Guide to Dreamwidth Roleplay

[mordremoth]

New to the DW RP scene? Here's some information about the site and the culture that you might find useful.

• While you can't play fandom characters from non-GW2 sources on this community, there is a wealth of panfandom roleplay on this site. One of the biggest RP meme communities is bakerstreet where you will find characters of all sorts from live action western media, anime, manga, video games, comic books, and movies.

Another popular community is dear_player where character posts are made as though they were speaking back to the person who is playing them.

• "Memes" in DW RP means something very different than it does on tumblr. These are not lists of questions for you as a player to answer about your character. They are, instead, self-contained RP settings/prompts, each setting up its own micro universe. Most RPers on DW will not assume continuity between one meme and the next. Each RP storyline (or "thread," as they are usually called here) is treated as contained only within the meme unless players agree to continue it elsewhere.

↳ Often in memes and "open RP posts", people will post "top level" comments with the name of the character and their canon in the subject line. Sometimes players will also their shipping preference in the subject line if applicable. Don't be surprised to see things like M/F (male/female), M/M (male/male), F/F (female/female), or OTA (Open to All) to indicate a player's preference.

↳ Sometimes top level comments are left empty, sometimes they contain extended out of character information about what a player does and does not wish to play out, or else it will contain starter prompt for others to respond to. If the comment is empty, the expectation is that the person responding to the empty comment will provide a starter, or at least engage the other play in OOC discussion.

↳ To jump into the whole RP thing, just click "post a new reply" on that post. You can type as brief or as elaborate a starter (also called a top level comment) as you'd like for your individual character. Look around at the starters which others have posted and click reply to post back to them. By replying to each other you will create threads of narrative between characters.

↳ More than one character can reply to the same top level comment! Each reply will generate its own thread and stay organized that way. It is up to you as players to negotiate any continuity issues if they happen to arise, so communicate with each other!

• A "PSL" is a private story log (or private story line). Rather than taking place spontaneously on a meme, these are RP scenarios between two (or sometimes three or four) players which will be done on a journal or in a musebox, rather than on a meme.

• A "musebox" is a community created by an individual player to house their roleplay threads. Rather than posting to a public community, they and their friends will post to the private comm and play there. This can give people a lot of privacy as entries can be locked so that only the individual participants can view them.

• Unlike on tumblr, tags are not used to search this site. They are used, instead, to organize content on a given community or journal. This can be one of the best ways to organize posts on your own journal.

• Many players on DW RP will create thread tracking posts on their journals which contain links to every thread they have done. You can find html codes for thread trackers (and lots of other stuff like profile codes, muse lists, etc.) at dreamcodes.

• "Backtagging" is a way of indicating how willing one is to return to older threads after a possible lapse or time away. If someone says they are willing to backtag for a long time they are saying that you don't have to drop a thread just because you've been away from it for a while. It also often implies that the pacing of tags will be slow--for some people with busy schedules, they can only manage to tag each thread once a week or every few days. In any case, it's always worth asking people here if they'd be interested in continuing a thread, even if it's really old--many people will say yes!

• "Boomeranging" is, in a sense, the opposite of backtagging. It means that a player wants, and intends to provide, quick replies, at least for a certain duration of time, even if they know they will have to slow down after. There generally isn't an expectation that anyone will boomerang tags in DW RP, but if you spend time on places like bakerstreet you're bound to see that some posts lend themselves to boomeranging tags more than others.

• A few points of etiquette:
- Please fill out your character's name on their journal's profile page! It is also very helpful to your RP partners if you fill out a bit of information about them, either on their profile or in a post on their journal, but even if you don't do either of these, at least fill out their name!

- If you are going to post in panfandom RP spaces, keep in mind that OCs are expected to have some basic information about them on their journal or profile in order to give your RP partners some sense of who and what they're dealing with.

- It is generally requested that players turn custom comment pages off by going to "manage account" and unchecking the box for "Show my journal's entry pages in my chosen style instead of the site skin" under "display" settings. Comment pages in the site skin tend to be much easier to read, though of course on your journal the choice is ultimately your own.

• While it's up to you if you will do so, it is common for players on DW to put an HMD ("How's My Driving?") post in their character journal. For OCs this is less of an issue than for canon characters, in which case it's largely used for critique (hopefully constructive) and sometimes compliments of a player's handling of that character. Many people prefer to have their HMD posts anon-enabled with IP logging off; some prefer to have comments screened by default. There is no hard and fast consensus on these things, but keep in mind that IP logging defaults to on for all newly made accounts. If you want to switch it off you need to do so in your account settings.

• Another post that many people will opt to put on their journal is the Permissions Post. (You can get a template for the most common one here, but there are lots of variations so modify it however you see fit.) This is one of the best ways to get a quick feel for appropriate boundaries when RPing with a character and player you don't know. Many players who commonly RP sexual scenes will also include some form of a kinks list to let others know what they do/don't want to play with a given character.

• It's inevitable that sometimes threads get dropped. Sometimes this is an accident, sometimes it's a product of fatigue or someone just getting stumped on how to proceed. Don't take it personally, it happens to everyone! It can be frustrating and disheartening though. If you're comfortable, it's fine to send the other player a polite PM asking if they'd like to continue, but don't pester people if they aren't keen. The DW panfandom RP community tends to have little patience for high pressure RPers.

• Have other questions? Just ask here and we'll do our best to answer--and to update this list as more things come to mind!