Learn 2 RP: Emotes

One thing you will quickly learn is a lot of role-players love to emote. Using emotes instead of words are a great way to describe your character, their actions or the situation better so that those around you understand you better.

Example:

Keste: Hello Desdarii!
Desdarii: Desdarii squints trying to focus on the familiar face.
Desdarii: Oh hello there, Keste! I almost didn't recognize you.

There are many emotes built into the game already that you can use with slash commands. Some of them have actions, some of them have vocals, some of them just display emote text on your screen. Most of them will say different things based on if you have someone targeted or not so make sure you try both versions out. Don’t worry about memorizing or knowing all of them. You will quickly develop your own favorite set of emotes that you’ll be using over and over.

As a word of warning, some of the built in emotes do not necessarily do what you think they should. For example you might think that /shake would offer your hand to someone in greeting; instead it says you shake your rear at someone. Not a very friendly greeting! Just look over the list or try an emote out first before using it in a RP situation.

You can create your own emote in game by typing: /em or /me

Example:

/em takes a sip out of her flask and slips it back into her pack.

Will appear in game as:
Desdarii takes a sip out of her flask and slips it back into her pack.

Creating your own emotes will not cause any actions or vocals to happen with your character but the text will be there describing what you are doing. These emotes have the same range as /say and will only be visible to those around you.

You can also bring your pets to live by adding a ‘s at the start of your emote.

Example:

/em 's kitten curls into a ball on her lap.

Will appear in game as:
Desdarii 's kitten curls into a ball on her lap.

The opposite faction will not understand emotes you make yourself but do comprehend emotes that are built into the game. Emotes made with the /em command show up as strange gestures to the opposite faction.

If you want to indicate an action in a specific chat channel, like guild chat, most people put asterisks or sometimes brackets or greater than/less than signs around their action to indicate an emote.

Example:

Desdarii: *Walks into the guild hall and greets her friends*

Using emotes will really help bring your character to life! Make sure you use start using them to give your character a little action.