THE OFFICIAL "HELP! I DON'T KNOW HOW (X THING) WORKS!" POST

[psionicmolotov]

Some of you are almost certainly new to Dreamwidth RP - that's okay! Ask your questions here and us DWRP veterans will answer. There are no stupid questions!

Comments

[colecanassis]

Well, I'm not exactly new to DWRP but I've forgotten how to link my own blogs. _@

[nevercaught]

Hahaha. You might have found out how by accident with that question. See, right now DW is set up so that if you put an @ in front of your username in a comment it'll make the link.

[adrainea]

Hi, I have no idea where to even start lol. I am not sure what the RP community like... standards are, common terms/practices, how to use Dreamwidth, what the multiple journals for characters thing is/how it works. Basically I'm starting from 0 and just would like to have some resources on the basics of everything lol. I really want to get into RP with other people but I haven't done this since I was a kid roleplaying in the comments section on Deviantart/in text messages with my sibling if that gives any idea how clueless I am.

[psionicmolotov]

Here's a post on basic dreamwidth functionality but I will try to tl;dr to spare you having to read reams of text.

Comment sections on deviantart are actually somewhat similar to how threads on dreamwidth are intended to work - two people going back and forth in a thread, each on single accounts.

- RP standards: have fun and be yourself sparkle on etc. If you want to get involved in the wider RP community that's a different beast, but in this community you can kinda do whatever, it's meant for that

MOSTLY though the way it differs from say, tumblr RP is that there's not as much of a big focus on fancy HTML and presentation. A lot of people will say "I'll match you" when it comes to prose style, which is kind of a free for all but it's generally split up into 'brackets' or more standard prose.

Brackets style:

What do you want? [ They looked suspicious. ]

Standard prose:

"What do you want?" they said, squinting suspiciously.

- Common terms/practices: You've probably heard ic/ooc before (in character/out of character) - that's in use here. "Player" refers to the person who RPs the character (as in, "i play this character/this character's player is [name]"). A "RP meme" is usually something intended to be quick to set up, like a preset setting ("this meme is an AU where our characters are vampires", etc) or prompt ("everyone has animal features/can't sleep/etc").

Multiple journals: You've already made a journal, so you sort of know how journal creation works - general practice for DWRP is to make journals for specific characters, with a username that suits the character, and then populate it with icons that fit that character's expressions. You can then fill that journal with things related to the character - rp prompts, visual inspirations, moodboards, essays on the character, whatever you like.
You can use the same email address to make multiple journals, and there is, as far as I know, no limit, so you can have them linked all to the same address and receive the same notifications.

Hopefully this helps! Please feel free to ask more questions for any clarification.