Back in the 'good old days' of traditional text only paper books (I'm talking of novels here, not comics), everything was black text on white paper. When a character said anything, speech marks were used. When a character thought anything, italics were used. This format has been successful for hundreds of years.

Now, I understand the need for the " OOC: " to indicate Out of Character discussions in story threads.

But does anyone know, how or when, on role play forums, colored text came to be used to indicate speech, and thought? Is there such a real need?

I don't know how it came about, but I recall that in the 90s (during the AOL heyday) there were a lot of text based RPG communities that used chat rooms, instant messenger, and message boards to run various types of RPGS (mostly freeform or with very simplistic systems). In that time period, I recall it was customary to color your text.

I've never really thought twice about it, but I do like it.

Whether there is such a need is debatable. Obviously there's not really a need for anything, but it's a matter of preference.

MUDs and MUSHes come to mind as a possible influence.

I myself prefer black on white with punctuation and italics as appropriate.

There is no standardised posting format, it's all just a matter of personal preference,  Some GMs use coloured text, some don't.

Black and white text was a printing limitation from pre-20th century times by which time it was traditional and extra colors not added to books except for high priced specials. IIRC the first major color photo in newspaper was back in 1976 for a Mars landing showing pink land/blue sky.

Computers started monochrome; TSR-80 anyone?  But they advanced, options showed up and savvy tech folks took advantage of these innovations and coloring was offered and folk took to it.

It stands out. You have to stand out to get noticed.

Nothing in a B&W post/print/text stands out.

This isn't a novel, though.
First of all, each protagonist is written by a different author, and many (if not most... or almost all) of them are amateurs.

Novels are also limited by the need to physically manufacture them. A single dark color printed on a single light color is considerably easier and cheaper to produce than something else. But then, not all novels do stick to just text. There are sometimes images, diagrams, change of fonts, and sometimes ways of playing with the medium like text that appears damaged to represent a damaged note or book the protagonist is reading--teardrops on a handwritten letter, or scratched out portions that another character tried to hide.

Obviously monochrome text is sufficient, but we have extra tools available. Why wouldn't we use them?



Oh, and italicized thoughts are a formatting choice that not all novelists use anyway, even if it is common.

On another site I use, the GM can set each character's speech to a different colour.  This makes it easy to tell who is talking.  Of course, that depends on each player to open and close quotations properly, including fixing any copy/paste that doesn't transfer accurately.  Also there is often an adjustment time since, though there are not as many choices for background as here, different people may be using different themes, so that some colours don't show up well for everyone.

It's funny that so many folks have posed questions like this.  Many expressing disdain for the whole idea.

As stated above - with new tools - comes new methods and means.

For myself - I find a *LOT* of players WON'T use quotations marks to indicate speech.  So, coloration is easier (often for them too).  Might sound minor and trivial - and you might be thinking "just kick them", but, that's just lame when the medium (the forums) allow for a perfectly acceptable option.

I don't insist on using colored text for speech; typically I follow the lead of whoever I'm writing with, or what standards are set by the group, if it's a group game.  I do like to use it, however, and when I ran a group I did ask that the players used colors.  However, I absolutely do not find colored speech to be an adequate substitute for quotation marks and proper punctuation.  I can't get past people not putting speech in quotation marks, even if the text is colored.  It just takes me out of the scene and grates on my nerves way too much.

Colored text can be helpful if multiple characters are speaking in a single post, as a sort of 'signature' for a character, to differentiate PCs from NPCs, etc.  I find it a useful tool and I think it looks nice, and it can also help when replying to a post; if you're reviewing to make sure your character responded to everything that was said in a long post, you can just refer to the colored text for a quick check before hitting 'post.'

As for where it came from, I'm not sure.  I remember on the first forum where I ever RPed each person was in the habit of playing multiple characters and we could only post under our account names, so we would use different colored text to indicate which character was doing what.
This message was last edited by the user at 19:42, Sat 06 Feb 2016.

I color my character's words here on this site, because that's what I've always done here.  I don't do it anywhere else.  I'm in three active games at the moment and in two of them the GMs have said that our characters should use colored text.  No problem, that's what I do here.

I think the generally slower pace of a play-by-post game (at least in my case) encourages more infodumps, so I can certainly understand why colored speech can be useful.  For instance:
http://i9.photobucket.com/albu...eech_zpsfrip1no3.png
I've tastefully blurred it out so that you aren't distracted by what was actually said.

In the first paragraph I basically wrote, "Hey, X and Y just happened, here's what I'm thinking: blah."

Then in the next paragraph I describe my own actions, and say something, and only that spoken text is colored.  Then I continue to describe my own actions.

And last I throw in my rolls and OOC descriptions of what "really" happened (for instance, up where I write what I was doing I described how my character was throwing something, and where he tried to throw it, and then down at the bottom I simply say, "attack roll, throw X at Y".

Still, though, there's a lot of text.  While I believe that my character's internal reactions and thoughts are great, they're not necessarily something that another character might realize.  And they might happen to look somewhere else or decide that they don't care what I'm doing.  What a character says, though, is usually the most actionable thing, and as such when playing by post here at RPOL I'll color my speech so that it stands out.
This message was last edited by the user at 21:43, Sat 06 Feb 2016.

I dunno...if someone came up to me and said "Hi there, nice day" and then proceeded to stab me in the face with a pointy stick, I wouldn't really care much at all about what they'd just said ;).

Had a discussion recently in one game about coloured text for speech. I don't get why people use it - if you want to show speech, that's what speech marks are for. And every character has their own profile/avatar so you can see who's talking just by looking at the left of the screen. And, you know, by the use of their name in the narrative ;). I never really was given any kind of persuasive reason as to why coloured speech is "necessary" beyond "The brain likes colour" (dunno about this...the brain likes patterns, but they don't have to necessarily be all multicoloured) and "all the other games I'm in have coloured speech". Which isn't really a reason at all. When I mentioned that seeing a game with coloured speech puts me off joining, one person said that they were "saddened" (or some similar word) that I felt that way because it meant I was missing out. This same person then said, a couple of posts later, that they wouldn't join a game if it didn't use coloured speech. I noticed this but forgot to pick them up on it when it came to typing my reply.

I try to work out why people use coloured speech and can only come up with a few theories. Maybe these people are lazy and don't want to bother putting in descriptive narrative about how their character is talking, or even that they are (ie not bothering with phrases like "X said"). Maybe they're terrible with punctuation and are somehow ignorant of the existence of speech marks or how to use them. Maybe they think that speech is somehow more important than anything else a character can do (it isn't - see the start of this post for an example :P). I dunno. I just find it really distracting and it bugs me. Imagine if books used this and tried to have a different colour for every character. Imagine if a book like Lord of the Rings did this, or anything else with a lot of characters often interacting at once. Would you have to try and memorise every character's colour? And if certain characters had colours that were really noticeable and one of them was believed dead or something, and as a Wham Line at the end of a chapter they suddenly come back and give a one-liner to announce their return...if you had just turned the page but not got to that bit yet you might notice their colour and have the impact somewhat spoilt by knowing they're about to suddenly turn up and start talking.

Whenever I look for a game on RPOL these days I have to remember to first check whether it uses coloured text for dialogue. I am in one or two games which use this because I wasn't in the habit of checking back when I joined. I just use plain black text and speech marks, though. Coloured text is for OOC and my colour for that is dark green...it would've been purple but in the first ever game I joined on here, the GM requested everyone's OOC colour be different and someone had beaten me to it ;).

I really, really prefer colored text for dialogue because, as I've gotten older, I have a lot of trouble focusing on and internalizing text.  The color helps break it up and makes the parts I really need to pay attention to (and respond to) stand out.

Then again, I'm generally on a crusade against people writing in 1st person in multiple-player situations (where the onus falls on the readers to dissect the 1st person post to decide what their character would actually know and what they wouldn't), so I'd say that's part of it, too.

I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with writing in first-person, necessarily. It's when they start including character thoughts and feelings that you have to start skipping unless you don't mind mixing player and character knowledge - I like to keep the two as close as possible so I try never to read any IC stuff that my character wouldn't know.

You know how you've trained yourself to usually ignore what's on the sides of the screen on a website because it's usually just ads?  (Or is that just me?)  Also, I have a widescreen monitor.

Edit: I'm not saying that everyone needs their own color to post.  I'm saying that I usually pick up who's posting by context or because the person usually puts that in their post like: ["Blah," said character.]  And I already have a mental image of what the character looks like, so I usually never look at character portraits.
This message was last edited by the user at 22:58, Sat 06 Feb 2016.

Before I found and started on RPOL, I desperately wanted to participate in PbF, and I found the numerous Star Trek PbF forums. What put me off joining them was the 'Training Sessions'. None of them, that I could see, allowed viewings of their story posts. Very few of them described what that training entailed. So I can only presume it was all about posting formats and writing style. Thank God, I didn't join them. There's nothing worse for me, than being dictated to.

The problem is that concentrating on the spoken words only means your character is missing out on non-verbal cues.  As Ameena said, if someone says "Hi there, nice day" and then proceeds to stab you in the face with a pointy stick, what they're saying isn't the bit you really need to pay attention too.  :>

So I'm in the no colouring camp - I quite agree that coloured text does attract the attention, so I prefer text not to be coloured so I'm not distracted from the rest of the post.

Thinking on't, paperback novels are ubiquitously black on white (maybe some kids' books dabble in colour ?) but does anyone know if any electronic versions of novels use colouring of speech or any other text ?  Cost of printing's not an issue there, so be interesting if they did.  And before anyone asks, I'm old school - I like to hold the book in my hands, even if it costs more.

I always use quotes, prefer not to colour speech , but am happy to do so if GM wants it (I write the post first then  once I'm happy with it, I go back and colour the spoken bits), and if my players want to colour speech in my games, they're more than welcome to.

I don't know where it originated, Rpol was the first place I saw it and for a while I thought coloured speech and fruity swearing were inventions of the Rpol Admin.

I'm with Silver Cat. I'm old-school and always use speech marks and punctuation in addition to colour, and I only use colour because it seems that the majority of games here use coloured speech and I just give my players what they want. I go with the flow.

Having said that, now that I've used colour for a while, I find it is easier to keep track if several NPCs are talking in the same post (most often happens in a GM post) and, unless you're in a really vicious player v player game, your interactions with other players will mainly be via speech rather than pointy sticks - that's what the orcs use, and you don't often talk to them...

Sometimes in a novel you have to re-read a paragraph to be sure who said what. Coloured text avoids that.

To me, only joining games that use black and white text makes as much sense as only dating platinum blondes. I might like them, I might even prefer them, but I'm sure as heck not going to restrict myself only to them - they're a minority, and there's an awful lot of wonderful experiences to be had out there with other colours... :)