Choosing a Room The user rooms section of Entertainment & Arts is host to many role playing rooms. Not all rooms use the Ayenee standards. Many role playing rooms will have (RP) or (RPG) at the end of their title, however if you see (AE) you will know that is a room for playing by the Standards described here at this site.

Once you have decided to click on a room and check it out, pay attention to the room description if any. This will appear in the chat screen just after the line telling you the name of the room you entered, and also stays displayed in a bar on top of the chat screen in your browser. Often there will be information that you will want to keep in mind, to decide if you want to RP there before entering your Character into the scene.

Feel free to look around, but often “room hopping” is considered rude and intrusive to those already in a room if you keep describing your Character entering and then leaving again looking for just the right place. As often as possible, try not to have your Character enter a room and RP scene until you are fairly sure you will stay for a bit to play.

When you login to an Ayenee RP chat room, your Character is not considered to be in the area, and you are not considered to be “In Character” (IC) until you have typed and posted an entrance. Before you do, it is a good idea to wait a moment and observe the room. This will give you a chance to think of an entrance that fits in with the current scene. It will also help you to avoid mistakes like taking a seat at the bar in a room with a name like “Starlit Forest Grove”, that wouldn't have a bar. You should also post actions describing your character exiting the room as well…that way it won't appear as if your Character just disappeared from the scene.

Some Players use Macros for their entrances. A Macro is an option used with Cheetachat, and is basically saving any text you input into that option, so that you can later paste it into the chat screen with a push of a shortcut key. This way each time the Player enters a new room, the text of their Macro entrance comes up automatically in the chat screen. It is suggested however, not to use Macro entrances. The downfalls of this are obvious: your entrance may not apply to all rooms or situations, the Macro might automatically enter your Character into a situation you'd rather it not be in (for example the tavern is on fire), and also many Players scorn using Macros as being lazy and redundant.

The process of having your character speak is easy. Simply type in the words you wish your Character to say and once you have hit enter, and the words will come up in the chat screen beside your name. Depending on the software and settings you and the other Players have, speech may come up in a different colour than actions. In Cheetachat, it appears in quotes and with “Username says,” before the actual words.

Most Characters have some form of speech or another. Much like the mysterious ability in most science-fiction movies, while it's likely many would speak different languages, most Players just consider their Characters to all understand the same language in Ayenee (sometimes however this is not the case and Players will actually type out chants and words in foreign languages for atmosphere). Aside from that sort of thing then, most speech comes up in plain english, and written in the first person (in other words written just as they would speak it), for example:

Yahoo Blacksword_Jim : Bartender, give me a pint of your best ale!

Cheetachat Blacksword_Jim says, “Bartender, give me a pint of your best ale!”

Begin each action by typing a colon before describing what your Character is doing. This will set it apart from speech. For example, if your character sits down, you would actually type “:sits down”. The colon removes the word “says” that appears after your character name to those using cheetachat, and to Yahoo software users will change the colour of the text as it appears on their screen.

Actions should be described in the third person, which is describing things from an outside point of view.

For example you would not do an action like this: Blacksword_Jim : I walk to my table and sit down.

Instead it would be: Blacksword_Jim : walks to his table and sits down.

However, when gaming it is a bit different from books, which are most often also written in the third person but in “past tense”. When gaming most Players type their actions out in the “present tense”.

For example a book might read like this: Blacksword Jim happily carried his ale to a table and sat down, barely in time to notice a Kender who had just pilferred some rich man's pocket nearby.

For gaming in Ayenee it would be more like the following: Blacksword_Jim : happily carries his ale to a table, and sits down, barely in time to notice a Kender pilferring some rich man's pocket nearby.

It is not known why this style of writing came to be used for role playing online, but it simply has. It is likely because the storytelling is in real time, and most people feel more comfortable playing and writing that out in the present tense.

You should describe your Characters actions as thoroughly as you feel is necessary so that the other Players understand exactly what your Character is doing. It is important to remember that each Player has a different view of how much description is needed. One Player may type an eight line paragraph to describe the same action that another only types one or two lines to describe. It is each Player's responsibility to be accepting of his or her fellow Player's style. Remember however, this does not mean you can go on describing many actions in a row without giving the other Players a chance to describe the actions and speech of their Characters in return.

Once your actions reach a point that they would directly affect another Character, you -must- wait to see how they react and what effect your action had on them.