How did you get started with roleplaying?

2005! Just got my mom's hand-me-down computer and searched for Zelda wallpapers for my desktop. Back then it was more of searching for "themes" that would give you a startup sound, icons, wallpaper, signoff sounds, etc.
Came across a roleplay forum and kept reading, and reading, and reading. Figured out what it was and gave a crack at it.

 

Weelll let's see, about ten years ago, this year. Soo.. 2005 I was twelve years old and my father told me he'd found this site I might be interested in. It was a Harry Potter site that forced you to start out as a first year (As I was 12 at the time it seemed appropriate to start off around my actual age). Though the site only allowed registrations a few times a year, so I took the sorting quiz and sorta forgot about the site.

A few months later my dad told me they were open so I joined and was completely pulled in. Never looked back since! Now I've been everywhere, from HP to Post-Apoc, to Gaming roleplay!

 

I started back in 2003 when I stumbled upon a tiny little HP fan group and was promptly made co admin! It wasn't RP at first, but it was a lot of fun (and is still running today but much,much bigger and now RP). My very first RP, though, was a TMNT fanfic site. I joined up and they had a chat where you could 'meet' the characters, interact with them. It grew from having fun in there, pretending to be someone different to actually making a full character and doing play by posts on forum and I haven't looked back since!

 

This is my favourite question to answer about roleplay.

I was one of those kids in chatrooms who pretended to be a fictional character. I was on a major Danish community for youngsters and one of my friends on there started sending me private messages with us pretending to be our characters. I can't remember how these characters spawned, but they were pretty detailed and we even made background stories about them. My friend then proposed that we moved the characters into a forum and so we did and that's where it all began. Later the same friend linked me to a roleplaying forum with a setting and everything and I made a copy of my first character on there. I think that was my first real roleplay experience.

 

My roleplaying for me began in 2008. I was someone who loved writing back in the day and wrote a lot of fanfiction and original chapters, short stories in my spare time in school and when I wasn't immersed into a MMORPG. It was one day when my friend mentioned he was posting a reply on a RP that I actually decided to look at the site myself. I was interested in seeing a community write and construct stories among each other. I was interested but didn't start until about a month after when I really started getting into it because a lot of the inspiration i got for writing created an idea to see and let the community write this along with me.

The thrill of writing a collaboration where even the user doesn't know what to expect and can be surprised by the decisions made by others in a certain situation. Suddenly building connections and friends and seeing the creativity that people bring to the "table". To this day I have been RPing with little downtime for when some RPs die out.

 

I discovered it by accident browsing chatrooms in my teen years on AOL. I started with Rhydin (x.x) and my first characters make me so ashamed today. They were horribly bland and very one dimensional. I've been playing for about 15 years now and it's something I really love :3

 

I started roleplaying through a Harry Potter forum. I'm actually not sure how it all happened.. I remember I went on this chat program called The Palace and people would pretend to be Hogwarts student & whatnot. Perhaps that's where it started.

 

I got started almost a year ago in a chatbox on FWG (FreeWorldGroup) of all places. I was playing flash games on the site and noticed that they had a role-play chatbox. I just watched other people role-play until I could get a grasp of the rules and then went ahead and joined in with my own character.

 

MSN Chats- "speed RP fight" were the thing man.

 

That whole MSN chat speed RP fight thing just fascinates me. >.>

 

I got started officially by a friend in highschool and now *coughtencough* years later I still enjoy it. Enjoy it better than writing stories in the way I was before because I never wanted to finish them as it meant to me the story was over. What fun is that?

 

I got started on MSN Chat website (which was pre-MSN, it was a website where you could create your own chat rooms (the title and rules). It was shut down in about 2003 I think, and then I moved onto Yahoo! Messenger and the roleplay chat rooms there. Only got into forum RP in 2008 by Star Wars, then branched out into other genres. Safe to say I only do forum RP now. :P

 

I started on Avidgamers, too! I remember seeing CBW kicking around back then, and I think I might have even made an account on there, but for some reason I never quite got started with it.

I began on a wolf RP, which I believe I found while searching for images of wolves for a school project of some kind. I then very quickly moved on to standard medieval fantasy, played a lot with DRoP, and by the time AcornRack came around I was playing anything and everything from dinosaurs to Star Wars. I think a lot of sites must have died very quickly for me to go through so many.

With AcornRack/SpleefNet's sudden departure, I stopped RP for quite a few years. I'd get the itch to try it again once in a while, but nothing really stuck. Then, finally, I lucked into a panfandom site that was really, really good. I proceeded to play there for about a year (playing Deadpool, an obscure Sith Lord, and an even more obscure character from Japanese mythology) before I realised panfandom wasn't a genre I could take - apparently, I tend to get too annoyed at some people's "interpretations" of characters. So I left, but I had the itch again, so I almost immediately went looking for the next.

That's when I stumbled upon MaM. I had never done an RP with dice rolls and other tabletop elements (other than an actual game of DnD), but I threw myself into it and I'm glad I did. It's now the longest I've ever been on a site and I'm still totally in love with it.

 

Yahoo chatroom.. way back when.

 

I've been writing since the 4th grade, but didn't delve much into RPing. Back when I played Ultima Online, my guild had a little event in-game, and some of us would take what we did in the game and turn it into story-form, post it on a guild website. That'd probably be my first dose of writing RP, though it didn't last long.

When I really got started, I was already in my 20s, and was a moderator on a forum. Another mod invited me to join in a small RP thread he wanted to start up, since I was in charge of the stories board. Figured why not, gave it a try, and... it died within a few days. Then someone started another one, Bleach-themed, and we joined it, but it died, too. Fast-forward about six months, and another Bleach-themed one started. Tried it, it lasted just a little longer (maybe two weeks) and then died. This was not a great site for RP, haha.

Someone who joined in on that last one, though, talked to me and the other moderator and said if we were interested in a Bleach RP, we should try this one called Halcyon Days. At the time it was on Bleachforums.com, but when that site died, the RP transferred over to a new site and just kept going. For seven years running, I've been part of that writing community, seeing some amazing authors come and go.

I missed out on a lot of the chatroom RP, but I'm pretty happy with the chapter-style RP I've ended up doing.

 

A friend of mine introduced me to Dragonriders of Pern writing clubs. From them I got into Star Trek, original fantasy, and Harry Potter RPG's. I have been in some truly brilliant RPG clubs, and I always like to find new ones. I currently run a space station-based Star Trek RPG through Obsidian Fleet.

 

Personally, I started off with warrior cats on a virtual pets site when I was about nine (cringey as hell, I know). Eventually it stemmed out into roleplaying humans and humanoids. When I began to improve at writing, and when I started to want something more in the line of fantasy, I moved into forum roleplay.

 

Warriors cats! That's wonderfully cringey.

 

My brother said, "hey wanna try something"

lol, here I still am.

 

Geez. It was over 15 years ago now. I cannot recall how I found RP boards or that it was even a "thing". But I do know I started on equine boards...you know, the ones with herds and pony battles and the sort? Yea...