When did you start roleplaying? Share your RP story here!

[Boone]

deleted

[Juice]

All started when I began RPing on WoW private servers, at around age 10 or 11 (roughly 7 years ago). Today, I credit RPing for the development of my skills as a writer (reading books helped a bit too).

[phantori]

For my birthday one year in middle school I was given a Nook to read various e-books on. However, I didn't use it as much for this as I did browsing the reviews for the Warriors books. At the time I was fairly into them, but my goal wasn't to learn others' opinions of them, it was to become a part of the roleplay that was going on in the internet-connected part of the system. All sorts of people were forming clans in the Warriors reviews, using the header as the name of their character, who could be a member of Ivyclan, Revengeclan, or Nightclan. My character, Sparkfoot, became the medicine cat of Ivyclan. I made friends, fought legendary battles, and translated prophecies from Starclan as Sparkfoot until the roleplay bug spread across the Nook network, inspiring a larger variety of plots and settings. Soon enough I was practicing swordplay at Camp Half-Blood, running alongside werewolves by a lake, and, eventually, playing the part of Zane in a Ninjago fan roleplay. This one in particular would effect me in unprecedented ways.

As I fought various enemies, hung out with Cale Fox, an OC and my character's best friend, and unexpectedly began dating Nya, Zane took on a life of his own, straying far from the original ice ninja's path to become a musician, inventor, shapeshifter, and human. Cale invited me to the roleplay being held in the comments of the hundreds of versions of Scarlet Letter, a sandbox-like area where anything was possible. During my first hour there, Zane broke someone's arm, had his guitar confiscated, and made several friends.

I started spending a lot more of my time there, developing Zane more, deepening relationships, until Scarlet Letter was my roleplay home. There's a long story that explains why I stopped using my Nook to roleplay, but to sum it up, it became too much. The people there were extremely dramatic, taking every little thing seriously, especially the massive amount of noobs showing up every day just to ruin our experiences. I started roleplaying online, still using Zane when I could, and varying between websites that either were too active for me to be able to keep up or almost completely dead. This is my current try, but I don't know how long I'll stay.

Throughout my participation in many different styles of roleplaying, I learned how to describe my characters and their actions, vary with my word usage, and, as I like to put it, "step into my characters' shoes". To this day Zane is my favorite character and I'm trying to turn his sort-of story into a graphic novel. Sparkfoot is also an important character of mine, despite the fact that I don't do Warriors roleplays anymore.

[DrawnIn]

When I was twelve, i think. Around that age. On neopets. Back then there was this kind of 'clique' that dominated the boards; the board was mostly unmoderated so no one stuck to the rule that RP's had to be about neopets and neopets only and that group kinda took it too far in the end. Happily joined them, to be honest, but it did cause a temporary shutdown of the RP board.

After that I've been on quite a lot of sites over the years but never really stuck on many of them, until I found Horse Home through a friend that was similar to Neopets Rp section in the way that it had strayed at least several continents from what it was initially about. From what a friend told me, back in the day it was about horses. Now there's two anorexics, a girl with a split personality, a guy who's killed multiple people, a dude who is some sort of gun-for-hire-except-not-really and basically no one really cares about the horses anymore.

[TheCheshire]

Goodness, it's been probably 9 years now. I was only 12 but my older cousin introduced me to the awesome world of Neopets. He helped me create a profile and got me set up. One day as I was browsing around I saw the forums pages and decided to browse through. I peeked through each one, kind of mulling over what was going on in there. It was when I got to the Roleplaying Forum did I really get interested. To me, at the time, it was like writing a book with a bunch of other people! I loved it, I was on there almost every day creating roleplays, joining them. My first roleplay I ever joined was about Gifted children.

Not too long after that I discovered Gaia online and did more of my roleplaying there since you had a lot more room to be creative and didn't have to worry about your board being deleted, your account being suspended or disabled. But I'll never forget my Neopets days. Lol.

[AlienBastard]

Role-playing wise i've been roleplaying since like the age of 12 or so back in 2009 on a site called sploder. At the time though, it was much more me trying to do text based games than roleplay. However it became that in time.

In 2010 on minecraft forums I started to actively roleplay, although in those times I did rapid fire quick text roleplays and I didn't really improve much on writing capability in forum RPs until 2011 when I made a roleplay called war room galactic domination which exemplifies how I viewed forum roleplaying as a game more than collaborative story.

That mindset lingered on, as in 2012 when I made space role-plays like Sagittarius my obsession with "balance" in a space RP setting got incredibly unreasonable. As a particularly unpleasant example I once told someone that nothing of value was lost when they quit the RP because I despised a race that I perceived as too peaceful since in my mind that equated to a mary sue race.

Said mindset ultimately led to a pretty big breakdown in in fall 2012 when I rage quitted a role-play I had and later cried "i'm leaving" in January. Although the reasons for that quitting had much more to do with me not wanting to enforce rules I disagreed with- a factor that in 2014 led to the RP clique I loosely associate with coming here.

2013 in roleplaying I consider a age of stagnation and decline since overall my interest in roleplaying took a steady decline since I never could keep interest in any RP I joined. Around September I quit again, although I came back 4 or so months later. By that point I pretty much decided to no longer announce any time I leave since I lost credibility by coming back a couple months later anyways.

By early 2014 I pretty much was on the verge of giving up the whole RP thing, but what managed to rekindle things was moving from minecraft forum RPs, something I wanted to do earlier but I liked being around a good share of the "precipricks" and instead stuck around. Eventually drama happened and the move to RPGuild happened.

[VATROU]

I think it was about, two? Or three years ago. Though it feels as an eternity since. My good friend on the 360 console, wanted to get some of us together for a Mass Effect RP, his younger, much younger cousin couldn't play the game and he wanted to introduce him in a setting of his creation. This after finding out about the Fallout games piqued my interest.

While the whole thing fell through rather quick, I caught the bug, and found the Fallout Artwork and Fan Fiction Site over at Bethsoft. Still there to this day. Though i RP here as well for things not Fallout related. My first real RP that welcomed me in was Law to the Lawless, a Fallout RP that took place around thirty years after the great war, when everything was fresh. We played Rangers seeking to civilize raider lands. I was a former con man, who had one last brush with death too many. It was soo much fun until it eventually died off.

[Cayden Black]

Was talking to a random person in a game, joined their forum on a spur of the moment. I've been roleplaying since then for about 8 years now.

BEST.

STORY.

EVER!

[Revans Exile]

I was at a Power Rangers discussion board, someone started an RP. It was no holds barred, all done for shits and giggles. We did autohits, came up with flimsy excuses to survive certain destruction, fun was had by all until one prick came in and ruined it all. Nobody did one liners.

[Chapatrap]

Started on Minecraft Forums on an rp called 'Orphanage: The RP' in 2012. Wrote one liners until mid-'13 when I joined up the fellows I know today. I joined RPGuild around this time too. Lost interest in around late '13, came back in early '14 on Minecraft Forums and a bit on here. Eventually, the group of lads I was with decided it would be best if we migrated here. Brought most of the Hardcores and Intermediates with us.

Here we are today.

AlienBastard said -lifestory.txt-

Hai, oZode. Forgot to mention you were a mod too.

[Gwazi Magnum]

It all started the summer of 2008 before I was just starting High School.

Having 2 months of summer to kill I was scrolling through the Internet, being a rather big Star Wars fan I joined a site called Star Wars Combine. It's essentially a real time star wars game, join a faction, do work etc. Me, being the Munchkin I am went ahead and made the character most like possible to be a Jedi, a Gand Swordsman and with the random name Generator he was called Duvnar Magnum. Almost immediately I tried to join the New Republic, do the typical "Fight the Empire" thing. They accepted me (as they do everyone), and as part of their response message linked the site's RP page to kill time in while I was waiting for them to sort out paperwork and stuff (The NR eventually proved disorganized and I never actually was able to join or sign up for training).

So I was sure "Sure, why not?" and checked out the forum RPs. The first RP I joined is one I would always remember, and I made a number of friends there who I would partake in many future RPs with.
Note, with this system it wasn't a "Make an Interest Check for each RP and they all separate", all the RPs we did were with the same characters, they just took different places on an overall timeline. Allowing for very long plots, character development and bonds to be created. This lasted for a while, where at one point I got a friend of mine back from Kindergarten who I still talk to today to sign up and join as well. But there was one issue happening... Admins. The Admins had this one huge issue with "You can't use stuff in the RP that you don't physically own on Combine!", and was cracking down harder lately... and note this included NPCs. So we couldn't even fight storm troopers without owning NPC storm troopers.

I was pissed and essentially went "Fuck this! I made a new site, who wants to come with me?". And literally every active person ditched the Combine's forum RP and joined the one I made... The Combine forums to this day have not recovered from that. And now that we had so much more freedom our role play's exploded, there were far more plots to explore, characters to develop etc. This lasted for a little over a year, only switching sites once in order to update the engine. Occasionally we had new people come in over time adding to our players, eventually to a point where half of our members were those who were never on the Combine forums. And we were all rather good friends too, to the point that three of the people there were even constantly trying to give me advice for whenever the day would happen that I'd get a girlfriend.

But eventually we were hitting the end of our year long plot-line, we ended it with a giant bang and everyone had a memory to last the ages. However, over time our power level had been slowly increasing, and it got to the point where once that Big Bang happened, we were at such a power level it just didn't feel the same refreshing and starting over with new characters... or keeping our current characters and doing a "What happened after?" sort of thing for too long. So that pretty spelled out the end to the site and community, people slowly dripped away. But some of us stayed together for a bit longer cause one of us spotted the RolePlayers Guild and invited the rest of us.

But it didn't take too long for everyone else to eventually vanish, to the point it was just me and the person who originally found the Guild were still on the Guild. And even then, after about a years time he was gone as well. So I had joined the Guild somewhere around Grade 10, and have stuck around ever since (I'm in my 3rd year of college now to give an idea of how long I've been around for).

[Rhona W]

Back in 1995-6 I was in Secondary School (roughly high school for you US folks), and a friend of mine got me in WH40K. This was 2nd Ed, when it wasn't all so remorselessly po-faced, and still had a sense of humour. I got into the background a fair bit, and I'd always been one for writing my own stories, creating characters, and so on.
My friends and I did this for our own amusement - not 40K characters, but superheroes and the like.
Anyhow, I checked out a local game store, tucked away in a dingy, all-but-forgotten mall in my town on a whim after being into 40K a fair while, but finding it lacking... something, and thinking more about the character side of things, and making up our own adventures.
I found out about the gloriousness that is Role-playing games, and bought Mekton Zeta, a mecha-based RP system, as it tickled the bit of my brain that is permanently devoted to Macross and Gundam.

I tried to understand it, and to run it with a few friends. But as the old saying goes, Roleplaying the first time is a bit like sex for the first time. You don't really know what you're doing, and it feels a bit wrong and secretive, but you know you're having fun, and that it feels pretty good. And the more times you do it, the better it gets.
And this was pretty much true - we ended up getting into a bunch of other games, and my friends got into role-playing as much as I did, and we purchased many gamebooks and systems, and played the hell out of them.

Eventually, people moved away, and our lives all changed. We still played tabletop together where we could, but I wasn't getting the game I wanted from my local group, so I wondered about gaming online, and looked into it. I first found out about Yahoo Groups, back when they weren't the crapfest they are now, and got into a lot of hit-and-miss games on there around 1998-2000, and then didn't really dabble in online much other than a handful of things here and there.
Around 2003-4 I got the impetus to set up a game on Yahoo called 'Thunderbolt Black', about a group of Mercenary fighter pilots. Shock, awe, surprise, it was a hit, and it's still lurching along (barely) now.
From that, I got into a few more games. I joined an awesome Ace Combat one called 'Chasing the Sunrise', which then died after the players all decided they liked WoW more than the game, and I drifted about a bit, before finding the Guild off of TV Tropes around four years ago. I lurked for a while, and then finally decided to take the plunge and make my own game, which has been churning along after numerous re-boots ever since.

So, I've been roleplaying in one form or another for about eighteen years.

(good grief, I feel so old)

[vancexentan]

I started roleplaying really back in the days of early runescape before it's modern updates but when I got serious about it was really just by chance on a relatively big youtube group by a guy who I would now never trust with a tin can that's been dulled and covered in foam. I was a relatively controversial person on that rp due to my inexperience tending to me god modding of which I have regrets looking back at many of the things I did. I also was a member of a star wars youtube group and it was where my username came from. Vance Xentan was a jedi for the old republic and after the twenty billion name changes I went through I decided that hey I liked this name I'll stick with it. I then went onto play on a small buddy based roleplayer group after youtube got rid of most stuff we could use to roleplay properly and spent years on there before taking an extended break from roleplaying and after falling into the anime fandom I ended up on here while searching for roleplays by chance two years back on the old guild before guildfall happened.

[Robeatics]

Anime RP forum in 5th grade. I... I can't say any more.

[Foster]

'05. Civics asked for a mock UN-resolution. Found Nationstates. RPed to test crazy social theories.

[Valeria]

Oh, haha ^^ My origin was in horse and wolf-pack rp's too. It was during the golden years of Neopets.com when the site was actually enjoyable and when its roleplaying forum was thriving. The first-ever few threads I started happened to be immensely popular so that was encouraging. I also discovered what trolls and flame-wars were.

[iamaloser]

LOL my story sounds so lame compared to all of yours.

It was 2007, I was in seventh grade and got into this site called Baltosource at the time, now it's Animation Source. They had a chat box and a roleplay box. I didn't know what roleplay was, and I went into it, to watch them and just kinda joined in. I love writing.

Been roleplaying since 2007, and that's really it. I travel from forum to forum, looking for roleplays and stuff XD

[MisterEightySix]

Okay, so way back in 2003, when I was eleven years old, I came across an old topic on a Sonic the Hedgehog fan forum which doesn't exist anymore. Looking for somewhere to talk to people because I was very antisocial back then, I joined it. I then randomly discovered that there was a section labeled "Role-Playing". Intrigued, I entered it, and was blown away by it. I created a silly avatar named Stardust and was a part of their antics for a few years. After a while, I got somewhat bored and disillusioned by it and left, but never forgot how much fun it was. Over the years, my tastes have changed (and Stardust is now a much more developed and original character), but I'm still kicking.

[Engel]

I joined a slice of life RP back in 2010 on this gaming forum I visited a lot to chat with people. The Escapist, in case anyone's heard of it. At first I was mostly bored by the RP and tried to mess things up by having my character do bad stuff, like pranks and such. My first character was quite the mary sue too, since I had no real experience with writing RP characters. However, there was this girl that I was chatting a lot with at the time who had been a roleplayer for years. She joined this RP I was in, after we talked about it. It became a bit more fun when I could have my character flirt with hers.

Anyway, a month later most people were upset with the GM, who started it, for a number of reasons. I'm not entirely sure why I did it now, but I stepped up as the voice for those who thought the GM was doing a bad job. An extended argument with the GM which lead to us falling out ended up with me having to start a new RP based on the changes people wanted to see. I did, mostly because this more experienced girl said she'd help me do it. Unfortunately real life caught up with her, and I was basically forced to do it with a co-GM which she'd picked. The co-GM was someone I didn't care much for. So like a month after I joined my first RP I became the main GM of an RP which had like 20 people in it. It took most of my time that summer to do that RP, when autumn came I had to step back because there was no way I'd be able to run an RP with 20 people and perform well in school.

It was a great summer though, and I had a great time doing that RP as an inexperienced GM that people had some faith in. The co-GM that the girl picked and I are still friends today, even though I couldn't stand him at first, haha.