Sincere roleplaying doesn't always mean "good" roleplaying, heh.

I now have to re-read One Piece... again. This is the second time reading your comic has made me want to do this and it is great.

Is anyone else having problems with the page loading for this one?

It might seem a little awkward since they are describing their actions and thoughts, not actually acting them out. That's more of an online roleplay thing than an offline one.

It still works though because while Nat is really into the whole roleplaying thing it doesn't necessarily mean she's great at it. And she's likely learnt how to roleplay from online rp channels and stuff. Luke's probably decent at it though.

Also I don't quite remember the coming conflict with Arlong, because it must have been like... a decade or something since I read it last? I only remember bits and pieces of it.

So that's going to be cool.

I agree. In a lot of the P&P groups I both ran and played in, there was the houserule that if a person narrated their characters thoughts or motivations, it meant other could interpret them due to their expressions, etc.
Of course, that didn't stop the GM from taking someone outside of the room and asking "What the hell was your toon thinking?"

But yeah. I see this a lot more often in Forum and MMORPG roleplay. It makes sense in Forum games, since you sometimes need to buffer the character count, and it's a lot more like co-writing a book than, say, a movie (in P&P).

Here it makes senses in the context of the story, though. Nami's more of a Thesbian RPer than a Combat RPer, and it seems like she's rubbing off on Luffy - YAY!

My own role-play experience is limited and dated (long story), but the general impression I got was you narrated/described things only if acting them out was going to be problematic. Usually this was because of the nature of what was happening: either actually acting it out was impossible for the people involved or it would create awkwardness to potential trauma for either the people involved, the audience, or both if a scene was acted out.

There was also the fact that an RPG really does have to balance out the role-playing and the gaming. My experience is the former is usually what suffers, but there really are people that instead forget about the latter. You can be bored because you don't get to role-play as much as you ought and you can be bored because you don't get to game as much as you ought.

That sounds more like the LARP (Live Action RolePlay) variant.

Never actually LARPed. We were usually playing GURPS, though eventually most of the group got into D&D 3e (which was brand new at the time).