ti-legacy.com

Also, while I liked The Inquisition and its non-combat XP accumulation and skill advancement, I'm kind of hoping for something a little less intense in how roleplaying is "measured". That is, I want to spend a lot of time doing "say" commands and short emotes to interact with other people, and less time constructing five-sentence emotes as if I am a professional author writing a story. Either the XP formula would have to be less rigorous about measuring whether or not you are RPing, or even better XP might not exist at all and skill advancement would be less concrete and formulaic.

I might just be misremembering why I felt compelled to write these four sentence emotes. Perhaps I just got the sense that there was a social stigma against short emotes, or something along those lines. Plus, the XP doesn't really super matter in TI nearly as much as it does in other MUDs, so I guess it's not all that important one way or the other.
Anyway, like I said, this was a long time ago. I just remember that the length of emotes everyone used felt clunky because it slowed down the live interactive element of roleplay that I was looking for. That is, it felt a lot more like co-scripting a scene than improv acting. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for at the time.
That also interacted poorly for me with some of the other features of the game. At least when I was playing, Inquisition had/has rich world-building that requires you to read hundreds of help files to understand basic background knowledge your character needs, an unforgiving IC culture that makes it easy to mess up and die or become a permanent outcast as a newbie if you don't figure out how to fit in fast enough, and lack of OOC channels to help you learn the ropes. There's a lot of good in that because it makes the game much more immersive, but at the same time I am reaching a stage of my life where I don't have as much time to pore over help files to learn which colors are legal for commoners to wear and what title you should call the widow of a knight. It's fun to learn and it encompasses this really incredible world built by the staff and players, but it also feels like a lot of work to do to play a game.
That said, I will give The Inquisition another chance. It was well ahead of most other MUDs I played at the time in terms of story, code-supported RP, and active player involvement in world-building. Should be interesting to see how much it has changed over the years.

Reddit Guy wrote:... felt a lot more like co-scripting a scene than improv acting. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for at the time.

I'm not a fan of purple prose, but I am a huge, huge fan of emotes that have more content and context than dialogue.

"The disemboweled mercenary crumpled from his saddle and sank to the clouded sward, sprinkling the parched dust with crimson droplets of escaping life fluid."
Crow: You mean blood?
Mike: Let's not jump to conclusions.
— The Eye of Argon MST

There are times within the life of any teller of tales (not including Film Noir) in which they are faced with a situation not most dire but not far removed: the writing, while not lacking in such delightful virtues as a sturdy coherent plot or rich characterization, is supremely dry and uninteresting to read.
In response, the writer chooses to indulge in the writing technique known to gentlefolk as Purple Prose, wherein the writing becomes much more florid, eschewing quotidian sentences for elaborate concatenation of phrases and clauses. On occasion, such racks of ornament can be despicable, with the scintillating adjectives bewildering the reader and obfuscating the subject. In the worst case scenario, such prose will reduce readers to skim-reading for fear of trudging through pages and pages of mundane description slowly and painfully, just as violet-tinted patches on a garment incompatibly hued are agonizing for a human being's photon detectors.