Viewpoint What age did you start roleplaying and why? (Elaborate)

[natsukashii]

In general? Since the elementary schoolyard days when I was 8-11 years old. I think imaginary play should be considered as "roleplaying". A few buds and I had just our love for our childhood favorites, our fondness for fantasy adventures, and our imagination to create some wild, sometimes chaotic af stories. We'd include anything you could imagine a late 90s/early 2000s kid was into at the time: Dragon Ball Z, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts (even though it in itself was what we were doing), Rayman (one of my buds was into that a lot), Sailor Moon, and a bunch of other fandoms kind of woven into it in an oddly beautiful way.

But of course, as we grew older, that time came to an end.

It wouldn't be until around 2008 when I was 17 years old did I venture into forum roleplaying. I got my start on a lovely Kingdom Hearts fansite, KHinsider that is still up and running (though a shell of its former self). Back then, it ran on VBulletin and I kind of got swallowed up in the hype of the RPG Inferno. It was insane because it often would lead to actual roleplays on the actual site. I miss those days because we weren't the greatest writers, but we told stories and had so much fun.

I wish I had half the ability I have now to write and my energy back then. Some days I sometimes feel myself losing the drive for this hobby but I've been at it for so long, part of me kind of doesn't want to stop because it's been part of my life for over 14 years now.

 

[Sciel]

Oh, this is hard to say. I’ve always been an imaginative sort of kid, but incredibly shy. I had a hard time socializing when I was younger so I’d pre-occupy myself with individual activities as opposed to group ones. I think it was fifth grade that I really took a shining to writing, but role-play itself didn’t come until two/three years after as I discovered forums before high school. So I’d say, I started probably at 12-13.

 

[Idea]

I started roleplaying around 2013 if memory serves me right, possibly 2012 (which would have made me 14 or 13 respectively). This is a story that I've told many times, but my first roleplay site was a fandom roleplay site, more specifically a digimon roleplay site. Digimon was a big staple of my childhood and when at one point I learned of a season I had never watched (digimon savers / data squad), I ended up binging it over a few days. After that I was full of ideas and I wanted to share some of them in writing, so I searched for a way to do that, and that's how I came across roleplaying, and more specifically that site. I fell in love with the rules and mechanics of the site, and immediately went to make a character of my own for it and start roleplaying. After a time, due to a certain awkwardness of some events, I ended up leaving and staying for some time on other sites not all specifically dedicating to roleplaying, but still in which you could roleplay. However, the quality drop was... quite noticeable to say the least, and I ended up continuing my search, until I eventually found my way to RPN.

For me, even today, a huge part of roleplaying is sharing my ideas and creativity, because I'm constantly getting ideas (not always very good ones of course). Aside from simply not knowing what roleplay was, the key thing to eventually getting me into the hobby (why I started at the age and time I did) was because this was the time in which two things were happening:
---> My time in the computer was starting to move out of strictly playing games. Me and my younger siblings used to share a computer (our parent's, but most of the time they didn't need it so...) and more often than not I was the one who took charge of organizing our schedules and making sure everyone was keeping to them. We often quarreled about it too. However, I was starting to grow detached from pouring that amount of time and effort into one or two games, especially as my time in school was starting to require more actual work from me. I wanted to try doing other stuff. I realize I'm being vague, and honestly on this statement I might contradict myself down the line, just cause this isn't my best remembered period of my life, though a few notable things have stayed with me.

--->I was having more independent time, with more chances to stay up late doing my own stuff in the computer. Unlike my phone, there were seemingly no limitations aside from time itself and my need to sleep regarding how long I could spend watching stuff, going through the internet etc...


These two things, plus coming across some videos making joking reviews about old shows I loved, I think created the right storm of events that would lead me to try to watch that digimon series, and to eventually follow that with "I want to write about it", which led to the rest of the sequence I described.

 

[monxmiracle]

I started rather late ( or early) compared to some people, around 2017 or 2018. So I was 17 or 18 at the time and I intially heard about roleplaying through the Harry Potter fandom. At the time I have no idea what RP meant or what it was. Rather all I knew is that I wanted to write and make characters. So the idea of being able to write stories and connect with other people in this way fate very compelling. It also lead to me making some very good friends who are practically family at this point so I guess in the end it paid off. That said having roleplayed for the latter part of 5 years I don't think I have an interest in stopping any time soon especially since it has helped me cultivate my writing talent.

 

[RedArmyShogun]

I was in my upper teens back in 2001, broke my left wrist in 7 places on a skateboard, took an interest in an anime forum and seen these people using a subforum to RP in. I was like this looks fun and made up an OC that was a power armored super soldier. My posts were huge run on sentences, my grammar was very poor, and I tried to use tech to make up the slack against anime swordsmen styled PC's. Gun never beats sword in anime Rp :/

Either way I improved became staff, carried on rping and have cursed the hell I willingly subject myself too with failing expectations I have of others.

I mean I enjoy the stories and characters I make along the way.

 

[s e v e n]

twelve. i was in a random group chat and people kept talking with asterisks and i went "why do you talk like that?". oh, if only he knew...

 

[GreenBeret]

I started at, I think, age 14, doing Mafia RPing. I quickly began doing other forms of RP, especially military/political RPing. my main focus is now police RPing. I like writing, and RPing lets me do that in a great variety of forms (military RP often means quite long articles, while police RPing is usually shorter, more action-oriented stuff).

 

[cream.snekkle]

For me it's been many moons ago, but I started around the age of fifteen. I flocked to others who were into long-term stories trying to hone in my craft as an apiriing writer. I relished in the idea I could be anything I wanted to be. Writing gives you such a freedom in fiction and allows you to go in so many different directions. Many times it was a pass time, other times it was a get away from reality when times got tough. I've met plenty good writers over the years and am glad to have such a site to find others who think the same.That euphoric feeling when the connection between the players is so immense that a story is birthed and finalized is one of the best feelings ever. It's rare to get a writer buddy like that, but every blue moon there's a diamond in the rough. Interested in hearing what others have to say, but just thought I'd ask and share.

To be honest, I actually don’t remember when exactly it started. From a teeny tiny age (maybe around when I was only a few years old?) I constantly had my nose shoved in a book. I gradually changed from children’s books like Magic Tree House and The Magic School Bus to picking up higher-grade books in fourth and fifth grade like Harry Potter, Warrior Cats, Wings of Fire, and the Percy Jackson series (at least a little bit of those last two). Around the same time my vivid imagination was going insane. I would “roleplay” with myself pretending I was the savior of the cool characters I would read about, so I would go and rescue Hermione from the jaws of death on my bed and whatnot.

And then I found Warrior Cats RPGs on ROBLOX, where my passion for roleplaying kicked off like a fiery ball of fire. I would go on the computer every day and find new people to go and roleplay with as cats. Scorpiontail, Ripple, Toxicbow, Whirlstorm… It was all improvisation on the spot. Forbidden Love Rps (FBLs) were (and are still) incredibly popular, and you could even make your own Clan and go wild with ideas. Like an ElementalClan, where each cat had a specific “element” found in nature.
The maps went from Mandaka’s forest and lake territory to Zyphorx’s lake territory and Vizavi’s forest territory, and now there’s Warrior Cats: Ultimate Edition, which I’m STILL hooked on to this day.
Cats, amirite ?

Anyway, after I met a couple of people in this funny little roblox group, I transferred to Skype. I roleplayed on there for months, maybe even years, and then over time as Skype became worse, I transferred—accompanied by a close friend from that group, now disbanded—to Discord. I started using Google Docs to write down my stories, branching out from the old Warrior Cats RPs and “elemental school” styled stuff to a variety of different fandoms that my friend introduced me to.
And then she introduced me to RPNation, where I now ramble about.

tl;dr: spent my whole life reading and going insane with my imagination, went from “roleplaying” on my bed to ROBLOX to discord and then to here over the course of 8 years.

 

[BackSet]

Once upon a time there was an 11(?) year old named [Name Redacted]. That 11 year old loved (and still loved) TTRPGs such as Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons. So, he decided to find a Minecraft server based around TTRPGs. He did not find one but he did find a really crappy roleplaying server. He enjoyed his time there, made mistakes, and eventually left for good when he realized that nothing substantial ever happened there.

A little while later this 11 year old was now 13 and he joined a Zelda forum. The forum had an RP section. He made a crappy RP blah blah blah he made mistakes and it ended.

Anyways, I went through a bunch of roleplaying sites before landing here the end. I'm 18 now as of writing this. Also, I'm still on the Zelda forum I just don't to there anymore.

 

[arato.]

I started at eleven years old in a Chatango chatbox. I asked older boys to teach me how to write, which they did, because I was borderline illiterate at the time. Seriously. That's not a joke. The education where I'm from isn't the best, so I was pretty terrible at reading and writing back then. I got much better, though, and it was purely to spite everyone around me. They all told me I was "too stupid" and I was always stuck with the books that had red stickers because they were "more my level". The final straw was when an older boy told me that I was too much of a child to learn to Roleplay. In hindsight, he was kind of right, because I only actually got better at it when I was around fourteen or fifteen, but still.

The answer is always spite.