Post by Curien on Oct 19, 2013 0:44:53 GMT
So I’ve been noticing an awful lot of rather stupid flavour texts recently and I think people are a little unsure of what exactly flavour text is for and how to write one properly. But fear not, I’m here to help you be less immersion breaking!
What Is Flavour Text?
Flavour text is a brief description of what people can see when they look at your character and usually describes their physical features or the way they move. When you examine another person in game who has a flavour text, it will appear after the list of their visible equipment and will likely be an incomplete sentence that you have to click in order to read the full flavour text.
What Should I Write?
Well I’m sure you’re aware that you're pretty limited when it comes to altering your character’s appearance so flavour text is a good way for you to add a little more depth to your character’s aesthetics. Try to think of it as a character description, as if you were introducing a character for the first time in a book and you wanted the reader to share your image of how the character’s looks; describe their visible features to the best of your ability but try to avoid too much text, nobody wants to spend five minutes reading about every inch of your character’s body.
You can also describe how your character moves or how they behave, hell, even how they smell.
What should I avoid?
You should never try to tell other people how they feel or what they think, this means things like “You are drawn to her eyes”, “He scares you a little” and “You think he looks a little too pale” should not be written in your character description, you don’t have control over how other people’s characters feel or think and doing this may annoy people. You should also try to avoid subjective adjectives such as “Beautiful” or “She has a very attractive behind” as how people feel about the feature you’re describing may vary from person to person; an openly homosexual character isn’t going to think a female character is “Rockin’ an awesome pair of titties”.
Your Flavour text isn’t your biography either; unless your character has their life story tattooed across their forehead, it’s pretty unlikely that anyone will be able to tell they served in the military, cry when they orgasm and have an unholy addiction to fine cheeses just by glancing at them in the bar.
You should also avoid describing features that are contextual; writing about your character’s grease stained labcoat is all well and good until you’re not actually wearing you labcoat. You can actually edit your flavour text in game but it’s generally better to just avoid any context dependant descriptions whenever possible.
Any Tips?
Well, as I said earlier, you should avoid telling people how they feel about something but that doesn’t mean you can’t try to lead them to the conclusion you want them to arrive at, try to be creative with your wording and use strong adjectives to emphasise certain features while still avoiding subjective adjectives.
You may not be able to write about your history but you can certainly hint at it, maybe your character moves with authority, maybe they seems to march a little when they walk or perhaps they have a limp. Tattoos and scars are also a good way to hint at your character’s past and can also lead to some interesting RP with other characters.
You can also set a pose in game which always starts with “This is [Character Name] they are…” so you can add more contextual information as you need to in game. You can also edit your flavour text in game but be careful, the edits don’t save.
Master the art of word painting; you're trying to paint a picture for the person reading your flavour text using only words so your word choice is important, a large vocabulary helps. Try reading a few books and see how the authors describe their characters.
Last but not least try to keep it clean, anything inappropriate will likely be reported to an admin or moderator and I’m sure you’ll have a hard time explaining what made you think writing a paragraph and a half about your character’s genitals was a good idea.
What Is Flavour Text?
Flavour text is a brief description of what people can see when they look at your character and usually describes their physical features or the way they move. When you examine another person in game who has a flavour text, it will appear after the list of their visible equipment and will likely be an incomplete sentence that you have to click in order to read the full flavour text.
What Should I Write?
Well I’m sure you’re aware that you're pretty limited when it comes to altering your character’s appearance so flavour text is a good way for you to add a little more depth to your character’s aesthetics. Try to think of it as a character description, as if you were introducing a character for the first time in a book and you wanted the reader to share your image of how the character’s looks; describe their visible features to the best of your ability but try to avoid too much text, nobody wants to spend five minutes reading about every inch of your character’s body.
You can also describe how your character moves or how they behave, hell, even how they smell.
What should I avoid?
You should never try to tell other people how they feel or what they think, this means things like “You are drawn to her eyes”, “He scares you a little” and “You think he looks a little too pale” should not be written in your character description, you don’t have control over how other people’s characters feel or think and doing this may annoy people. You should also try to avoid subjective adjectives such as “Beautiful” or “She has a very attractive behind” as how people feel about the feature you’re describing may vary from person to person; an openly homosexual character isn’t going to think a female character is “Rockin’ an awesome pair of titties”.
Your Flavour text isn’t your biography either; unless your character has their life story tattooed across their forehead, it’s pretty unlikely that anyone will be able to tell they served in the military, cry when they orgasm and have an unholy addiction to fine cheeses just by glancing at them in the bar.
You should also avoid describing features that are contextual; writing about your character’s grease stained labcoat is all well and good until you’re not actually wearing you labcoat. You can actually edit your flavour text in game but it’s generally better to just avoid any context dependant descriptions whenever possible.
Any Tips?
Well, as I said earlier, you should avoid telling people how they feel about something but that doesn’t mean you can’t try to lead them to the conclusion you want them to arrive at, try to be creative with your wording and use strong adjectives to emphasise certain features while still avoiding subjective adjectives.
You may not be able to write about your history but you can certainly hint at it, maybe your character moves with authority, maybe they seems to march a little when they walk or perhaps they have a limp. Tattoos and scars are also a good way to hint at your character’s past and can also lead to some interesting RP with other characters.
You can also set a pose in game which always starts with “This is [Character Name] they are…” so you can add more contextual information as you need to in game. You can also edit your flavour text in game but be careful, the edits don’t save.
Master the art of word painting; you're trying to paint a picture for the person reading your flavour text using only words so your word choice is important, a large vocabulary helps. Try reading a few books and see how the authors describe their characters.
Last but not least try to keep it clean, anything inappropriate will likely be reported to an admin or moderator and I’m sure you’ll have a hard time explaining what made you think writing a paragraph and a half about your character’s genitals was a good idea.
