Orcs are basically always self serving and have tenious alliances (understanding long term consequences isn't their strong point).

How much role exp you get is going to be different based on which imm is judging and their particular mood at the moment. Since you don't know who is judging you when (and if anything else is going on to influence them) you can't really establish a pattern of behavior is going on.

I think what they're doing is going through a checklist and seeing if you've established key points. This is why I always provide a summary chapter, so I can hit those key points very clearly so that an Immortal can get a quick grasp of what makes me different and how to establish that I'm being "me" and not just being a generic orc.

A good example is an orc that has a feud with fire giants, or cloud giants, and maybe that feud has impacted the way they talk and how they interact with said people. Maybe they speak in the third person to mock cloud giants. Maybe they're excessively paranoid around giants, so they won't group with them under any circumstance.

Point is what I'm doing there is trying to establish a personality besides just "nameless orc that wants to be chieftain".

Obviously you don't want to alienate your audience, but as long as it's original, entertaining, and written in some semblance of English, you should do okay.

I feel that if you go looking to please you'll end up with something less than if you had just written what you're feeling.

And what pleases Daev might not be what pleases Amaranthe, so that might be the disparity between your 500 and 2K roles right there.

There's expectations of topics that should be covered in a role.

1) Why is your hometown what it is?
2) Why is your profession what it is?
3) How does your sphere impact your life?

etc and so forth.

If you're not going through the "checklist", you're missing the point. And in my experience, if you hit each of those items, you will get 1500xp. Maybe not 2k, maybe not a role contest win, but you'll get the full amount. This has held true for my last 6? lowbies, many of which only had one single role entry which was a bullet-ed list summarizing who I am and what I'm about.

The role command first and foremost is a vehicle to describe what sort of roleplay to expect from your character, their history and motivations so that from that, an Immortal can tell if you're playing your "role" or not.

Stories are great, I add them to a lot of my roles but purely as entertainment - to me the core *function* of a role is to establish what my role is in a very traditional "actor in a play" definition.

I've entered 3 role contests.

I have 2 wins.

I couldn't tell you how much IMMxp I get for my roles, but I know it's a bit. I just don't pay attention that this one got 1K, this one got 2K.

I just write what I'm feeling and hope that somebody "gets" me. If not, I don't particularly care.

I always have a role in my head but I don't enter it until I get a title reflecting my role. So far the last few managed to perfectly sum up what I was going for without having anything entered.

Unless I want to visit silent tower/get a con quest/empowerment I tend to not bother, the xp and skill gains are nothing to worry about in my book.

That said, I think you're very good at getting your role ideas across with a minimum of fuss, so wrecking #### while doing that probably gets you those titles and completes the circle of life.

Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba