How To Use It (A quick comm guide)

[modnote]

First time using Dreamwidth to roleplay ever? Looking for some advice? You've come to the right place! 

However, please note that this guide is focused on this particular community. There are a lot more communities and games to explore on this website and this doesn't necessarily cover all you need to know about them. If you want to branch out, feel very free to look for more guides online or contact me and ask about it!

(A lot of the information here overlaps with the FAQ, don't be confused by this.)

BASICS

Step One: Make an account for your muse!

This one is easy. Sign up for dreamwidth if you haven't already. You can tamper with your profile and journal style all you like, but it's not actually necessary to prettify anything before you go. In choosing your icons, you probably want to make sure to cover all basic expressions your muse has (anger, sadness, excitement etc.). Unless you pay for an account or use html to integrate images into your posts, those are going to be your thread icons. 

Also, if you have more than one DN-related muse? Make accounts for all of them. The more the merrier. We don't currently have a limit on how many characters / versions of characters you can play, so go wild!

Step Two: Joindeathnoterp and deathnoteooc

As far as Death Note RP goes, these two communities are where the action is at. The split in functions is simple:

deathnoterp is where you RP. Everything In-Character goes there. Further information will be down below.

deathnoteooc is for the muns to chat about things. Want to introduce yourself and say hi? Have a specific plot idea in mind and need someone to play it out with you? Are leaving for vacation and want to notify people of the hiatus? That goes there! Make your posts, reply to other people's posts - just communicate and be nice to each other!

Step Three: The Actual RP-ing

RP on dreamwidth functions in the form of posts that you reply to. To give you an impression of how this might look, I made this beautiful example post.

Character A (mod) sets up the scene - like open starters on tumblr.
Characters B (Mikami) and C (Jakotsu, who is still not a DN character) both reply to the starter. The threads that follow are just your everyday RPing. You reply to each other's comments and get a nice linear comment chain.

There are two major writing styles for DW-RP.
The first one is what I used in the Mikami thread. It's the normal kind of prose you are all familiar with.
The second one is what I used in the Jakotsu-thread. It's not actually much different, except that you use brackets. While this is generally reminiscent of the *walks around* action style, it has developed to a much more coherent form of writing. All narrative text goes within the brackets and all dialogue is placed outside of them. In this, the narrative text can have whatever length you want. If you want to put five paragraphs into your 'action spam', absolutely nobody is stopping you. 
The HTML code to make your brackets small is <small>[ my rp text goes here ]</small> .

Which style you use is entirely up to your preference!

The alternate to making your own posts is memes, such as this. On a meme, it's not 'everyone responds to Character A' but rather 'everyone makes a comment that other people can respond to'. For examples on how this might look, you can check out the posts on bakerstreet  which is DW's most famous meme community. (It is also free for everyone to play in, so if multi-fandom is your thing, that's one comm to go!)

ADDITIONAL INFO

Okay, and now specific to Death Note RP. What do we do HERE exactly?

 Anything you want, actually. Here's some examples of what you can do:

-Memes, obviously enough. Reply to the one's posted by the mod account or post your own! (Or even invent them, if you're feeling creative today.)

-Open posts of any variety! Setting etc is your choice entirely. You play Mello and you decide he's suddenly on a beach resort and want him to meet other people there? Great, post about it. Your Matsuda is a rockstar and has a concert that people could come watch? Cool! Really, you don't have limits. Another idea could even be making your character post ICly to the internet etc.

If you want to do a specific plot and pre-plan something, you can discuss that in the OOC comm, of course.

So what kind of character can I play?

Any character related to the Death Note franchise, from any timeline or AU. 

How do I tag my posts?

Like on tumblr, tags are an important tool to organize RP and make it easy to find again. As such, please tag posts you RP in as character name (in western order): yourusername. This way, all posts can easily be referred back to. For example, my tag for Mikami would be teru mikami: inordertobelieve . 


More questions? Comment here and I'll answer you as soon as I can!