I started having interest in RP back in... geez... early highschool... so '98? Many of my friends were into D&D, but the whole thing was intimidating to me because of all the math -- my brain isn't wired for math beyond the most basic skills and (perhaps oddly) fractions/percents -- so I watched from the sidelines a lot and whenever a couple few friends were DM'ing they'd have me do voices/bit parts for NPCs, or help them write scenarios.
Later part of highschool ('00-'01-ish) someone in our circle discovered the WhiteWolf games (Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Mage the Ascension, etc), which is based off of a d10/percentile system, which I could understand. Finally, I got to join as an actual player and not just the voice of the automated telephone operator. My first character was a... Stargazer Werewolf, I think... I don't remember much about her, to be totally honest. Later we adapted the Mage module for a Matrix-themed campaign, and I remember my character there had "CTRL+C/CTRL+V" as her signature ability... soo much fun to use, but would earn me so much Paradox that would alert Agents really quickly to our presence.
Right around the same time, I got into LARPing. There was a couple leagues in the area, and while I wasn't able to go to many of the Official league events for health/legal reasons (the State was involved with my "health and welfare", and they had some really strange notions of what I was and wasn't capable of at age 16/17), I could typically make the house events and practices with my friends.
After graduating, between most of my circle of friends being scattered by college and my health hitting a major snag that kept me from being even a third as physically active as I used to be, I started getting into videogames and online stuff. I was playing Phantasy Star Online and did some RP both there and on the Sega of America forums (mostly on the Sega forums... anyone who played PSO knows that the chat system there wasn't the best medium). I started branching out into other types of forum and IM-based RP after that.
I started playing FFXI soon after the NA release, but it was about another two or so years before I discovered that the server I was on had a couple RP communities. I joined up with them and... well, I made some friends, I made some enemies, I made some mistakes. Looking back, the communities there weren't horribly lore-abiding, and there was a lot of weirdness going on that I unfortunately picked up and adopted.
Towards the end of this time in XI, some old friends from highschool and I had begun to reconnect, and we broke out the old WhiteWolf books. Our schedules all seemed to perfectly match up, and we had Game Nights two to three times a week for several months. Had a really kickass Vampire/Werewolf campaign going on, in which a character very dear to my heart, 'Emma', was born from and actually is the original inspiration for part of the modern-day fantasy writing project I have.
Unpleasant Life stuff happened at some point. Situations being what they were, I had to give up on playing (and by proxy, RPing) XI because I just didn't have the time, and -anyone- who's ever played XI before Abyssea and all the updates to make soloing possible knows that the game was both difficult and a major time sink -- it took HOURS to just get an EXP party going, only to spend two hours killing monsters before the party broke up and you walk away with only 10k more EXP than when you started with. Remember folks, XI used to be a game where the Dev's idea of nerfing was "knocking 3 hours worth of HP off an NM, therefore making the fight only 6 hours long now" and they pit level 60 players against level 75 mobs for their level 60 armor. Also, stuff had apparently happened with the RP groups, so even when I started getting time back to just log in to RP, my enthusiasm to do so really, REALLY badly suffered.
Eventually, I gave up on XI... and I moved on to World of Warcraft in '07.
Judge if you want. The first appeal to WoW for me was that I could play for an hour or so at a time and feel like I actually accomplished things, which was super important because at the time that's all I had. The second appeal was that I landed on Steamwheedle Cartel, which was a really, REALLY good RP server. A lot of people, when they hear about RP in Warcraft, they immediately associate it with Moonguard and the rampant ERP. Not the case with Steamwheedle. Not to say that ERP never happened, but I think in the years I played on that server I only actually saw it once, and never encountered actual RPers soliciting (LOLRPtrolls, not Troll-race Trolls, were a different matter of course). Horde-side, the RP atmosphere was almost militaristic and was the favorite pass-time of many of the Big Name Raiders/Endgamers. It was -fantastic-, the community (which spanned both Horde and Alliance) was -fantastic-. I feel I can safely say that these are the people who really taught me how to RP, how to research and respect Lore while still being creative, and that cliche is perfectly acceptable (especially if the lore heavily supports the cliche) as long as one approaches the cliche from the correct angle and embraces it properly, and when in doubt or when the Lore is too vague to be useful, pull from Real-World equivalents and build theory off of that before going "it's magic".
2010 rolls around. Various reasons, left Warcraft behind and I wandered the 'net for a while, searching for something new for RP. Tried Champions Online... RP scared me there. There's another game I tried... I honestly can't even remember the name of it, I was in and out in a few da-- LOTRO. It was LOTRO. I hated it. And there was a parade of Free-to-Play games that a roommate kept pressing me into because "Oh, you'll love this! This is exactly what you want in a game!". Except I hated them all. Eventually, a co-worker talked me into resubbing to WoW and moving to his server, where he was in an RP guild. And it was... fine, I suppose. Had some fun for a couple months, but the appeal died quickly.
Aaaand then, FFXIV 1.0 was released. I was SO excited, this was the "Project: Rapture" that had been whispered and hinted about since end of Chains of Promathia/beginning of Treasures of Aht Urghan. And it looked soooo pretty, and in lurking on old XI RP sites, I saw people were stirring and talking about the server the Beta community had claimed for RP.
... Except, in trying to play it, it nearly fried the four-month-old gaming rig that we put the disk into. The computer's specs were more than adequate, the game just kept crashing and sending up errors. Eventually we gave up, especially when we had learned that it was apparently easier to cancel one's account than it was to equip a hat.
A couple months later the friend who I have been doing MMO's and forum RP with since back in the days of PSO and the Sega forums (he once joked that he is my Official Stalker) suggested that we try FFXI again, and that he had found a possible candidate for an RP group to join and from all accounts, the game had become solo-friendly. I'll be totally honest. I was skeptical. Really, REALLY skeptical. But he eventually talked me into it. And while his interest eventually waned and he unsubbed, I'm still playing XI and RPing with that group. Yes, the group is small (and has gotten even smaller as some people completely jumped ship to XIV after 2.0 was released), but we still have fun.
Which now brings me to the release of ARR. When the XI group started talking about doing RP in XIV, I was very much against it. My limited experience with 1.0 had left a bad taste in my mouth, but not only that... I was on a big-rig truck, with only a $200 Wal-Mart special Acer Netbook for a computer (which actually handled XI just fine), and a mobile data connection from AT&T that majorly disliked cows, rainy weather, trees, other trucks, and the whole states of Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and just about everywhere west of Missouri. Buuuut then my husband got me a better laptop, and we switched our phone/data plan to a service that actually worked in 90% of the country.
Obviously, I was eventually talked into trying ARR. And I'm still here.
Later part of highschool ('00-'01-ish) someone in our circle discovered the WhiteWolf games (Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Mage the Ascension, etc), which is based off of a d10/percentile system, which I could understand. Finally, I got to join as an actual player and not just the voice of the automated telephone operator. My first character was a... Stargazer Werewolf, I think... I don't remember much about her, to be totally honest. Later we adapted the Mage module for a Matrix-themed campaign, and I remember my character there had "CTRL+C/CTRL+V" as her signature ability... soo much fun to use, but would earn me so much Paradox that would alert Agents really quickly to our presence.
Right around the same time, I got into LARPing. There was a couple leagues in the area, and while I wasn't able to go to many of the Official league events for health/legal reasons (the State was involved with my "health and welfare", and they had some really strange notions of what I was and wasn't capable of at age 16/17), I could typically make the house events and practices with my friends.
After graduating, between most of my circle of friends being scattered by college and my health hitting a major snag that kept me from being even a third as physically active as I used to be, I started getting into videogames and online stuff. I was playing Phantasy Star Online and did some RP both there and on the Sega of America forums (mostly on the Sega forums... anyone who played PSO knows that the chat system there wasn't the best medium). I started branching out into other types of forum and IM-based RP after that.
I started playing FFXI soon after the NA release, but it was about another two or so years before I discovered that the server I was on had a couple RP communities. I joined up with them and... well, I made some friends, I made some enemies, I made some mistakes. Looking back, the communities there weren't horribly lore-abiding, and there was a lot of weirdness going on that I unfortunately picked up and adopted.
Towards the end of this time in XI, some old friends from highschool and I had begun to reconnect, and we broke out the old WhiteWolf books. Our schedules all seemed to perfectly match up, and we had Game Nights two to three times a week for several months. Had a really kickass Vampire/Werewolf campaign going on, in which a character very dear to my heart, 'Emma', was born from and actually is the original inspiration for part of the modern-day fantasy writing project I have.
Unpleasant Life stuff happened at some point. Situations being what they were, I had to give up on playing (and by proxy, RPing) XI because I just didn't have the time, and -anyone- who's ever played XI before Abyssea and all the updates to make soloing possible knows that the game was both difficult and a major time sink -- it took HOURS to just get an EXP party going, only to spend two hours killing monsters before the party broke up and you walk away with only 10k more EXP than when you started with. Remember folks, XI used to be a game where the Dev's idea of nerfing was "knocking 3 hours worth of HP off an NM, therefore making the fight only 6 hours long now" and they pit level 60 players against level 75 mobs for their level 60 armor. Also, stuff had apparently happened with the RP groups, so even when I started getting time back to just log in to RP, my enthusiasm to do so really, REALLY badly suffered.
Eventually, I gave up on XI... and I moved on to World of Warcraft in '07.
Judge if you want. The first appeal to WoW for me was that I could play for an hour or so at a time and feel like I actually accomplished things, which was super important because at the time that's all I had. The second appeal was that I landed on Steamwheedle Cartel, which was a really, REALLY good RP server. A lot of people, when they hear about RP in Warcraft, they immediately associate it with Moonguard and the rampant ERP. Not the case with Steamwheedle. Not to say that ERP never happened, but I think in the years I played on that server I only actually saw it once, and never encountered actual RPers soliciting (LOLRPtrolls, not Troll-race Trolls, were a different matter of course). Horde-side, the RP atmosphere was almost militaristic and was the favorite pass-time of many of the Big Name Raiders/Endgamers. It was -fantastic-, the community (which spanned both Horde and Alliance) was -fantastic-. I feel I can safely say that these are the people who really taught me how to RP, how to research and respect Lore while still being creative, and that cliche is perfectly acceptable (especially if the lore heavily supports the cliche) as long as one approaches the cliche from the correct angle and embraces it properly, and when in doubt or when the Lore is too vague to be useful, pull from Real-World equivalents and build theory off of that before going "it's magic".
2010 rolls around. Various reasons, left Warcraft behind and I wandered the 'net for a while, searching for something new for RP. Tried Champions Online... RP scared me there. There's another game I tried... I honestly can't even remember the name of it, I was in and out in a few da-- LOTRO. It was LOTRO. I hated it. And there was a parade of Free-to-Play games that a roommate kept pressing me into because "Oh, you'll love this! This is exactly what you want in a game!". Except I hated them all. Eventually, a co-worker talked me into resubbing to WoW and moving to his server, where he was in an RP guild. And it was... fine, I suppose. Had some fun for a couple months, but the appeal died quickly.
Aaaand then, FFXIV 1.0 was released. I was SO excited, this was the "Project: Rapture" that had been whispered and hinted about since end of Chains of Promathia/beginning of Treasures of Aht Urghan. And it looked soooo pretty, and in lurking on old XI RP sites, I saw people were stirring and talking about the server the Beta community had claimed for RP.
... Except, in trying to play it, it nearly fried the four-month-old gaming rig that we put the disk into. The computer's specs were more than adequate, the game just kept crashing and sending up errors. Eventually we gave up, especially when we had learned that it was apparently easier to cancel one's account than it was to equip a hat.
A couple months later the friend who I have been doing MMO's and forum RP with since back in the days of PSO and the Sega forums (he once joked that he is my Official Stalker) suggested that we try FFXI again, and that he had found a possible candidate for an RP group to join and from all accounts, the game had become solo-friendly. I'll be totally honest. I was skeptical. Really, REALLY skeptical. But he eventually talked me into it. And while his interest eventually waned and he unsubbed, I'm still playing XI and RPing with that group. Yes, the group is small (and has gotten even smaller as some people completely jumped ship to XIV after 2.0 was released), but we still have fun.
Which now brings me to the release of ARR. When the XI group started talking about doing RP in XIV, I was very much against it. My limited experience with 1.0 had left a bad taste in my mouth, but not only that... I was on a big-rig truck, with only a $200 Wal-Mart special Acer Netbook for a computer (which actually handled XI just fine), and a mobile data connection from AT&T that majorly disliked cows, rainy weather, trees, other trucks, and the whole states of Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and just about everywhere west of Missouri. Buuuut then my husband got me a better laptop, and we switched our phone/data plan to a service that actually worked in 90% of the country.
Obviously, I was eventually talked into trying ARR. And I'm still here.