"Lore" being a bit of an umbrella term for background info that can be called upon. I'm the writer in a game project right now, but not the creative or narrative lead, and I'll tell you this, GOD I wish the director had a lore bible for me to reference. If I need to verify "canon", I have to DM him and he's not always available, between hospitalization, being from Israel and fleeing the war, having a full time job as an artist, and just being in a different time zone.
But returning from that tagent, fleshing out a singular chunk of Torn City would be a nice way to keep up a cohesive and accessible RP community, so if two players that haven't spoken before say they're going to "Tom's Computer Repair", we can all know approximately where that is, or at the very least what it's like.
Precisely, and possibly creating descriptions/ lore for those places. So example, you could mark a building on one of the streets as "Dystopia", a techno-themed night club. It's reasonably popular, but was over time frequented by software crackers, grey hats, black hats, and various cyber criminal organizations. The owners took note of their consistent patronage and more importantly their frivolous spending habits, so adjustments were made to accommodate them, making it a safe den in meat-space for hackers to physically network and get plastered.
That's across the street from the Swiss Maiden cafe, which used to operate into the late evenings until Dystopia smothering the nights with techno music. Even if it didn't affect the inside of the cafe that much, it was clearly reducing patronage in the evenings, so the owners have a bitter hatred for the club. The cafe is otherwise nice and started facilitating live music in the early evenings to help drown out the noise from across the street, so it's become somewhat of a jazz lounge that's popular with hipsters and jazz enthusiasts.
The Sparklean Laundromat next door has been around for a long time, and no one is sure who even owns it at this point. When you ask anyone working there to empty the coins from the machines, they usually just shrug. With apartments in the area not having large enough laundry facilities for how many people live in them, Sparklean gets a lot of a traffic, making it a decent place to make small-talk as long as you keep your hands on your possessions.
So, I was pondering something that could be good for fun worldbuilding/ creating a shared sense of setting. What if a bunch of people picked some miscellaneous section of the map and fleshed out the buildings within it? Something like our own little Kamurocho. If the Yakuza games mean anything to you, that is. Just a tiny little district in the city that we could put on labels for the buildings.
For sure. I probably gave off the wrong vibe initially. My point was chiefly that having certain demands or expectations in someone's output benefits no one. Too large of a requirement can be difficult for new writers/ players, or too restrictive for experienced ones, and that "demand" can lead to people needing to waffle just to satisfy the other person, which neither teaches writing skills, nor promotes a friendly dynamic.
I suppose I should clarify, I'm bemoaning the people who will talk down to other players for a lack of "RP literacy" because they don't meet a desired word quota. That's not good for new players and it's not good for experienced players. It can also make it difficult to parse multi-player threads/ sessions. I've been to a lot of "seeking RP partner" channels in discords, and frequently their demands are absurd. Coupling that with the fact that demanding a hefty word count doesn't equate to better writing, or at least not automatically.
I've played with people who complained that I wasn't replying with enough because two characters were having a conversation and I would reply with the necessary lines to keep the conversation rolling. Those aren't enjoyable people to be with.
I should specify that having done a bit of professional writing, being amateur novelist, and still working my way into the games industry as a writer, I don't define "literacy" as being capable of writing long stretches of text. I follow the old saying "You're not done when there's nothing more to add, you're done when there's nothing more you can remove."
Example: Sally Bridgemont felt her dark blonde hair toss in the breeze, its tips frequently whipping back and hitting her cheeks. Her emerald eyes would be shining in the sun were it not for her aviators. With the windows down, she could hardly hear the Led Zepplin blasting through the old car's speakers, but that didn't matter. The revving of the engine was the best music she could find. Sally was a motorhead. She loved cars, motorcycles, jetskis; if it had an engine and spewed emissions, it was a part of her domain. She had been driving for five hours through the country, crossing state after state, only stopping for the occasional bathroom break, some all-American fast food, and to top off her machine.
That was a lot of descriptive text sure, but it's all so expository, and hasn't told us anything important besides her liking cars and being American. We know she's female, blonde, has green eyes, and likes old music. We don't know where she's going, why she's going so far, what she's like as a person (hobbies don't count as a personality), or even her age. Is she a young woman going on a road trip to meet up with someone she met online? Is she an old lady heading south to see her grandkids? Not answering those questions builds up intrigue, but frontloading your text with unimportant information just bogs things down. What's even worse is when it's repeating established information, as is commonly the case in people padding out RP posts.
You'll also see a heavy reliance on subtle actions to stretch your word count without adding anything, such as: tapping fingers, licking lips, sighing, breathing, eyes drifting, humming, chewing, tapping your foot, crossing your arms, crossing your legs, tapping on your phone, analyzing who you're talking to, straightening your appearance, etc.
Not that it doesn't help to build the scene, but sometimes it's employed specifically to make a two-sentence reply meet the expecations of "RP literacy".
I'm still figuring out the lay of the land, but I'd enjoy an in-character experience for the game. My only thing is that I'm super burnt out on forum RP because of how much space gets taken up per reply, and I don't subscribe to the philosophy of "literate" roleplayers being people who post padded 8-paragraph filler posts for each and every response in a conversation.
I was considering putting up a personals ad, though that casts a narrower net and as a new player, 10k is affordable, but kind of a lot.