A thread written from the perspective of someone in an ATL posing the question of what if history had gone as it in fact did go in OTL. Example:

DBWI: What if the South had lost the Civil War ?

Thread participants are expected to act in-character, as if coming from the ATL world. The sense of the thread is revealing the ATL world by discussing how the A-ATL (that is, OTL) might look. Generally it is considered bad form to predict OTL accurately - instead, participants should come up with well argued and reasonable, but totally inaccurate, assertions for what OTL should look like.

The phrase “DBWI” is sometimes used in a wider way to mean any sort of role-playing, including “Future Blind What If” to mean role-playing in a future setting. A contemporary use is expressed in Redem's celebrated The Many Nations of North America, aka “How did you live the war?”

Much less commonly used is “Triple Blind What If” which has various definitions - one is e.g. TBWI: What if the South had won the Civil War (rather than being defeated in 1861?) to introduce two new layers of role-playing.

Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy is very fond of DBWIs, but his DBWI threads have a strange tendency to attract inexperienced members who fail to understand the concept, making him storm off in a huff.

Straha was infamous for hijacking DBWIs, and turning every DBWI-ATL into some post-nuclear exchange dystopia. Such is generally considered bad form.

Recently thecreeper has been responsible for a number of DBWIs that have either (i) degenerated into Ameriwank, and/or (ii) involved n00bs selectively discarding the details established in previous posts.

Recently, people have seen DBWI used in other contexts and affixed it to a normal WI because they don't understand its meaning. ASBBWI has also appeared as a superfluous label for a WI in the ASB forum. MrP was last seen screaming and calling for his shotgun, only to break down in tears when Torqumada reminded him that Britons cannot have guns.

Codae coined the terms “DB Discussion” (e.g. DB Discussion: Was King Louis XXIV good, or bad?) and “DB Chat” (e.g. DB Chat: Your thoughts on the Canadian presidential elections) to denote ATL threads from the Chat and Discussion forums, respectively.