Experiences Where Did It All Begin?

[Coreonysis]

We all have a reason we began to roleplay.
Some are much more sad than others.

I began after a good friend first got me into writing in general, and then into collaborative writing. He then introduced me into the vast, wide world of roleplaying. He's gone now, and I still try to write better than him.

Where did you begin, my friends?

 

[SandraDeelightful]

I started because it sounded like fun and because I got to meet people who were into the same things as me. It involved writing and I got to meet others who enjoyed it, too and meeting people who liked my ideas about plots and settings.

 

[MiracleGrazer]

I started with D&D 3.5, though my introduction into freeform roleplaying came through this chatroom I joined that was a small community of players from a discreet MMO called Imperium Nova. Someone from that game invited me to an unrelated RP.

 

[Sacrosanctus]

Strangely, my earliest roleplays were on a game that had nothing to do with it at all; it was a fan-based multiplayer computer game of a popular anime, Attack On Titan. I don't remember how I found them, but there were servers often hosted there specifically made for roleplaying. I joined that community without even knowing exactly what roleplaying was, but I jumped in and had a lot of fun. It was great.

 

[Bang Bang]

Gaia introduced me to this thing called roleplay (back in the day, when there was a whole section for it, and I actually understood how the site worked) and from then on out I've been snorting it neat off of the internet. Made my friends at school do it by email. Hounded TopRPSites.com for hours. Done goodness knows what with goodness knows whom. Sold my soul. Prioritised writing over my education. Probably joined a cult or two along the way.

All rather tragic, really.

 

[Idea]

Well, it's a long story for me, but I'll try to make relatively short.

So it started when I was a kid. Like a lil kid, bout four, and began watching digimon on tv. It was a kid's show, but I loved it growing up and even today it still holds a special place, as having learned more I can appreciate the true depth of it. But moving on, up until I was like 8 or 9 I watche the seasons that would air on TV, but then they stopped coming and I moved on. This is until a particular person with whom I had recently become friends with had this big obsession with anime. I couldn't bear myself to reveal it to anyone at the time, but I did feel like watching digimon again. So I went and looked it up, and found there was a new season of it I never watched! So I binged it over a week and I was so thrilled by the nostalgia I just needed to create my own digimon and stuff, and I wanted to write and to share it with people! So as I researched I found this "digimon forum roleplaying" site, whose rules and system I fell in love with. There I began my roleplaying career.

However, certain events led things to become a little awkward there, and with the forming of so many lciques on top of tht, I sut felt like I wasn't losing that place as somewhere I could belong in, so I moved on to other sites. That friend of mine taught me to create a fake email, so I began having more freedoom going into different sites (my parents had set it up so they would receive every email I did with my real email), and I began roleplaying on devianArt. However, by comparison, roleplaying there was absolute crap. So I searched for a new forum roleplaying site. And so, I found RPN.

 

[farewell]

Stumbled into it on Gaia, somehow. Didn't realize what it was until after the fact, and by that time, I was hooked.

 

[CrowOuttaHell]

When I was young, I got into collaborative writing with some of my friends. When their characters kind of got too bland or too cringey for me, I thought, "everything has an online equivalent" and hallelujah, I stumbled into the wide world of roleplaying. I've been practically everywhere (Chatzy, Gateway, hell even Wolfhome) until I got comfortable.

 

[Corrosion]

I started roleplaying because I was incredibly bored one day several years back. I've been writing stories ever since I first picked up a pencil. I was a member of around six different RP sites, four of which were shit, one was halfway decent but not really for narrative writing since it was a political simulation game known as NationStates, and the last one was pretty good but slow, until I discovered this place. I was pretty new to roleplaying, so I made terrible and cringy AF characters and did all the wrong things. But the more time I spent on this site, the more my writing improved, and the more I began to love this hobby. I really started to get into the hobby in 2015-2016, and that was a fun time, when I had the best roleplaying experiences in my opinion.

Roleplaying also allowed me to expand the universe of my creation. When my worldbuilding project was in its infancy, it was a simple idea: humans have first contact with aliens, war happens and everyone dies. That universe has become increasingly more complex throughout my time on this site, and really, I'm pretty damn thankful for that.

TL; DR: I got bored one day, decided to write stories with a bunch of random people online, loved it.

 

[Imaginiaria]

I started roleplaying in an MMO called Elsword. I found it after browsing through the practice rooms in PvP where a lot are held and decided to give it a shot. I haven't really written as much as I do now, so they didn't go well at first and I either had poorly made characters that were 'inspired' by video games and TV or I just played as whatever character from the game I was using.

I kept going with it and it got to the point where that was the only thing I'd open up the game for. Eventfully I got better which made me want to do more actual writing for roleplay or even my own stories. I made a couple friends from it too, one of which randomly decided to make his character the guardian and/or servant of my character whenever we're in the same room (Don't ask why, I have no idea and just rolled with it).

Eventually I had to stop using the game because of WI-FI problems and now I'm here a year later after the last site I used went down and made another friend who I now roleplay with on gmail.

 

[BackSet]

I started with a crappy Minecraft server with people who barely knew how to roleplay. I thought it was a DnD thing but eventually began Roleplaying normally. I was horrible. Now I'm better at it because I worked to better my Roleplaying skills.

 

[I3ookI7ragon]

Legend of the Green Dragon servers were my starting point, nearly 15 years ago. I still frequent one, despite it dying a slow and painful death. But a good chat with some people from there got me looking for more serious Roleplays.. and well, here i am.

 

[JojoLee]

I started when I was eleven on an old pc game called Bang Howdy. I was taken under this characters wing and he taught me the basics. From there I continued to role play to meet new people. I also strive to become better and better.

 

[Roman]

A website with a shitty forum. I would always look at the forums section with interest, and eventually started going there more often. At some point, I had taken an interest in writing. I've always wondered what roleplaying was like, mostly because at first I thought it was weird, but then I tried it out for the first time, and enjoyed it. I ended up wanting more, as that forum began to wither away like an old book. I then ended up here. My journey was a short one in terms of typing, but it was something I'll always remember because I found my new hobby.

 

[Fondezer]

I started on Google+.
One of my friends invited me to a roleplay community so I decided to check it out.
Turns put I enjoyed it, and have been role-playing ever since.
Well, trying.

 

[Jules8008]

I started on a rather small page, with Warrior Cats RPG's (everyone starts dark). My characters were about as interesting as an empty piece of paper. Or toner. Or fir needles. I was proud of them, and now I am just thinking "Jesus Christ why did no one tell me to S T O P?!". Zero research, just end my life. The page went down, I switched to a replacement site where I am currently writing a zombie RPG..
Then it went to a page called My Candy love, where I am occasionally still roleplaying. Then I went here; haven't started roleplaying here yet.

 

[Winter_Wolf]

I started because I saw that it was a thing on the Armchair General Forums, a forum dedicated to military history and related to the Armchair General magazine. In that magazine they would have a couple sections where they'd "put YOU in command" of a squad or platoon in WW2 for instance and you have to choose between courses of action or submit your battle plan via mail. I liked them so when I saw the same kind of things on the forums, I tried it out.

We called them "Wargames" usually, and could range from more accurate historical ones or alternate history. Probably the best one I was involved in was an alternate history scenario where the USA joins the Central Powers in World War I, rather than the Allies/Entente, and we could play as a Naval officer of any of the nations. I commanded a US Navy fleet which did some raiding against the British and French colonies and vessels. It was pretty cool, and the ACG site is probably why I'm most interested in military-related RPs (as well as history in general though).

 

[Simdroid]

It all began in a land far, far away. With a wonderful woman, my fourth grade teacher, who decided to encourage me to write. Of course, my skills weren't quite there up to par. My grammar and spelling were rough. But she said, I had creative ideas so I kept going. As for the actual medium of role-play, I started with an apocalypse site perhaps in 2012 or 2013. I don't really remember how I came across it, but I was really drawn to the lore. It was about the societal collapse in 2012 and the Mayan predictions. Being really young, I had to learn of the rp slang and mechanics (i.e. what "canons" and "plot pages" were.). It's a shame that it's offline now, but I really did appreciate the help of the people who got me started there. They were kindred souls. ^ _ ^

 

[Volxohr]

Hmmmm.

I guess you could say I was around 14 years of age when it first started. How I got to be introduced to doing it was by visiting a chat site online when I was younger, asking for people to roleplay. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. But during those times, I wrote FanFics and typed stories that just came to the top of my head. But I know see as time went by, my skills of writing have improved and has made myself a better role-player than before. Haha. I am happy all those years have paid off. (:

 

[rae2nerdy]

On chickensmoothie.

Which for those who don't know is a site that was originally just collecting cool art of animals and stuff.

So on one of the forums they had where you could make your own "adoptable" pets and give them to people on the site.

I had this really elaborate shop with a solid backstory called idk Tortuga Island or something.

It was where you could adopt wee little animals that lived on this make believe island and me and my staff would put them in handmade paint backgrounds and each week they would move around their little tank thing doing random stuff.

You could by food, accessories, the whole nine yards.

So I decided that I wanted to add to the fun for the customer and make little tour of the island ( cuz even waay back when i was world building trash ) and one of my staff told me - oh you want to make a roleplay?

And long ago geek was like.... what?

So she explained that roleplaying was where you got a group of people together to play make believe and was basically exactly what I wanted to do with the tours. Cuz we would all be pretending to go to this island I made up and look at the animals I had made up and it was all just make believe funs.

Sooo that's pretty much it. I wandered into the tiny roleplay community of chickensmoothie and the rest is history.

 

[ceolsige]

A site called Nothing But Neopets, when I was 10. I don't remember how I got there, aside from sort of playing Neopets, but I saw people roleplaying and knew straight away that was my jam. I quickly had to look elsewhere, however, since I was not interested in playing as a Neopet. The rest is ancient history.

 

[DatBoi]

I used an App called Pet Next Door back when I was, like, 11 (does anyone remember that? Please, it was my entire childhood but no one else used it oml). As someone who has been an avid reader since pre-school, it didn’t take me long to realise I loved it.

 

[Deumeawyn]

This gives my age away... I was 13 and I joined a Lord of the Rings forum because the Fellowship of the Ring movie came out and I had just read the books and was a total fangirl. On that forum they had a 'Roleplaying' section, and I created a crude character and walked into an inn.. The rest is history. Been forum and IM roleplaying off and on since then.