under the cut, you’ll find a total of 07 app formats that can be used for roleplays! feel free to use & edit these in any way you need!! if you find this post useful, please consider giving it a like / reblog so i know :-)
(1) ╰ ♡ * ･ﾟ ◞ faceclaim › gender › pronouns ——— is that CHARACTER NAME i see at FAVOURITE PLACE? i heard the AGE year old has a reputation of being the LABEL around town - which honestly makes perfect sense seeing as they’re POSITIVE TRAIT & NEGATIVE TRAIT. their best friend apparently thinks they most resemble CHARACTER from FANDOM but i don’t really see it. do you? / ooc name, age, pronouns, tmz
(2) 〈 faceclaim / gender / pronouns 〉well, well, well.. if it isn’t CHARACTER NAME, the AGE year old who’s best known around town for NOTABLE MOMENT. keep this between us but i’ve heard that they SECRET; can you believe that? i guess it makes sense seeing as they are quite POSITIVE TRAIT & NEGATIVE TRAIT. lets just hope that little secret doesn’t get into the wrong hands... / ooc name, age, pronouns, tmz
(3) 「 faceclaim 〳 gender 〳 pronouns 」 CHARACTER NAME is a AGE year old who has quite a reputation for being NEGATIVE TRAIT. some would beg to differ & say that they’re more POSITIVE TRAIT. their best friend said that their biggest pet peeve is HERE so don’t do that around them unless you really want to annoy them / ooc name, age, pronouns, tmz
(4) ﹛ faceclaim | age | gender ﹜ welcome to (town / apartment / etc name), CHARACTER NAME! just to make sure, you go by PRONOUNS, right? ok, great. i just have a few questions for you before i can let you go: how long have you been here for? AMOUNT OF TIME. what’s your current occupation? OCCUPATION. what’s your dream occupation? DREAM OCCUPATION. wow! interesting. lastly, this is a bit of a random question but - what’s your favourite song? SONG by ARTIST. & that’s all she wrote, friend! see you around! / ooc name, age, pronouns, tmz
(5) ｡･:*:･ﾟ faceclaim / gender / pronouns. see CHARACTER NAME over there? they have quite a reputation of being the LABEL. the AGE year old has been around these parts for AMOUNT OF TIME and within that timeframe, have landed themselves a job as a/n OCCUPATION. don’t tell them i know this but i overheard that their biggest regret is REGRET. sad, right? hopefully they get over it one day. / ooc name, age, pronouns, tmz
(6) faceclaim / gender / pronouns ——— wait, is that CHARACTER NAME NOT doing HOBBY? shocking! i wasn’t sure anyone could peel the AGE year old away from it. so... i did a little digging on them and found out that their most played song is SONG by ARTIST. and they’re often seen with SOMETHING OF IMPORTANCE with them... that’s kinda sweet, isn’t it? i wonder what else there is to know about them.. / ooc name, age, pronouns, tmz
(7) ╰ ☆ ◞ faceclaim / gender / pronouns ——— no way is that CHARACTER NAME.. they’re notoriously known for being NEGATIVE TRAIT & NEGATIVE TRAIT but there are some people who have seen them being POSITIVE TRAIT & POSITIVE TRAIT. if you ask me, they remind me a lot of 3-5 AESTHETICS, but that could just be because they’re considered the LABEL around town. just keep an eye on them & see if their true colours shine through.. / ooc name, age, pronouns, tmz
What I mean when I say graphics set, is all the header graphics you need for a main blog. So admin post, unfollow, follow, activity check, individual admin graphics ect, ect. I can also make promo graphics, character graphic PSDs, or I can make one off graphics if that’s what you’re looking for.
So, whether to set up a RPG main as a primary or secondary blog 100% comes down to personal choice. There are lots of pros and cons for both, and I have had experience with both. The end determinate is how it is you wish to organise things, and how much you end up trusting your co-admins (if you have any). I set up Welcome to the Dollhouse as a sideblog for a couple of different reasons, my anal retentiveness to organisation being the primary reason, and the other group blog I am a part of going through its malicious deletion being the secondary reason; there were a couple of other reasons that I will touch on as well, but the decision to go with a Secondary Blog is from the experiences I have had as an Admin. Since I have touched on these issues, I have had several asks inquiring that I make a guide on how to set up your main as a secondary blog and manage it, which is the reason for this guide!
What are Primary and Secondary Blogs?
First, I want to discuss the differences, from an admin perspective, between a Primary Blog and a Secondary Blog. Tumblr’s general blog management can be found here, but let’s look at what you can do as an admin with both:
With Primary Blogs you can:
Follow people back
Message people from the main
Submit posts (like promos or shoutout requests)
With a Secondary Blog you can:
Password protect (if necessary, useful if your RPG goes on hiatus an you want to take it “offline” before a reboot or something)
Have multiple members/users contributing information without sharing login information
Accountability (you know who is posting what because their icon shows)
Admin Privileges
Now, the biggest issue with both of these blog types, because Tumblr does not have a “Super Admin” role, is that in some way you are needing to trust your co admin.
With a Primary Blog, anyone with the password to your account can go in, post, delete content, delete asks, or even delete the entire blog and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. Tumblr will only tell you that someone logged into the account, but that’s about all they will tell you. The other admins could even change the email and password, and not let you know, essentially locking you out of your own creation.
With a Secondary Blog, there are also trust factors. In order for your fellow admins to get the inbox feature, and the ability to answer asks they must be promoted to an Admin. However, once you promote someone to an Admin, you can’t take that back. They have to be the one that removes themselves. This also means that should something go wrong dramatically, they can delete content, or post content maliciously, and you can delete it because you’re an admin, but you can’t kick them out; and I have a feeling Tumblr staff will simply say “too bad” if you go running to them. If you are fine managing the inbox on your own, you can have co-admins as members, with the ability to post content and delete their OWN content, but not the ability to delete other’s content or answer messages.
The way I have Dollhouse set up is as a Secondary Blog, and both Adri and Whitty are Admins (they are also admins to all the side blogs I have for the RP). I trust them implicitly with all of my content, and I know that because of the relationship I had with them for nearly a year before we became admins for Dollhouse, that if there was any issues the communication relationship among us all is solid and if any of us felt it time to leave there would be no drama. But, this is a pre-established relationship that has come with time...as I have seen in other corners of Tumblr...this is not always the case, so please choose admins wisely, and please give them access wisely.
Organisation
I am an organisation FREAK, and I’m pretty proud of it. I rarely have more than 10 items in my inbox (IF ANY), and I WISH there was a drag and drop feature for Drafts like there is for the New XKit Enhanced Queue extension (hey @new-xkit-extension...) The over-arching reason why I decided to make Dollhouse a Secondary Blog was because as a collab blog it nicely keeps track of who is posting what, and it allowed me to keep my own admin stuff organised in ways that can’t happen when you have several people in a Primary Blog as a main.
So that brought up the question...what to use as a Primary Blog. One of the issues that I had as an admin was accessibility. As a newbie to Tumblr RP I basically became obsessed very focused in the group I was in, and when I was promoted to admin, my daily accessibility was felt by many. I had several of the members coming to me to answer questions that they had had for a while that had gone unanswered by the creator. It ended up building relationships between me as an admin to the members, and in that relationship they felt comfortable coming to me with things and talking to me about things that they didn’t feel comfortable bringing to the main. Additionally, we did end up having some drama where one of the members had an issue with an admin and DID bring it to the main in a poor manner, instead of approaching another admin about it, which caused some really hurt feelings and grudges. Please see my posting about how to bring issues properly to your admins. This is also a great PSA to admins and mods to stop addressing anon issues in your RP, because it doesn’t solve anything and often is more trouble than it’s worth.
Because of this experience, I wanted to create a safe environment for everyone who joined. After discussing it with Adri and Whitty, we all created Primary Blogs as our admin blogs. You can see an example of my Admin Blog Here (please don’t follow it though...it’s for members only...again with the organisation). These blogs can get asks and messages, and are places specifically set up for members as a safe space to come talk to us.
The Setup
Now that we all had Primary Blogs, I set up the main as a Secondary blog, as well as a couple of additional secondaries.
I have an admin group blog that is password protected that is an admin-only chat. We have final remarks on applications or notes to each other that are 100% admin related. We group chat on Skype, but we all go off on tangents, so things can get really lost in the shuffle; having a blog that’s devoted to admin business helps to keep things clear and clean.
We have an apps blog, which was created so that we could have a separate “applications folder” in the inbox the process of which is shown here. We did the same thing creating a hiatus blog so those are also kept in a separate folder.
Finally we have a gossip blog that is attached to it all as well, and the OOC chat blog. I’ve made Adri and Whitty admins of all of these so that they can manage it just the same as I can. The only ones that the members are really aware of are the Admin Primary, Main, Gossip, and OOC blogs. The rest are just background for us, and you definitely do not need to go into as much detail as I do...again...obsessed with organisation. But our Admin Primary structures look a little like this:
Primary Admin Blog
RPG Main
Admin Chat and Resources
OOC Chat
Application Blog
Hiatus Blog
Gossip Blog
So then...how do you Admin?
Before it kinda seemed like everything came out of the main RPG blog. When you have it as a secondary, you can’t contact players, you can’t ask for shoutouts and promotions...but you can from your other blogs. For shoutouts and promotions I have a separate primary promo blog that redirects to the main, because you can run into upload and posting caps when it’s a secondary that effects the rest of the functionality of your other blogs. For messaging the players, I use my primary admin blog, because it helps promote relationships between you and the members, and when you’re messaging back and forth, it’s helpful to know who they are talking to instead of “The Admin Body.”
It’s a different way of going about things, and it requires a lot of set up in the beginning (especially when you go as in depth as I do), but once your RP is up and running it makes things go SO smooth. You never have to wonder where something is, or if someone on your crew saw something, and the members never wonder who they’re talking to, and they always know they have a place they can reach out to if they need to talk to someone specifically.
hi love, do you mind helping me looking for some kind of guide for gossip blogs? please and thank you:) x
Of course! I see that someone else has already helped you out with a few links, but I’ll give you some of my own tips since I am currently running a successful Gossip Blog. Here are my steps to success:
Choose a character- this is important because you need to know how your gossip character will interact with the rest of the RP. Will they be snarky? Sarcastic? Overly excited? Any way you want to take them, that will help you choose a gossip blog FC (I recommended Nina Dobrev, Rachel McAdams, Leighton Meester, Sasha Pierterse, Ashlley Benson, Paul Iancono, or even Jim Parsons)
Set yourself up for success- you need to choose how you interact with players. Will you let them send you anonymous tips? Will you write blog posts about the weekly happenings? Or will you just share opinions on happenings shared with you?
Set up a schedule- it doesn’t need to be strict, but you should have a time that people can expect the gossip blog to be active so that they are more inclined to send things in.
Don’t be afraid to hate everyone equally- picking favorites often leaves some players out of the loop, while other’s feel extremely immersed. Make sure that for every negative thing you say about a character, you also defend them sometimes. Remember- you’re character is, for lack of a a better term, bitch and should act like one.
Keep active and informed- if you are not an admin, make sure you’re keeping up to date with everything that’s going on within the RP. Knowing what’s happening even before someone gossips to you about it will give you time to think of some good, sassy responses!
Make guidelines & a blacklist- You need to make sure players are aware that everything said on the blog is not to be taken to heart, and is not meant to offend them, or their writing. Make sure you also have a list of thing and people you cannot talk about under any circumstances. Every gossip blog i personally have every run has had at least one person who feels uncomfortable with them, and that’s fine. You should work with your players to find a level that works for them, whether that means deciding not to include them at all or a compromise.
