Advanced Roleplaying Techniques

This article assumes that you know what eWrestling is. If you have stumbled upon this article and have never heard of the hobby that many of us are obsessive-compulsive about writing on a daily basis, here is a link that will help you along the path to weirdness.

https://steemit.com/roleplaying/@vastrix/what-is-ewrestling-9e46ef3260825

Once you have sort of gotten the idea of what eWrestling is about, your next step will be making an eWrestler or more. This will be the link for that.

https://steemit.com/roleplaying/@vastrix/building-a-ewrestler-tagteam-and-stable-a67d5c6c083d1

Here, we will focus on the techniques used in roleplaying that break every rule in the book. That or bend them anyway…

The first thing that we should cover real quick is the basics. There is the two different styles of writing that I have seen. Script style and Novel style.

Is one style better than the other? Depends on your outlook for things. If you are getting geared up to write the next great novel, then novel style will serve you well. If your speed is more along the lines of trying to write a screenplay, then kudos for you.

Now that we have the styles covered, let’s cover the types of promos that you might see.

The basic of all eWrestling would be the Promo. Your wrestler walks down at the ring, be it the evening of the show or some house show, and they talk some smack about their opponent. Pretty simple and normally televised. You will want to make sure that you follow every rule that the efed you are in lays down as they often follow what can or cannot be on television.

The scene for the promo might be different than “in the ring at some show” , but it boils down to mostly talking smack about the opponent with little to do with character development.

Then there is the reverse of this where we get a glimpse into the life of the character with only a little bit of smack talking or match preparing. These can and do run fairly long. They also have a tendency to break the rules of what can be televised. They can try to make rules about wanting to limit activities of illegal drugs, murder, and so on, but these things can and do happen. If you break the rules of the fed you’ve joined in these ways, you just have to accept the punishments that are dealt out for you needing to tell your story uncensored.

There have been roleplays that I have seen where both promo and character development elements are used. These often can get lengthy and sometimes are a bit oddly compartmentalized.

Let me list out where some rule breaking might be seen.

1. Drug Abuse
   The off camera lives of many a wrestler has run short because of this. A combination of booze with anxiety pills, pain medicine, steroids, and so on. It’s toxic. We want to limit this kind of writing, but when the spotlight is off of the character...things happen.

2. Death and Murder
   If someone shot someone else point blank on a wrestling show, we would expect the person to be arrested right away. If you’re in an efed where every promo is televised or online in some way, this would be reasonable to be one of the rules that would be set into place. Unless of course, the wrestler is arrested and fired...shit happens.

3. Don’t use other wrestlers without permission
   We can expand this to other characters that belong to other people without permission.

This is mostly for the idiot who cannot write a good roleplay to save their life and think that the best thing for them to do to “get over” is to jump your character and humiliate them before the big match. This is rude without asking permission first.

Now we can break that rule. Though the owner of the character(s) being used will really have to trust you to write for their character(s) without screwing them up totally. This is important for tag teams, stables, in depth feuds, and so on. Note that using their characters gives unwritten permission for them to use your characters in turn.

I find that so long as people are communicating what they are writing so that they can feed off of each other when writing their roleplays that some really good stuff can come from it.

1. Racist, Sexist, and Porn.
   None of this is acceptable on a politically correct charged television environment. That is why this material is best reserved for “off camera” roleplays. Sex sells, but we don’t really need to get into pornograhic details here. We’re (probably) not male teens looking to read a roleplay and beat off into a sock while reading.

I find that better roleplays will have some kind of reaction to the last show. If there was some kind of injury dealt during the show, sell it! Walk with a limp, a cane, or crutches if a leg injury was dealt. Have bandages, plenty of stinking bandages. Address the betrayal if here was one. Otherwise let the staff know that you read the last show in some way.

Addressing the upcoming show in some way would also be a good thing. Use the location in some way, show that your wrestler is getting ready for their match somehow. This shockingly doesn’t just mean “I’mma gonna kick your ass and stick barbed wire in your butt” over and over again in different ways. Just somehow show the mentality of the wrestler and how they are getting ready for their opponent.

My favorite roleplays are either co-written by a couple of handlers or one leading directly into another as a series of events. This requires a certain amount of communication between the handlers so that they know where to pick up from the last roleplay.