rpanons | dine on a balanced breakfast of playing tops and bottoms

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If you get a really long and lengthy tag with several hooks (multiple lines of dialogue, setting changes, new body language for every new line of conversation), do you need to respond to each and every hook?

Or is it ok to respond to one or two? Maybe even just the last one, to keep the scene/conversation going smoothly?

not really. i think treating a tag like a checklist of individual hooks you have to respond to can lead to clunky replies that can be a bit hard to respond to. it can give the thread a sort of stuttery, stopping and starting feel

rather than each individual hook, try and take the tag as a sum of its parts and reply however feels most natural. sometimes this means you aren't going to hit on a response to every single individual eyeball twitch of the other character but it will give the thread an overall better sense of forward momentum, at least in my experience

+1 this is the way

personally i'd choose the one or two that would lead to the most interesting thread results and gently brush over the others as 'something the other character did but there was no time for my character to react'

but i personally hate breaking tags up into responding to dialog line by line so

I always prefer making a conversation feel organic. If you reply to each hook separately, you get the weird parallel conversations phenomenon, which is just distractingly nonsensical.

(Replying to you but also to the rest of the anons who replied)

Yeah I try to avoid the parallel conversations too, but a lot of people tag this way. I've been trying to figure out if tagging back without the parallel dialogue (even if that's their practice) is fine.

I don't want them to think I'm ignoring something they've set up, but I also want to move the thread along if that makes sense.

like the anons before me, i advise to avoid getting bogged down in reacting to every little thing. at a certain point it kind of feels like i have to overlay both tags on a projector to figure out what character b is doing throughout character a's tag.

with dialogue, i recommend treating the entire tag's worth as one line even if it has been broken up by introspection or bits of body language or action. it is very likely the tag was not written in mind for your character to respond to each line separately, so it is better to let the tag breathe. if the conversation shifts too much or there are multiple points you want to touch on, i would start with the latest line and work the conversation back around to the other points you wanted to hit.

it's also on the thread partner to not give too much in one tag. if there is something that happens early on in the tag that your character absolutely would react to in a way that would derail the flow of the rest of your partner's tag, i would reach out to the player to ask them to shorten their tag to that hook so that your character can react properly to what is happening.

in general, i try to treat my tags like dnd turn-based actions. if i'm not initiating a scene change or ending a scene, there is only so many things my character can do within a tag in real time. kind of like on tv or in movies, just think of a normal tag as like one camera shot where someone is doing or saying something before the camera cuts away to the other character.

I usually go backwards if I also want to respond to something earlier, so I start with the latest dialogue and then add in a response to an earlier point as though I just didn't want to interrupt them while they were talking.

If it's not natural, I just stick to the latest talking point and acknowledge the rest in the narrative to show my character was paying attention.

dine on a balanced breakfast of playing tops and bottoms

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