Most of your rules are right, and are good ways to help people completely new to roleplays write. But there is (in my opinion) a rule that should fundamentally be on every roleplay helpguide : Rules are meant to be broken! Some rules, such as spelling, don’t IC market a product, etc. are common sense, and are hard to break, but, for example,

“Write no more than 1024 characters per post, or no more than ~ one paperback page at a time.”

I think I have broken that rule every roleplay I have been in. The lengthy pieces of writing are necessary in, say, a key romantic scene, or explaining the entrance of an important character, or a long (subjective) scene. Already, I have, according to your rule, am half-way to my bare maximum.

Remind people how rules are useful as a base, but they are meant to be broken in some cases! In fact, the best of the best do it wholeheartedly. Quentin Tarintino, when writing Pulp Fiction, for example, broke all the rules of script writing; writing things that you cannot act out, for example, writing a characters history, etc. Once you get the hang of something, then you can start twisting it and tweaking it until you get it juuust right, and anyone who says it disagrees with current rules, well, they aren’t being creative, they are being technical!

Anyway, I’d like to stress how much I like and agree with most of what you said (especially how it is newb friendly). Just try and avoid saying number limits, because I know people who have taken that literally. Like when I said to try and use no more than 2 adjectives per 500 words, people just wrote storyline, and I almost cried at the lunacy of the situation (it turned from the big, strong, bald white man carried his furry grey dog hurriedly to the large, underpaid vet to “The man took his dog to the vet. The vet cured the dog.”

P.S I probably went on quite a bit there…

P.P.S 1556 characters.