Experiences How did you get here?

[ukpezzzz]

Hello. New to this forum and this style of RP.

To elaborate on a generic question, I am curious what people's stories are which led them to where they are now. What people's thoughts are with RP and the good and the bad they have seen from it. A way to get the general mood of this forum and a way to share stories and curiosity.

I'll go first. I used to play WoW for a time, ending in 2016 when I generally got bored of the game, but before I could quit, I compulsively decided to join an RP server and see what that was about.
Six years later... (It was good), I find myself drifting away from the open form of RP that is joining RP guilds and roaming the world finding people to RP with. There have been good stories from this, some bad. But nothing huge. It was good overall. But it was hard to stay there with a slowly dwindling community and people forming closer and closer nit groups which are mostly self-contained and isolated.
For a time, I tried private servers and found the same issue. The people who did stuff mainly already had a group to log in for and it was all very self-contained. That, combined with the fact that characters of mine would meet people, only to be soft-ghosted by them weeks or months after. This was a constant issue I faced throughout my time with online roleplay, and why I came to a place like this, as I grew burned out and weary of that community.

What are other's experiences over the years? Are these pros and cons people have seen in their paths to online RP? I got here through WoW. How did you get here?

 

[Len Auphydas]

The earliest RP's I can remember doing were over on the skyrim wikia's forums back when wikia was called wikia. Well, online RPing anyways- plenty of in-person make believe with friends that was essentially the same thing before that. I got involved in a community for skyrim roleplaying for some time, with some disagreements and drama along the way but nothing too dire. That community ended up sort of branching out into a bunch of new settings, one of which I made as a continuation of my make-believe fantasy's. These never really took off and that community sorta died a quiet death, along with me falling out of contact with just about everyone I know from around then.

Around that time I also got involved in RPing on the warhammer 40k wikia, and those were quite a bit more elaborate RP's, probably the first that was more of a proper forum RP. But around the same time I started doing shorter form, purely fluff RP's on Google Plus when that was a thing. Eventually the warhammer 40k wikia RPing scene also died a quiet death, and I started looking around for new avenues of Roleplaying.

The next few years saw me frequenting quite a few different sites or forums. Discord, reddit, and RPrepository being the main ones. The roleplaying reddits tended to take my posts down without any reason given, so eventually I gave up on those. Discord was... Fine, ish, but as my Looking-for-partners posts got more elaborate I started running into issues with the cahracter limit, plus whenever I had been on a server for more than a week I already felt like I had exhausted the entire pool of potential partners. Some stuck around for a while- The longest being many months, the shortest being a single message. Overall though, I found the quality and consistency there was lacking so I ended up over the past few years using mostly RPRepository. I took a few long breaks, the most recent one being the entirety of 2022 and a bit of 2021.

I went back to RPrepository for a few months but after I had yet another of many disagreements with the staff and rules over there, I just decided to call it quits and leave that site for good. Again, I ran into that feeling that I had exhausted the entire sites population of anyone interested in my prompts anyways, so I ventured out to look for greener pastures.

I had been on this site before briefly- back in 2018, I did try to make an LFRP post, but it got taken down as it was interpreted by the staff as sexual content. for the record, it wasn't, but I can understand how it could be interpreted that way. But since my ability to write LFRP's with clear signs of intent had improved over the years, I hopped on over here again and tried again and so far, I've had no issues. Not much success either, granted. But I haven't been looking that hard, and at least with how much larger the population seems to be here, I don't think I'm anywhere near completely exhausting all potential partners.

 

[GojiBean]

Hoyo!

Glad to see you here!

I started roleplaying when I was about 9 years old, live action in the backyard or around the neighborhood with my best friend(s). We'd roleplay basically anything from Pokemon to Yugioh to Jurassic Park to Legend of Zelda to DBZ, etc. As I grew older that method of roleplaying faded away and was eventually lost to me for about two to three years. But, in 2009 my sister invited me to roleplay online on MySpace (when it was still relevant, lol) and that was the beginning of my online roleplaying adventures.

I started on a particular website which, today, is as dead as a doornail and has fewer than 10 active users on it at any given time of the day. Kinda sorry to see it in such a state given how popular it was when I first joined, and even up through around 2016-2017 it remained incredibly popular.

Anyway, I decided to expand my roleplaying horizons in 2015 when I first popped in on RpNation. At the time I was on a different account. And, thanks to my personal flaws during that time period between about 2015-2016, I made a lot of unfriendly relationships and abandoned that account to start fresh. Ended up doing it again a couple years later. Surprise, surprise, Goji has interpersonal issues thanks to Social Anxiety and General Anxiety Disorder being a bit of a double whammy working against me when it comes to interactions and conversation. Lol.

And now, here I am! Still alive (somehow), and kicking!

On RpNation, outside of the initial account's negative experiences which were all self-inflicted wounds on my part, by the way, my experience has been overwhelmingly positive. It has the usual issues which come with the roleplaying environment like frequent ghosting and RP's falling apart for various other reasons. But, when the RP's flow, it's a great place to be in my opinion. Hence why I'm still around. Lol.

I've tried other sites as well over the years. But none have ever really felt as alive or active as RpNation for whatever reason. Even with a relatively similar user count, and relatively the same number of active forums and threads, for some reason it just doesn't feel lively and I get bored and uninterested within a few minutes of scrolling through the latest threads. Not sure what it is. And I won't name the sites, cause I don't want my personal experience to turn anyone off from shopping around for potential new experiences. But all the same, RpNation is the best site I've come across for my personal roleplaying style and enjoyment.

Cheers!

 

[ukpezzzz]

Mentions of the real-life experiences made me realize I sort of missed out what made me make the change to an RP server to begin with.
My dad's a big table-top roleplaying nerd. So all the dice and books and in-person talking role play experience.
Every time I would go see my dad when I was young, he'd take me to these sessions at his local club. Did all sorts from D&D and other games centered around other things like star wars or mass effect.
As a preference, I prefer text-based rp over voice as I can't really get into character when speaking it. My own voice distracts me and the text format really gives me the time to focus completely on the character.

Cool stuff so far though!

 

[weavestories]

What a nostalgic topic!


I remember being a kid and voice roleplaying on the phone. The phone, btw, was a land line with an actual cord attached to the phone set in the wall. I don't think my friend and I would have necessarily called it Roleplay back then, though. I think we'd have just called it "playing pretend." Yep, I'm dating myself here. In my late teens there was the Vampire: The Masquerade phase and of course the fun of Star Trek RP chat rooms in my early 20s. I've been a fangirl of different fandoms for as long as I can remember and my best roleplay memories were from an era of text based using AOL chat and email format. I used to create digital "fanzines" with my partners and we'd often send character videos and art back and forth.

This is my first experience with an actual site dedicated to roleplay of all various formats and I find it both fascinating to see the evolution of an art form of personal expression and encouraging to know that a whole new generation is carrying on something that started in small rooms with dice and cards or with fanzines typed out on actual typewriters and mailed using actual snail mail. I'm excited to see if this old cat can learn something new and can't wait to meet some new fannish folks. After all, it's all about the story isn't it? We're here because we love creating or playing characters we can't get out of our heads and developing amazing world spaces for them to interact.

 

[cajunhusker]

My first roleplays were on neopets in the late 2000s. I was introduced to it because Neopets had (and still has) roleplay boards, which lead to me finding guilds and forums back then, and making some awesome friends. Most of my early days were Warrior Cats RPs, ngl, but there's some Vampire Knight ones that live rent free in my head as well as some of those "Gifted" ones which had a vaguely similar idea to My Hero Academia except that it was very much before that and it was also like "Gifted vs Normals".

I was on Tumblr for a while too where I was part of the groups that popped up there, especially around the Whedonverse (fuck whedonbut I loved the rps).

I'd also been on and off Omegle for years. I used it a lot to find partners and would go over emails from there pretty regularly, which I really liked. The crash of Omegle is what lead me here.

All of this mixed in with email/text with some of my oldest friends.

 

[A Sparkling Zombie]

AOhelL RP chat -> The Keep RP chat -> Gaia Online. I spent a decade or so there. When I was in college, I started frequenting an adult forum site, which eventually has become my primary stomping grounds, because I've come to appreciate the RP culture and values there. I joined RPN within the past five years, I think, as a secondary place, but it's rare for a group to check all the right boxes for me. Mainly I just haunt this board, much to everyone's chagrin.

 

[Pokeking]

I love this variety of topics. Fair warning. I show my age here.

My first exposure to collaborative writing was in 1996 when I was in high school. In the spring if that year, my school launched what was called the Creative Writing Club which was led by our librarian. In the fall, we did something like Google docs in which the members could log into the same file. Our faculty leader set up a story in which the members would each post part of the story. It was supposed to be a mystery, but soon deviated from that tone. Today me would have had the writing experience to handle the story differently. However, I only wrote sci-fi/fantasy. I was the first one to log in after our librarian wrote the first part.

The story became a multiversal quest undertaken by the members and their variants to stop Duran Duran (a single person) and Carmen Sandiego.

My first true foray into message board roleplay was in 2002, when I was in college, on a platform called Medaverse. The first story was called Red Ground Tavern and Inn. Again, today me would have done things differently. I had a character, now named Jojin, who was a Gary Stu. On a side note, I am trying to revise him so he's suitable for RP play. For now, he remains a cameo NPC. Given my current OC roster, I would have used a different character.

That closed up because people weren't posting and the GM had left months before participation began to slow. I was trying to search the internet for message boards of similar interests and happened upon Yahoo groups. This led my to a series of roleplay websites. Some of the same faces kept showing up, but something would happen which resulted in a new board being created with the surviving users joining and maybe some new people entering. Participation on the most recent one halted and I spent months trying to find another RP board when I wandered into RPN and here I've been since. I just wish I had found RPN years before.

 

[GhostCall]

It all started on chickensmoothie when i accidentally figured out what forums were, LOL. I was like wait what is thi- I LOVE THISSS