Awesome! There are a few things I want to point out before I get started. Grammar and punctuation. That was something a forum I used to frequent was very stringent on—there used to be people with the word SPAG in their signatures that would go around and correct people's posts. Very annoying, but there was still something to learn. SPAG stands for Spelling, Punctuation And Grammar, and it's key to writing in getting all your thoughts conveyed properly. Without proper SPAG it's going to be hard to follow your posts, and worse, people will have trouble trying to discern what it is you're trying to get across.
There are a few SPAG mistakes in your first post—allow me to point them out:
Put a period at the end of your sentence. "Twilight Town". Sometimes the rules on where a period goes when ending with a quotation is iffy. Some people like to put it inside all the time, while others (like me) think it's fine outside so long as it doesn't indicate what was said was the end of a sentence. Here, you can put the period inside or out. It all depends on your stylistic preference!
Capitalize new sentences. "Knowing…". Also, there's a missing comma in the middle of that second sentence: "Knowing that it was way
too peaceful for him and even though he liked fighting
, he didn't mind the serene feeling it gave him."
Some other minor errors: Struggle Tournament is capitalized. It's a game, and as such is a proper noun, like Scrabble or hosting a Tekken 5 Tournament.
Double space your paragraphs! It's much easier on the eyes and therefore makes things much easier to read!
That's a run-on sentence. It flows better with a few periods separating the different thoughts: "Ryoga arrived to the sandlot. He noticed two people fighting with plastic bats and collecting orbs. It looked fun but Ryoga needed to figure where on Tameiru he was."
Lastly:
Clean that sentence up a bit. It's a bit of a stream of consciousness and thus hard to follow. It's a run-on sentence, too, and the addition of remarking how it's the autumn is unnecessary and makes the sentence rather bulky. I would suggest something simpler, like: "So far the only indication of his whereabouts was that he seemed to be somewhere near the Jantoin Highlands. It was mostly due to the cold, but also the expansive mountain range that surrounded the town."
Twilight Town seems to be set in the mountains, so it makes sense for him to come to that conclusion. Would he simply figure that out based on cold alone? Surely there are other places in his home world that can get rather nippy. Then again, if he's unaware it's fall and the Jantoin Highlands is his only point of reference, then it could make sense. I bring this up because this is all things that should be going through his head. He doesn't know it's autumn, you said as much, but we as the readers don't need to know either. Part of RPing is to get inside your characters' heads, that is, only remark on things your characters would remark on. My favorite perspective for RPs is the limited third person viewpoint, which means you have an omniscient narrator, but the narrator only follows the character and doesn't know anything more. Leave the rest to the players who are writing with you. If you don't want to be surprised about the season, there are little things you can mention, like brown leaves on the trees (or the fact that those leaves are littering the street), the fact that the sun seems super cool at this time of day, a nip in the air, the SMELL OF AUTUMN (which is a lovely smell and oh my god I love this season).
This segues to my next bit:
Get inside your character's head! You're here because you want to tell a story, a story about your character, and in order to tell that story you want to show everyone who you're playing and why they should be playing with you. There is
so much missing in this first post that I would love to know about. How did Ryoga get to Twilight Town? How does he know it's call Twilight Town? That's a key detail we're missing. Where did he learn it? Was it a sign post, eavesdropping a conversation, talking to someone? It's the same thing with the Struggle Tournament. How does he know it's called Struggle? Struggle is a game native to Twilight Town. It doesn't exist anywhere else. He won't know what a Struggle is unless there was some sort of outside information, and that's missing in this post.
There's something here I want you to focus on: Show vs. Tell. It's key to making your writing interesting for your readers. "…even though he liked fighting…" Okay, that's cool, but portraying his hankering for a fight could be much more effective if you wrote something like: "His hands curled into fists, his arms itching with pent up energy. It had been a long time since he last got into a proper brawl, and there was a kick in his step as he searched the streets for someone looking to cause trouble. Relaxing his hands, he sighed. The streets were empty; not even the darkening alleyways had the decency to host a vagrant vagabond intent on some ill mischief. His eyes reached the sky, taking in the golden colors of twilight. He had to admit the peace was something he was not expecting. Breathing in the cool air, his arms fell to his sides. Despite it all, the serenity was somehow soothing to him."
See how I turned that one sentence into a full paragraph? Showing not only gets your point across, but there's so much more mood to the words, emotion in your character that we didn't receive before. I'd recommend Googling "Show vs. Tell" and see what you can find. Check out these links, for instance:
www.mariavsnyder.com/advice/showvstell.phpwww.wright.edu/~david.wilson/eng3830/creativewriting101.pdfAnd
read! Read, read, read! The best way to improve your writing skill is to read published works. Brian Jacques's
Redwall series was always a favorite of mine, Robert Jordan's
The Wheel of Time series, anything by King, Crichton, there's a world of books out there that are super enjoyable and you'll soon find yourself growing as a writer because you're learning it all through osmosis, even if you're not actively studying the way the authors set up their sentences and paragraphs. And if you do read extensively, good on you! Read more! We could always read more.
One more thing I want to mention: Ryoga is new to this world, but he seems pretty chill about it. Why? Most people when arriving on a strange world experience a myriad of emotions, confusion, fear, excitement, intimidation, etc. I don't really get any of that from Ryoga. He's a little confused, but I don't know how confused he is or why. What was he last doing? What is he thinking? Where is his
struggle? I'd like to direct you to a few threads in Traverse Town that take first posts in a strange new land. Check out Cadey's thread
First Snow. Both Cadence and Rosa do a brilliant job of finding themselves in a strange land and portraying the emotions their character is feeling. Also, take a look at my first post in
Where Is This? Zephyr wakes up completely confused at what's going on and just COWERS for a while. It's super adorable.
So I'd like you to take all this in consideration and rewrite your first post. Give some more emotion and thought process to Ryoga. Show, don't tell, in your writing, and leave things blank that he shouldn't yet know about. Twilight Town, Struggle Tournament, so on and so forth. This can be figured out later through RP, and it's nice to have someone there to help your character discover what is happening rather than state it all in the first post.
Go forth!
