Emoting at YOU
Don't do this, it can KILL.

If you are 100% sure you're alone, still don't do this. It's bad form people, even if it doesn't get you in any IC trouble.

I assume anytime I see "you" in a pose/emote that it's a pose, and I'm being targeted by it and react appropriately.

That's how the SD system is built, even if pose can be a bit weird(like not capitalizing the "he" if I start a sentence with "I").

Do folks feel that pose has been documented in help, @tutorial and YouTube videos enough? It seems like much less of an issue than it has been in the past.

Also you can use socials instead of emotes or poses.

I believe 'bird playername' would work.

You can practice in private in the emote and pose tutorial, as there is a mirror in the tutorial room for just that purpose :)

Also, I'm not against folks helping each other out OOCly, if they agree on local OOC to try posing, and want the other person to give them feedback if the pose didn't come out right so they can improve.

As far as I'm aware there is no such thing as private RP in SD, you never know if someone else is potentially watching, so when emoting never assume there isn't a third party involved that you're unaware of!

I spent about a year mostly emoting and then decided to convert entirely to pose for everything, always, aside from the odd spoof, and my narrative prose dramatically improved.

The main things to remember are not ending clauses with pronouns (punctuation after pronouns gets eaten) and skipping '.' for infinitive verbs.

And remember 'to be' is a verb!

.am, because I .think I .am.

- Certain verbs aren't conjugated correctly.

- "Myself," "mine," "herself," and a handful of other words will remove all punctuation attached to them.

- Pose doesn't capitalize "I" to %P (She/He/etc) at the beginning of a sentence.

- Ending a quote with a comma instead of a period breaks the quote.

- If you have a quote in your pose that exactly matches text earlier in your pose, the quotes will magically fly all the way over to the first time that sentence or phrase appears.

- Only two quotations max per pose.

While I love pose for it's emersion, it almost feels like a gamble to get it to work right.

Posing with echo on I have found to be a really wonderful storytelling tool. You experience your actions directly, telling and seeing your story yourself in the first person -- but you also get to read your own story from the perspective of the audience, as omniscient narration.

Beyond all the coded advantages that pose has, I think the benefits of this are not immediately obvious, but will absolutely yield positive improvements in player writing and, by extension, how compelling a character's story is.

When I have a message that I know will break pose, I employ a little bit of clever emoting or spoofing to never specifically reference the other character names, instead falling back on descriptive prose. "The red-eyed woman who has her attention," for example (provided there weren't two characters who could possibly match that description).

Nobody can tell the difference between a pose and an emote in that situation! It also lets people know that you're paying attention to their descriptions and clothing. Total ego boost. 😊

But 0x1mm's tip is solid gold. I moved to one of the other threads in order to post a specific usage example, but, thanks 0x1mm, there's always something new to learn.

This has the added benefit of making interactions more... Well. Interactive. I personally find having to wait one to five minutes for a paragraph less enjoyable then seeing a stream of shorter poses that I could react to along the way.

Other reasons that long-ass emotes, poses, and even just say's are discouraged here are, this isn't PBP RP (play-by-post, google it), and powergaming sucks.

RP here is real time - there is no need at all to use "your turn" to do everything you want. In PBP, it could be a week before the other player(s) post their "turn" back, so yeah, the RP "economy" is different. Same with comparing to some MUSH's where the convention is to take your time to express all you want. SD is different. Taking your time is an inconvenience at best to the other players you're RPing with.

At worst, it's powergaming. When you use a SIC, or a say, or a long-ass pose or emote to describe everything your character did in the 5 minutes it took to write it, you rob me of the chance to react. It really burns my ass when someone says or poses something I would naturally and emphatically react to, and then the other player assumes I didn't react at all and proceeds with another three or five distinct statements or actions which could only proceed from my non-reaction. No - you might not have gotten to do or say those other things if you hadn't steamrolled my ability to react in the first place. Or you might have decided not to, based on my reaction.

If you have more to say or do, go ahead and start writing them after you send your first action or statement. Or at the very very VERY least, don't follow up with things which railroad your RP partner or assume their reactions. That's powergaming, defined as RPing for the other person. You wouldn't like it if someone fucked with your agency either.

So, for each distinct pose or statement, keep it concise, keep it real-time, keep it interactive, and keep it fair. You can always send more, and how much better when you know the context based on the reactions you get.