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Gegenji · **12-08-2014, 09:26 AM**

I still remember the moment I first got introduced to "RP," and it was way back in elementary school during the after-school daycare (around third or fourth grade, if I recall correctly).

There wasn't any dice, there wasn't any rules. It was one of the people working there telling us all a story, with us as the characters, and constantly looking to us when "we" were presented with an obstacle and asked us what we could do. People mentioned their hats, their favorite yo-yos, busting out that Yak-Bak they had in their backpack. No matter what "solution" we threw at her, she took it and made it work and continued the story. And it was amazing.

Ever since, whenever something has caught my interest - video game, TV show, comic book - I've found myself making "fan characters" for them and imagining how they'd interact in that world. The earliest one I can remember was a Sonic fan-character "Fists the Echidna" - who was half echidna, half robot (I was nine at the time, so cut me a little slack there Laugh

) - that I thought up around the time of Sonic 3's release. I would even trace over pictures I could find of Knuckles and "robotocize" his left side, up until I could draw the character on my own (albeit rather poorly). I do find myself thinking up characters like that still, but I'd like to believe that they are a little more nuanced and creative. Or I could be just kidding myself, who knows? Tonberry

That brought me to Dungeons and Dragons (2nd edition. THAC0, y'all!) in the later days of elementary school with a friend of mine named Ben. I could read the handbooks, have ideas for these worlds, and actually use them! It was amazing! I've been playing pen and paper games like that on and off ever since (both in person and through online chat rooms), including running a game here and there.

Even when I got introduced to my first MMO while in training for the military (Vanilla WoW), I found myself developing a backstory for my Night Elf Hunter and even jotting down a few short stories. It wasn't an RP server, though - I had no idea such things existed, in fact - so it was usually just left on the wayside. I did the same thing for my characters in Everquest (naming my Necromancer's minions - like Mr. Happy the Wilted Flesh), FFXI, Champions Online (Favorite was Lard Almighty, the ex-Football player and overweight superhero - everyone had muscular or sexy heroes, I had to!), All-Points Bulletin, even my brief stint in Monster Hunter 3 (loved my grumpy, elderly Lancer and his love of tea. HOOAGH!)...

Then the burnout happened. I was in a hardcore raiding guild trying to push through the latest expansion of WoW, there was in-guild drama and most of our "recruits" were just using us to gear up before applying to a further-progressed guild. One guild leader got replaced with another, who got replaced by my friend that got me into WoW in the first place, and then he just up and quit without a word, leaving me in charge of this crumbling mess. I ducked out and swore off MMOs for good.

I still had my pen-and-papers, at least. I was running a 4e DnD game in a homebrew world with some friends of mine. Slowly, though, that drifted apart too and I had no real outlet. My days dwindled to "go to work, come home, play Team Fortress 2 until I got bored enough to spend the rest of the evening watching YouTube videos."

Sister was playing FFXIV, tried to get me in, I passed. The free trial rolled around, she tried again and I relented. I decided I'd stick to pure casual stuff - no more raiding guilds and the like anymore. Made my Lalafell, stuck around after the trial ended, and slowly worked on leveling him while perusing the official forums. Came across the Lore section - the naming conventions, specifically - and then stumbled on a thread that linked to here. Investigated on a whim, and... well, you can see how that turned out. Thumbsup

So... um... yeah. Blush

Melodia · **12-08-2014, 09:55 AM**

I started rp'ing in D&D tabletop stuff a long time ago. This little blue box set with some rough maps and dice and from there went to Rifts, and Vampire: The Masquerade, AD&D, Shadowrun, a Robotech one, Traveler, and so many others.

As FFXIV is my first MMO I had no idea rp could exist here until I'd found this site by accident. And I just enjoy playing out a story. Smile

Â I like seeing it unfold and not knowing how the other living parts will react or perform is part of the fun.

On a side note, I did openly engage in a random walk up rp with a complete stranger yesterday and it was so much fun, a friend of her came over and we discussed the nuances of Limsa city mentality and the need for law enforcement and how far the line needs to be drawn. Very interesting and fun discussion.

ProvaDiServo · **12-08-2014, 10:20 AM**

It's definitely the personalities that come together and interact. definitely been a major thing for me since I started with forum rp back when.

MikoBehnen · **12-08-2014, 10:57 AM**

I moved away from my hometown about a year ago to an area that is not entirely welcoming to the odd or unique. I didn't think it would bother me but I no longer get to hangout with my LARP friends (I never played, but I'd run around and be prop girl), the closest Renaissance Festival is well over an hour away, and I work from home so I don't get to meet a lot of new people. I like RP as an idea of an extension of yourself in a game, and I enjoy the fact that you can create great friendships through the internet. (My parents still play with a friend they met over 10 years ago in DAoC). I enjoy being creative and figured since I've never done it before but had loved watching friends play, why not give it a shot.Â

tldr: I missed my geek culture and opportunities to be creative, and RP seemed to fill both those shoes.

ArmachiA · **12-08-2014, 11:37 AM**

When I was 17, I was really big into theater (I was a part of all my schools drama productions in High School) and really big into writing, so my High School boyfriend decided to get me into his Table Top group that played Vampire: The Masquerade every week. I had no idea what this "Roleplaying" thing was or how it was supposed to work so he picked my Clan for me - a Malkavian.

The group I started playing with took it... really seriously. Like an exclusive club. They made up some rules that were really restrictive and, when I enjoyed the first game I played and decided to ask if some of my other friends could join, they said no. You couldn't try new clans because YOU were the clan you picked after all. No new characters. Etc Etc

Eventually, I picked up my own copy of the main book and read through it, realizing a lot of the rules they had were just rules they made up. Instead, I decided to start running campaigns on my own. I let all my friends play (Starting small) and learned the ropes of GMing (They called it Storytelling in V:TM) over the next year. By the time I was 19, I was running games quickly with 20 people on average - most of the people from the original group I played with moved over to me as their GM.

I really began to enjoy crafting stories for people. Making plots that people could get lost in, making NPC's that people would take about for YEARS, putting in twists and turns they could never see coming. My big difference as a GM was I always had a "PC" character that hung with the main group, though they didn't make any plot altering decisions, they were always around to see how my character would form friendships and stuff. I learned later a lot of GMs don't actually roll a "PC" sort to speak, but I liked it, it always made me feel more connected to the group.

Anyway I was a GM for V:TM (And eventually Mage) for... 5 years before I stepped in FFXI as my first MMO. I was newly 22 and thought that everyone in MMO's rped. I just thought it was what people did, little did I know. I started the only RP LS on the server and went from there.

Why I RP? I still enjoy writing and acting. For acting though, I'm not really one to be on stage anymore, so RP lets me kind of get the bug out. I love crafting stories. I really love being a GM and have people live in my stories. I love seeing people talk about how exciting a scene was - not knowing that I had my hand in that talking to the villians and making sure they new what they were doing. Or doing a roll20 session and having people talk about how cool it was.
On the player side: I love seeing where my character is going to go. I love watching relationships form and characters grow and writing stories about her and all kind of things.

Roleplay is pure creativity and I really like the creative outlet.

Fun Fact: My dad hid the fact he played D&D from me and my sister until I got into V:TM to which he said "Thank God I stop stop hiding I'm a nerd."

Warren Castille · **12-08-2014, 11:48 AM**

I've been using characters to tell stories since I was a youngling. I remember clearly taking my box of action figures out to the front steps and having grand adventures between my heroes and the villains, usually cribbed from whatever movie or TV show I'd watched. I did this a lot as a kid, and remember clearly at one point my neighbor laughing at me. Well, my adult brain tells me in hindsight that he was laughing at the wonder of a child using his imagination and his toys (complete with voices and background music!) to entertain himself. It might have also been my "THIS ONE'S FOR YOU, MORPH" as Wolverine slashed away at my Terminator toys.

In middle school a friend and I had marble copybooks we'd just fill with shit-tier Mary-Sue fiction. We'd pass the books off between classes and at the end of the day and in our own way we were doing an offline play-by-post setting. He'd write a bunch of stuff, I'd add to it, so on and so forth. We filled a lot of books that way, and we had probably zero to one readable lines out of all of it.

Once I got into tabletop in high school, it was basically second-nature to me. I grew up making up stories for my toys and playing video games, so being able to do both at the same time was the best thing. That eventually branched to MMOs and here we are today.

I still have GI Joes and X-Men toys on my Amazon wishlist. Sometimes my friends will humor me, and I still have my boxed Archangel (my first X-Men toy!) on my bookshelf at home, right alongside my Duke and Flak Viper toys.

...I can't tell you, cannot stress enough, how tempting it is to open them up and play again. I've already got the superflexible Spider-Man from the late 80s and Iron Grenadier and Destro to play with.

FreelanceWizard · **12-08-2014, 11:59 AM**

So, I started RPing a long time ago -- back in 6th grade, when a friend in my art club decided to bring me into his gaming group (which was, at the time, playing GURPS). I had to hide exactly what RPGs were from my parents, who, after I mentioned someone was talking about D&D, went on a tirade about how it's the "devil's game" and I'd become some sort of Satan-worshipping demon summoner. What attracted me to RPGs then was the ability to tell interesting stories and play with mechanics that simulate a world.

I didn't do much outside of tabletop RPGs (Rifts! AD&D2! RuneQuest! GURPS!) until high school, when I was introduced to Vampire: the Masquerade LARP (this was during the days of the Big Cyan Book, before the Grey Book Laws of the Night, for those trying to ascertain how old I am Smile

). While I got eliminated through someone else's intrigues on my third game, I got hooked on the idea of large-scale political games. The trick of the artful backstab and the emergent behavior of large numbers of people all telling their own stories have always been intriguing to me.

Around the same time, I managed to stumble into a shell account on a remote server through the local university's VAX (which had guest access for Gopher, which you could use to initiate telnet into other systems -- this was back when everyone was more trusting than they are now Smile

). That got me into MUSHes and MUXes, which were sort of a natural progression from LARP. Being a reasonably competent programmer, I was able to learn TinyCode and get into Wizarding.

So, when I was introduced to EverQuest, I naturally wanted to start RPing there. While I drifted between it and MUSHes for a while, I eventually got into some very good RP groups on EQ's Firiona Vie server, and have been RPing in MMOs ever since.

I still have a particular interest in telling stories -- I have a weekly tabletop game that's been going on for the better part of a decade now -- but I also enjoy watching others' stories unfold, collide, and merge into a living world. It's that latter part that attracts me to LARP and MMO RP (which, I maintain, are exceedingly similar).

Kage · **12-08-2014, 01:21 PM**

I'm not sure if it's really being -made- to RP but there's always just a sense of fun to it.

I love to read and so when I hear about a good narrative I just want to know more. It's so easy to do that with some FFXIV RPers. People start their stories in public or in private. Sometimes their private stories leak out to more people than originally intended. Some times the stories are "trivial" but more times than not they're well-written and important. Being the one at the bar, just listening to what's going on... Makes you feel almost like one of the those guys at a bar just listening to old-timers' stories.

D'aito Kuji · **12-08-2014, 01:34 PM**

I got started started roleplaying when I immersed myself in City of Heroes. Â I had a love of comics even as a little kid, especially Justice League, Teen Titans, and X-Men. But even in my tweens and early teens, I recognized that a lot of stories they told were...not the best quality. Â I thought I could do better.

So City of Heroes was my chance and I started RP'ing. Â I met a group of RP'ers on Formspring who did out-of-game RP and I started writing stories with them and interacting with them and their characters on a day-to-day basis. Â I'm not sure that our stories were any better than mainstream comics but I loved them. Â I was invested in them. Â They were my world.

And that world came crashing down a couple of years ago when the game was cancelled.

I scrambled around looking for new RP opportunities and settled in The Secret World for most of the time since City of Heroes sunset.

But I wanted new and more fantastical challenges and FFXIV seemed up to the task and so far, the RP has been slow in coming but good when it happens.

At my core, I RP because I want to tell the story and to be a part of it. Â I don't want to sit back and watch/read. Â I don't play RPGs for the same reason; they aren't my characters. Â It's just a quirk, I guess. Â But I have to feed that creative side of me, even in gaming or I'll feel like I'm wasting my time. Â And reaching out, making connections with someone, seeing someone react to my character is so fulfilling to me. Â It makes her and the world she lives in that much more real.

Cliodhna Eoghan · **12-11-2014, 10:36 AM**

Wow reading all these are so fun. c: A lot of them mentioned acting out minor things with their toys and it reminded me of something I had done with my younger sisters a long time ago.

Back when Burger King had all those silver Dragon Ball Z toys, we had pestered our mother until she had gotten us most of the set, (I forgot who we were missing but we had most of them.) Being stuck at some sort of car show for my parents to watch, we then spent the entire time in the back bleachers acting out stories with those toys.....mostly which included a scene where Goku died and we held a funeral; Vegeta danced on his grave and got yelled at by all the other attendees until they started fighting (Kai blasts were represented by using lemonhead candy.) Laugh

ANYWAY now that I shared that derptastic memory; I wanna hear more starter stories from people if they got any to share! OuO

Cliodhna Eoghan · **12-11-2014, 10:41 AM**

(12-08-2014, 11:48 AM)Warren Castille Wrote: ...I can't tell you, cannot stress enough, how tempting it is to open them up and play again. I've already got the superflexible Spider-Man from the late 80s and Iron Grenadier and Destro to play with.

Doooooooo itttttttt OuO

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What makes you RP?

RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes