"ok but how does dw rp work again??"

[daddykong]

Crash Course in the Basics of DWRPing

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.

Comments

Open-Ended Prompts

[daddykong]

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.