So there's been some talk about using THINK and FEEL to document your character's motives, especially when they are being adversarial or duplicitous. (I'm intentionally leaving TELLs out of this post, because I'm only focusing on things that don't broadcast to the room.)
I love that THINK, FEEL, and REMEMBER exist. Sometimes I use them a lot. Sometimes I barely use them.
I use THINK sometimes to work out what my PC is going to say before he says it, or for bits of throwaway dialogue that don't need to clutter up everyone's screen. But I don't always use it to document the motivations behind WHY my PC has said something or reacted the way he did, and I don't for two reasons.
1. Whereas the length of my emotes vary depending on the pacing of the scene, and the writing style of my partner(s), I still fall very squarely into the "improv acting" camp from the earlier discussion about emote lengths. When I'm inhabiting my character and roleplaying well, I'm reacting as him to the things happening in the moment. THINK and FEEL sometimes go out the window, because I'm trying to maintain a certain pace, and also because writing a narrator's view is a little immersion breaking for me.
2. The other reason I don't use THINK and FEEL in many circumstances is simply because they're the wrong verbs. Human thought is complex and personal, but unless we're trying to work out something language-related, I don't get the sense that many of us think in grammatically-correct English sentences before doing something, and FEEL can be similarly clunky. I'd be a lot more inclined to use FEEL if the verb was IS, or DO, or even WONDER. Which is why I'd love to see a command like IMOTE, that functions identically to all the other EMOTE commands, but only echoes to the player and to the staff. Here's some examples of what I'm talking about.
<<a tense conversation that Yeshev isn't a part of concludes>>
say (dryly) Well. That was pleasant.
think I'm not terribly interested, but I'm going to make a pithy remark and see how people react, because I do that all the time. (This documents the rational, but it isn't a believeable thought, and strikes me as bad writing.)
feel disinterested, but not above making a pithy remark to see how people react. (This isn't terrible to me, but it did take far too long to figure out how to match the rest of the words to the verb FEEL, which has the side effect of making me think about my RP instead of just RPing. Also, it leads to a log dominated by You feel, blablah, You feel, blahblah, You feel.)
imote isn't terribly interested, but that won't keep him from making a pithy remark and seeing what happens. (This, for me at least, is much more elegant and easier to write without dropping out of character)
imote doesn't have a horse in this race, but he's not going to pass up the chance to glean some information (Same, and even harder to parse into a THINK or a FEEL).
This has been something I've been thinking about for a while, but wanted to open it up for wider input/discussion as opposed to just filing it in the IDEA wishlist.
