Forums » Smalltalk » How'd you get into RP?

I was looking to satisfy a very specific emotional need by role-playing a very specific emotional fantasy with someone. I literally wasn't sure if such a place existed to do something like that. I googled "role-playing" and boy was I in for a surprise. But not only that...by accident I discovered that aside from indulging in emotional fantasies, it is a lot easier to write a decent story when you are writing with someone else. The plot ACTUALLY moves forward. Also I discovered that role-playing is really freaking addictive thanks to the social aspect. It's like fiction meets Facebook. Also people on here are really enthusiastic and fun.

Actually started by talking out non-canon scenarios with canon characters from whatever shows we were into at the time. Then we gradually introduced fan-characters into the mix to fill roles the canon chars didn't.

I didn't get into OC role-playing until freshman year of college, when the community for a comic-making tournament was just so fun! We talked all the time about how our characters might interact and RP'd potential plot points to share some fun continuity in our work. It let us build these neat connections between our own characters and the world they were in.

I started out just writing for myself. (And probably worth mentioning that I'd play pretend with my littler brother, who's a full 7 years younger than me, so that lasted into my early teens.) I joined a writers website, which remains among my "top two friendliest websites" even now (this being the other), even though I haven't been active there a long time. I apparently stood out (at least for my age; I joined at 13), and I can't remember if it was becoming a "preferred author" or being gifted a paid membership that initially gave me access to the site chat. (Things have changed around there since I joined. It's been a long time.)

That chat led to two things. One, there was one person there that I'd get into these utterly ridiculous "chat battles" with wherein we would pretty much just try to out-ridiculous each other with crazy powers and stuff. I wouldn't really call it RP, but it was related, I suppose. The other was that I was among a few that one of the users invited to a little semi-RP forum town, just a little ProBoards thing he threw together. That was my first real taste of RP, and it sent me searching for more.

I think it took a few years before I actually got into anything that wasn't a ProBoards site. Most of what I found were MUSHs and MUDs, but those didn't really suit me. I found it much easier (and more free and open) to write out a character on forums. It was another little ProBoards site (actually a pretty decent-sized one, for what it was) that really solidified my enjoyment of RP and gave me a proper launch.

Guys. There is a song. It's a love song. But they're kept apart because she "was always playing Minecraft" and he "was always playing Roblox."

...

Then they try to get a game to share, but find out she's on xBox and he's on Playstation.

/off-topic

I used to RP with actions in asterisks *like this*, which I think I picked up from Neopets over a decade ago. I would take that concept and get my friends to roleplay with me through MSN, then I learnt about the more literate style of roleplaying on a site called iScribble (which is more for drawing than roleplaying, but people used it for that regardless). That was also the place I learnt about RPR I think, it was common courtesy to link your character's profile before beginning a session so that everybody could get acquainted and one user posted their RPR profile. I liked the look of the site and how it worked, so that's also why I decided to make an account here!

Whenever I was a freshman in high school I reconnected with an old friend. She got me into anime and some video games, and we joined writers club together and told me we could co-write our own book so we sent text messages back and forth acting as cooler versions of ourselves getting trapped in a haunted house (re: based off Ao Oni) with a bunch of our favorite characters and it was all very mary sue-ish, but fun to look back on.

I don't even exactly remember how I started -- possibly on Habbo Hotel, in some kind of "stable RP rooms" where you roleplayed ponies. Around that time I was also into virtual animal care (a specific variation where people make their own virtual stables/kennels/etc, learning enough html to code a simple or even almost professional-looking website, and the caring of horses happened on guestbooks like freebok in a storytelling form by people who wanted to partake but didn't want to make their own stable/kennel website, this is not like neopets or the like where the framework already exists), which also resembled RP a bit. I finally got into forum RP at around age 13, but I don't remember the specifics of where I even got the idea to start an RP forum. It was almost popular for a couple years until I lost interest in running it, since then I've bounced around on other people's RP forums, groups and chats, and now on RP sites too.

I think there was a forum sub-section for it that I found while on an interest-based forum for something else. Then I migrated to Furcadia, which is where my interest in creative collaborative writing really took off.

To be honest the first time I roleplayed, I didn't even know it had a name.

I LARPed when I was younger, but I never knew that there was a written form of RP - I always thought that it was live action or table-top. So about ten years ago I meet someone online and we hit it off, we somehow started writing a story out through the PM function of that site, we ended up spending about 700-800 pages of PM before we were finished with the story. About a year later I'd find that what we did was in fact a roleplay, and I started to jump into sites that had roleplay sections, even though they weren't designed for roleplay (ie. ChickenSmoothie, and FooPets).

In about 2012/2013 I learned about self hosted roleplay sites/or sites completely dedicated to roleplay. Since then I've stuck to sites like this, and I'm happy that I found my niche.

I got into RP when I had joined this game known as FeralHeart. I knew nothing about RP at the time and was really confused and lost at first as to what everybody on that game were talking about x'D but eventually I had friends on there that I had made that tried getting me to RP with them and it took time for me to warm up to the idea of RP and I was actually rather paranoid about it at first if I'm tbh but eventually I tried to RP more and more and began joining groups on there to RP with a bunch of peeps and ive just grown to love it since. x'3 so how I got into RP. xD

How did I get into Roleplaying? Oh geez.... played a wargame called Squad Leader with my little brother and we had our own game leader markers. We would play the scenarios and gain skills and rank as we went, or get killed trying. I got to be a seargent in the Warmacht on the Russian front, but I jumped on a grenade to save my men and was killed. I did get the Cross of Iron with Oak Leaves.

After that, I played tabletop D&D for a year or so, then I started to get involved with a Tolkien message board where an active RP forum was going. I got into group writing and my character Halasian was created for a group roleplay called 'Shadow Over Arnor'. I have been more or less into writing with others since then. My main interest has been writing within the general guidelines of canon of Middle Earth, filling out the summaries of the historical timeline given in the books in more detail. So much so I have created several characters based on the time of the War of the Ring, and some during historical accounts like the Kin Strife of Gondor (of which I'm involved in an epic writing project with my wife and co-writer, and a bit of a prequel to it with her and another writer on another forum).

My original pen name here is a name I gave my Dunedain Ranger character that got his start as 'Ranger #26' (of the 30 who rode south to meet Aragorn). Halasian was morally grey in the years before the events in Lord of the Rings, and I was able to tie them together, having him be Ranger # 26 (Hanasian)'s father. Anyway, I'm getting long-winded here.

LOL wow AOL. That’s my first experience with RPing. A friend at school told me about it. Now that I think about it, I owe her for essentially jumpstarting my passion for writing.

Anyways, my fondest memories of that time was playing as Daigo Kazama (from an old VG called Rival Schools) partnering up with someone that played as a samurai/archer class from Final Fantasy Tactics to fight a giant Evangelion-type monster. I probably have nostalgia glasses on, but it was an amazing battle.