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Forums » Smalltalk » When and Why Did You Start Roleplaying?

A very simple question, and I'll answer first! :D Don't worry about it being embarrassing, I'm sure mine is the most embarrassing haha

So, I watched this Youtuber named Aphmau. I was really obsessed with her Minecraft series MyStreet, and well- I went on Amino and started roleplaying as the characters. I wanted to find a new way to let my creative energy out! This was back around 2016, and it brings back so so so many warm memories. I met good friends there, and they brought me through tough times <3

Now, how about you? Leave your story!
Oh, I know Aphmau, but I never really watched her a ton.

I started RPing when I was in 6th grade. I started that randomly and unintentionally. I had this drawing app that no longer is social anymore, but I first RPed on there after I found out what exactly it was and some people had asked me about it. I became really into it and switched over to RPing on Amino, but soon due to some personally issues, I had to stop RPing and couldn't do it. I really started to miss online RPing - I played DnD but it just kind of hit different - so I found this sight when I was in 8th grade and have been RPing again ever since then.
Ok so i started rping in 6th grade some friends had told me about it and at the time I needed an escape but it quickly morphed into a way for me to make things or series I love to come to life.
I started a little later in life. I joined a fencing club when I was 18 and some folks were talking about this things called LARP. I thought it sounded a little nerdy, but also kind of fun. So I tried it out and I was hooked! XD

From there, we had an IC forum that served as the tavern for in between the monthly in-person events, which got me started on the play-by-post stuff!
Debatably, the universal answer would be in early childhood when the concept of playing pretend developed (or arguably even as an infant exploring how it feels to make various expressions and what the reaction to them will be, because I'm pretty sure evidence has been shown to indicate even as babies we'll try out different sounds, expressions, etc. without always feeling the associated emotions in a given moment) as a standard part of human social development. XD

Setting that aside... I think I was somewhere between 13-15 when I acquired the concept of play-by-post RP. I was an active member of Writing.Com (at the time Stories.Com) and commonly the youngest member hanging around the site chat. One of the other chat regulars set up a sort of "cyber town" thing, a forum on ProBoards where the assorted threads were locations around this little town where we still basically acted as ourselves, but with some "creative" spin to our lives, like running shops around this imaginary town and generally being able to pretend to interact in person. After that, it was on to figuring out how to look up more of these sorts of "interactive writing" situations and quickly delving much deeper into fantasy pretty much as soon as I learned I could.

Prior to that, all I had was experience playing maybe a few different JRPG video games a little (nothing was ever mine and I was, y'know, a kid, so how much I could ever play was controlled by others) and had a vague awareness that D&D existed. What I recognize to be my first RPG experience overall was Chrono Cross, a sort-of sequel to the much more well-known Chrono Trigger. I wasn't used to games being so centered around an evolving story, nor being able to make choices that could make the details of that story play out a little differently. Game even had at least two different endings, but I think more? (And that's besides simply being aware of how some of your choices affected the setting and its inhabitants a lot more than they affected you and your path - like there's at least one acquirable character who it can be assumed dies if you don't take the path that lets you get them, and there are other choices that can alter other species' feelings towards humans, including at least one path that starts a blasted genocide chain.)
In 7th grade, I was friends with a girl who we’ll name Olivia. She was dating one of my bfs friends so we were all close. She had started a small RP among her, me, my bf, and another mutual friend. We kept it going for a while, we normally did fantasy and just kind of chaotic randomness for laughs. We drifted from it and Olivia wasn’t being super nice anymore so me, my bf, and the same mutual friend created our own. That went for a while and then it was just me and my bf in an RP (still chaotic randomness). We did that for a while, but then my bf and I broke up, leaving me lonely and needing to spill my creative juices (sorry that sounds weird lol). I stumbled upon this site and here I am! Love the people on here btw! <3
I've played pretend looooong after other kids stopped. It must have been up to when I was like... what... 13? And that was supplemented by the use of poseable figurines for play that was similarly RP-based. My transition to technology was RPGs like Baldur's Gate II and Neverwinter Nights. So whilst technically I haven't done any TTRPG D&D until 5th ed, I've been playing D&D games since... 2000-ish? Once I stopped with the playing of pretend, I just played RPGs instead.

Online RP for me basically came about through semi-meta RPing on the game Freelancer. Which started when I was like... idk... 15? And the RP side more or less kicked off a couple years later. The community I was part of also had RP forums, so I got my taste for forum RP there. A friend from that community got me in touch with a GM who was looking for players for his bespoke fantasy RP, which used tabletop rulings, but was mostly handled through spreadsheets. Which was interesting, because unlike a lot of tabletop systems, there were a lot of skills and stats that were calculated through formula (handled through excel). I think it helped to fuel my own love of formula-filled spreadsheets... though certainly I don't use them for RP!

And that's when RPing became my obsession special interest. I was in a period of borderline-suicidal depression, and that weird excel-based RP was the main thing keeping me going. The only thing I really looked forward to. And then... it stopped.

Being very very shy, finding new friends for RP stuff was incredibly hard. I managed to find some RP in Final Fantasy XIV... until the main RP group collapsed in on itself (and I had returned to once since, but it had become so toxic, I didn't stick around). But anyways, what feels like less time ago than it actually was, I did manage to hook up with an RP partner on DeviantART... who introduced me to RPR. That was in 2014, and I've been here ever since. Barring a couple of breaks, but I think my last break was in 2016.

Meanwhile, since my sort-of-but-not-quite TTRPG games had ended, I'd had this big empty hole that I'd been trying to fill for yeeeaaarrrs. At long last though, I managed to introduce my brother to a little thing called Critical Role (which I found out through watching the Yogscast when Mark Hulmes and Chris Trott were initially discussing the possibility of starting their own D&D stream, which of course became High Rollers, which I have watched from the very beginning and still continue to watch). I managed to spread a love of TT D&D across a number of friends and family members and finally have a D&D group! I started as a player because I doubted my ability to speak good (my verbal eloquence leaves much to be desired), but after everyone started to move away to start adult life stuff, I was the only one who was really interested in DMing over discord, so I became DM. And honestly, whilst I wish I had more opportunities to be a D&D player, I don't mind DMing.

And that is my RP story. I guess.
ALTY_Heave Topic Starter

Zelphyr wrote:
Debatably, the universal answer would be in early childhood when the concept of playing pretend developed (or arguably even as an infant exploring how it feels to make various expressions and what the reaction to them will be, because I'm pretty sure evidence has been shown to indicate even as babies we'll try out different sounds, expressions, etc. without always feeling the associated emotions in a given moment) as a standard part of human social development. XD

Setting that aside... I think I was somewhere between 13-15 when I acquired the concept of play-by-post RP. I was an active member of Writing.Com (at the time Stories.Com) and commonly the youngest member hanging around the site chat. One of the other chat regulars set up a sort of "cyber town" thing, a forum on ProBoards where the assorted threads were locations around this little town where we still basically acted as ourselves, but with some "creative" spin to our lives, like running shops around this imaginary town and generally being able to pretend to interact in person. After that, it was on to figuring out how to look up more of these sorts of "interactive writing" situations and quickly delving much deeper into fantasy pretty much as soon as I learned I could.

Prior to that, all I had was experience playing maybe a few different JRPG video games a little (nothing was ever mine and I was, y'know, a kid, so how much I could ever play was controlled by others) and had a vague awareness that D&D existed. What I recognize to be my first RPG experience overall was Chrono Cross, a sort-of sequel to the much more well-known Chrono Trigger. I wasn't used to games being so centered around an evolving story, nor being able to make choices that could make the details of that story play out a little differently. Game even had at least two different endings, but I think more? (And that's besides simply being aware of how some of your choices affected the setting and its inhabitants a lot more than they affected you and your path - like there's at least one acquirable character who it can be assumed dies if you don't take the path that lets you get them, and there are other choices that can alter other species' feelings towards humans, including at least one path that starts a blasted genocide chain.)

An answer to the first paragraph, you a very right, I played pretend a lot with my friends XD I made a whole series with my friends and we roleplayed it everyday on the playground…the memories! Lol
I started when I was little with my friends, stopped when they moved and then started it back up as writing exercises when I started taking writing classes. But I didn't get really into it until the 5th year of my abusive marriage. It turned into an escape and stress reliever. I'm getting a divorce now, and I'm still in love with roleplaying.
Geez every time I think about it RPing has been a part of my life for a long time. The concept of role playing was first introduced to me in 2008, when I started playing roblox, some really classic old Roblox. I was probably 11 when I found a bunch of RP games and groups and I became obsessed with them. My biggest fascination was always the making and development of characters. Of course I was 11, so none of my characters where good but it was my start. Roblox introduced me to the idea that there’s a whole internet landscape out there full of people who also like these little virtual escapes to be whoever you wanted and to truly live out fantasies of these larger then life personalities in a very personal and connecting way. Damn, that was nearly 13 years ago my goodness…

My fondest memory was doing a RP with someone in the sight about Halo, my favorite game then and still today. We created a large cast of characters and at the time they felt very real and held special connections to us. It always seems hard to finish a RP that RP when I was about 13 had a satisfying ending with each character either suffering a hero’s death or managing to retire after battles hard fought, even did a follow up RP with some characters children buroto style. Maybe if I could like back on that RP I would think it’s cringe but was important to developing my skills as a writer today. I’ve been looking for a Halo RP to bring back that old feeling but it never happens. Maybe it’s for a reason.
I was eleven I think when I started writing my own stories and creating characters for them. Why I did that was because my good childhood friend moved away and I was becoming introverted and found a way to amuse myself? I was thirteen when I actually started roleplaying online with other people. Kinda went nuts on some forums and a few of us jr high and high school friends had a forum to play our OC’s on. It was quite fun, until it wasn’t. I then went to a place called Storytime where I got into some deeper writing with a few others.

Then I graduated high school and started into college and life got busy and taken up with other ‘adults’ stuff and it gradually became a lost passion of my past. It wasn’t until this year when I was seeing my psychologist that I was reminded of all the fun I had roleplaying. She suggested I should look into doing it again some to help relieve some of the stresses of my everyday existence. I did, and it worked great as an escape from the real world I find myself in into a bit of make-believe as characters. I keep it measured though as I see rp can easily become a rabbit hole to disappear into. :)
I started when I was around 15 or 16 I believe at first I wasn't even experienced in this type of thing but I loved writing and always wrote random stories, fantasies as one does like a diary. When I found out you could do it with other people it was crazy to me, I was like "What, you can do that?" I don't remember how I stumbled across it but I know I joined this in 2018 I think it was or sooner than that i don't remember what it said on my profile. I have been in and out of it for a couple years sense life does get a bit crazy here and there but I always find my way back as it helps me feel a lot better about what is going on in life and what is a happening in my mind, overall just makes me feel a lot happier and able to get my creativity out sense I feel like the past couple of months I haven't been doing that so I came back to this and only been back for two days and oh my oh my can I tell ya that this has made my mood swings better! And what is amazing my significant other is so supporting of this as well sense it makes me happy and helps me a lot with my depression and other things!
No idea when it started, but when I was a young child playing on Roblox, I was bored and decided to dip my toes into the waters that were roleplaying games. I didn't know what they were or what the appeal was, but I had nothing better to do, so I joined them anyway!

As time went on and I explored these games, I began to learn how to roleplay as characters. I ended up falling in love with RP. As I kept going, I made new friends and I tried it out some more. Eventually, as the games I adored on Roblox died out and my friends just stopped playing entirely, I quit Roblox and started posting my artwork on DeviantArt because, once again, I was bored. I made a new friend there and she asked me to roleplay, and we did! We roleplayed in private messages, and that helped warm me up to roleplays that were solely text-based. The games on Roblox allowed us to explore pre-set areas, but in text-based ones, you had to make it up yourself. The only limit was your imagination!

And then of course, I continued to scratch my RP itch with my best friend IRL. We came up with dumb characters (who have dramatically evolved since then) and we continued to build our worlds together. And recently, we decided it would be a good idea to come to RP Repository, so we could have an easier time sorting our info and have a great place to keep our RPs, rather than having them get lost in our emails!

Amazing what boredom can do, eh? It helped introduce me to one of my favourite pastimes! <3
GingerHades wrote:
And then of course, I continued to scratch my RP itch with my best friend IRL. We came up with dumb characters (who have dramatically evolved since then) and we continued to build our worlds together. And recently, we decided it would be a good idea to come to RP Repository, so we could have an easier time sorting our info and have a great place to keep our RPs, rather than having them get lost in our emails!
^me!! ;3
Okay but in all seriousness. Hades was the one to introduce me to text-based RP, when I was.. 12? 13? I don't know. In any case, I didn't even know the word for it at the time, I just thought of it as "that thing where we write what our characters are doing" (we would often do little turn-based battles, too, so sometimes, since I didn't know the word, I'd just ask if Hades wanted to do a battle. Or toss a random enemy into the chat (it was Google Hangouts.).)
Before all that, I had always loved to write, and I did RP in the technical sense (a.k.a. playing pretend, especially with stuffies.) I'm not actually sure at what point I learned the term for text-based RP. Hades was probably the one to tell me, but I'm not sure - it could also have been my own research. Either way, when I found out that it was an established thing, a whole new world of possibilities were opened for me, since I realized I could RP with all sorts of people and using all sorts of characters.
So the exact timeline is kind of fuzzy, but in my earlier RP days I did a lot of RPs based on Warriors (those cat books), along with the ones Hades and I were doing with our OCs (which used to be cringe but I'd say are kinda cool now.) Most of the characters I used to have weren't very great, really. But I think (I hope) I've changed myself and my characters for the better in the time since then. :) And now I still RP with Hades, but it's more fun now I think because the world and characters are so much more developed. And I RP with people that aren't Hades, using my other characters. I don't really do fandom RP like I used to. Not that I wouldn't, I just typically don't.
So that's my RP history, I guess. I've come a long way, and I hope to continue improving my writing and character-building as time goes on! :)
Like most kids, I played make-believe games, so arguably then.

But I guess I started doing the more "officially recognized" term for RP when I was 14 and stumbled my way into Furcadia, drawn in initially because I love creation toys. Found a lot of people in that game who liked to pretend to be someone else.

At that age, I really needed to pretend to be someone else, far away from my actual life...

At first, it was just a way to cope. My characters were some extension of myself, even had a fursona after a while just because that was what all my friends did and it was an easy connection to make with people online. (I no longer consider myself a furry, but at that stage in my life, it was helpful to find a community that I could feel safe and accepted in.)

I guess, as I got older, it also became a safe way to experiment. There's the obvious... well, y'know, stuff a teenager might be curious about. But I also used it to figure out things about myself that were difficult to talk about, or to practice social interactions through a proxy which helped with my social anxiety. (I wasn't a well-socialized kid. I spent most of my time alone and had a lot of isolating experience as a kid. The internet was my only social outlet, and a sheltered teenager being socialized on the internet left some... need for adjustment, haha.)

In healthier groups of people, OOC communication was encouraged when something went too far or just "derailed" everyone else, and I think that was a good first start to learning how to assert what I want and am comfortable with, not just IC, but in general.

I've always liked to make worlds more than characters though, and I fell out of RPing so much in my adulthood, because I felt like the people I RPed with didn't really take worldbuilding very seriously and were a bit vain with their own characters instead. In 2017, though, I got into tabletop RP, which has a very different feel and set of priorities to the kind of RP I was used to before.

I didn't consider picking up freeform RPs again until this year, and mostly joined RPR on a whim, because someone in r/LFG's discord server mentioned it offhandedly. I've since found a few people who care about the same things that I do in RPs (namely that there should be some overarching goal besides just character growth, otherwise I can get bored or just lose all my focus), so I've enjoyed it here so far.
Well, I started when I was in elementary school (I'm 19 now, so I've been roleplaying for 10 years) when I was an extremely heavy reader. A few months later I joined this chatroom which was full of roleplayers, I thought it was weird how they would "act out" their words since I was so young so I just instead decided to chat with the non-roleplayers. Well, that got boring so I eventually began to join the others with the roleplaying. I think a year or two later I had learned and became experienced with more detailed writing and roleplaying, so I moved to the app G+ (google plus) to meet people who could write up to my standards such as responding with 10-20 length paragraphs and the other person would commit to returning the same length, if not longer. Over the years I've roleplayed with many different genres and dealt with other roleplaying partners so I know what I like and don't like. My roleplaying era lasted until I was 13 when google plus shut down and I decided to move to Wattpad to continue my writing. I'm still very new to this site and how it works, but I'm still searching for roleplays that catch my interest. :)

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