discussion What or how did rp come to you?

[Whale]

Hi, so let me explain cause im not good with wording myself haha... Yeah. 

 

Anyway i recently became a little curious bout this sort of thing and i always loved good stories and the like. As you may or not imagine that i was a little curious when i found out what rp means and what you do. So i wanted to ask you peeps what brought you to role-playing out games or why you do so. 

 

On a sorta different note, my curiosity is so strong that i bothered to make an account just for this question. This is also my first time posting in anything fourm-like...i think?:moogle:(also, im gonna use these emoji cause they cute. i have no self control).:tonberry:

[Asyria]

To make a long story short, I went from make-believe to Choose Your Own Adventure books, to D&D, to MMORPGs in which I found people were roleplaying.

 

:tonberry: ftw

[Teadrinker]

Well, it started out many many moons ago when I was like 12 on an anime message board.

 

...

 

I wish I was kidding but yeah. It was pretty organic. Folk just started chatting and emoting little actions at each other with astaricks. It was typically stuff like using squirtguns or throwing pies.

 

Through that it became clear that different folk clearly had different personalities and traits. Characters started to take shape. Different characters developed different habits over where they liked to hang out or sleep. Some liked just hanging out and chilling, some liked freeform sparring DBZ style, some liked cooking etc. I personally had the one that chilled in the rafters. Don't give me that look.

 

Folks bedrooms started appearing and suddenly apparently there was a living room and kitchen. The one day the Papa Bear dad character emoted building a house for everyone and that's where they all lived Tenchi Muyo style.

 

Are you cringing yet.

 

Anyway, then things got complicated. Folks characters started trying to date. This went about as well as you can expect with a bunch of kids behind the keyboards. Place gigantic dumpster fire emoji here.

 

Round about this time everyone knew each other OOCly even though none of us knew wtf OOC meant. It was just "Oh that's X and he lives in Y and his dad's in jail." and stuff like that. People kept in touch via AIM and Yahoo messengers. It was considered 'cheating' to talk over them while posting on the message board.

 

Did I mention I was 12? Good. Ok.

 

People wrote a lot of stories and fanfictions about all the characters hanging out together but they would do really cringy stuff like make X and Y break up in their story and insert Z into the mix. Villains appeared and boy were they one dimensional mustache twirlers. A lot seemed based off Sephiroth.

 

Anyway, that's how I first started RPing. Quite by accident by emoting throwing pies.

[Arashin Kujqai]

Tbh, I'm not 100% sure how I found RP... All these years in mmo's or games where I could customize my character, I just immersed myself into the game enough. I'd usually follow the main story(if there was one) and then on the side I'd imagine scenarios my character would get into or would be involved in. Eventually I kept doing this enough to where I started writing a bit and even having commissions made based on images in my head I formed off it all. At some point, some game I believe had dedicated RP servers and that's possibly when I realized it was a thing that people do.

 

Might've been Tera but I wanna say it was before that in some other game. I didn't really get into RP in Tera though at all like I do in FFXIV. When I came to this game and discovered there's this tag that says RP, and I asked.... Suddenly my first month or two, I kept it on all the time and some people would walk up to me RP'ing and others would ask why I had it on. I had never realized this was such a thing and then foudn out there's whole servers dedicated(unofficially of course) to things like this. I guess I wanna say I discovered RP myself through my own imagination and then games showing me "yeah! it's a thing!".

 

Then over time of playing here, did I develop a sense of wanderlust for all of it's lore, and started writing MUCH more intensely. I started to get a feel for the universe, how to talk different ways, write different ways... I mean I always loved seeing lore in mmo's prior to this (Aion prolly being the first?) but I hadn't met an mmo yet that let you take all the information and apply it to acting out characters you make or writing. So I guess now I RP and love FFXIV now because.... IT'S A THING!. I get to put my imagination in public and others can actually interact with it like it's real... Maybe it's just me playing imagination as a kid again but it doesn't ever feel like it.

[ɴᴘᴄ]

To make a long story short, I went from make-believe to Choose Your Own Adventure books, to D&D, to MMORPGs in which I found people were roleplaying.

 

Seconded. After MMORPG i went back to tabletop, though. :bomb:

[Yandros]

To make a long story short, I went from make-believe to Choose Your Own Adventure books, to D&D, to MMORPGs in which I found people were roleplaying.

 

 

 

Replace D&D with things like Shadowrun and White Wolf....and yeah, that's me.  Toss in a mild obsession with fantasy books when I was younger, and there you go.

 

Though I completely kept my table-top rpg habit.  Currently playing GURPS, Honor + Intrigue, and Savage RIFTS.

[Zanther]

I've done some DnD in the past and have done (to my slight shame lol) LARPing with my friend and brother in our backyards over the course of nearly 10 years (we slowed down the last 4) and once I started in 14 I had seen lots of rp'rs on Balmung. Sadly, I was not able to get into rping in 1.0 cause of my **** computer. It wasn't until just a few months before Heavensward before I jumped into the fray (I had done some minor rping for a few months before) and have been off and one in the rp world since (more on my alt then main lol...main is looking for a good rp FC again).

 

But ya, it was watching people on my server rp and drove me to want to join up with them. Glad I have for the most part

[Eses Fafa]

In 2007, I started WoW and joined Steamwheedle Cartel because it read 'Roleplay' when I was joining my first server. I was curious about it in the hopes that it added more immersion, and one day while I was in a guild, some person asked me if I wanted to roleplay. I was like 'it's new to me but sure!'.

 

My tauren druid walked with some undead lass through Hillsbrad discussing politics, and I suddenly gained an urge for more over time.

[Zhavi]

I was always writing stories, even as a little girl. In middle school, I started really wanting to share my love of writing with my friends, but though my friends supported my love of writing and reading, none of them really liked to write. So I started looking online for people to talk to about writing, and learned about collaborative stories, and from there, rp.

 

I stumbled into a MUD in the early 2000s, and I can't tell you how wonderful it was to be around people who felt the same love of writing I did, and to share stories and characters together. I was lucky, I suppose, in that I found a lot of people to admire and look up to, and learn from in terms of how to construct plot and characters. As well, it lead me to meeting some absolutely fascinating people. At the time, my mother was convinced that rapists and serial killers lurked online behind every corner (and that roleplaying lead to satanism and moral corruption, thanks to some news stories about DnD related murders), so it took some determination and cleverness to continue to rp. In a way, I think that made me love it even more.

 

But from game to game, setting to setting, through real life trials and business, ups and downs, even past my own moments of introversion and solitude, what drives me to rp is the same thing that brought me to it: my absolute adoration for writing -- for building stories and characters -- and sharing that love with other people who feel it, too.

[Edric W.]

I got wasted one night, logged into the RP server of TERA and accidentally wandered into an RP event. I was just talking normally, but they must've thought I was RPing. Made a friend there, and she got me into it.

[Eyrilona Wistmoenwyn]

FFXIV is actually the first game I seriously RP'd in. However, I preferred playing on RP servers in MMO's, as the community often made the server feel alive and added to the atmosphere. Granted, I did do some Harry Potter forum RP over 10 years ago when I was much younger.

 

Anyways, one day I was randomly wandering the server bored when I saw a shout notification for an RP event, and thought 'Screw it, I'm gonna go check it out.' I basically improv'd my character's personality and backstory on the spot, and had a blast with what came to mind. And now I've been hooked ever since!

[Marisa]

Back in 2007, I was made my first Horde alt in WoW. Joined a guild called "We RP in bed". Had no idea what RP was at the time. I asked, they explained. Slightly later on, tried to join the WoW RP community. Absolute trash. Nothing but circle-jerking drama queens with no coherent stories. Then Warhammer: Age of Reckoning came out, and I decided I'd try again. Joined the most amazing Dark Elf rp group. Had a guy who RP'd as my Goblin slave, absolutely hilarious dude. Still miss him today. Took a break from it when WAR went to shit, played some more WoW, then found you guys a couple years ago and I've been here since!

[Gegenji]

FFXIV is actually the first game I seriously RP'd in.

 

This is actually true for me as well - at least for MMOs. I mean, all my characters in other MMOs sort of had a... story background in my head? Like my Night Elf Hunter was actually blind and used his animal companion and his other senses to actually hunt. Or, even earlier, I gave names to my Necromancer's minions in Everquest. But FFXIV was the first MMO where I actually actively sought to seek out RP and RP interactions.

 

I specify MMOs specifically because I've done tabletop RPGs and the like since 2e DnD (aka, the Wonders of THAC0). The earlier ones were just, like... me with fantasy stats (as I figure many first-time characters are, especially if you were elementary school age like I was), but over time I've thought up and sometimes even got to play many different character ideas.

 

What's funny is that I think the seed got put into my head in... third grade, I want to say? I had a sort of after-school daycare thing I used to go to on the regular where we'd hang out and play Sonic Spinball on the Genesis and the like... but one of the counselors did this creative storytelling thing where she told this grand adventure with us kids as the heroes. She'd use stuff we had on us to explain how we solved problems and sometimes even prompted us for solutions. I don't think we ever "finished" the adventure, but that sort of fantasy-group-storytelling thing is what I think made me jump on the idea of joining a DnD game a couple years later.

[Asyria]

To make a long story short, I went from make-believe to Choose Your Own Adventure books, to D&D, to MMORPGs in which I found people were roleplaying.

 

Seconded. After MMORPG i went back to tabletop, though. :bomb:

 

Yeah, I never left tabletop.

 

I'm even streaming a campaign I run on roll20.

[C'kayah Polaali]

It all started with D&D for me, back in Jr. High. My characters were fairly standard tropes for a nerd in Jr. High - I had a lot of "powerful" wizards, etc.

 

Around that time I started getting into writing, as well. Short stories, mostly. That ended up feeding back into my RP, in the sense that I started getting into making characters who were not just power projection fantasies for my 12 year old self. That started an on and off love affair with pen and paper RPGs that's continued to this day.

 

In the mid 90s I discovered MUDs (yes, I'm old). My favorite was AmberMush, which had a decent number of really good RPers and writers on it, and was also interesting because everything in it was player created - everyone could create persistent objects in the game.

 

Then came MMOs. Eve Online, at first. Despite the reputation, Eve has (had? I haven't played in years) a good RP community. It didn't hurt that I was absolutely in love with the game's PVP model, to the extent that I haven't been able to get into PVP in most other MMOs at all. I RPed in LOTRO (I'm a Tolkien nut), Star Trek Online, STTOR, EQ2, etc.

 

Which led, almost accidentally, to FFXIV. Some non-RPing friends got me into it, and I made an alt on Balmung to check out the RP community. Years later I'm still here, still RPing, and enjoying the RP community (in general) more than most.

[Zen]

It was purely and simply an act of rebellion toward my husband, and a celebration of "I do what I want" when we separated. 

 

I became fascinated with watching others RP in Ultima Online, tried it out with someone holding my hand, and then tried to get my husband interested in it. He didn't understand what RP was all about and ended up trolling the RP events I brought him to. It caused him to lash out further: When I refused to stop and was at work one day, he deleted my characters, my ICQ account, and canceled my sub. 

 

Fast forward two years: We were separated, I moved out and got my own place and began thinking of all the things I wanted to do that he wouldn't let me do. I went straight for Star Wars Galaxies, made an entertainer and started RPing hardcore, drinking up the RP scene as if coming off a long drought. 

 

I never looked back; on many levels!

[Caspar]

Around middle school, or early HS, I got my start writing Imaginary FAQ for original characters to an original theoretical fighting game. I became more interested in writing a detailed plot from then on out as I thought of why the character behaved the way they did and how they learned their special moves. I slowly grew from "they have this because it's cool" to "why did they learn it?" and things spiraled out of control from there.

 

Later RP, mostly forum based, was largely an experiment to help me stay fresh for writing exercises, but slowly became a hobby of its own and "joined" with my IAQ interest years before. I played pen and paper RPGs as well, but because most of these were IRL I was too self-conscious to RP during games.

 

Finding the RPC wiki by accident was what led me to RP in FFXIV, my first MMO RP. Prior to this, I had not RP'd in a good four or five years.

[Whale]

Just got back and read all this and they were pretty interesting since i had to research all these acronyms.

 

So from what i have gathered from all of the comments is that everyone is more or less drawn to rp because of the love of storytelling even if it is something small like a side story. It is the desire to know more or immerse yourself into the world that is the appeal of rp, from what I've gathered anyway.

 

From my view, getting into this because you wish to improve your writing skill is also a fun and effective way to go about it too. It is difficult to get the background or objective of a character to work with the overall goal or nature of the world, nevermind the reactions to other different characters created and controlled by other people.

 

This was a very fun to read all in all and it was surprisingly informative. I learned new acronyms and found board games I've never heard of. It was also interesting to see how this could improve one's story building and writing. All in all, this was beyond interesting(btw teadrinker, you're gonna have to do a lot better than that if you want me to cringe8-))

[Mimi]

I must've been 12 or so, and I came across good ol' Naruto roleplay on a forumotion site. Thinking about it, it was really bad, but as a young kid you don't really think about it.

 

That's mostly it. I've been stuck on role-playing since then. I've been on/off within the recent years, and I usually feel self-conscious about it because English isn't my first language. But, it's a good way to improve on your writing skills and learn to better yourself.

 

I usually like to brainstorm about lore, my character's lore, making complicated characters if able. I'm still kinda rusty  but I hope to get better.

[ExAtomos]

Got into tabletop roleplaying just after high school, then did some forum and chatplanet rp online (I'm old lol.), found a good MUD (Lensmoor), got into larps and the SCA (if they say they're not roleplaying, they're lying). Didn't really get into mmos (besides dabbling a bit here and there with EQ and the like) until XIV since it's on console and I've rarely had a decent pc (still don't) much less a regular place to live til recently.

 

I just love being able to write (it's like art with words) and share stories with others as well as play as different people.

:moogle:

[Zhavi]

Just got back and read all this and they were pretty interesting since i had to research all these acronyms.

 

So from what i have gathered from all of the comments is that everyone is more or less drawn to rp because of the love of storytelling even if it is something small like a side story. It is the desire to know more or immerse yourself into the world that is the appeal of rp, from what I've gathered anyway.

 

From my view, getting into this because you wish to improve your writing skill is also a fun and effective way to go about it too. It is difficult to get the background or objective of a character to work with the overall goal or nature of the world, nevermind the reactions to other different characters created and controlled by other people.

 

This was a very fun to read all in all and it was surprisingly informative. I learned new acronyms and found board games I've never heard of. It was also interesting to see how this could improve one's story building and writing. All in all, this was beyond interesting(btw teadrinker, you're gonna have to do a lot better than that if you want me to cringe8-))

 

YOU SHOULD TRY IT. :D

[Suko'to]

For me, it started with D&D and CYOA Books as well. They opened up the realm, and set the base, I think. I didn't really start Roleplaying though until I learned about a little chat room on AOL called Red Dragon Inn. I was about 12, I think, when I started to really learn the idea of chat RP.

 

From there, I progressed from public rooms to private ones I made myself, and I even got more into the RP communities that were on AOL, even joined some guilds who had rolling/gear systems. Eventually, however, the people in that community grew more and more sparse. So I got into other stuff, like Diablo 2, then FFXI. I was there until sometime after Chains of Promathia came out, which was about when Vanilla WoW was pretty well establish.

 

I switched over there for a long time, especially when I realized Blizzard had set up official RP servers (something I think SE should've done a long time ago), and I realized the RP community was actually pretty huge! I stuck with WoW through Cataclysm, and a little bit into Mists of Panderia before I got into Tera Online. I was there for a little while until FFXIV: ARR launched, and I've been here since and never looked back.

[Whale]

Just got back and read all this and they were pretty interesting since i had to research all these acronyms.

 

So from what i have gathered from all of the comments is that everyone is more or less drawn to rp because of the love of storytelling even if it is something small like a side story. It is the desire to know more or immerse yourself into the world that is the appeal of rp, from what I've gathered anyway.

 

From my view, getting into this because you wish to improve your writing skill is also a fun and effective way to go about it too. It is difficult to get the background or objective of a character to work with the overall goal or nature of the world, nevermind the reactions to other different characters created and controlled by other people.

 

This was a very fun to read all in all and it was surprisingly informative. I learned new acronyms and found board games I've never heard of. It was also interesting to see how this could improve one's story building and writing. All in all, this was beyond interesting(btw teadrinker, you're gonna have to do a lot better than that if you want me to cringe8-))

 

YOU SHOULD TRY IT. :D

 

Maybe someday, when im good and ready:P

[Menord]

In a way, I feel like I became a roleplayer through sheer luck.

 

First - when I was around 14 or 15 years old - I got a pen pal who told me that she was a live-action roleplayer and invited me to a game she was organizing even though I hadn't even heard of live-action roleplaying before that. A few years later, I decided to give World of Warcraft a try (thanks to encouragement from my brother), met someone online who introduced me to roleplaying in MMOs and ended up in an actual roleplaying guild. That eventually lead to me dressing up as a Blood Elf and running into another WoW enthusiastic in a convention who then introduced me to tabletop roleplaying.

 

While I nowadays roleplay mostly in MMOs (or FFXIV, more precisely), I enjoy all three forms of RP I listed because all of them give me the chance to create and live through stories and see the world from a different point of view than my own. Escapism can be a wonderful thing in moderate doses.

[AkhutaiAngura]

I.. Don't actually remember HOW I started, but I do remember where. 

 

Been RPing on various digital mediums since I was about 10, in the late 90's. I started off in AoL chatrooms (Red Dragon Inn, anyone?) where I explored various aspects of the online RP life, made a lot of friends, lost a lot of friends, so on. From there, I moved onto MUD/MUCK/MUSH's (Text based online games), where.. Basically the same thing happened. The difference here was the characters and settings - AoL chatrooms, your settings were different for each room. The Red Dragon Inn, a slave market, etc. Characters could be literally anything within those terms... But on the MUCKs, you had a more strict thing to keep in. I started off with World of Darkness mucks, making a Werewolf: The Apocalypse character. 

 

During that phase, I also moved into forum RP in the forum of GaiaOnline, though that didn't last long comparatively speaking. Next, moved on to WoW via a girlfriend. Once we broke up, transferred servers to an RP Server and that pretty much opened me up to MMO RP. I've been in games like Tabula Rasa, Guildwars 1/2, WoW, SWTOR, Aion, Tera, FFXIV (Obviously), ROSEOnline (..Mistakes were made, Korean MMO's are not the place), Neverwinter (Also not a good place, surprisingly)... And.. Yeah.

 

As to why? I do it to escape. When you RP, you can literally be anyone. RL, I'm a 5'11, 180lb, 29 year old male who has very few friends, next to no social life outside of his volunteer work and girlfriend, and not a lot of self confidence. But in game? Akhutai Angura, an Au'Ra who is pretty much the opposite of me. Very social, curious about life and things, very confident and strong. 

 

On a side note though, it is interesting to think of how my insecurities manifest in the RP world - In that Akhutai has a very tribal manner of speech, and doesn't speak 'common' very well at all.. A sort of manifestation of my own social ineptness. 

 

Anyways.