Drop cap for FIRST paragraph only

Question

I know how to create a drop cap for a paragraph manually. But I will be filling a textbox from XML, which may contain one or more paragraphs. If I assign a drop cap as part of the paragraph style, every paragraph gets a drop cap, when I only want it on the FIRST paragraph. It seemed liked Nested Styles offered some promise, but that appears to only work with character styles, and drop cap is available only as a paragraph style.
Is there any solution to this, short of scripting? And if scripting is required, does anyone have any pertinent examples of applying paragraph styles with scripting? I'm a seasoned pro with VB, but I haven't tried VBScript in InDesign yet, and not even sure what the object model looks like.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Please forgive my ignorance, but is "next style" some kind of intrinsic functionality (as suggested by the quotes)? If there is some kind of functionality that says apply a variant of style to the first paragraph, and the original (based on) style to the rest, that's what I'm looking for.
I did arrive at a work-around, using the original style and basing a new style on it (thanks for the tip, I didn't think about that), but it's less elegant than I'd like. What I did is, instead of assigning an XML tag to the entire textbox, I selected the first paragraph and assigned a tag to it; then I selected the remaining paragraph(s) and assigned a different tag. I mapped styles to each tag, with the first having the drop cap. So far, it seems to work--though I've found that with ID and XML, it's best to keep things as simple as possible. ID's implementation of XML can be a little squirrely. This also adds the burden of having the software which generates the XML, determine when the first paragraph ends and the second begins.
If anyone else out there tries this, please note: ID adds as "Story" tag to the structure. You'll need to add this tag to your XML as well (and remember, tag names are case sensitive).