Ondorus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stardunes) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
tutorialbox2015-11-06 10:57 am
stardunes) wrote in tutorialbox2015-11-06 10:57 am
Let's DWRP
[[ooc:
Welcome to Dreamwidth! This is a journaling site in the vein of Livejournal, which resembles LJ in its heyday in terms of layout and function, but which took a different, more user-friendly path. DW is home to a decently-sized and well-established RP community, most of which migrated here from Livejournal after an LJ update that took away some functions RPers relied on.
There are a handful of DWRP tutorials out there that explain how to use the site and explain the conventions of the DWRP community, but I've always learned best from models and I know I'm not the only one, so I wanted to make a guide that shows examples of what it's talking about as it goes along. Two characters I play will be hosting this guide, showing you what RPing on Dreamwidth actually looks like as they explain the how and why.
DWRPers like to think we've figured out a good way to use DW's functions for RP, but there's always more than one way to do things. In this guide, I'll touch on three different...layers, I guess? of how DWRP works:
1) anatomy of the site and how to use its functions
2) how DWRPers usually use those functions to RP
3) and why.
I hope that explaining the reasons will both make it all make more sense and provide the tools to mess around with the formula if you so desire!
The bulk of the guide won't touch on DWRP culture for the most part, just the mechanics of RPing on Dreamwidth. The exception will be in preferred formatting things, like [actiontags], toplevels, setting up journals/communities, things like that.
With that, let's start things off!]]
Welcome to Dreamwidth! This is a journaling site in the vein of Livejournal, which resembles LJ in its heyday in terms of layout and function, but which took a different, more user-friendly path. DW is home to a decently-sized and well-established RP community, most of which migrated here from Livejournal after an LJ update that took away some functions RPers relied on.
There are a handful of DWRP tutorials out there that explain how to use the site and explain the conventions of the DWRP community, but I've always learned best from models and I know I'm not the only one, so I wanted to make a guide that shows examples of what it's talking about as it goes along. Two characters I play will be hosting this guide, showing you what RPing on Dreamwidth actually looks like as they explain the how and why.
DWRPers like to think we've figured out a good way to use DW's functions for RP, but there's always more than one way to do things. In this guide, I'll touch on three different...layers, I guess? of how DWRP works:
1) anatomy of the site and how to use its functions
2) how DWRPers usually use those functions to RP
3) and why.
I hope that explaining the reasons will both make it all make more sense and provide the tools to mess around with the formula if you so desire!
The bulk of the guide won't touch on DWRP culture for the most part, just the mechanics of RPing on Dreamwidth. The exception will be in preferred formatting things, like [actiontags], toplevels, setting up journals/communities, things like that.
With that, let's start things off!]]
Anatomy of a Post + Thread
My name is Ondorus, and I'd like to extend the same welcome to you. I've had many fascinating experiences on Dreamwidth, and I hope that you can experience the same.
We'll start with something very basic: posts and threads.
This webpage - and the block of content posted by my account at the top - is a post (or entry). Posts are made by accounts, known on Dreamwidth as journals. They can be made to the journal itself - as on Tumblr, where a blog where posts can be made is always associated with an account - or to a community, as this post was. Communities on Dreamwidth are shared spaces where multiple journals can post, but the community account itself cannot act as a journal - it cannot send or receive messages or post under its own name, and it must be linked to at least one administrator journal.
We'll touch on all that later. For now, just understand that one journal must make a post in order to create a space to roleplay in.
Below the post come the comments. On Dreamwidth, people roleplay through chains of comments, through which a series of replies can be easily identified - Miss Frey, would you like to demonstrate?
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Right under his comment, there's a little link that says "Reply to this". When I click that, a box comes up, and I can write a reply. Nice and simple!
Once it's posted, my reply is nested under his comment. On Dreamwidth, it's easy to see the flow of the conversation! But if you're ever not too sure what a comment is replying to, you can look along the bottom. The link that says "Parent" will take you straight to the comment it's directly replying to. Context, context, context!
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Comments on Dreamwidth are formatted in HTML markup. They respect line breaks - you don't have to slap down
s - but you'll get used to the code for bold or italicized or tiny text pretty quickly.Check out these pages for more info on what HTML you can use in comments. Don't worry about "cuts" for now, that's a post thing and we'll explain that later.
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Do you see how she replied to me twice, and I could reply to both? Roleplay threads don't usually split like that when they're between two people, but the ability for a comment to branch out into multiple threads is frequently used in other ways.
Now, in the context of roleplay, comments are usually called tags. You won't see that terminology used in reference to out-of-character discussions on Dreamwidth - a "tag" is a comment's worth of roleplay. It's a verb, too, as in "Frey tagged me twice".
"I have three tags waiting for replies."
"I will tag you back after work."
And so on.
A thread is a series of tags that comprises a sequence of events in roleplay. It can also be a verb - in this case, it's not so much about the act of replying to an individual tag as the general act of playing out a scene with someone.
"Our thread is becoming very dramatic."
"Can you link me to the thread?"
"Our characters should thread together when you're less busy."
Of course, terminology isn't vital to the process of roleplaying, but if you intend to play with those established on Dreamwidth, understanding the lingo will no doubt make things easier.
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...Well, while I'm talking about terminology, I suppose I should cover a few more.
The person behind the computer screen is usually referred to as the player or mun. "Mun" is an older term, short for "mundane", coined at a time when roleplay was a little more...dramatic? Some people dislike it for that reason, but it's much shorter to type.
The character, meanwhile, is simply referred to as a character most of the time.
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Besides "Reply to this" and "Parent", you can also see a few other links under a comment! There's "Thread from start", "Thread", and "Hide comments" - the higher up in our thread you go, the more comments you can hide. Hide comments is exactly what it sounds like, go ahead and give it a try! Then "Show comments" to get all those missing tags back.
"Thread" gives you a direct link to that comment and any comments nested under it. Go ahead and give that a try, too. That link is pretty much the same as the link that says...uh, "link", up near the timestamp in the comment header. I think the only difference is that one preserves your page style if you changed the way you're viewing the page...but, uh, that's kind of an edge case. Don't worry about it.
And then there's "Thread from start", which is super helpful. "Parent" takes you one comment up the chain, but "Thread from start" takes you all the way to the top of the thread - to the comment made directly under the post! If you want to read a thread from the very beginning, that link is your friend.
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You can't see it, but when Frey is logged in, she sees these icons in the grey comment header:
The first allows her to edit her comment, and the second allows her to delete it. Once I've replied, the first vanishes. She can still delete her comment entirely if she wishes.
Now, because I made this post, I have a few extra privileges when it comes to the comments under it. When I'm logged in and I look at Frey's comments on this post, this is what I see in the same space:
Naturally, there's no edit button - only she can do that. But in addition to deleting her comment, I also have the option of screening, freezing, or tracking it.
You'll hardly ever see or use these functions in the course of normal roleplay. Screening a comment makes it invisible to everyone but the person who made the comment and the person who made the post; freezing a comment keeps it visible, but removes the option to reply to that comment or anything under it. They're usually used when you need to moderate a discussion or perform administrative functions when running a large roleplay game. Tracking is...well, I'll cover that later.
When I look at this comment after posting it, I'll see the same four icons, plus the edit icon - because nobody has replied to my comment yet, I can still edit it.
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Now...I'd like to demonstrate a feature of Dreamwidth's comment nesting system. Once a thread reaches a certain length, the comments will collapse into links to save space on the page and prevent them from becoming entirely vertical. At this point, you can either Expand the collapsed comments, or you can click on a comment to access that comment and all below it directly.
...The second is rather difficult to explain, but I'm sure you'll understand once you see it. To that end, we'll need to stretch this conversation out a bit. The exact number of comments needed to make the thread collapse varies based on how many threads are on the page, but...well, it'll be fine.
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Tree.
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-Orange.
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Needle?
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Tagging in Style
Now, technically, if you and a friend come from somewhere else to use Dreamwidth for RP, it's not like you have to follow any of these "rules". But DWRPers are used to these kinds of tags, so you're probably going to see them if you play with us. And, honestly? We think our way of doing things is pretty neat and we hope you think it's neat too.
Generally, there's two RP styles that you see in DWRP: prose, and...there's actually a few different names for the second one. So far we've just been using unaltered dialogue.
Prose!
Of course, he's not limited to expressing only physical actions in prose. Part of the fun of RP is knowing what's going on in a character's head, so if he imagines a cactus - like so - he can do that for the benefit of the reader, even if Frey can't reply to that.
Actiontags/Brackets!
And then there's these things!
[Frey gestures at her own tag, drawing a box with a finger around one of the peculiar lines of bracketed text.]
Sometimes it feels like everyone has their own name for these things, but if you call them "brackets" people will know what you're talking about. "Actiontags" is the other one our player knows, and she's also heard "commentspam", but that also refers to a different style of RP that we might or might not talk about later.
When you write your tags like this, you write the dialogue normally, and everything else goes in brackets - actions, thoughts, player commentary, anything. Our player likes to use brackets because she plays mostly from video games and drawn media and the focus on dialogue feels a lot like the way we appear in our own canons.
It's...actually not that different from prose. Some people will say that they associate prose with long tags and brackets take off the pressure when they're threading things like quick back-and-forth conversations that don't need much more than dialogue, or that they feel like they can be more casual in brackets...other people will say that brackets look choppy and unnatural they have an easier time writing prose. It's all up to personal preference.
[Frey shrugs. Heck, two people don't even have to be using the same format to RP together, as long as they understand each other. She could reply to Ondorus' prose tag just fine!]
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No matter which method is used, it's important to evaluate tags to determine what cues the character is meant to respond to and what is put there simply for the reader's entertainment. Dreamwidth roleplayers value the division between in-character and out-of-character knowledge.
[So if I joke in brackets about how Ondorus wants to marry fruit juice, that's just between me and the other player, and Frey shouldn't be replying to that.]
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I think that's pretty much it when it comes to brackets. They're way simpler than they sound when you try to describe them without looking at them.
...Oh, yeah - most people do their brackets with one [small] tag around them to make them smaller than the dialogue - except HTML, of course, so they use the pointy brackets.
[One small tag keeps them compact but readable, and DW has styles that make all the text on site bigger if it's so needed.]
[[There are lots of ways to format brackets, though! Different people have different preferences.]]
[Just keep it readable.]
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We've been using icons this whole time, so we probably don't need to explain what they add to a tag. "A picture is worth a thousand words", and all. If you're playing from a visual canon, sometimes it's easier and more effective to just show the expression a character is making or what they're doing than it is to try to describe it.
Icons are part of Dreamwidth's layout, and you select one when you make a post or comment. A free account gets 15, which is pretty good for most characters, and people are usually fine with secondary accounts that hold more icons, or embedding icons into tags if you don't have room for more.
Or, you can get a paid account, which can hold up to a hundred icons. Paid accounts are three US dollars per month, and you have to have a credit card - Paypal requires any site it works with to put, uh, certain content restrictions in place that the fandom communities on Dreamwidth wouldn't be too happy about, and Dreamwidth's staff isn't interested in restricting them.
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the "content restrictions" are porn]O-of course, you don't necessarily have to use icons - it's simply prevalent in the roleplaying community here.
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And I think that about wraps it up for this part!
Notifications
By default, when someone replies to a comment you've made, or makes any comment on a post you've made, you receive a notification. Also by default, that notification will go to two places: your Dreamwidth journal's inbox, and to the email account you used to set up that journal.
Dreamwidth allows you to make an unlimited number of accounts with the same email address, so most players that play multiple characters rely on email notifications to know when they've been tagged. This has two advantages over using Dreamwidth's own inbox. First, because all journals' notifications flow to one email, there's no need to log in and out to see your outstanding tags. Second, because the most popular email clients automatically refresh, there's no need to reload the page to see whether you have new notifications.