Advice/Help How long is a good reply?

[Idea]

This hasn't happened to me exactly but one time someone gave a reply similar to this:

She finished speaking and looked intently at her conversational partner, waiting for a reply. She didn't do anything, she simply stood there and waited for a reply, as she had just finished speaking. She waited for him to reply, wondering what he would say.

What is your take on something like that?

To answer that I'd like to refer to what I said earlier:

How long should you typical reply be? It should be as long as it can be, so long as it is the most efficient to your goals and you are able to make every ounce of it count.

The thing that post does wrong is not the repition itself, but rather repeting something for no reason other than to repeat it, and including an action for no reason other than including that action. As far as I can tell the player was either not given anything to work with in the prior post, was extremely lazy or was trying to do something with the character they are clearly not skilled enough to accomplish.

The most common excuse I see for that kind of post is "that's just what my character would do". Assuming the person was thinking that way (AKA the post being the result of the player's attempt to make the character consistent rather than them being lazy or not being able to work with the current circumstances), then what's happening is rather simple: Poor character design.

When the player makes their character (which has to stay consistent enough to not just be a plot device with a face, but have enough wiggle room not to be a robot, just inpututput), the player should account for their own skill, experiences and willingness to research. Not everyone is equally capable of playing every type of character, even if they love those types of characters. One of the most common types, for instance, the silent badass loner, is extremely difficult to pull off, yet as mentioned, is pretty common, and they are often the kind that results in post like that. Because when a player doesn't think ahead before desigining a character that wouldn't reply, they might encounter times when their character would be silent, but then they don't know how to fill that space or give their partner something to work with.

The problem isn't the repetition or the specific action, it's that the player didn't know how to make use of them.

 

[Phantasmagorialice]

From the perspective of somebody who only recently started doing this: I believe that a good reply doesn't necessarily have a length requirement but needs a certain component. That components is that it needs to give whoever you're interacting with something to build off of. I feel like that's the most important part.