tutorialbox | 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!]]

Threaded | Flat

Gladly.

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?

Okay, time for Part Two! Now that you know the basics of how to use Dreamwidth to tag or have a discussion, let's talk about what tags usually look like!

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.

Before we move beyond this post, I'd like to touch on how Dreamwidth roleplayers keep track of the tags they receive.

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.

Anatomy of a Post + Thread

Tagging in Style

Notifications