Forums » Smalltalk » First introduction to RP

As the title says.....what was your first introduction to role play?

Was it D&D? Minecraft? Roblox? What?

For me it was quite odd. There was once this Halloween themed site called "Caverns of Blood" which may or may not still exist. This was an early 90s website so...yeah.

Well, one day they added a public chat to the website, and that's how I learned about interacting with people online and roleplay to an extent.

I didn't get into RP heavily until later, when I found "The Cyberchat Nexus" which was the site that died on me long ago.

After that i jumped around from place to place, finding mostly....cringe and filth....which I cannot stand....until I found...

YOU WONDERFUL PEOPLE!

*coughs* Okay that last part belongs in its own thread....but yeah. How were YOU introduced to RPing?

Bahaha wow, I never really thought of how I got into role-playing till I saw this.

But now that I have thought about it, it's embarrassing. I'm 16 years old and have been role-playing for over 5 years now but what got my sorry 10-ish year old butt into role-playing was... a combination of Warriors (yes the book series by Erin Hunter) and Animal Jam. If you do not know what it is, AJ is some National Geographic browser 2D game where little kids could play as an animal and customize them, hang with friends, etc. Like Club Penguin. I spent a lot of time on that game, much against the wishes on my mom who hates online stuff, and eventually stumbled upon these weird "Clans" other people my age were making. It happened to be based off my favorite book series at the time and I was hyped to join in.

It didn't take long for me to get into the groove of role-playing and I found that I loved it. Over the years I quickly grew out of the game and started my journey hunting down forums online. I've hoped around several (of which died many times or changed so much I lost interest).

And now I am here after a bit of break.

If you cringed while reading that, I'm so sorry. I cringed just remembering all of this. But, hey, got to start somewhere I guess LOL.

My first ever ‘rp’ was me and my little brother playing war games in the seventies. My first ‘character’ was a Luftwaffe fighter pilot who did quite well in air combat until he crash landed his FW-190 and was badly injured. We played Squad Leader and Patrol with made-up leader-characters too.

Later in the early eighties we got into D&D (TSR 2nd ed.) quite heavily for about a year, with four of us spending every free moment we had playing. It died a slow death as it tapered back to a couple weekends a month, then we just stopped gathering and playing. I found all the DM note, maps, and the miniatures in the attic of the folks house a few years back when I helped my brother clean out the family home after mom died.

Online RP I started in 1999 on a new-found Tolkien Middle Earth site (The One Ring . com) and began writing collaboratively with virtual strangers. Been at it on and off over the years, and here I am on RPR!

Considering how horrible my memory is, I might be wrong, but:

World of Warcraft. It was around early Cataclysm when I started taking art seriously, and in order to do so, I decided to make a specific character to draw and oh wait she needs a family and oh wait I already have a character and BOOM THEY'RE RELATED NOW

So on and so forth. She was an awful Mary Sue (and I'm pretty supportive of Mary Sues just for people to have fun with but oh my god 7/8th grade me what even were you doing?) but I made this character and another one, found a guild, ended up making a few friends around my age and we started RPing on a very regular basis.

It was so bad. It was so so so bad lol

Oh yeah! Mine was on Wheel of Time Mania I think. It was a thread I created called Circling Birds. I really love the Wheel of Time and back in '03 I was maybe four books in. Either way I was playing catch up and loving it. I was in college but still couldn't put those books down. Anyway, I've loved RP ever since. I think I dabbled on this site years ago like '09 or 2010....not sure, but I found it again last year.

I started when I was six, which means I'm young and have been roleplaying for a stupidly long time. I snuck onto websites for 13+, and while my mom did check on my online activity she maybe wasn't diligent enough to recognize all the websites I was on were for older kids.

So my start was actually on Puzzle Pirates and Furcadia. I had... gosh. RubyRedLove on PP and Zaza on Furcadia and they both were absolute disasters. I didn't get decent at roleplay until I was nine years old, banned from both Puzzle Pirates and Furcadia [Puzzle Pirates because it made me "behave poorly" (I had told someone they're 'dead meat' while we were playing a game, this was the particular issue) and Furcadia because apparently one of the people I was chatting with had a name that was another word for pedophile [although she never could tell me what that word was, and everyone I chatted with regularly was pretty innocuously named]), and turned to Neopets. I begged my mom to fill out the form to allow me to chat at nine years old, joined a Warriors rp guild, had a Mary Sue... and Sunnypaw slowly evolved into a pretty decent character.

Now I'd like to say I'm rather talented at both roleplay and writing in general, having evolved past my poorly constructed characters into something much better. Although you can see the remnants of that with the older characters I have on here, Kinsey and Briony+Amaranth for example. But hey! Can't all be perfect

uh, When I was really young, I dont know how young exactly, I did roleplays in person at recess- and I guess thats just "playing make-believe" but I kinda just kept that up continously and all of my other roleplaying experiences eventually sprouted from that I Think, so I wouldnt really consider there to be a distinction. as for online roleplaying, probably the first was on the elder scrolls wikia forums.

It might come as a surprise to some of my friends, but the very first experience I had with RPing was LARPing, and I think I was about 11 when that was something I tried. I don't like the "acting" part of it, though, so I only did it for one weekend and never tried it again.

First time I did written RP was when I was probably around 12-13, and had already been writing my own stories, that I used to print out and bring to the school library and read to the younger kids. A friend of mine and I then began writing in a notebook, which we took turns in taking home. As the both of us then got a computer in our room, thus having internet connections always available, we switched to RPing through MSN Messenger, copy-pasting everything to a Word-document for safe-keeping. That kept going on until we were about 16 and started high school - she gained new friends and moved past RPing. I found some other friends through the interwebs, and did my RPing with them until I was about 20 and moved to Morocco for a while. Meanwhile, they found other friends and lost interest in RPing, so we lost touch while I was away. From then and up until finding this site, I didn't do any RPing at all, and it actually wasn't until about two years ago that I really got back into it.

You asked for my introduction, and got my "life" story. Whoops?

That is beautiful Penholder! Thanks for sharing!

So Many RPs saved to word, so many lost when websites ceased to exist suddenly. I still back up my RPs. I have an external hard drive full of word document archives going back to the year 2000. I consider them works of art, but wonder if I’ll ever read them all again.

With the passing this year of a friend whom I wrote some of them with, and my ability to pass the tales we wrote together on to her granddaughter who appreciated it so much, it really makes it all worth it.

This website!

Oh boy, my first time was when I was 13/14 and was a disaster. As for what actually happened, well I'm going to keep it short and sweet.

Essentially I actually have to thank my ex best friend for introducing me to rp even though she was a terrible teacher. She basically allowed me to create a mary sue monstrosity. Then she had me rp with one of her friends and I ended up making a newbish mary sue mistake and he blew up on me. That set me back about 6 months before I was willing to try again. This happened on Gaia and I never tried to RP there again.

Luckily I eventually found people who were willing to properly teach me on Furcadia which was also introduced to me by said ex friend, though I found these people on my own.