WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT TEXT PAUSES IN GAME DIALOG?

I used to do this a lot until people complained about it.

It makes sense. Let people read at their own pace...

author=Sated
When I have pauses, I allow the player to skip them at their leisure. The \! command is infinitely better than the \| command.

Sore Losers uses far too many forced pauses. It's one of the first things I'd correct if I were to release a patch for that game all these years later. I think it's a pretty rookie mistake to assume that the player wants to read everything at the same pace you think they should.

I used to have this \! but people hated it. So I opted for \. personally.

Now we all know why Yanfly added a text speed option on his System Options Script or something(?)

author=Corfaisus
Kind of scary, right? Keep that in mind when writing dialogue. Although now I have to ask; what's worse: ellipses or parentheses/asterisks around an implied motion such as breathing or looking around?

Depends on how difficult it is to show the implied motion. Looking around is easy enough, but something like breathing is fine to describe, and I'd rather it be distinguished from dialog somehow. (Though personally I prefer if people can show it rather than telling it because I'm a real stickler for that.)

Whenever I added text pauses in my RPG I noticed they are really disruptive. Like I'd hit the space bar but I realized it wasn't done yet and had to hit space again afterwards. It was my own game yet even I found it obxnoxious so I worried that other people would too. At first I concluded that I should use text pauses much less often, but lately I wondered that it might be ideal simply to never use them at all and simply use multiple text boxes instead. (After all you'd be doing so anyway, so it would be more consistent)