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

[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!