Dimentions Roleplaying Community

What Is Roleplaying?

Roleplaying: collaboratively acting out the actions of characters with 2 or more people, where each person takes control of 1 or more characters.

Often, table-top roleplaying games are what people think of first when they hear the term. However, this website isn't about tabletop games, but rather groups of 2 or more people collaborating together to write a story using text.

In the context of this website, an individual 'Roleplay' is defined as a story that people create by typing what their character does in relation to the other characters' actions.

What Is Dimentions?

Dimentions is a new type of website which aims to bring the roleplaying community together. People roleplay on many different services: Instant messengers, MU*s, forums, and chat websites. However, for the vast majority of these, the service either isn't easily accessible for most people (they require the installation of dedicated client software) or they're not designed to accomodate roleplaying (such as forums and online chat services).

How Does Dimentions Help Roleplayers?

Dimentions strives to give its users a framework for helping them collaborate with and find fellow roleplayers easier. This includes things like:

• Tag-based Asset Searching

  Not everyone creates their own roleplays. It's important to allow roleplayers to be able to browse and search not only for roleplays to join, but also for other assets (see below).

  Assets are important to more than the person creating them, as they give a good impression of what the asset's creator is like. For example, a user who creates a lot of science fiction assets is probably really into science fiction. Essentially, the ability for a user to find assets that are interesting to them can help them find others into the same things they are.

  As for the tag-based nature of it, tags are controlled and indexed by the database. Searching for a combination of tags will result in items that match all the tags to come up on top, while items that match, say, all but one will go underneath. Items that only match one tag will be at the bottom, and items that don't match any simply won't show up.

• Clubs

  For those who are creating their own roleplays, you can't always just sit around and wait for someone who happens to be into the things you are to search for the specific tag combination your roleplay has. And those looking for a roleplay might want to see not just roleplays already started, but also look for people who are going to create a roleplay - and have not yet done so.

  To this end, Dimentions includes a feature called 'Clubs'. Clubs are sorta like mini forums, and are designed to be 'Out Of Character' (OOC). Any user can create their own club for any topic (as long as the club name is not already taken), and of course invite others to join their club.

  The idea is that with clubs, people can look for others who have similar interests, and either talk about those interests or plan a future roleplay dealing with that interest.

  Right now, many roleplaying websites are dedicated to only one community of roleplayers and their particular interests. Some are even dedicated to a single roleplay. While this helps people find a group of like-minded individuals, it puts a division in the roleplaying community at large; not every individual has the exact same set of preferences, and yet not every roleplayer would want to join a plethora of different websites for all their different interests, or even be able to find roleplaying websites for their interests.

  Clubs make it easy for people to join together with others with the same interest, while also exploring other interests that are out there. It centralizes this as well, so that things like notifications come through in one (organized) place. It gets rid of the division in the community at large by including every community into a whole.

Organizing And Relating Assets

There are a few basic assets that all roleplays have. Traditionally, all of these are stated in every roleplay at the start (or in some cases, such as with characters, at random intervals throughout the roleplay when it's first mentioned/created), taking up space and making it difficult to look back at for reference.

On top of that, many roleplayers want to re-use these assets in other roleplays - often because they have a series of several roleplays that all create one larger story - and it becoems cumbersome to re-type everything every time, or if things change, to synchronize changes across roleplays.

Instead of having these assets scattered throughout a roleplay or duplicated across several roleplays, Dimentions organizes these things and relates them to each other. Things that are related to each other can easily link to what they're related to, so if you're looking at one you can easily either find out more about it, or find out what it's related to.

Here are some of the assets Dimentions organizes:

• Characters

  Essentially, characters are the actual people and sentient creatures you roleplay as. They often have lives and backgrounds of their own, descriptions, personalities, and other details that make them unique.

• Universes

  Traditionally known as the 'Setting' the roleplay takes place in. However, 'Setting' usually refers to a specific place; roleplays can end up being adventures that take place in many different places, even with different groups of characters interacting in different places at the same time!

  Another term one could go by is 'Worlds', but since some roleplays might exist in a science fiction environment that has travel to multiple planets, it's still not quite descriptive enough.

  For now, each roleplay associates with only one Universe. Roleplays about travel between parallel universes can just make several headings on their Universe description page for each one; I think naming them 'Multiverses' is a bit too far.

  The naming of this asset is open to discussion!

• Roleplays

  It may seem obvious, but roleplays themselves are assets. You might want to refer to events of one roleplay in another, and vice versa, for example. You also want to relate what roleplays exist in different Universes, what characters have been used in a roleplay, what roleplays a character has been in, and so on.

For an example of how Dimentions organizes things, consider: instead of describing the Universe's history, location descriptions, and so forth at the start of every roleplay, instead associate each roleplay with a Universe that contains those descriptions. That way, not only can you go look at the history and description from any page of the roleplay, but you can also easily see how many roleplays belong to any particular Universe.

^{More of this description will be written later.}