How to make my roleplay responses more lengthy/detailed?

Question

How can I make my roleplay responses more lengthy and detailed?

For the recent months I've been roleplaying with several friends. our replies are normally two or three sentences. While I've shown signs of improvement at understanding my character, I've started to see that my responses need detail and consistently appear to count on a similar structure, similar action words, I've attempted longer reactions they simply don't come out as well.

Here are a couple examples on how I roleplay:

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She smiled. “I slept well did you?” She asked as she watched him it up.

She smiled “That’s good I’ll go start on the breakfast.” She walked out of the room and into the kitchen.

She grabbed the pots and pans as usual and began to turn on the food and grab everything she needed.

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Now, what I’m mainly pointing out here is my pattern of opening with either my character’s name or pronoun. And that it’s merely 3 lines long and has no detail at all. It’s been bothering me for a while but I rarely know how else to word/structure certain things. The nature of roleplay already puts me into a position where I can only write things my character is doing, saying, thinking, or feeling -- is this a natural consequence, or could I be doing more?

Answer 1

Length isn't necessarily the issue here - many interactions you have throughout the day will be short ones, 3-liners like this. If you wrote out your actual morning from today like a page from a book, you'd probably find it fairly similar! The problem is more that it doesn't necessarily read well.

Step 1: Try leading with the dialogue.

"Hello there," the warrior quipped as he emerged from hiding

Step 2: Use Participles, and swap the verbs / pronouns

Snarling, his opponent replied "General Kenobi"

Step 3: Stop with all the smiling.

Or, at least, the repetition. Of 5 sentences there, 2 of them are "She smiled." - adjectives and synonyms exist. "She smiled shyly" / "She smirked" / "She grinned lasciviously".
Secondly, your last sentence uses the verb "grab" twice, which makes it sound - well, constrained, stilted.
Finally, all 5 of them (if we exclude dialogue for a moment) begin with the word "She". If a pronoun is needed, see if any sentences can be rewritten to use "Her" instead. This brings us to...

Step 4: Show, don't tell.

Currently, your excerpts read like a monotonous list.

She did this.
She did that.
She did the other.
Later, she did more of the first thing.

While there is nothing actually wrong will "telling" - and some stories / authors do it very well - you seem to have fallen into several of the pitfalls that this (mildly overhyped) advice is there to help you avoid. Anton Chekhov, to whom the advice is often attributed, is frequently misquoted with the following pithy summary:

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

(His actual quote, in a letter to his brother, is much longer and more detailed: "In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball")

So, let's try those lines again:

She smiled, and asked "I slept well, did you?", her eyes tracking his body as he got up.

"That's good, I'll go start on the breakfast." With a smile, she walked out of the room and into the kitchen.

Grabbing the pots and pans as usual, she began to turn on the cooker and collect everything she needed.