discussion What or how did rp come to you?

[Ceoile Stendan]

I can trace it back to my childhood: playing make-believe games, and telling stories, with my toys -- puppets, LEGOs, action figures, and more. 

 

I then discovered Tolkien when I was 11, and D&D a few years later.  From the very start, when I was playing tabletop RPGs, I was doing more than rolling dice and killing orcs.  I would come up with backstories for my characters, and loved to have conversations with the other players IC.

 

I've played tabletop RPGs for many years, and for me, that sort of roleplaying has always been a part of the game.  For me, my characters' backgrounds, relationships, and motivations are every bit as important as their in-game exploits.

 

I finally got drawn into MMOs a few years ago, by a good friend who'd become my RP partner in a D&D campaign.

[Delilah Scythewood]

I was playing Dark Age of Camelot when I was in 2nd grade. I started RPing there without realizing what RP really was, pretending to take other characters on tours of the land and standing on a rock to tell stories in the square.

 

Later, I discovered chatroom style RP in FF11 in their PlayOnline chatrooms. After that was more formalized forum RPs in MSN Groups (may they rest in peace) before graduating to MMOs in WoW my senior year of high school. Now MMOs are my preferred method of RP followed my mediums like Tumblr and Discord!

[Weiss]

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.

 

For me it started around the same reason.. well, more or less the same. I started on forum based RolePlay which Theme I can't remember. It was all in English which made me struggle very much (I'm native Portuguese and my English skills back then were worse than now) and since my English would look "funny", I got bullied there and moved to one where I could write in Portuguese. That forum For me, it started around the same reason.. well, more or less the same. I started on forum based RolePlay which Theme I can't remember. It was all in English which made me struggle very much (I'm native Portuguese and my English skills back then were worse than now) and since my English would look "funny", I got bullied there and moved to one where I could write in Portuguese. That forum was a Naruto RP forum hosted on forumeiros, and it started really bad as my writing skills weren't good. I would write without descriptions and if I did they used to be short and didn't cover anything like surroundings nor the other player character. I would also add emotes to my character dialogues instead of describing them, sounding something like [Weiss: "This is a good coffee :3"]. Little by little my writing skills started to improve and before I was able to notice it, around 3 or 4 years had passed since I joined in.

 

It has been a while since the forum closed and one day, after beating heavenward, I got curious about trying RP on FFXIV and despite being quite different than a forum based RP It's something I don't regret at all doing.

 

I like to check Lore, both for my character concept as well as for the lore as a whole.

[ArmachiA]

Way back in the Late-90s when I was in high school (I'm old) there was a thing called Vampire: The Masquerade that was pretty popular in the circle of high school where the goth kids hang out. I wasn't a goth kid (Yet, give me a year) but I was a Drama kid and a lot of the Goth kids were involved with the Drama club backstage. I became friends with them just by happenstance and they asked me if I wanted to try V:TM and explained what it was. I didn't get it at first, but they told me it was just playing a character you make up and the the character has stats. I was really into vampires back then so I agreed to give it a go.

 

I explained it to my parents later and my dad was super excited, saying he's been playing Dungeons & Dragons for YEARS and it sounded just like D&D and I'll think its fun and I'm just like him.

 

My friends had no idea how to DM a game on their own, so my first experience was a giant mess - but I really liked the idea of playing characters, dungeon crawls, and political intrigue. I had a lot of fun playing a Malkavian with a split personality - one which was weak and one which was basically OP (I was 16, gimme a pass) - and wanted to keep playing but my friends were used to older, more experienced people DMing so after that I picked up a copy of the book and started DMing for anyone in school who wanted to do it. I had one campaign that had 23 people, from popular kids to gothy kids in it (This wasn't because my school was so passed cliques, just that Drama club had a lot of different kinds of people in it and my sister was also very, very popular and played a Ventrue). That was my life till about 19 when everyone graduated and moved away, including myself.

 

Still it stayed with me, and I'd run various WoD games on the internet with my friends who also had the internet - which actually wasn't a lot of them in the early 2000's. When I was 22, I picked up FFXI as my first MMO and just kinda assumed everyone RPed in MMO's and even when I was corrected I just never stopped.

[Xe'roseh Yuush]

My mother introduced me to RP, because I have a really awesome mom.

I was about 8 years old, my brothers were 9 and 10, and my mom decided to hold a table top rp for us loosely based off of D&D, and I say loosely cus those we did make character sheets, we did not follow all the rules. I made a fairy character, I was a pretty sparkly fairy for my first rp that was to help defeat a dragon.

 

We didn't rp very often, my brothers got into Anime instead, and I of course followed suit. Not to mention we didn't have the attention span to sit down and get along long enough for full on campaigns.

 

I really didn't get into rp until high school. After high school I fell out of it until well after my collage years, when I started playing MMOs and discovered rp was in there.

 

Though I can truthfully say, that I have been rping since I was 8 years old.

[Dawnstar]

It was thanks to my classmates who really hated roleplay.

 

I was in high school, and I'd just begun playing this game called World of Warcraft. Just about my entire class played it. A few of the boys started talking about these roleplay servers, and the "weirdos" that inhabited it, acting out a role and pretending to be their characters and how weird that was, and I thought "Hey, that sounds pretty cool" and made a character on an RP server to see what that was like.

 

I didn't have anyone to tutor me. I was really, really terrible at first, making the most cringe-worthy character backgrounds because I simply didn't know the first thing about RP or the setting.

 

It took a few months, but I eventually found my feet and acquired enough knowledge and writing ability to write a coherent character background, applied for my first RP guild with whom I stayed for years, and the rest is history!

[Maloy82]

first off a little  late on this  thread sorry, and im kinda new here, but not new to rp I been in the game of rp ohh since I was about  12 or 13 I guess,  I lived in the mountains , so I was always surrounded by woods,  and I used to love fantasy adventure movies like Conan and beast master etc, so I would go in the woods and fight imaginable  monsters on some  quest I would think up in my head as I went along, eventually my buddies all  joined in I lived by , then llater on we got into D&D then they all started partying to hard and droped out and so I found my way to mmorpgs.

[Chidori]

Lets see. SO I was introduced to the game via my roomie. I happened to come across her when she had the character creator up before 2.0 relaunched. I was like OOO can I try to make something, they let me. And decided from there to get the game! 

From there we joined Gilga, back when RP was pretty heavy there. She used to RP in 11, so guess it was natural she would get into it here. It started out with her dragging me around, from there I started to get into it as well. Rest is history!

[Mahorela]

Honestly the story of how I started RPing is really silly. My first MMO, like most people, was World of Warcraft back when I was like 14. During Burning Crusade I bought into the Arena server, thinking I was much better at pvp than I was and had any chance of making it lol.

 

To simplify that I met someone who played on Wyrmrest Accord, the big Rp server. Now, he wasn't an Rper, I wasn't an RPer, and frankly my circle of friends was the typical 'what kinda nerd ROLEPLAYS lololol' sort of folks.

 

So, I made a character on Wyrmrest to hang around with my new friend and was your stereotypical troll. I'd run around and make a fool of myself and kinda just hover around RPers. Then I started being like, "I wanna step up my game" so me and my friend went about finding all these things for my level 5 paladin to wear and look cool and look more like one of the RP characters. You know, to troll em harder. It was a sweet look, admittedly. I somehow managed to get a rare shield and a sword that sheaths on your back along with this red armor set and was pretty damn snazzy for some low level character. I think this outfit is what started to sell people on this character.

 

I'd walk around and just approach people with whatever dopey idea we came up with at the time to pester people... But the more I did it the more I built this strange sort of continuity with the character. Eventually I was walking around as this retired war vet trying to figure out what happened to his daughter who joined the war effort. People took me seriously, people actually RP'd with me, and before long I realize what happened and was like, "This is fun."

 

So then I made a more serious character with the intention of actually RPing. I read lore, I wrote back stories, and now RPing is basically my main hobby like a decade later.

 

Honestly if the people of Wyrmrest Accord hadn't been so welcoming I probably wouldn't have ever evolved passed my troll phase and would never have discovered how fun RP is.

[Koti Nexus]

I'll keep mine fairly short and simple: Being an only child and creating your own imaginary games with yourself, thus generating many personalities for the characters you are acting out in your toys. Then we just continued onward.

 

 

So longer story -

As a little girl, I would take the My Little Petshop figures, they each had names-- and the store owner, this barbie doll, would always get kidnapped by the Evil Dino King (which was one of those T-Rex toy figures), and they'd have to go save her.

 

My mom was convinced when I was a kid, that I had friends over that she peek in and just see me-- and I was creating all those voices. Yeah, this would be the first signs of roleplay.

 

In Elementary, I was the kid on the Playground everyone went to, to come up with ideas and typically-- I would base my ideas off of like Movies or video games (aka Star Fox or Sonic) and everyone had a role they would play as that character or you know, enemy.

 

We continue forward a bit more...

When I was probably around 10, we moved from Texas to Arizona. I had no friends, knew no one, and was home-schooled. Once again, Only Child with no one but myself. However, my new tool of interaction was the internet. I discovered a thing called Chatboards (which were our chatrooms before the days where they would automatically refresh themselves, so you had to click a refresh button to get updates).

 

The place I went to was an s8 chatboard that was around Transformer and I created my first Original Character for Transformers named Neva. She was a 1995 I believe, Pontiac TransAm. Hunter Green.

 

I also roleplayed Optimus Prime himself, cause I always admired him growing up. This lead me also to a Gargoyles Chatboard, cause Gargoyles was in like the end of season 1 or 2, somewhere in there I think? Might have been on re-runs? Hard to remember exactly, but anyway, I created my first Gargoyle character named Celine, who was a Raptor-goyle.

 

The Gargoyles place was also my first introduction into more serious roleplay... and also my first introduction into why it is so important to separate self from a character. I hurt a really good person, because I got to close. A gal who played a male Raptor-goyle, my little young heart didn't understand this concept... I learned this concept, but accidentally destroyed our friendship.

 

This eventually lead me to trying to understand why a girl would rp a guy.... and I quickly came to understand why. It was a challenge. It was fun. I am now one of those women who did what they did, but I also tread careful. Cause like her-- jump ahead to now a MUD called Aetolia... I didn't check to make sure someone understood the 4th wall, I assumed, like they did with me, that this person who was falling in love with my character... wasn't keeping themselves separate.

 

They got hurt, like I got hurt so long ago, but instead of it being a 10 year old, this was someone in their teens and they took it far worse than I did when I learned.

 

However, it never stopped me, I kept on rping, and I'll admit. I'm addicted to roleplaying! I love it. I love drawing my characters and creating more and more personalities, trying to push the limits of what I can play and solving where my limits are of what I /can/ play well.

 

It never gets old, though I have learned with a busier life I now have however, that I have to reframe from alt-crazy behavior in both 14 (cause I've been at this since 2010, so I burnout easy), but also on a MUSH I play on.

 

Roleplay is fun, its enjoyable, it can be addictive, but like all things. One has to be careful when they been at it for a long time, to not burn themselves out.

[Aegir]

Last year I did one of the Inquisitor side quests and realized that I, too, want to burn people! \o/

[Graff Lacroix]

D+D in middle school and onward, though my favorite tabletop is (and probably always will be) Mage: The Ascension. I already had plenty of experience imagining "what would I do in this situation" from various forms of media and writing my own stories.

[TokenBG1009]

One of my best friends just dragged me into the world of RP one evening when we were talking on AOL. I'll never remember what prompted it because I'm pretty sure he just started out of nowhere. From there I spent literally all of my free time in AOL chat rooms RPing with everyone I could convince to talk to a kid who had no idea what he was doing and not a single original idea in his head.

 

...I mean one of my first characters was a Vampiric Demon Drow who wielded twin scimitars and spent his time sulking in the rafters of the Red Dragon Inn while sipping whatever the hell blood wine was. I'm not proud of that. Okay, maybe a little proud.