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

Tagging in Style

[tillselegantly]

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.

Prose!

[stardunes]

Ondorus nods, and coughs into his fist. "...Prose is self-explanatory, and used in some form on most roleplay platforms. I think it's safe to assume you already know how to use it - it's the same style of writing used in novels."

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!

[tillselegantly]

[...She's missing something, isn't she.]

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!]

[stardunes]

[Yeah Ondorus is just gonna swap over too because his player likes brackets.]

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.]

[tillselegantly]

[Luckily, Frey's player is wonderful and would never do that. ;D]

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.]

[stardunes]

There's one more thing that's very dear to Dreamwidth roleplayers - icons.

[tillselegantly]

Man, I almost forgot.

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.

[stardunes]

[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.

[tillselegantly]

Yep, exactly. Our player sometimes plays without icons, if she's playing original characters against friends, but most people expect icons and once you get used to it it's a hard habit to break.

And I think that about wraps it up for this part!