dreamwidth rp Q&A

[swagu]

First of all, welcome to Dreamwidth-based roleplay!

I'm opening up this posts to general questions about roleplaying on this site because after seeing some newer players come into this format, I realized that there are a lot of things I take for granted and just assume everyone knows even though that's not always the case! We're a very unique format with our own standards, lingo, and what have you, and it's often difficult to jump into unless you have someone holding your hand along the way. There are a lot of resources out there to get you started, but at the same time, there's always something better about asking a person directly when you have a question instead of hunting for an answer in something that's already been written and may not even apply!

Just to give you a little background about me, since I'll be answering the questions, my name is Christy! I actually started out on journal-based roleplaying on Livejournal in 2006 more or less on a whim, and I've been continuously playing ever since. I've played a wide variety of characters in an even wider variety of games, and I've both created games from scratch and run them and helped mod ones that other people have made. So as such, you can ask questions about RP from the perspective of a player, but also from the perspective of a mod.

And of course, as a disclaimer, all answers I give are purely from my experience and my opinions! You might find that other people have different opinions or answers to questions, and I of course encourage people to jump in and answer questions as they see fit. This post is open to any kinds of questions at all, and if I don't have an answer for you off the top of my head, I'll do my best to try and find one for you. There's no such thing as a stupid question, so ask whatever you want! Even if it seems like the most basic, inane thing, I'm still happy to answer.

So go ahead! Ask any questions you'd like, and I'll answer them as quickly as I can. ♥

Comments

[swagu]

You're very welcome! I'm glad it's helpful, since that's definitely my goal here. ♥ So let's get to the new ones!

5) Absolutely! This does depend a little on the game, since how each game uses their communities can tend to differ, but for most games, the difference amounts to how the character is physically communicating. Network posts are usually used for the communication device (the phone your character is given as a usual staple, more or less), whereas logs are used for in-person interactions. However, it's also acceptable to use a network post where you have someone making a "call" to everyone in the game like "hey, I'll be hanging out at so and so, come stop by" and have log-like prompts as a part of the post. So, for examples! Here is a post that's purely a network post, in that Sebastian is making a broadcast to the entire game and it's purely a prompt for characters to respond with the phone. On the other hand, here is a hybrid post, but it's on the network community because it does include a phone option in the second one, as compared to this open log post where there's no such option.

Basically your decision on what kind of post you want to make amounts to how you want your character and others to interact! If it's in person, it's more log-oriented, but if it's not, then a network post should be fine.

6) This is definitely 99% personal preference, but my personal reason for stick with email over the DW inbox amounts to habit mostly, but it also has one very useful feature that DW doesn't have the same capacity for, and that's searching. This isn't something that's terribly useful when you're new to a game, but when you're in a game for a longer time, then this becomes invaluable when you're trying to remember if two characters talked, if they talked about a certain topic, etc. By basically using the Gmail inbox like Google, I can see every email and thus tag I've ever gotten on a certain topic.

So for example, if I want to reference some random thing that I know my character knows, but I'm not sure where it happened, I can effectively Google the tag! This has proved super useful to me, and it's also why I never delete any of my emails. I have like 60k+ (read) emails in my inbox, no joke.

But this one really does amount to personal preference! That's why I personally prefer using email notifs and never really touch my DW Inbox, but I know people that do the opposite with no problem!

7) Navigation posts are my jam, so I'll give you my general rule of thumb! If I was going to someone's journal to find out about their character in my game, what would I conceivably want to see? In general, your standards are going to be Application, HMD, Permissions (if your game has one), and IC Inbox. These are basically the four things that a casual visitor is going to go looking for, and you can see the basic example of that on this journal. This journal also has an additional post for a character opt-out since she's a nasty piece of work, but that's obviously character dependent.

The navigation post is for other's convenience, so they should be made with someone else in mind, basically. So for example, if you go to Sebastian's journal and ignore the navigation post for the purpose of this example, there are a lot of posts in his journal. You'll have to dig for quite a bit to find one post that you might be looking for! So his navigation post links to everything that someone could conceivably be interested in, and it's also broken into sections since his journal is full of information. For a scarier example, you can check out my old navigation post for him for when he was in CDC as well! CDC was an especially info-heavy game, so it was almost required to have a lot of links like you'll see on that tab, but that's definitely specific to that game.

In short, this navigation code covers the basics, though.

8) IC Inboxes are basically used however you the player wants to use them, since they're not exactly something standardized across DWRP as a whole, much less games. Some games allow IC Inboxes to be used for AC, and some don't, first of all, so this is something you need to be certain of before you start using them heavily! This also influences how I personally use them, so let me give you examples for a game where they can't be used for AC as compared to one where they can.

For games where I can't use them for AC, they're more or less for messages that could be handwaved, but the player and I decided not to for whatever reason! I usually use them as a transition into a log, such as in this brief thread. These are the kind of conversations that you can absolutely talk out with the other person and just be like "hey let's assume they talked and then showed up for this log," but I enjoy threading out these little conversations! Alternately, they can be used for one-on-one "network" conversations, such as in this thread.

This is an example where the line becomes blurry and is a little unspoken common courtesy sort of thing. After all, I absolutely could have made a network post for that conversation with a sort of caveat that it was closed to the character. However, this is generally frowned upon if you don't also have an open prompt for everyone to respond to. So IC Inboxes are great for those kind of conversations where Character A would call Character B rather than meeting them in person, but you don't have a wider prompt for the game as a whole.

As for games where they do count for AC...! Well tbh then they're just a log that I feel too lazy to make an actual log post for and that's it. Which you can see here! This is absolutely something that Aki and I could have made a proper closed log post for but just didn't feel like it... That's really all it amounts to in that case HAHA. I use my ic inboxes way more in games where they count for AC, and I don't really know why, since they're definitely just logs! Laziness always wins somehow.

[mikii]

rolls up my sleeves, thank you for replying so fast and with so much, in such a short amount of time!! this response gave me the confidence to go reply to some network posts in the meantime... now that I actually know what they're there for and used for ᕙ( * •̀ ᗜ •́ * )ᕗ

This is a question that I'm not sure if you'd understand entirely, since this is mostly a personal thing for me, being new to DWRP and the DWRP system, and therefore tending to be more self-conscious about my rping on DW so far as a result!! But:

9. After being in a game for some time (for me, it's a month or two in), do you ever get sort of... self-conscious about the character that you're playing? Naturally, as much as I'd love to put myself and my character out there, I tend to be a bit more shy when it comes to doing just that. Do you have any tips on how to combat shyness when it comes to, well... DWRP in general?

Since from what I've noticed so far, DWRP is heavily reliant on players talking to each other and plotting things out that way; and of course, I know that players talking, plotting, etc, happens across all roleplay mediums, but DWRP seems to involve... a whole lot more of it than I've ever seen previously, if that makes sense!

[swagu]

LMAO YOU COMPLIMENTED ME FOR BEING FAST and then look at me now... I'm sorry for the delay here!! This is a different kind of question to answer, so I was waiting to answer it and then it sunk to the bottom of my inbox never to be seen again... Until now.

Because to answer your question, yes, absolutely! It's a feeling that probably won't ever go away either, but I am the number one advocate that this isn't a bad thing, and it's not something you should worry about too much if you can. Easier said than done, I know, but here's why and how I personally combat my shyness—

The most important thing to help kick shyness in the face for me is to kind of just realize that feeling shy in this way is 1) perfectly fine, 2) perfectly normal, and 3) the other person is probably also feeling a little shy too! Like for example, think about how excited you are when someone tags you. It's the idea of woah!! woah, someone wants to RP with me, and I'm really excited about it. And I can guarantee that in most cases, that's how the other person is going to feel when you tag them. We're all nerds here, and we're all a little shy too, since it's definitely a little intimidating to blindly tag people you don't know. It's easy to fall into the loop of beating yourself up over tags, characterization, all kinds of things, but really, I think one of the most valuable things I realized with regards to RP (and life in general, honestly...) is just how true the saying "you're your own harshest critic" is.

It's easy to feel self-concious, and it's not a bad thing either! After all, this means that you're being thoughtful about your RP, and you want people to enjoy playing with you as much as you play with them. Or at least, that's how I feel when I get really self-concious. But the biggest and best way to overcome this hurdle is basically to just go for it. Nine times out of ten, it'll go great, and you'll get new threads and even new CR you may have never expected or known that you wanted as badly as you do. And that one time that it doesn't quite mesh? That's fine too! The absolute worst that's going to come from it is that you and the person you tag just don't mesh for whatever reason, which is totally normal too. In my experience, people are generally super understanding of this, because that also happens to everyone. And after all, nine out of ten isn't bad odds at all.

I can't find the actual comic that comes to mind, but I think this post gets to the point of what I mean. It's easy to be harsh on ourselves because we tend to view things from a different lens. I find that the best way to get over self-consciousness is to be aware of that lens because it helps me get over my shyness.