Let's DWRP

[stardunes]

[[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!]]

Comments

[stardunes]

Indeed.

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.

[tillselegantly]

Let's play word association until it gets long enough!

Tree.

[stardunes]

Ah-

-Orange.

[tillselegantly]

Apple.

[stardunes]

Juice?

[tillselegantly]

Glass.

[stardunes]

Vase.

[tillselegantly]

Flowers.

[stardunes]

Cactus.

[tillselegantly]

.....

Needle?

[stardunes]

Thread.

[tillselegantly]

Uh, glove.

[stardunes]

Arrow.

[tillselegantly]

Feather.

[stardunes]

Bird. We should be getting close.

[tillselegantly]

Sky! I hope so.

[stardunes]

Sun...

[tillselegantly]

Moon.

[stardunes]

Stars.

[tillselegantly]

Light.

[stardunes]

Magic.

[tillselegantly]

Iron.