I think they're pretty similar to sandboxes but the big thing about DRs is many, many character multiples, and in a lot of cases, being broadly open to AUs

ooh, thank you

most were single fandom and... idk

so sandboxes are restricted to one storyline between the same people?

i think it depends on the fandom, how big, how fad, and how much people don't know each other

i think sandboxes that i've seen often have like some kind of check-in and character claim situation

whereas a dressing room MAY have a community for OOC intros and stuff but you don't have to do a claim, you usually just start posting

the DR that I was involved in and eventually ran (but did not set up) was like,,, the setting was pretty similar to entranceway's

for me dressing rooms were often something like a hotel/mansion/cruise ship just people coming in and out

it was a weird mansion that grew and lost rooms and the rooms would have the effects on them, mostly status effects

hmm. in that case, a dressing room sounds nicer

just some liminal space characters ended up in sometimes

but there was also 8dressing (infinity dressing)

i really miss that structure

like desperately lmfao

I like the idea of character multiples and being open to aus

which was more of a panfandom city

you have to decide to what extent you want it to be open to AUs, because a problem that I personally saw in the one I was in ("problem" = you decide how much of a problem it is) was people using crossover AUs as an excuse to bring characters from another fandom into a single fandom DR

every time I hear about the dressing room eras I like the sound of it

ah

it was honestly a nightmare to run but that's because people 1. didn't have as much of an idea of how to behave in general as they do in DWRP today (so in many ways it was the wild west) and 2. expected to basically be allowed to do whatever they wanted

which SHOULD be allowed within reason, but sometimes there are outliers

yeah i remember certain fandom Moments

i.e. people got mad at me for banning room effects that were rapey, stuff like that

What happened?

oh

which i did because when i took on modship it was an all-ages community

the actual biggest fights were over keeping people from godmodding or infomodding

the one thing i can say is that people do keep trying to start dressing rooms on dw and they don't really go anywhere

yup

that's a shame

8dressing was super popular like 10-11 years ago but it sputtered out and i haven't seen much like it since. it was more structured than something like dear_player.

I was thinking about a Star Wars dressing room, but also a multi-fandom one because I like crossover CR. But I don't know how much interest it would gather .

DRs like that have settings

I think you could do one or the other

Star Wars DR is one of those things that I think could take off, esp this december

there are at least 3 star wars dressing rooms that pop up every new movie :< they never last long, sadly

there was a Stranger Things one last year

i don't want to discourage you! but just giving you the history

yeah, another reason they don't take off is that a lot of people have at least one or two people in their fandom who they're avoiding

I wondered! I remember seeing SW things floating about but it's been a long time

i mean, not star wars, just single fandom DRs in general. i also think that stuff tends to not be advertised that well, or that it takes a backseat to memes etc. there was a fantasy/D&D-style DR maybe earlier this year or sometime last year that never really went anywhere.

it makes sense

I just want to gather all the Star Wars players so I don't have to hunt them down on memes/games when I want to play with canonmates XD

i think that because we don't get a ton of new blood, while it is definitely possible to meet new people (I still have my old friends from 5+ years ago but I also have newer ones! and probably my current closest RP friend is someone I met about 2 years ago?)

most people on DW know each other to some extent, esp if they play from the same fandoms. But there are a few fandoms where it's possible not to have crossed paths because they're so popular -- MCU, Star Wars, etc.

not a good track record huh

how open a setting? like the mansions and cruise ships where different rooms have different effects, but that's up to the player?

that's interesting! I haven't been on bakerstreet in a while, but I definitely remember hearing that before about tdms being fun to play in even if you don't want to app

maybe it would be helpful if I looked at TDMs of games I've been in

for a star wars one I already had some ideas for like...setting posts, or era posts with different setting prompts. but I would like a multifandom dressing room like this

side effects, curses, magic going wild, and so on

Yeah, like I'll tell you, the one I ran for a while with a few friends was like... there was no accessibility to new people because the setting became like 98% canon, but then when I wrote down the most agreed-upon stuff and said "here's a reference for new people"

i basically got harassed by some existing players for cramping their style.

so you get around that by having as much nailed down as possible going on

going IN, sorry, typo

this makes sense!

people don't like change

yeah, plus we had one notoriously rigid player (kind of a legendary wanker in some ways, who I made a co-mod before I really understood that she was Like That

who was honestly ready to throw down because I wrote down that most people thought of the setting as having eight floors and she, a relatively late arrival, didn't see why there couldn't be infinite floors

this is obviously a ridiculous situation because neither side mattered much

it didn't especially need to be either thing!

ooof

so nowadays I'd be like "fine, whatever, I don't care, it's just a DR" but at that time it was like "hey, please stop personally attacking me for writing down what I was told when I was new"

and a lot of my experiences with running that kind of setting were kind of skewed by having that kind of co-mod. (like, when i made up that reference post it was amazing, but as soon as someone she was shipping with felt restricted by it, I was the worst person ever and killing RP and keeping them from being creative with my rigidity.)

so yeah, I'd say set things up as much as possible beforehand

you could do stuff like making it so only moderators can post rooms/effects, put them on a queue, or you could leave it completely open but give them a reference table (this is what a given room looks like, this is what it does)

I think that basically because this was like 2008-2009, a lot of crazy status effects were a relatively new idea, and after that they kind of became game standards or meme standards, so they're just not as novel as they were anymore

how many games have "shadow events" now?

what are shadow events?

that might also be a reason for DRs kind of dying out

usually they're like, a bad or dark side of the character's personality splitting from them and acting on its own. details after that can vary.

oh

I've also seen a variation where a character splits into their positive and negative traits

(once in a while they're literal "shadows attack people" events, but that's not really a status effect per se.)

yeah. there was a very strong expectation that there would be extremely hands-off moderation.

unless you set out from the beginning to make it slightly more moderated.

i actually became a DR mod because the original mods were so hands-off that they had basically left after the first month, and we had stuff like people posting "just been fucked" posts with 14 year old characters. And this was not so long after Strikethrough on LJ, so it was something that made a lot of adult players nervous.

so just establish that you're going to moderate problematic things without actually being controlling, and you're halfway there.

Quite different from sandboxes, which still have a certain amount of direction/storyline even if no one is in charge. in Dressing rooms, pretty much anything goes. I ran a single canon one for Dragon Age for a few years. (still miss it honestly)

I think one thing is that a lot of DRs back in the day kind of turned into sandboxes because the sandbox concept wasn’t really that much of a thing at the time (on LJ).

Just kind of morphed over time because regulars tended to treat a lot of them as sandboxes.

But I also think that if you have a framework in place for what you want it to be (enough to encourage interactivity, not so much that people feel really restricted), the main job of a DR mod after that is player comfort.

Largely you’re there to ban toxic elements (so everyone else doesn’t leave) and keep people from harassing each other.

(I remember that the one I ran had people who were mad that anyone wanted to play with any continuity at all, people who were mad that consensus continuity and previous events were ignored, basically just a couple of different factions with different ideas of what a DR should be.

Some people wanted something more like a meme comm, some people wanted something more like a sandbox, and sometimes there was conflict over differing expectations. I don’t think there would be that kind of conflict as much now, because the concept of a sandbox is so much better defined! But the flip side is that DRs don’t have the popularity/traction

that they once did.)