Okay, so doing RP on Dreamwidth is very similar to RP on LiveJournal, if you were around that corner of the internet back then. If not, I got you fam. Heads-up, I use the terms "journal" and "account" interchangeably- they mean the same thing.
Sometimes people have personal journals that they use for, well, personal stuff from blog posts to consolidating and linking all of their RP accounts into what's often called a Muse List. It's not necessary to go to these lengths if you're just playing like one or two characters on Dreamwidth. A character's journal is typically defined by its name and its icons. The name can be a weird joke or play on words, something symbolic, part of a quote, the character's name... or even something unrelated, if you wanna be weird about it. The username is going to get associated with the character and every post made as them, so you should at least try to make it indicative of the character in question.
The icons, on the other hand, usually provide visuals of the character emoting- a full set of icons means you can match the face to the tone and carry some extra oomph with your posts. But there's nothing wrong with having even just one icon if you're playing an original character. Commissioned icons can be expensive, and not everyone can draw their own. If you are able to get or create multiple icons, a solid guideline for a good spread of emotions can be found here. Free Dreamwidth accounts have a maximum of 15 icons, but a paid account gets like, hundreds. Icons can be uploaded to a journal by going here, and you can pull straight from a URL or from a local file on your system. Icons are allowed a maximum size of 100x100 pixels, and larger uploads tend to get awkwardly resized. Icons of non-square sizes (ie 30x100) tend to look a bit odd, so taking a moment to crop/resize/manipulate an image to the 100x100 size helps a ton. This can totally be done in things like MSPaint too through some slightly tedious nonsense- if you'd like a walkthrough on how I've done that just ask.
Typically, the character's app goes as an entry in the journal, for others to reference. The app varies from one roleplaying game to the next, but they often ask about backstory, personality, special abilities... standard enough stuff. On top of all of that, you may want to tweak the design of the character's journal once you've made it. This can be done here. Designs are listed as "TITLE by AUTHOR for STYLE", so if you like the layout of a particular journal but not the color, you can just click the link to the style and it'll automatically filter to those. I like picking designs that seem to fit with the character's personal tastes or color palette, but there's no wrong answer here. And if you don't want to see all the colors and different formats whatsoever, you can go to the display settings and change Entry Pages: Shown to You to Site Skin.
Dreamwidth roleplays can take place within a community or within smaller, individual posts. Group roleplaying games will most likely take place within a dedicated community, which is pretty much an access-locked mini-forum. Some players may put posts within their character journals so that one-off roleplays with no attachment to a game have a place to go. But we're focusing more on communities here because the audience for this is definitely more than one person. There are usually 2-3 communities for any game, each with a different function: the log community for more detailed or in-person posts, a net community for in-character communications over electronics like text, voice, and video chats, and an out of character (OOC) community for logistics and planning. The rise of things like Discord means that an OOC community can be a little redundant, and with smaller games the Log and Net communities can easily be consolidated into one, and the players just differentiate between the two. They often do that by using tags assigned to a post, akin to Tumblr's and Twitter's. Tags typically include designations like [event] or [char: NAME] so that players can easily isolate things they're looking for.
As I said, you can think of a DW community as like a message board. Within an RP sense, that means that each entry within the community is its own separate sub-event. The mod(s) might post an event to the community, which means that all RPing directly related to that event happens in the comments to that entry. Some things, like RP events, are often guided like a D&D game, while other posts are more open-ended prompts.
For the sake of a structured example, let's say that a group of nine adventurers go into a dungeon to get a treasure. They immediately find a three-way fork, and split into trios. One group finds the treasure, but it's guarded by a boss fight! The other groups don't know this until they finish exploring their paths, only to have people from the boss fight group run in and tell them to help fight the boss before the party tank dies from distracting it. They make their way back to the boss, but the tank has taken some serious damage and can't keep fighting, so the other eight adventurers fight the boss instead! Then, the tank gets taken to a hospital off-screen, and later the other adventurers come by and give them chocolate and flowers and hugs and stuff.
Visually, it would look something like this...
Post Body: Mod details dungeon and points out the three paths. In a Discord or OOC comm discussion (or even an IC thread if people want) the trios are determined and each gets their own thread within the post.
Optional Pre-Event: IC discussion of who's in which groups, characters shooting the shit beforehand, whatever.
TEAM ONE: Enters the dungeon through the first path.
team one chains a bunch of comments (probably alongside the mod guiding them like a dungeon master) until they finish their chunk of dungeon. comment chains gradually slide to the right so it looked like a giant triangle of rp content.
At one point, someone from the Boss Group appears, and tells Team One to come fight the boss before someone dies. The thread would then (or soon after) end, and be assumed to link up with the boss monster.
TEAM TWO: Enters the dungeon through the second path.
team two chains a bunch of comments (probably alongside the mod guiding them like a dungeon master) until they finish their chunk of dungeon.
At one point, someone from the Boss Group appears, and tells Team Two to come fight the boss before someone dies. The thread would then (or soon after) end, and be assumed to link up with the boss monster.
TEAM THREE: Enters the dungeon through the third path.
team three chains a bunch of comments (probably alongside the mod guiding them like a dungeon master) until they find the boss, oh shit.
There's probably a pretty short thread of the tank in question fighting this boss monster on their own, or maybe it's handwaved altogether. Or maybe it's set aside as something fo the mod and player to write out at their leisure, separate from the group's expectations for the event.
The other party members show up, the tank goes down, and they fight the boss. OR...
BOSS FIGHT: gets its own separate thread in the post so it's not so hard to find
THEN, once that event is done enough, the tank's player makes a new entry in the community located in the hospital as an aftermath post. If the players all agree, it could even be included as an extra thread at the end of the Event post. It's whatever.
But things aren't always so predictable. In fact, most posts set the scene in a variety of ways, encouraging players to open their characters up to threads with others through a variety of prompts. An easy example is a carnival! The descriptions are normally a bit more detailed, but a person writing the base prompt could have options like...
A. RIDES RIDES RIDES - roller coaster, teacups, vomit inducer, haunted house, GO WILD
B. GREASY FOOD - funnel cake, doubly deep fried funnel cake, deep fried milkshake with plastic cup also deep fried
C. GAMES GAMES GAMES - squirt guns, throw the ring on the bottle, get swindled, WIN THE STUFFED ANIMAL OF YOUR DREAMS
D. OTHER - shine on you crazy diamonds
And a character's comment, called a top-level, is cherry-picking what they want to work with from those options, and would be one comment to the entry including all of something like...
A1. There's definitely some kind of meat in that... - detailing the character's misadventures on the vomit inducer
A2. Haunted houses bad for other bodily fluids. - detailing this poor fuck, knees a-quiver, about to enter a haunted house and prolly die
C. KING OF GAMES - this nerd got it together and is cleaning up at the squirt gun game, that's too many stuffed animals please help them
D. A MUGGING - look, all those stuffed animals are begging to be stolen, plz help from these vagrants
So the important thing to keep in mind with top-levels, especially when there's a bunch of them around, is that they don't have to mutually exclusive between characters. It's generally poor form to have your character respond to more than one prompt from another character (unless it's exclusive to them, which is fine!) but the only thing stopping your character from throwing a reply at every character with a top-level in the bunch is your own mental reserves and free time. It might be easier to start smaller with 2-3 threads at once to test what your limits are, though. And it's not often mandatory to write a top-level set of prompts, sometimes it's funner to just rise from the depths and hit the threads that really give you a fun feeling. There are no wrong answers with this, but be willing to put yourself out there.
Threads can also involve more than two people, that's totally fine. Whereas threads with two participants tend to alternate, threads with three tend to cycle, so Character 1, Character 2, Character 3, then Character 1 again. That ordering can be shaken up if the players are cool with it.
And sometimes, a third (or more!) character can drop in out of nowhere and interrupt the flow of a thread. This is called threadjacking, and must be done carefully so you don't step on toes. There are instances where you can pull off that sort of thing without advance warning but it really depends on the temperaments of the players and characters in the thread.
Since we all have lives and sometimes RP threads can take a bit to make happen, there's backtagging, which is a player's tolerance for threads taking longer, and how willing they are to keep a thread going after its prompt has gotten a little older. Some people will backtag an introduction thread for months, and some will stop after a few days or weeks, whatever's their comfort level.
Either way, you shouldn't feel awkward asking the person you're threading with what the end state is. (That's not a real term I've seen people use but I'm using it now, so!!!) Sometimes all parties are winging it and seeing what happens or things reach a natural conclusion, which is fine! But sometimes the players both start to run out of steam or inspiration, so it's easier to say "when do we wanna wrap this one up and how?"
These topics and many others can be figured out through a Permissions Post which I outline further down.
Roleplaying is, on a deep level, about consent. Between the players within a given thread, or all players of a given group. Players are all assumed to be on the same page by writing and submitting their apps and reading the rules, but some stuff is more personal.
That's where Permissions Posts come in. Some things here may not be entirely applicable, but you can easily scroll through these fancy-formatted posts to get an idea of the sorts of things people decide to say they are/aren't down with, either in- or out-of-character.
This is a comment in the making. We've got the From field, which is the journal you're logged in as, you only should care about this if you have more than one. The Icon Used area on the top right normally has keywords in that arrow-box but I don't have any icons on this account, so. Oops. The Subject Line is often left blank, but can be used for snarky banter between players. It's helpful if you're doing a chain of comments back-to-back. The Message section includes the body of the post itself, using limited HTML coding. Worth pointing out is that makes text smaller, and makes text bigger. These can be nested, so asdsads is real small.
The basic setup for shorter-form posts is that thoughts and actions are bundled up into a some sort of container, usually brackets [] or parentheses (). These are then contained in a classifier so the text takes up less space. Anything the characters actually say is outside of those smaller brackets, formatted normally. Longer-form prose-y posts are a-okay and would use the same sorts of formatting (or lack thereof) if you were writing in a word processor. The above shorter format can be used for more in-depth posts.
And sometimes you'll want to chain a series of comments together, often for dramatic/humorous effect to show a character's change in demeanor through a reaction. A player might decide, for example, to have the character react to something very funny by bursting out laughing, chained into a comment of the character shouting about what they're laughing about, and then a third of the character collapsed on the ground, struggling to catch their breath. This sort of approach is only really viable if you've got multiple icons showing that range of emotions- the content of those chained posts can just as easily be condensed into one if preferable.
I do a quick-and-dirty example of this sort of comment chaining below:
[ So obviously, this is a terrible idea. But that Blue™ Flavor Mountain Dew™ needed to get drank. And that styrofoam cup of ramen noodles needed to be eaten. And what else do you do with food, if not cook and consume it?
The hum of the microwave faded into the background, but a glance a the timer ticking down showed that it was almost time, that sugary fizz-slop was almost boiling(????). This train wreck has already started, and despite the horrified gazes of the onlookers, it shows no signs of- ]
[ Ding! The microwave went off, and it was like something broke in his mind. The door swung open- ]
Hehehehe- [ A hand wrapped around the mug's handle, gently removing it from the box. Sure, the soda wasn't boiling like water needs to be for ramen, but... close enough! ]
HahahaHAHAHA- SHIT don't drop it! [ The words came out as if through a fire house as a stumble almost sent the uncomfortably warm mug of soda flying into a wall. Catching himself, he regained composure and breath in front of the sink.
And then he began to pour the soda into the ramen. ]
[ It took just a couple moments, but the deed was done. His face scrunched up in confusion and disgust as a hand snapped a few pictures from a cell phone. ]
Does... does this look like it's supposed to turn green? [ The guy's hand then extends the cup. Second opinion needed. ] Did I break it?
Chained comments don't even have to have text, they can just be a visual adventure through a character's reaction. Those can be fun.
If you try to use them, just look for good opportunities for that marked shift in a character's mood as a point to split comments on. But try not to overuse them, because after a point, you can probably make the comment work better by condensing it into a single comment.
Jerks and douchebags and assholes and antagonistic interactions can be... tricky. I've played many of them, and it's more often than not a very fun experience. Since RPing is all about communication and consent and trust, an asshole character can sometimes inherently chafe against the norms of players. In fact, I've seen many instances of poorly executed or poorly received asshole actions completely destabilize playerbases and games! So here's some advice I've picked up that might help.
For Players of Assholes:
OWN IT. When you write a douchey tag, it's a conscious effort on your part. You're crafting each sentence and picking each word with intent. Acknowledge that your character is usually (or is temporarily being) an ass. Accept it, because nobody's going to be sunshine all the time. It's fine, it's human (or whatever race they are!) and you don't need to feel bad about the mere act of writing rudeness.
Expect Resistance! Nobody likes being mistreated. If they're into that sort of thing, then it's likely only in a consensual situation with clear boundaries. So if you make the decision to write your character enacting in assholery, assume that it won't go over well! Characters can push back and even turn the tables! Your character might damage or destroy a relationship. That's fine, those things can be natural consequences of bad behavior! On top of that, players might remark about the character's actions or personality. That's fine too, because if you see some jerkass while you're on a bus, you're probably gonna be like "wow, what a jerk!" And the best way to deal with all that is, uh, the first bullet point. Go reread it if you need to.
Write It Well! This might sound mean, but asshole characters are best served when the writer behind them is going to clearly explain the motives and rationales behind the actions. It doesn't always have to be immediate (an explanation in-character can be fun!) but it needs to be there. If there's rudeness or hostility with no context or backdrop, then your character may as well be a faceless jerk shouting obscenities at someone else from across the street. If you find yourself repeatedly explaining the motive behind a rude action (especially if it's from a character who isn't normally rude!), you've fucked up in writing the action and should either clarify if needed, or weave the information into later posts. And then you drop it! Learn from your mistakes and don't do it again. You and your characters don't defend good days, so don't defend a character having a bad day. Remember, OWN IT because the character is making a conscious choice.
COMMUNICATE, DAMMIT. This is always important! Playing an asshole means you should be willing to play preemptive damage control. As I mentioned in the second point, characters and players will probably be like "wow what an ass." Some characters will eject from the social link forever, while others can get past it, and that's up to you and the people you write with to figure out. If you're feeling attacked for writing an asshole, or if someone feels attacked because you're playing an asshole, be willing to talk about it! You'd be surprised how often I've had lost or damaged relationships between characters that could've been remedied with like five minutes of direct, player-to-player interactions.
Use Progressive Douching! Some characters are always, always jerks. That's fine! But it's very easy for those sorts of threads to just abruptly end, because a character doesn't want to put up with that. So it's important to find ways to turn that rude behavior into substance. Tease a motive in their words or in their actions. Or hell, have them say why they're doing the thing out loud! "You literally just insulted me, pal." If they're taking their frustrations out on someone else, contemplate having them realize this. Most people (and characters!) who feel they've been wronged just want to be heard, so giving the perpetrating character avenues to get that catharsis can be very helpful for everyone. If your character is not really confrontational they can always remember the situation for later, when they might be less in the midst of being a pain. It's never worth it to have a character just do something rude and treat it like an island that nobody can interact with. Some psychologists say that anger is a sort of disguising emotion, that there's always something underneath it like insecurity or regret or shame or whatever else. Honestly, just don't have the character be a jerk in a vacuum. It's a building block.
GROUP THREADS! Okay, this is actually the most dangerous place to have your character be a prick! Here's why: Threads with many characters can have a long delay between tags and can take a while to get anywhere, unless everyone's sitting down to crank out the entire thread back and forth. If you're thinking about why your character is going to be a douche to someone, think about the goal of the thread; it's probably cooperative. If it's not, go wild! IF IT IS A COOPERATIVE THREAD WITH MULTIPLE CHARACTERS you NEED to be conscious of the rest of the group and their opinions. If you don't know and vibe with everyone, you should reach out to the players and see how they feel about the douchey behavior. You're going to have three outcomes here, and I'm going to tell you when you should go ahead with each. If everyone is okay or indifferent towards the rude behavior, put it in the thread and go ahead. If less than half of the players are okay with it or if you really want to have the character do the thing regardless of what anyone else wants, make a splintering thread where your jerk does the thing. If people generally aren't on board with it, fucking don't. Group threads are a huge hassle to coordinate, and if the group gets slowed down or derailed, it could easily frustrate players. The more characters there are in the thread and the more players there are that you aren't super close with, the more you should be leaning towards either a splinter thread or not doing it at all. ALSO in a group thread, if you do throw down a rude contribution, be willing to edit it if people ask. This entire bullet point is just about Communicating. Do it.
For Players Encountering Assholes
COMMUNICATE. Obviously.
Players of Chronic Assholes Can Be Self-Conscious! Sure, it sorta clashes with the whole OWN IT point, but there's nothing wrong an asshole's player being unsure if the character is too much, consistent, realistic, and so on. If they ask, be honest!
CALL THEM OUT. This goes back to communicating but a player is not allowed to get away with being rude or inconsiderate towards other players just because they're playing someone who is an asshole or does a rude thing. "My character is being a jerk so I see your opinion and lol too bad" is just Not Okay. Goes back to that point on progressive douching. Be willing to ask them questions like "If your character does this, mine won't be willing to interact with them anymore, are you okay with this?" or "The motive behind this tag doesn't really feel right to me, is everything on the level here?" If they're defensive to the point where they're offended that you ask questions like these, they're probably not doing a good job of playing an Asshole.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
The Character Journal
Date: 2019-01-02 10:49 pm (UTC)The icons, on the other hand, usually provide visuals of the character emoting- a full set of icons means you can match the face to the tone and carry some extra oomph with your posts. But there's nothing wrong with having even just one icon if you're playing an original character. Commissioned icons can be expensive, and not everyone can draw their own. If you are able to get or create multiple icons, a solid guideline for a good spread of emotions can be found here. Free Dreamwidth accounts have a maximum of 15 icons, but a paid account gets like, hundreds. Icons can be uploaded to a journal by going here, and you can pull straight from a URL or from a local file on your system. Icons are allowed a maximum size of 100x100 pixels, and larger uploads tend to get awkwardly resized. Icons of non-square sizes (ie 30x100) tend to look a bit odd, so taking a moment to crop/resize/manipulate an image to the 100x100 size helps a ton. This can totally be done in things like MSPaint too through some slightly tedious nonsense- if you'd like a walkthrough on how I've done that just ask.
Typically, the character's app goes as an entry in the journal, for others to reference. The app varies from one roleplaying game to the next, but they often ask about backstory, personality, special abilities... standard enough stuff. On top of all of that, you may want to tweak the design of the character's journal once you've made it. This can be done here. Designs are listed as "TITLE by AUTHOR for STYLE", so if you like the layout of a particular journal but not the color, you can just click the link to the style and it'll automatically filter to those. I like picking designs that seem to fit with the character's personal tastes or color palette, but there's no wrong answer here. And if you don't want to see all the colors and different formats whatsoever, you can go to the display settings and change Entry Pages: Shown to You to Site Skin.
The Roleplay Environment
Date: 2019-01-02 10:50 pm (UTC)As I said, you can think of a DW community as like a message board. Within an RP sense, that means that each entry within the community is its own separate sub-event. The mod(s) might post an event to the community, which means that all RPing directly related to that event happens in the comments to that entry. Some things, like RP events, are often guided like a D&D game, while other posts are more open-ended prompts.
GUIDED THREADS
Date: 2019-01-02 10:52 pm (UTC)Visually, it would look something like this...
Post Body: Mod details dungeon and points out the three paths. In a Discord or OOC comm discussion (or even an IC thread if people want) the trios are determined and each gets their own thread within the post.
THEN, once that event is done enough, the tank's player makes a new entry in the community located in the hospital as an aftermath post. If the players all agree, it could even be included as an extra thread at the end of the Event post. It's whatever.
Open-Ended Prompts
Date: 2019-01-02 10:52 pm (UTC)And a character's comment, called a top-level, is cherry-picking what they want to work with from those options, and would be one comment to the entry including all of something like...
So the important thing to keep in mind with top-levels, especially when there's a bunch of them around, is that they don't have to mutually exclusive between characters. It's generally poor form to have your character respond to more than one prompt from another character (unless it's exclusive to them, which is fine!) but the only thing stopping your character from throwing a reply at every character with a top-level in the bunch is your own mental reserves and free time. It might be easier to start smaller with 2-3 threads at once to test what your limits are, though. And it's not often mandatory to write a top-level set of prompts, sometimes it's funner to just rise from the depths and hit the threads that really give you a fun feeling. There are no wrong answers with this, but be willing to put yourself out there.
Other Terms
Date: 2019-01-02 10:59 pm (UTC)And sometimes, a third (or more!) character can drop in out of nowhere and interrupt the flow of a thread. This is called threadjacking, and must be done carefully so you don't step on toes. There are instances where you can pull off that sort of thing without advance warning but it really depends on the temperaments of the players and characters in the thread.
Since we all have lives and sometimes RP threads can take a bit to make happen, there's backtagging, which is a player's tolerance for threads taking longer, and how willing they are to keep a thread going after its prompt has gotten a little older. Some people will backtag an introduction thread for months, and some will stop after a few days or weeks, whatever's their comfort level.
Either way, you shouldn't feel awkward asking the person you're threading with what the end state is. (That's not a real term I've seen people use but I'm using it now, so!!!) Sometimes all parties are winging it and seeing what happens or things reach a natural conclusion, which is fine! But sometimes the players both start to run out of steam or inspiration, so it's easier to say "when do we wanna wrap this one up and how?"
These topics and many others can be figured out through a Permissions Post which I outline further down.
Permissions Posts
Date: 2019-01-02 11:17 pm (UTC)That's where Permissions Posts come in. Some things here may not be entirely applicable, but you can easily scroll through these fancy-formatted posts to get an idea of the sorts of things people decide to say they are/aren't down with, either in- or out-of-character.
In the past, I created and used this:
Anatomy of a Comment
Date: 2019-01-02 11:21 pm (UTC)This is a comment in the making. We've got the From field, which is the journal you're logged in as, you only should care about this if you have more than one. The Icon Used area on the top right normally has keywords in that arrow-box but I don't have any icons on this account, so. Oops. The Subject Line is often left blank, but can be used for snarky banter between players. It's helpful if you're doing a chain of comments back-to-back. The Message section includes the body of the post itself, using limited HTML coding. Worth pointing out is that
makes text smaller, andmakes text bigger. These can be nested, soasdsadsis real small.The basic setup for shorter-form posts is that thoughts and actions are bundled up into a some sort of container, usually brackets [] or parentheses (). These are then contained in a
classifier so the text takes up less space. Anything the characters actually say is outside of those smaller brackets, formatted normally. Longer-form prose-y posts are a-okay and would use the same sorts of formatting (or lack thereof) if you were writing in a word processor. The above shorter format can be used for more in-depth posts.And sometimes you'll want to chain a series of comments together, often for dramatic/humorous effect to show a character's change in demeanor through a reaction. A player might decide, for example, to have the character react to something very funny by bursting out laughing, chained into a comment of the character shouting about what they're laughing about, and then a third of the character collapsed on the ground, struggling to catch their breath. This sort of approach is only really viable if you've got multiple icons showing that range of emotions- the content of those chained posts can just as easily be condensed into one if preferable.
I do a quick-and-dirty example of this sort of comment chaining below:
1/3 i am so sorry
Date: 2019-01-07 01:00 am (UTC)The hum of the microwave faded into the background, but a glance a the timer ticking down showed that it was almost time, that sugary fizz-slop was almost boiling(????). This train wreck has already started, and despite the horrified gazes of the onlookers, it shows no signs of- ]
2/3
Date: 2019-01-07 01:05 am (UTC)Hehehehe- [ A hand wrapped around the mug's handle, gently removing it from the box. Sure, the soda wasn't boiling like water needs to be for ramen, but... close enough! ]
HahahaHAHAHA- SHIT don't drop it! [ The words came out as if through a fire house as a stumble almost sent the uncomfortably warm mug of soda flying into a wall. Catching himself, he regained composure and breath in front of the sink.
And then he began to pour the soda into the ramen. ]
3/3 this foul deed is done
Date: 2019-01-07 01:17 am (UTC)Does... does this look like it's supposed to turn green? [ The guy's hand then extends the cup. Second opinion needed. ] Did I break it?
BONUS + WARNING
Date: 2019-01-07 01:24 am (UTC)If you try to use them, just look for good opportunities for that marked shift in a character's mood as a point to split comments on. But try not to overuse them, because after a point, you can probably make the comment work better by condensing it into a single comment.
End
Date: 2019-01-02 11:23 pm (UTC)questions etc
Date: 2019-01-02 11:26 pm (UTC)ON ASSHOLES
Date: 2019-02-28 01:37 am (UTC)