wereguy2 wrote: I was not invoking common sense, merely stating my own opinion.
Yoss did make a good point, yes, though I don't really like the idea of breaking up related components of the same motion. For example, going back to my scenario in the original post, I was trying to type out a particularly complex shrug, involving a number of secondary movements around my character's body. This is, in itself, a single movement, and breaking it apart, or any other such action, seems rather flow-breaking to me.
Don't get into storyboarding or film production, then. Taking a simple action, such as a shrug, and rendering it a complicated action requiring more than a few words for the sake of description and couched significance may have a role, but not in the middle of an action sequence. That action sequence being defined by the possibility of danger, where time itself actually seems to play a role in the fate of those involved. If you amend your style to match the situation, you're contributing to the emotional experience of everyone involved. Quick, broken responses portray a tense or hurried situation, or at the very least, one where time is of the essence, even if the PC is keeping his Mary Sue cool.
When you do the opposite of what the situation calls for (which is sometimes appropriate and is a tactic that should be used sparingly), you run several risks, one of them being what happened to you, the other one being irritating the crap out of every one else who is on a thrill high and you suddenly tone down the drama by taking ten thousand years making a mostly useless and fluffy post about a god damn SHRUG, and another simply not being taken seriously by anyone else or having the egotistical "look at me I type macros" syndrome.
My main PC, as someone people may remember, can be either very tacit or throwing out massive walls of text. It really depends upon the situation, and I try to have a good measure of the mood and atmosphere and tailor my style to be appropriate (while retaining the character's complexity and significance...remember, less is often more!) When my PC does throw massive walls of text that are singular thoughts, it is my way of exhibiting the latent and unintentional impact of a high Charisma.
The massive walls of text the PC produces are (I hope) entertaining and interesting to read, and therefore don't earn any ire...plus I type quickly and don't edit myself too much so it doesn't take forever for them to come. But they're also very dominating. They stand out, they practically demand attention in a "beyond the fourth wall" way, and I think it works rather well to underscore the character's larger than life charisma...even when the character is trying to be passive or even overly intellectual and boring, the charisma comes through like a hammer smashing at the inside of your computer screen.
In action sequences, though, I keep the text short and flying. If lines overlap, all the better, as tense situations involving lots of people talking can indeed be confusing. And I stray from large descriptive emotes in action situations - give me the verb, and maybe an adverb stylizing the verb, and perhaps a subject noun (maybe with attached adjective or two for good measure, but usually adverbs and adjectives should be avoided because they're clunky and often just bog progress down) and that's all that's needed.
Is anyone laughing at this overanalysis yet? Please do, and try to forget the fact that I'm actually drop dead serious (because it is very embarrassing that I am!)
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