I've put on several role play work shops in the past, and while I don't have the necessary time that would be needed to dedicate for a workshop today, I did decide I could offer my services as a writer, veteran role player, and long time e-fed character, to help anyone (new and/or old) at getting better at role playing and developing your character. If you're interested, you can private message me or respond to this and I'd be more than happy to work with you privately one on one and develop your technique, find what you're good at, and expound and increase your writing skill and ability in that area.

Like I've said, I've been in the business for a while and although I don't have the time I used to, now that I'm married with two kids, a business owner, and day trader, I do like helping people and I love writing and reading other people's stories! So if you're interested in wanting to expound on your abilities, or if you want to help others along side me and offer your assistance as well, I'd be more than happy to use you as well! Either way, let me know! I think this could be really cool seeing veterans help newer people in the industry and at the same time, getting better themselves and finding areas where even the "best" can improve!

Thanks for reading this, I'm definitely looking forward to speaking with y'all!
- Neil

You know, I've always thought it might be pretty cool to do semi-regular articles on certain aspects of writing, but post them publicly so everyone can benefit. Like a general "workshop" type thing. It could especially be beneficial to newer players I think, who sometimes come here and get blown out of the water and just leave. Maybe with each article tackling a different theme (ex. effective character building, naturalistic dialogue, cutting a good trash talk, etc....) I'm not exactly swamped with free time lately, but if people were serious about doing something like this or there was a significant interest I'd contribute.

Same.

As obvious in my three RPs so far, my style is very prose-based and so trash talk isn't particularly my forte but I'm available to help out with story based stuff.

Trash talk is a tough one because as much as we do have a unique and talented roster at the moment, some of the hardest hitting and most intricate trash talk I've seen has been during other eras. I wouldn't want everybody being taught the same formula for trash talk that has been successful "enough" in a landscape that isn't necessarily demanding of top notch trash talk techniques because there's so much more to trash talk than just trashing an opponent while sounding clever. I'd love to see our trash talking title (Federweight title) being attempted daily and changing hands multiple times a week, and that alone is one example of how we'll know when we have a collection of the best trash talkers who can then start teaching others, and everybody's hands will wash each others asses very nicely. lol Right now most people just ignore it or are afraid to go for it, and the judging of its exchanges is kind of just based off of who sounded better between two quick exchanges rather than true back and forth battles, retorts, shut outs, etc... from what I've seen.

Really the same could also be said about narrative, character development, even basic story telling... and most importantly, simple writing. Somebody can be seen as a rather entertaining story teller by the people looking on but if their work is suffering from basic spelling/grammatical/etc... errors that we were taught how to avoid in grade school and high school alone, it's a problem and is going to start hurting more in the future because while we're all roleplayers and story tellers, we're doing it through one core tool - WRITING ABILITY. Sloppiness such a coding errors, mismatched formatting and spacing, etc... also are really easy to catch if somebody proof reads their work and it matters. While I've seen some excellent work in RPs lately, we're coming off of what many would see as a pretty long slump period and I've been working hard to try and get a variety of writers and RP styles in the doors to hopefully see the XWF evolve into the beast it was once known to be, years ago.

Not cutting down anybody's work but I feel like with such a small crop of upper level talent that fits the XWF RP mold (not just basic efedding molds), we need to tread carefully and make sure we're not turning everyone into the same writer who may or may not actually be as refined and polished as they believe themselves to be. I sound like such an ass right now, I'm sure. lol But I've got to be the guy who says this stuff. Hope you guys can see my point though and overall I DO support this general idea, and would also love to take part in something like this just to make sure the people seeking guidance are receiving the type of advice and direction that the XWF will be demanding in the (hopefully) near future, rather than what might sabotage them in the long run once things do really heat up down the line.

Shane, you don't sound like an ass at all my friend! We need honesty, and open and honest communication will only help serve us and encourage us to be better, rather than settle in complacency. As long as it's done with respect, of course lol.

I totally hear you, and I thought about that myself here, not just about other role players but about myself as well. I'm sure we can all use a refresher course, as well as some genuine tips and tricks from others that can help out those who want to listen and receive them, veteran or not. Although I had more of a generic idea, then specific, so that everybody could benefit from the advice. Things like, expounding on scene information, detailed characteristics and attributes, protagonist and antagonist building, etc. etc. Generic things that will in general, make us better writers. Not anything too specific in particular to style, so that nobody would be pushed one way or another in their thoughts and ideas and still be allowed to have creative thinking and thought processes that are "out of the box." Does that make sense?

Your input is more than valuable here man, don't ever apologize. I for one definitely appreciate it!

(04-06-2018, 03:03 PM)Shane <img src="https://i.imgur.com/pUgtAVa.gif"> Said: Trash talk is a tough one because as much as we do have a unique and talented roster at the moment, some of the hardest hitting and most intricate trash talk I've seen has been during other eras. I wouldn't want everybody being taught the same formula for trash talk that has been successful "enough" in a landscape that isn't necessarily demanding of top notch trash talk techniques because there's so much more to trash talk than just trashing an opponent while sounding clever. I'd love to see our trash talking title (Federweight title) being attempted daily and changing hands multiple times a week, and that alone is one example of how we'll know when we have a collection of the best trash talkers who can then start teaching others, and everybody's hands will wash each others asses very nicely. lol Right now most people just ignore it or are afraid to go for it, and the judging of its exchanges is kind of just based off of who sounded better between two quick exchanges rather than true back and forth battles, retorts, shut outs, etc... from what I've seen.

Really the same could also be said about narrative, character development, even basic story telling... and most importantly, simple writing. Somebody can be seen as a rather entertaining story teller by the people looking on but if their work is suffering from basic spelling/grammatical/etc... errors that we were taught how to avoid in grade school and high school alone, it's a problem and is going to start hurting more in the future because while we're all roleplayers and story tellers, we're doing it through one core tool - WRITING ABILITY. Sloppiness such a coding errors, mismatched formatting and spacing, etc... also are really easy to catch if somebody proof reads their work and it matters. While I've seen some excellent work in RPs lately, we're coming off of what many would see as a pretty long slump period and I've been working hard to try and get a variety of writers and RP styles in the doors to hopefully see the XWF evolve into the beast it was once known to be, years ago.

Not cutting down anybody's work but I feel like with such a small crop of upper level talent that fits the XWF RP mold (not just basic efedding molds), we need to tread carefully and make sure we're not turning everyone into the same writer who may or may not actually be as refined and polished as they believe themselves to be. I sound like such an ass right now, I'm sure. lol But I've got to be the guy who says this stuff. Hope you guys can see my point though and overall I DO support this general idea, and would also love to take part in something like this just to make sure the people seeking guidance are receiving the type of advice and direction that the XWF will be demanding in the (hopefully) near future, rather than what might sabotage them in the long run once things do really heat up down the line.

Could you expound on what you think is missing from current trash talk that was captured in earlier eras? Not trying to snark, it's just that most of us weren't around back then and just don't know.

I hear what you're saying about wanting more back and forth with regard to trash talk. I see it as really a function of time, and the fact that a lot of efedders who were around back in the day are hitting ages now where we just don't have the time to go back and forth like that.

I don't know if I've ever mentioned it here, but one of my favorite feds I've ever been in was a place called Hardkore World. It's been closed for years, but it had a very unique format in that shows only happened like once a month (if that), but the RP threads were open the whoooooole time, so the trash talk battles were insane. You could legit have people cutting back and forth's like 10 times a piece and that happened regularly. That place had a very unique "flavor" though, and the people who were there were such die hards that the lack of show frequency never hurt the fed much. They also had only one RP thread for the entire show (yes, it's as insane as it sounds), so often times you'd even get people taking pot shots at people who they weren't even facing. It sure was a clusterfuck at times, but my God was it entertaining. My breakout character there was actually Madison and that place was where I learned a lot about how to cut trash and evolved my style beyond just doing character development that was irrelevant to the match at hand.

A single thread for an entire month of RPing for an entire show's worth of people? It sounds both exciting and scary as hell to even think of participating in or keeping track of staff/judge wise. lol We sometimes do back and forth trash talk threads per match when it's a house show but at least then it's divided up by match so some element of structure is there. I can see how it might be fun though to sometimes see people cross over into insulting others they aren't booked against that cycle. I wonder if there's a way to experiment with something that brings that freedom and some of those elements without having it turn into a clusterfuck of insanity. I'm always up for trying new (to the XWF) styles and experiments.

As far as the trash talk goes, I miss the feeling of reading somebody's trash talk against someone else and feeling like even I myself got kicked in the stomach or like I need to cringe at how badly the victim in question got dismantled, not just by direct responses to what they said earlier but by having their entire "character" of their character torn to bits and their entire history spun back at them in such a way that there's almost nothing that person could do or say to come back from it. One of the best I've seen in that style was John Madison in his very early XWF days but I'm not sure what happened along the way with him because even he will tell you he doesn't quite have that ability anymore. Most of it I think was on the lost boards we used before our current boards, but I might dig around later and see if something of that nature from him can be found on these newer boards.

Going back further in time, names like T Money, Kid Money, and sometimes even Steve Jason had incredible ways of delivering their trash talk and it didn't matter if the opponent had even said anything at all for them to feed off of. James Raven and Blizzard have that ability with slightly more comedic elements thrown in so not only are you seeing that they crushed anything that was said against them but you're laughing your ass off at some of it along the way because of how stupid they're able to make their victim look. Then there are the types who just know how to talk shit in such an overbearing asshole way that people will mention how they're afraid to even send the person an OOC pm, which I've heard said guys like Sid Feder, Sewaside, and I think John Samuels because they had a way of pushing the envelope so close to OOC sometimes without going OOC that it just made you believe they really do want to hurt you in real life.

How do I really sit here and lay out piece by piece the formulas these guys and others have used though? Any of the names I mentioned could most likely beat me in a trash talk battle and it's my job to recognize and respect that (and score it accordingly) more so than to have the ability to conjure up that same level of material myself. I wish we did have all of the old boards, like even the old old boards before the old boards but unfortunately all that great material is lost for the most part.

I do feel like your mentioning of the back and forth singular thread/reply style being what brought you up in the trash game kind of explains the style I see you have mastered, whereas you may not have been exposed to the type of trash talkers who sometimes can trash a guy successfully without even needing anything to reply to, and in SOME cases without even actually trash talking them. Sometimes the way a narrator's description or even a series of scenes are laid out can expose the poor writing and/or narration of the opponent without said character even once saying anything bad about the opponent's character, and I just haven't seen these types of things done in some time.

In order to really clarify what I mean about what's missing, I feel like we need to get into some detail about your own work and I hope you don't mind. When it comes to you particularly, you're excellent when it comes to sounding like your characters believe they're the most superior and intelligent being on the face of the planet in how you write them and talk down to others, but a lot of the success you've seen has been through that style of intimidation working splendidly on opponents and kind of leaving them unsure how to react, I think. Yes that's a definite victory when it happens but does fall under the umbrella of what I described as our current landscape having a good number of people who are either just afraid or not sure how to act/react accordingly when they buy into the IC superiority that your characters exude.

As soon as you convince them they're beat, they ARE beat in that regard and they're apparently afraid to attack any of the elements of your RPs that others may have been able to, which I don't want to get into and give away because it's up to them to figure out and up to you to patch along the way, etc... but one thing I can get into some detail about simply because it's very obvious (I feel I'm not giving anything too huge away in the following two paragraphs) is I'm very shocked you have gotten away so clean on so many occasions where it seemed as though you didn't even proofread your work, which on its own won't hurt yourself TOO badly with most of our current judges but could have been exploited to incredible levels by the right opponents.

There have been many times you'll glaze your narration and commentary with vocabulary that suggests your narrator and character have a superb intellect and intelligence level, but then in the same sentence the grammar is broken or you're writing "your" instead of "you're" (or other common yet necessary to avoid strikes if we're going for the superior intellect style) and that just kills the WHOLE mood of what you're attempting if we're seeing thesaurus worthy words right next to incorrect usage that clearly isn't intentionally tied to an IC quirk or flaw. Broken coding left unfixed also delivers this negative effect. It feels unnatural or careless, and just isn't convincing if it's not all flawless when it comes to the easily fixable elements. See what I'm saying? And these are areas harder trash talkers and exploiters would have had a field day with and been able to feed off of like monsters when they tie it in with the half of their trash talk that didn't even need those extra bits to feed off, tying right in with being your answer of SOME of what we're missing lately in the fed. Just this small aspect alone can be huge under the right light. The ruthless killers who can take ANY and everything, spin it IC, and in turn train someone to never allow themselves that same mistake/opening again. I wouldn't normally get into these types of details with anybody publicly but it seemed like you were open to getting into detail here and I'm just hoping you can use these points to improve and refine your own work in the future, or perhaps some people can see this and start trying to go harder in the areas they'll attack. So again as I said earlier it's not a knock against you or anyone when I talk about the landscape or who has had a somewhat easy path... it's just that there are a lot of strategies and abilities I've come to know as being amazing, that are sadly missing from today's XWF. That why I stress that we don't want everyone to become the same writer, same trash talker, etc... we should be trying to learn and improve as much if not more than we're trying to teach others or give feedback. All of us, myself included if I am RPing.

By now I feel like I'm just rambling on but I do find these types of talks fascinating and like sharing my thoughts. When I have more time during the week I'm going to try and do some digging for some examples of what I feel are amazingly hard hitting trash talk pieces on our current boards and if I find anything that really reminds me of that feeling of being kicked in the stomach, I'll make a thread somewhere with some examples.

All in all I think we do have a great roster here and as long as we're all feeding off of each other's ideas and everybody is always adapting and thinking outside of their own box instead of trying to emulate somebody else, or trying to teach too much of what they themselves do, we may have one of the XWF's strongest rosters yet later this year!

PS: Didn't proof read this yet. Might edit it later lol just need to post and go eat!

Ok proofed it and edited a few lines as of right now. Back to my food I go!

Oh, guilty as charged. I've absolutely made those errors and I'm working to clean them up. I think it's kind of hard to hit on grammar errors though, like the you're, your etc...because if you're treating it as a promo that is being listened to, how could somebody possibly suss out which variant of a contraction somebody's using? They all sound the same. To me, that dips way harder into fourth wall breaking than even I'm willing to do (and you all know I dip my toes in that well on a fairly regular basis) and it would be easy to turn the tables on that and be all like "what kind of fucking lunatic thinks they know what contractions I'm using...?" I used to hit Caedus on that level of pedantry sometimes and I feel like it worked well. Hell I would love to run into somebody who tries to go all written word grammar Nazi on one of my pieces because I think it would be easy to call out how insane that is. I mean, can you imagine Hulk Hogan being all like "Lemme tell ya somethin' brother, you need to remember your past and present participles when you're telling me I huff farts, BROTHER...." LOL. I'm exaggerating of course, but I think you get the drift.

Plus, I realize it's not your personal point of view, but I'm much less of a purist when it comes to grammar and image tags and stuff like that. I see the entire hobby more for what it aspires to be (a televised event) than what it actually is (a writing competition). So, when I'm reading a piece, I'm way more apt to let grammar stuff go if I come away thinking, "Damn, that would be a killer shoot or an amazing scene if it were filmed".

(04-06-2018, 08:55 PM)The Engineer Said: Oh, guilty as charged. I've absolutely made those errors and I'm working to clean them up. I think it's kind of hard to hit on grammar errors though, like the you're, your etc...because if you're treating it as a promo that is being listened to, how could somebody possibly suss out which variant of a contraction somebody's using?

They absolutely can, and have. I just don't want to be the one giving these finer details out of how to hit on those things since clearly 99%-100% of the current roster doesn't know how to do it. I promise though, when done right, it's entertaining as hell and hits very hard. Even I was shocked the first time I saw it done right, not in a cheap ooc-ish manner.

Quote:Hell I would love to run into somebody who tries to go all written word grammar Nazi on one of my pieces because I think it would be easy to call out how insane that is. I mean, can you imagine Hulk Hogan being all like "Lemme tell ya somethin' brother, you need to remember your past and present participles when you're telling me I huff farts, BROTHER...." LOL. I'm exaggerating of course, but I think you get the drift.

lol I totally get it, and I'd love to see it too because I bet it would be a very entertaining read from both sides if things really got that down and dirty because remember I'm talking about masters of the art and not people who will come off as idiots reaching too hard for straws. This is what I'm talking about missing! lol

Quote:Plus, I realize it's not your personal point of view, but I'm much less of a purist when it comes to grammar and image tags and stuff like that. I see the entire hobby more for what it aspires to be (a televised event) than what it actually is (a writing competition). So, when I'm reading a piece, I'm way more apt to let grammar stuff go if I come away thinking, "Damn, that would be a killer shoot or an amazing scene if it were filmed".

I can appreciate that too but I've always been guilty of thinking of an RP as a whole as a presentation. People who can get away with a brilliantly written piece that's creative as hell, plus has amazing formatting, easy on the eyes coloring, zero errors, pictures and graphics/layout that increase the appeal, and heck even a song or video(s) added in if it/they actually fit the theme of the piece of work, have always been the ones I fall in love with and try to have homosexual sex with. Or course the substance and quality of what's being told through the writing weighs in above all else but I do love an amazing "presentation" as a whole.

(04-06-2018, 03:25 PM)Christian_Andrews Said: Shane, you don't sound like an ass at all my friend! We need honesty, and open and honest communication will only help serve us and encourage us to be better, rather than settle in complacency. As long as it's done with respect, of course lol.

I totally hear you, and I thought about that myself here, not just about other role players but about myself as well. I'm sure we can all use a refresher course, as well as some genuine tips and tricks from others that can help out those who want to listen and receive them, veteran or not. Although I had more of a generic idea, then specific, so that everybody could benefit from the advice. Things like, expounding on scene information, detailed characteristics and attributes, protagonist and antagonist building, etc. etc. Generic things that will in general, make us better writers. Not anything too specific in particular to style, so that nobody would be pushed one way or another in their thoughts and ideas and still be allowed to have creative thinking and thought processes that are "out of the box." Does that make sense?

Sorry I missed this earlier but yes that does make sense and is more in line with what I'm hoping we can all help each other with to continuously grow and have even more fun reading each others ever improving works, all the way from RPs to written results.