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CDT Main Page
Rules, Things to Keep in Mind, and Answers to some Questions
The Big Things
- All TV Tropes forum rules are in effect within the threads.
Don't be a dick, respect your fellow writers, encourage people to contribute, and no explicit sex or NSFW content- keep it PG-13. Innuendo and nudity are generally acceptable without being too lascivious, but any actual sex must be done offscreen. Swearing in character dialogue and descriptions of violent acts are also allowed as long as they are not added gratuitously and the violence is not too graphic for primetime television. - Writing for the CDTs is, on a technical level, no different from writing for a novel. All standard technical conventions of prose fiction writing and English spelling and grammar apply in the threads. Of course, character dialogue is exempt from strict grammatical rules if that is a part of their natural voice. If you need extra help with English, Purdue University's Online Writing Lab can help, particularly their pages on grammar and punctuation; their page on mechanics can also help with general communication.
- If you ever have any questions on a guideline written in this folder, something that's happening in-thread, or just want a second opinion, don't ever hesitate to ask, whether in the discussion thread linked in the intro above or a PM. As informal as we may be, a little bit of communication can go a long way towards having a good experience. As a corollary, if you feel that someone is bending or breaking a guideline listed in this folder or otherwise posting in a way that's rendering the story difficult to proceed with, please say so.
- Interested in jumping in? If possible, we recommend that you skim the first and last few pages of threads, and thoroughly read their opening posts so you can get a basic idea as to the setting presented within. If the thread you're interested in is more than a few pages long, don't be afraid to drop by the discussion thread and ask for a recap, or guidance on where to put your characters.
- Please read the first post of any thread before jumping in, which can contain valuable information about the details of the setting, special rules or restrictions to follow in addition to the ones in this folder, and links to resources such as the thread's designated TV Tropes page, maps of the setting, and the weather and current time of day in-thread. When possible, their contents are also pinned at the top of each page of the thread in a pinkish-orangish box. As you write, it is a good idea to refer to this first post often to ensure things remain at least somewhat internally consistent.
- It is helpful to think of the CDTs as a book series and to write using conventions that would be appropriate to see in a work of literature. If you already have them, posting drawings or visual likenesses of your characters can be a nice touch, but we'd rather not be given profiles, information about, or descriptions of characters beyond the broad sort of details you might expect to find in a back-of-cover blurbnote . It is more useful to us all, both as readers and writers, that your character's in-story portrayal be allowed to speak for themselves, because that's how general readers are going to be experiencing your character. Also tying in with the book series analogy is what to do if you bring a character you've already used in a past thread- write and describe them as though this is their first appearance, regardless of how much or in what ways they've changed (or haven't) since their last in-thread appearance.
- It's advisable to come to these threads with a loose goal in mind to guide what you do with your characters, which can be anything from wanting to work on a specific aspect of a character that's proving difficult to trying something new out to simply wanting to have fun or help people. It doesn't hurt to mention it out-of-character, whether as a spoilered comment in-thread or in the discussion. As you write, try to be mindful of your fellow writers' reasons for being there. Communicate your intentions and make an effort to ensure everyone you're writing with can share the spotlight. If you're stuck and not sure what to do, talk it out!
The Nitty-Gritty of Participating
- Ideally, posts should be at least a paragraph and contain an action of some sort. They could show reactions to the other events and characters around them, advance the plot (whatever that plot may be), set something up for later, or reveal something about your characters, such as their thoughts or feelings on a situation. If you're writing your characters in a Cast Herd with two or more writers, try to make sure everyone in the group has a chance to reply. Don't get into rapidfire back-and-forth posting with only one other writer- either slow down and let the others in your group have a turn, or split off into your own group. Alternatively, if you're in a somewhat large group and your characters really don't have much to contribute at the moment in terms of actions or dialogue that isn't just agreeing with what someone else said, you're free to forfeit your 'turn' to help keep things moving.
- Don't bring more characters than you can handle given the other goings-on of your life. By 'handle', we mean writing for with reasonable depth of character, which, as these threads are writing exercises, we prefer to breadth. If you bring more than one, make an attempt at getting all of them involved with the characters of another writer. Try not to keep all of your characters together, especially if there are more than three, as interacting with that many characters tends to be awkward for other writers, and makes it hard for all of your characters to get adequate attention. Bouncing off of one another without interacting with other people's characters should be done in moderation and only with a good reason. You've been given an opportunity to get your characters around other writers who can notice things and move your characters in directions you may have never found on your own, so don't waste it doing something that you can just as easily do alone.
- Whenever you bring a character to a thread, make an entry for them in the Active Troper Characters folder on the thread's TV Tropes page. In this entry, provide a link to their in-thread introductory post (or whichever post contains the most details about their physical appearance), your Troper handle, and a brief, one- or two-sentence description of your character. (If you have drawings or visual likenesses of your characters, you can also include links to those images.) This will make it easier to keep your characters from getting lost in the shuffle.
- Since this is a collaborative environment, be aware that if you have an especially detailed plan in mind such as a specific plot that you want to make happen, you must account for the fact that it will not go exactly as you want. Do not expect to be able to foresee or control the behavior of other writers and their characters.
- Although non-casual threads generally lack any inherent means of protecting characters from harm or death, note that none of our threads will ever disallow any particular type of character or genre, and that includes characters who are not equipped to defend themselves or others. In order for these two groups to continue coexisting within single threads, we ask that you please respect the wishes of other writers who would prefer that their characters go unmolested. In a similar vein, unless absolutely everyone involved happens to be okay with it (which is unlikely to happen at best), it is preferable that you not disturb large parts of the cast or physical setting in a way that will make it difficult to continue with the thread in the same manner as before. If some characters are having a pleasant day at the park or trying to eat their lunch in a cafe, don't have your character come by and shoot the place up, even if that is actually what they would logically do in that situation.
- Events that are disruptive without harming anybody fall into a similar vein. If you decide that it would be appropriate to have your character crash-land in the setting, suddenly collapse, make their Loyal Animal Companion loudly threaten someone, bring a very strange-looking character within sight of other characters, or do or bring something else similarly unignorable, exercise caution. Bring it up in the discussion first and make sure that you have time to deal with the consequences in-thread. Don't hold off on posting because you want the other characters to speculate amongst themselves about whatever it is you brought. Keep things moving.
- Some threads may have explicitly defined (such as an interdimensional door) or implicit (e.g., an otherwise modern, Western city would logically have paved roads for cars and buses, passenger trains, maybe even an airport, etc.) means for characters to reach the settings in the threads. These exist more or less for flavor or setting definition purposes and can be freely ignored. Your characters can appear in the setting through any method you choose, for any in-story reason, and in most cases anywhere, provided that other characters would logically not have had any reason to notice them prior. It all depends on what you want to do with the character. Especially if there's no logical way in your characters' home setting for them to end up at a setting of a thread's nature and/or they'd be bewildered upon arrival, it would perhaps be more beneficial for their development if the nature of their arrival was left vague and if you wrote your character(s) getting over the initial shock during their introductory post. This is one example of a situation where conversations between your characters and no other writers would be not just acceptable, but advantageous- it gets your characters into position for development with little fuss.
Specific Guidelines For Specific Concerns
- If your character speaks a language other than English in your work and you do not want to deal with language barriers, all threads come prepackaged with a Translation Convention. Your characters' speech will miraculously be translated into other listeners' languages without anybody's knowledge, and they will hear everyone else's speech in their own language. If a character speaks their preferred language with an accent, why, you can make that carry over, too. Have fun with it!
- Death Is Cheap around these parts- if a character is incapacitated or even killed during the course of the thread, they do not have to stay that way beyond the end of the thread; whether if they should is up to the discretion of the writer of the crippled or dead character. The details of the event can be glossed over or made light of as the writer deems appropriate. That being said, if you're bringing back a character who watched another suffer some horrible injury or even die, it's a safe bet to make your character's specific memories of the event fuzzy.
- In some threads, fight scenes will happen. With characters from so many different universes with different rules and abilities, it's very important that we try to maintain some order. Do not autohit- that means writing your character doing something, such as throwing a punch or shooting at somebody else's character, and writing out the effects on that character, whether it hits or harms them or whatnot. Also, don't forget to communicate. Exchange PMs with the writers of your characters' opponents to lay down some loose guidelines and establish a bit of camaraderie to help keep feelings from getting hurt in the process. It also doesn't hurt to apply this practice to nonviolent debates, as well.
- This is important more than ever with the extreme variance of speculative fiction elements- what may be possible or ubiquitous in one world may be impossible or vanishingly rare in another, and what works in one manner in one world will almost certainly work differently in another. Though you and your fellow writers can certainly attempt it on your own time, it is plainly impossible and too impractical for us to fully reconcile the exact interactions of something like magic or antimagic from two different systems for us as a group to be able to even take this on a case-by-case basis. The major rule to keep in mind is that you should never attempt to assume how something of yours will affect something that isn't yours, regardless of perceived genre-specific 'norms', real-world mythological basis, or any other 'standard'. Go ahead and write your character throwing that punch or pulling the trigger, but let the writer of the character on the receiving end decide how they'll take it.
- As a corollary, asspulling your character out of harm's way is seriously frowned upon, as with all forum roleplays that feature combat. Recall that in the end, we are developing our characters and writing a story together, not trying to show how awesome/badass our characters are. While these 'stories' of ours may not be great, avoiding Deus Ex Machinae when we can is one small way to make them just a little bit better. Note that if you have characters with fictional abilities, you will almost certainly have to alter them slightly for the threads. For instance, if your characters' magic would theoretically be able to bypass someone else's antimagic just because it operates on a mechanism that isn't applicable to your magic or because it's 'technically not magic' by your in-setting standards, let their antimagic work on your characters.
- Do not take control of any character that does not belong to you. This can come in many forms, from the obvious one of having someone else's character do something (whether an action, reaction, facial expression, etc.) as though they were your own to various indirect forms that make unignorable assumptions such as autohitting (discussed above) or including several actions in a single post that depend on other characters doing (or not doing) something. Controlling other people's characters can make them act out-of-character and is also very disrespectful to the writer because you're presuming that you know more about their own creation than they do. It's like finishing someone's sentence for them. It's not showing someone your interpretation of their character, bringing it up in the discussion or a PM is.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall is a time-honored tradition around these parts, mostly in the form of characters noticing the various quirks of the settings created for the threads that set them apart from their own home settings. If Breaking the Fourth Wall is possible in your characters' home work, you can still participate and let them keep their knowledge of their nature and the existence of the wall, but you, the writer, must keep in mind that the fourth wall of the threads is completely solid. If your characters' knowledge or ability to interact with the wall allows them to do things that wouldn't be possible if the wall were completely solid in their home work (such as Medium Awareness or consulting the audience and receiving feedback), they will have to give those things up for the duration of the thread. But do not despair, as there are ways that this can be worked with depending on what direction you would like to take your characters in for the thread, including but not limited to:
- Allowing them to discover for themselves that the fourth wall is solid here with appropriate results, whether they have an epiphany and reevaluate themselves, have to learn how to get by without the fourth wall they're used to, and/or just have to deal with people finding them daft.
- Letting them think about stuff beyond the fourth wall and other metafictional things all they want while keeping it to themselves. Telepaths and other means of mind-reading won't be able to pick up on any metafiction-related thoughts, but will be able to pick up on everything else.
- Choosing not to show or mention any metafictional elements at all.
Thread Idea Bank
In this folder, we store ideas for new threads that have previously been proposed but have not yet become actual threads. Obviously, if you would like to add something here, you can; this page is, after all, publicly editable. Just don't remove anything until it becomes a thread. And note that not all ideas in here have to be completely serious, 'we're-definitely-gonna-do-it' thread candidates and can inspire other, possibly related ideas.
- A large region, with multiple towns and cities and a quest-giving guild
- A safari
- Natural disaster relief
- An open-air shopping concourse, with writer-defined stores
- A suburb
- Transformers with the human characters fighting aside the Transformers in Humongous Mecha in "mangaesque" style.
- An amusement park (casual thread)
- 'Hardcore' threads
- A lond winding road that goes from nowhere to nowhere, crossing jungles, mountains and deserts along the way.
- A Darker and Edgier, Grey's Anatomy or Person of Interest -type plot (this has no fantasy elements in, none at all, more Slice of Life and Darker and Edgier).
