Where did you start RPing?

[Kurt S.]

I started here...I don't know what I'm doing...halp

[Aoi Fukiku]

After a few years on Chatro, I moved over to Gaia Online...

 

Me ade Clio actually met on gaia.

I remember joining Gaia when it was new. Back in the early 2000's e_e

 

/feels old now

[Chris Ganale]

Me ade Clio actually met on gaia.

 

Gaia had its uses for a time. Though I don't think I've kept in touch with anyone from there. Most of the people I rolled with there that I still talk to were people I brought with me to begin with.

 

I remember joining Gaia when it was new. Back in the early 2000's e_e

 

/feels old now

 

I joined at the very end of 03, so yeah...

[Steel Wolf]

After a few years on Chatro, I moved over to Gaia Online...

 

Me ade Clio actually met on gaia.

I remember joining Gaia when it was new. Back in the early 2000's e_e

 

/feels old now

 

This whole THREAD makes me feel old.

 

I remember when GeoCities was, like...graphically represented like an actual neighborhood with each website's address ending in a number like a house. Anyone remember that stuff?

 

Man...

[Faye]

Hahaha, well. I guess I technically got my start in elementary school with typical "make believe" games on the playground and after school. As we got older (around fifth or sixth grade), the same friends I used to play with all began RPing through AIM, and then began to role-play on Neopets about ten years ago. From there, I did a lot of forum RP on a site called VampireFreaks about seven or six years ago, moved from there to doing chat and forum RP on a site called ReignofBlood and also began to try out some tabletop games (D&D and ShadowRun mostly) and a little LARPing. Somehow, I got talked into playing TERA online during its closed beta which was where I began RPing in MMO's, and from TERA I moved to FFXIV:ARR when it launched. Voila! I've been RPing for as long as I can remember; it's only the place and medium that have really changed.

[Elysia]

 

 

 

This whole THREAD makes me feel old.

 

I remember when GeoCities was, like...graphically represented like an actual neighborhood with each website's address ending in a number like a house.  Anyone remember that stuff?

 

Man...

 

YES. 

 

I also remember running my own Geocities site which was actually nothing more than a fanlisting dump. :roll:

 

I started when I was 11 or 12, I think, wandering into a forum RP site called Fyre Myst. When that one died, I moved on to an affiliated forum, Runes of Desire. Then it was nothing for a while until I discovered the darkside of LiveJournal communities and fandom - I RPed anime and Disney characters. /facepalm This is the reason why longwinded forum RP is still the RP medium I am most comfortable with.

[Aoi Fukiku]

 

 

 

This whole THREAD makes me feel old.

 

I remember when GeoCities was, like...graphically represented like an actual neighborhood with each website's address ending in a number like a house.  Anyone remember that stuff?

 

Man...

 

YES. 

 

I also remember running my own Geocities site which was actually nothing more than a fanlisting dump. :roll:

 

I started when I was 11 or 12, I think, wandering into a forum RP site called Fyre Myst. When that one died, I moved on to an affiliated forum, Runes of Desire. Then it was nothing for a while until I discovered the darkside of LiveJournal communities and fandom - I RPed anime and Disney characters. /facepalm This is the reason why longwinded forum RP is still the RP medium I am most comfortable with.

I used Geocities as character sheets. What was the other? Angelfire?

[Chris Ganale]

Tripod was a service, I think. I think I still have the address for the Gundam RP info I hosted.

 

Yes, yes I do.

[Aoi Fukiku]

Tripod was a service, I think. I think I still have the address for the Gundam RP info I hosted.

 

Yes, yes I do.

Oh my gods. You linking that brought me to Elfwood where I used to write stories way back when I first started Rping! D:

[Kage]

I RP'd on Gaia with stuff like dis

[Harmonixer]

Ah-hah. The stories in this thread are really entertaining. It's always interesting for me to see where other people started. Brings a smile to my face.

 

When it comes to myself, if I had to pinpoint a moment where I discovered RP... Hmm.

 

It was when AOL discs, the freebie ones were still a huge thing. I mean most people used them as frisbees and coasters, but I was collecting them and making new accounts wherever and whenever I could. I remember discovering general chatrooms and really fascinated with the idea of being able to communicate with people very far away outside of letters and just phone calls. Something we take for granted today sometimes.

 

I was pretty young at the time, and at the mercy of whatever hardware I had access to. I can't tell you the excitement I had when I was able to move on from dial-up and to use cable for my isp, hahah.

 

I used to see strange titled rooms, not always sexual mind you. Themed, and often using weird combos of letters and numbers to spell out things. Remember when leetspeak was a thing? Sometimes if the room wasn't locked, you could get a glimpse of this world, where people claimed to be wizards and werewolves, women could be men, men could be inanimate objects capable of sentience. Huge distant lands that we could only dream of, until now that is!

 

I quickly became obsessed! I had to know more, to understand what it all was. So I first started RPing in the official AOL chat room called The Red Dragon Inn. As the years went by, I ended up joining various MUDs and spent an awful lot of time in The Keep. Which, I'm fairly sure still exists today.

 

I used to RP really goody goody knights. Really typical shit. I mostly started as a good guy. Always had a sword, too good to ever use a gun. (I know, right?) 0It is something that I can't bring myself to do these days. Everytime I try to play a nice guy now, it usually turns out boring for myself.

 

So yeah, I started in AOL chatrooms, then moved to bbs/forums, The Keep and then mostly every MMO I've played since Everquest. There's too many to list here, but most notably EQ, WoW and more recently TERA, GW2, and Wildstar ones that I enjoyed while I still played them. Maybe not so much GW2 outside of very close friends. I had mostly awful experiences.

 

One thing I will say, I think having RPed in so many forms and in as many games as I have and for as long as I have, it has only made me appreciate it more. I started very young, was able to convince people I was much older than I actually was. Which I attribute to reading so much, which I still do. I spend most of my time reading or writing when I'm not working. Or daydreaming, hahah.

 

I refuse to play an MMO unless I can find some form of RP, it's just not as fun for me as the communities aren't to my liking. It's rare that I play games that don't cover it in some way, even if it's for myself. Even my Monster Hunter character has a loose story behind it that my fellow hunters often crack jokes about it.

[Harmonixer]

Tripod was a service, I think. I think I still have the address for the Gundam RP info I hosted.

 

Yes, yes I do.

 

That, is incredible. Hahahha.

 

EDIT: OH GOTT DOUBLE POST, MERGE IF POSSIBLE

[Romy Leonhardt]

1996, D&D offline.

2001 FFXI Online, in my first mmo. I was so young then. Like, 23?

[Eses Fafa]

Hahaha, well. I guess I technically got my start in elementary school with typical "make believe" games on the playground and after school. As we got older (around fifth or sixth grade), the same friends I used to play with all began RPing through AIM, and then began to role-play on Neopets about ten years ago. From there, I did a lot of forum RP on a site called VampireFreaks about seven or six years ago, moved from there to doing chat and forum RP on a site called ReignofBlood and also began to try out some tabletop games (D&D and ShadowRun mostly) and a little LARPing. Somehow, I got talked into playing TERA online during its closed beta which was where I began RPing in MMO's, and from TERA I moved to FFXIV:ARR when it launched. Voila! I've been RPing for as long as I can remember; it's only the place and medium that have really changed.

I remember you! You were a frequent Vanarch! I actually used to work for ya on Elinorell at one point!

[Faye]

Hahaha, well. I guess I technically got my start in elementary school with typical "make believe" games on the playground and after school. As we got older (around fifth or sixth grade), the same friends I used to play with all began RPing through AIM, and then began to role-play on Neopets about ten years ago. From there, I did a lot of forum RP on a site called VampireFreaks about seven or six years ago, moved from there to doing chat and forum RP on a site called ReignofBlood and also began to try out some tabletop games (D&D and ShadowRun mostly) and a little LARPing. Somehow, I got talked into playing TERA online during its closed beta which was where I began RPing in MMO's, and from TERA I moved to FFXIV:ARR when it launched. Voila! I've been RPing for as long as I can remember; it's only the place and medium that have really changed.

I remember you! You were a frequent Vanarch! I actually used to work for ya on Elinorell at one point!

 

I was! Elinorell, I remember that name!

[Mae]

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.

[U'roh Tia]

Oh god, this is gonna be a trip down memory lane and a embarrassingly awesome one at that. I was introduced to Roleplaying through of all things, Gaia-Online, and I didn't even go there because of Roleplaying. I just went cause I was a 13 year old young boy addicted to the booming Anime Tread. Including Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, the HORRIBAD 4 kids Yu gi oh and at the time my then Girlfriend sent me there. I was bored and poking at the various forums and found the Role Playing boards.

 

The things I roleplayed... I'm embarrassed but I figured I'll let the community laugh. My first ever RP was Rping Bardock of DBZ fame in a silly as a heck Fan fiction-esqe story line that can basically be boiled down to Anime Secret Wars for those familiar with Marvel comic's story lines. I was 13 and had no flippin' idea on how to even write but it was awesome. I had so much dang fun so it was only natural I moved onto other sites, hoppin' about various chat sites and such Roleplaying where I could to the present now 28. 

 

Then on one of these sites I met one of my best friends and she convinced me to try giving MMOs a Shot, this was about 4 years ago. She brought me along on FFXI where I did minimal off game RP with her. My first ever in game RP character was a Blood Elf on WoW. It was such a new experience in a good and bad way, learning of all kinds of new negatives and positives in such a environment. After that, I left due to reasons related to XIV and now I am here!

[Jana]

Somehow, I got talked into playing TERA online during its closed beta which was where I began RPing in MMO's, and from TERA I moved to FFXIV:ARR when it launched.

 

TERA was also my first experience RPing on an MMO, but I'd done RP on small forums for a few years before then. I'd talk more but then we'd have to start posting TERA screenshots and I don't have any handy on this machine...

[Tiergan]

I got started in AOL chatrooms. :V

 

Good ole "Rhydin". I was 13 or 14 and my characters were all embarrassingly awful.

[Gaspard]

Jedi Knight, Jedi Academy.

 

From Thereon out I've switched Mediums, games and methods to RP more times then I can count. Star wars based games, Forums, several MMO's, Text RP, Chat RP. You name it. Eventually that all led me to FFXIV

[Barengar]

I've been one to feel drawn toward telling stories of adventures and interesting people since I was told to write about whatever I wanted in the 2nd grade. Yet, somehow, it never dawned on me that I could do it in my video games until my time in EverQuest II and that was by accident no less. Even after 5 years of playing the original EverQuest that idea had never even crossed my mind.

 

Luckily for me, however, I wound up transferring from my original server in EverQuest II onto the roleplaying one (Antonia Bayle) for reasons completely unrelated to roleplay. It was there that I stumbled upon and roleplay guild conducting a meeting in a lodge out in one of the lower level zones. To say that I was immediately enamored by the concept would be selling it short! I signed up shortly after and befriended some of the greatest people I've ever had the pleasure of playing video games and roleplaying with.

 

That was nearly 10 years ago and there have been many place in between then and now. One thing remains true though; I now struggle to comprehend the prospect of playing a MMO without roleplaying!

[TheLastCandle]

I got started in AOL chatrooms. :V

 

Good ole "Rhydin". I was 13 or 14 and my characters were all embarrassingly awful.

 

... -hangs his head- When I was 13 or 14, I roleplayed Vampire Hunter D and Madmartigan from Willow in the Red Dragon Inn.

 

I am ashamed. x3

[Desu Nee]

I got started in AOL chatrooms. :V

 

Good ole "Rhydin".  I was 13 or 14 and my characters were all embarrassingly awful.

 

... -hangs his head- When I was 13 or 14, I roleplayed Vampire Hunter D and Madmartigan from Willow in the Red Dragon Inn.

 

I am ashamed. x3

I rped an 2cool4u bunny from a show that didn't lasted a single season and Habbo Hotel.

 

 

Can't get more embarassing than me.

[Tiergan]

I only learned about the RP in AOL chatrooms because this girl I was babysitting (who was 9) jumped into them while on my computer and immediately started spamming A/S/L over and over to show me how cool it was.

 

I immediately herded her away from the chatroom going "OH SWEET LORD, DON'T DO THAT." and then went back the next day to try RPing in there. I'm 99% certain my first character was a very small chocobo because my screenname at the time was, in fact, LittleChocobo. :V

[Cliodhna Eoghan]

in the before time, in the long, long ago....i had a friend that got me started on table top. our first game was vampire the masquerade. her character was an overly emotional self hating tremere

 

mine was bubbly highschooler that had been changed vampire literally for no raisin...and was still bubbly/totally fine being change vampire gangurl

 

and our gm's story was a harrowing tale of some vampire (possibly mlkavian? he never really said...) that found us and wanted to use us to make a race of "better vampires" by putting us through some random tests that iirc were easily solved....but the last step in doing so; would mean we were suppose to kill him....

 

looking back with the magical hindsight glasses; it was a pretty damn awful rp.....but it was more fun than i had before and was instantly hooked. bad characters/plot and all <3

 

afterwords; we'd watch random uncut anime that he had on vhs.....yeah it was that long ago >.>;