Roleplaying Philosophy (Updated), Hints to help GCWA roleplayers.

[andrew5210]

Hey guys,

I thought I would remake this post and make it a little more detailed. I've been having a lot of questions come my way in the last couple of weeks about how I judge the roleplaying. The best way to explain is in one massive post. So let's go through the points.

I have a criteria set up for grading purposes, which I try to follow religiously. I want to try and stay balanced when it comes to the way I grade, as nothing's worse than a hypocritical owner who grades differently depending on the person. While I can't guarantee my own biases won't come into play, I try to limit them as much as possible.

I have six key grading points, each of which gets a percentage attached to it: Quantity(25%), Believability(10%), Consistency(10%), Settings(25%), Storyline(25%), and Grammar(5%). The astute among you will realize that the percentages add up to 100%. I have a handy-dandy spreadsheet set up for grading, where it does the math for me (I just enter in the grades). From that, I determine the winners.

Let's cover the six fields (ooohh, this is going to get detailed *gulp*):

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Quantity (25%):

This is the only category where I grade a bit on a curve, so to speak. I've always been more a fan of quality over quantity, but if there is a major difference in the number of lines, I am forced to take it into account.

The roleplaying rules are always the same: one roleplay per day, 150-line limit per roleplay. The daily limit is 12:00am Central Standard Time. Now, you don't have to wait 24 hours after each post. You could post at 11:55pm CST on Tuesday, then post another roleplay at 12:30am CST on Wednesday. Both would count.

My policy is this: I only grade for quantity if one wrestler has over 100 lines more posted than his opponent. So, say, in three rp's, Roleplayer #1 has 450 total lines, while Roleplay #2 has 385 lines. That's only a 65-line difference, and, thus, I'll throw quantity out the window and grade strictly on quality.

My reasoning for the 100-line setting is this: a wrestler who has more than 100 lines more than his opponent has basically written what amounts to an extra roleplay. I feel that he or she should be given credit for that. If you ramble the whole time just to get the length, well, your quality grades will plummet (and quality is still 75% of the grading). But I still like to see the effort put forth.

I do take number of roleplays into account, but only slightly. If one wrestler has three poor 30-line roleplays, while the other wrestler has one great 150-line roleplay, I'm going to judge on quality (since, technically, the second wrestler has more lines).

One big rule that's been recently implemented is the "Overage" rule. If your roleplay goes over 175 lines, I will be forced to take off 1 point from the quantity grade. If it goes over 200 lines, that's 2 points, and so on. This is to encourage people to stick to the 150-line limit. I won't penalize for a few lines over; just try not to go crazy with it.

The flip side of that is the "Minimum" rule, which I'm starting to grade more seriously on (after being lax on it for a while). You need to have at least 20 lines for the roleplay to count. I mean, if all the effort you can put in is less than 20 lines, why should I take the effort to grade it?

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Believability (10%):

Believability is a tough question in terms of e-fed wrestling. I'm looking for creativity in writing, after all, and sometimes that creativity can take your wrestler to strange and bizarre situations that would never happen in real life. Since I happen to enjoy those types of roleplays, I try not to grade too harshly here.

The reason I do grade this one is because some guys take things too far, into the realm of "Nobody would ever believe that" territory. Just to pull a few off the top of my head:

1) I had a guy once run around shooting people in the street, including killing a police officer. Would he really then have come to wrestle his match, with no legal issues against him?

2) I've had wrestlers fly around or time travel to meet their grandfather. Unless it's explained at some point in the story (such as it all actually being a dream or a movie), I have to take off for that.

3) I remember one from long ago where the wrestler fell and broke both his legs, then expected to compete. Think about that. Would Vince McMahon let someone who was in traction a few days before wrestle at his event?

Just a few things to keep in mind...

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Consistency (10%):

This one's mostly a catch-all for me, in the way your story progresses. Some wrestlers will write out their roleplays and completely forget parts of it that came before. This tends to bother me, as I'm always striving for storylines to connect.

Names tend to be the most dangerous in this one. I've seen where a wrestler is talking to "Ginger" in the first roleplay, but she becomes "Jeanie" in the second one, and maybe back to "Ginger" in the third.

Consistency also counts towards the way your character reacts to what happened on Friday Night Inferno/PPV cards. If you send in a segment where you violently beat down your manager, don't then have the manager happily part of your roleplays, at least for a while *lol*.

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Settings (25%):

I've always thought Settings to be a major part of the creativity of a wrestler's roleplays. After all, if one guy does three roleplays from his house, playing a video game, while the other guy does three roleplays of climbing Mount Everest, I'm certainly leaning towards the second guy.

While I've softened my stance slightly on settings, I do still think that you should try to avoid having the majority of your roleplay in either your home, the gym, or the arena. Those are the three most common, and, to be honest, they bore me to tears. If you're only in your house for the first part, and then you go off to somewhere else, that's fine. But don't work out in the gym for the whole roleplay, or else I'm grading low.

I'm not saying that every setting has to be in a foreign land, far from it. But try to avoid the 'usual suspects' when possible. The more I like your settings, the higher grade you'll end up with.

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Storyline (25%):

The storyline grade is pretty simple, and yet the most complex for me to grade. What I look for is, do your roleplays tie together in some way? Are you going somewhere with the story throughout the posts? And is there a beginning and a conclusion (of sorts)?

If I have a tough choice between two wrestlers, with one doing three separate roleplays of going to the beach, going to the store, and meeting friends, and the other doing a storyline wrapped around finding a missing child, I'll go with the second person.

Storylines just make it more interesting for me to read, as well as others. You want your characters to be growing into their lives, and the best way to do that is through your roleplays. I honestly never have a full sense of where a character is going to go after I create him. The writing takes him places.

BTW, storylines do not have to 'end' at the end of a set. I've seen lots of guys start a storyline in one 3-roleplay set, and take another dozen to finally reach a conclusion, building it up all along the way. While I like to see some "referencing" back to the earlier roleplays (since your opponent may not have read your earlier roleplays), I'm always willing to go through continuing storylines.

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Grammar (5%):

This should be an easy one, but just in case...

What I do here is take your roleplay and place it into Microsoft Word '07. I then run the Spell Check on it, and grade according to what it tells me. Here's how I grade:

0-1 errors = 10 pts
2-5 errors = 9 pts
6-10 errors = 8 pts

And onwards. While grammar does not have a high grading percentage, it can still be crucial to whether you win or lose. The best way to prevent this? Type up your roleplay, then do exactly what I do: put it into Word and have it correct the errors BEFORE you post.

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Line Count:

Just to throw this in here (since it's part of Quantity), the way I grade lines is by, once again, using Microsoft Word. I place the roleplay into Word, set the lines to Times New Roman, Size 12, and remove all spaces between lines/paragraphs. Next, I take all the small lines and put them together. As an example:

Mike: Hi, Bill.

Bill: Hi, Mike.

Mike: How are you?

Bill: Good.

This does not count as four lines. I combine these all into one. This way someone doesn't get away with an increased line count just by posting one or two words a sentence.

Once all this is done, I run the Word Count option (which shows me the number of lines). This would be another way for you to easily check yourself against the way I do things.

BTW, for some reason, people get different counts on different computers, but it's rarely off by any dramatic number. If I show someone is over the 175-line limit, I'll have someone else that I trust check it and get their own count, just to make sure.

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That covers the six fields that I use to grade. To show you how I use them, I have a couple of examples (names have been changed to protect the innocent, er, wrestlers):





This would be an example of two different wrestlers going at it. The wrestler's total grade is in the lower-right corner. The max a wrestler can get is 30 (or 300, if you want to tack a zero on to think of grades on each rp). As you can see, the big difference in this grading was the settings, as Beta got a higher grade in that category, giving him or her the victory.

Another example:





As you can see with this one, the grading was close in many areas. However, the quantity grade was knocked into effect by Epsilon having 448 total lines, while Theta only had 323. That's basically an extra roleplay in Epsilon's favor, causing me to enable the "Quantity" grading. That makes a big difference in the grading.

Finally:





Just thought I'm emphasize this last one. If you don't roleplay, you aren't going to win! Common sense? Yes, but it's still always going to be an issue in the roleplaying world.

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Hopefully, this listing is helpful to you guys, in explaining how I grade. If you want more information on how to become a better roleplayer, I've got the highly-touted/rarely-used Training area that you can go to.

GCWA Training Facilities

If you're pretty new to e-fed wrestling, I always recommend this. Sure, I built it a long time ago, and I probably need to change its color scheme a little (appears a little hard to read, hmmm), but I figure a lot of it is still very helpful to a wrestler's growth.

Peace,
Andy aka the Accelerator

[TLS]

how many words do you think is a 150-175 liner? Maybe that might help me in terms of knowing when to stop.

[andrew5210]

A few examples from the Warriors of the Ring IV roleplays:

- The Big Bifford's 1st RP - 152 lines; 2,516 words.

- Dangerous Dan's 1st RP - 150 lines; 2,200 words.

- The Lost Soul's 1st RP - 144 lines; 2,099 words.

So I'd say, on average, that once you get around 2,200 words you're probably close.

[Arachne]

Hurray for small words.

[J. Rish]

I don't know my second one this week was 2107 words and I think it wasn't much over 100 lines. That's why I've never really been a fan of counting them by lines, that and it's much easier to just click the "word count" button on Microsoft Word. But it's all good.

[Bifford]

How seriously do you take "grammar check"? And Spell Check?

Grammar check and spell check lead to unrealistic dialogue. In real life, some folks say things like "What'n da hell do you mean?" Sometimes people speak in incomplete sentences. To have all characters walking around with their subjects and predicates in their proper places makes for unrealistic and even possibly silly-sounding dialogue.

[andrew5210]

Biff,

I do not take off for fragments and the like. The way I do it, I go through the "Spelling/Grammar" check and decide, piece by piece, if I think it should count.

Honestly, for the most part, I mainly just take into account spelling errors, and then fit in what I think of as common grammar mistakes. Some examples of what I'll count off for:

1) Leaving the apostrophe off. A lot of people, for some reason, will type "dont" instead of "don't", and "cant" instead of "can't". Those bug me, since it's usually easy to fix, and it has nothing to do with how the character talks; it's just leaving it off.

2) Putting in the same-sounding, wrong-use word. People do stuff like "He's into wrestling to.", when it should be "He's into wrestling too." Usually, Spell Check will catch stuff like that.

3) Spelling mistakes. That one's pretty self-explanatory. If the Spell Check picks it up, it should be easy to fix.

Now, when it comes to what a person says, I won't take off for it if it's just the way they talk. Using "Dem" instead of "Them" or "da" instead of "the"? No problem. I skip right over purposeful comments like that.