How did you get into role-playing?

When you stumbled upon this hobby, how did you get into it? Were you D&Ding, AIMing, or LARPing back in the day? Or have you always been a writer at heart? Tell us the story of how you came to be a role-player.

My ex used to play D&D on a chat program made specifically for that and I was interested in playing with her. Tried it and it was too numbers based and the chat itself moved too fast to write anything longer than 140 characters. One of my ex's rp partners directed me to Literotica and the play by post section. I jumped in with both feet, made a horrible thread, writing as if I were a D&D GM at first, narrating and directing the action of the players that came and went in my thread. Eventually, I began to copy their style of third person limited writing.

that was quite a while ago, for me~ when i look back on what got me into writing, it's almost enough to make me crack up, because i honestly can't really believe it.

i was 11 at the time, and heavily into anime. i grew up with sailormoon, and cardcaptor sakura, but when i discovered inuyasha at that age - it blew my mind. especially because my step dad at the time refused to let me watch it (for unknown reasons - it's not like it was highly mature in content, and i never took anything i watched off shows or movies and applied them into real life, so there wasn't any actual harm in it). i'd sneak in some episodes whenever i was able, but that was far and few in between.

at school, i was looking up some inuyahsa pictures on google, and i found a forum website dedicated to the show. it had general discussions on characters for fans, fan art areas, and, storytelling. which was their role play section. i didn't notice it for quite a while - mainly only revisiting the site to listen to their inuyasha playlist. but when i found it, i got hooked. instantly. one-liner responses, shoddy re-makes of actual characters.. oh. those were the days.

i can't remember where i went from there.. but i know my inuyasha writing shifted into other topics, themes, and maturity ratings rather quickly.

I started with good old Pen and Paper. Later I found the Internet and HTML rooms for rp. I absolutely loved Text based online rp. Been doing that for years. I hate rping in German language though, and found it increasingly hard to stay awake Long enough to meet with Americans to live-chat. I've been larping the past ten years as well. Fantasy as well as vampire.
And then I found Forum rping. And now... here I am.

sixlikesgore. said:

that was quite a while ago, for me~ when i look back on what got me into writing, it's almost enough to make me crack up, because i honestly can't really believe it.

i was 11 at the time, and heavily into anime. i grew up with sailormoon, and cardcaptor sakura, but when i discovered inuyasha at that age - it blew my mind. especially because my step dad at the time refused to let me watch it (for unknown reasons - it's not like it was highly mature in content, and i never took anything i watched off shows or movies and applied them into real life, so there wasn't any actual harm in it). i'd sneak in some episodes whenever i was able, but that was far and few in between.

at school, i was looking up some inuyahsa pictures on google, and i found a forum website dedicated to the show. it had general discussions on characters for fans, fan art areas, and, storytelling. which was their role play section. i didn't notice it for quite a while - mainly only revisiting the site to listen to their inuyasha playlist. but when i found it, i got hooked. instantly. one-liner responses, shoddy re-makes of actual characters.. oh. those were the days.

i can't remember where i went from there.. but i know my inuyasha writing shifted into other topics, themes, and maturity ratings rather quickly.

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That is a pretty interesting start. The first anime I ever saw was Sailor Moon. My stepdad was in the Navy and we lived overseas in Italy for a number of years in my youth. I would occasionally catch Sailor Moon on the late night tv and watch it in Italian. I was hooked! Inuyasha is stellar stuff. Really love Rumiko Takahashi's other works as well. I think Inuyasha was my first encounter with manga. There was a comic shop near our house that just had boxes and boxes of stacks of anime comic books - like, not how you get manga from B & N in the novel sized books but actual thin, 30 page leaflet comics.

Dryad said:

I started with good old Pen and Paper. Later I found the Internet and HTML rooms for rp. I absolutely loved Text based online rp. Been doing that for years. I hate rping in German language though, and found it increasingly hard to stay awake Long enough to meet with Americans to live-chat. I've been larping the past ten years as well. Fantasy as well as vampire.
And then I found Forum rping. And now... here I am.

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You're German, Dryad? I have to admit, I love Germany and it'd be the one country I'd cross the ocean for to visit, if given a choice. Larping? Do you have a group that you play with? There was a chapter here locally that I always got a kick out of seeing when they'd come into the grocery store where I used to work, all done up in their elf ears and costumes.

Gaiaonline. I found myself getting into trouble because I wanted to play adult themes. Since Gaia introduced me to cybering, it became the best way to rp. I joined Gaia on a whim and I wanted a ninja headband they were offering for avatars. From there I learned about Hentai Sanctuary I think... Eventually Blue Moon, Lunar Radiance, and a couple more places.

A lot of people seem to have started on gaiaonline. It is interesting to see the varied paths people take to find themselves here.

A friend got me into it and it helped me escape the rough patches in life by going into my own fantasy world back then it was all non sexual of course though lol

Sleepingskill said:

A friend got me into it and it helped me escape the rough patches in life by going into my own fantasy world back then it was all non sexual of course though lol

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Thats good that you had a friend and an escape to go to during that rough time. I've used rp in similar ways, playing violent or aggressive characters to unleash some anger in safe ways. Also nothing wrong with nonsexual although it is hard to find on sites like this one. A lot of my stories over the years have been an even balance of sexual and non.

I started it out role playing at an old viking village (reenactment) when I was a kid went on to do Larps

I am so jealous of people who got to do LARPs in that semi-professional group way. The closest I ever got was dressing up in capes and scarves with plastic swords, while wandering around Naval housing with my best friend. We'd pretend the huge jungle gyms were castles.

Foteviken is a living history museum. We have a few of them in Sweden. My parents were into it so that is why I got started so young there. A lot of students go and volunteer there during school holidays. Its fun and preserves our history. Larps are huge in Sweden - I use to do make up in an orc group. I am just too busy at this stage now with my studies.

That's a really cool way to preserve history. Around here, since I live in PA, we have the Civil War reenactments and particularly the Gettysburg group. On a whole, I like LARPs but Civil War is my least favorite part of American History.

Gaiaonline. I used to write stories with people but it was never really roleplaying. I learned the hard way that roleplaying means you can't control someones character lol.

But yeah, I loved it. Sometimes I wonder if I never discovered it, would I actually be better off as a writer? I feel like I don't write anymore because I don't have anyone encouraging me to. Before, I didn't need encouragement, I just needed an escape. Roleplaying has sort of replaced that now that I use it as an escape.

I had to learn that too, PP! My first ever role-play was written as a GM with a character I played but was less focused on character and more about moving things around and stuff. Thankfully, my partner at the time tolerated my stage direction until I began to copy them in posting style.

I wonder that same thing but think, probably not. I've always been afraid of success or exploring my own potential and I think that over the years, through role-playing, I've actually gotten really cocky and confident about my writing capabilities. Enough to propel me forward in my solo ventures now; like, anything else can be wrong, like outlining, motivation to write, etc. but one thing I know from the constant validation of partners over the years and the necessity to beat some requests off with a stick, there is nothing wrong with my ability to paint pictures with words. THAT part, I know I can do. So, finding that amount of confidence to go it alone, somehow, some way without role-playing? I don't know how it would have happened. Because it wasn't there 10 years ago and it took that long to convince me to try it by myself.

I stumbled into rp rather oddly. It started off in middle school when I was exchanging letters with my then girlfriend that lived one state over. We were both friends of the Dragonriders of Pern series and we idly discussed the possibility of doing what would have been fan fiction by mail. The idea came about as I researched the setting online and found MUDs, never joined any but the idea was intriguing.

Then she got internet and we did random fantasy rping over MSN messenger. There was no real story telling, just us acting out make believe with ourselves as the characters.

From there I joined A Sailormoon Romance and took part in their AIM chatroom with it's rping which was unstructured as well as joining in on forum rp with actual settings and stories in mind. Around the same time I learned 3rd edition D&D.

Since then I've just wandered a few forums and gaming groups.

Embarrassingly enough, I started off on the infamous world of GaiaOnline.

At the time, it was a PG13 anime-based forum site, where you got a cute avatar and it had many threads. One of the common things to do on there was to roleplay.
I actually joined illegally when I was 10 and started roleplaying at 11.
I started "adult" roleplaying around 12 on the same site.

Pretty sure I illegally joined BlueMoon at 16, actually. Not using this account, but another. (Don't kill me ~ To be fair, where I'm from, age of consent is 14, not 18 in Quebec, Canada. So, yeah... Lame excuse, but I was young and stupid? And apparently horny.)

Edit: Please note I am 23!

I stumbled across roleplaying sometimes around 1996-1997 when I was around fourteen or fifteen years old. I'm not even sure how I ended up there to be perfectly honest, but I found myself on a site called Chathouse that had multiple chat rooms broken down into sections with one of those sections being The East Wing. I was drawn to that section because of the over-abundance of vampires and my love of horror, but soon found out that I wasn't quite sure what I was looking at, what I was watching. I have always loved reading and writing ever since I was old enough to do both, but this was something entirely different. I watched people delve into this cooperative storytelling of fantasy creatures, vampires, World of Darkness, and so many other styles as a way of escaping the real world and creating something. At first, I wasn't sure if it was something I wanted to try out. I went back and forth with it before creating a character that maybe lasted a whole month before deciding I was okay with this world. It was right around the month point where I officially created a character to play and never looked back. I didn't stay too long at Chathouse because I wasn't a system player and, at the time, there wasn't too much love for freestyling in the rooms I was drawn to. So, I migrated to another site and stayed there for a long time before branching out into forums and such.

The rest is history, as they say!

I use to frequent The Sims forum boards a few years back. My roommate was into rping. So when I saw a thread about a rp, I thought, ‘why not?’ So I signed up and ran with it. I fell in love. The addiction has grown from one rp to fifteen. Now my roommate doesn’t rp anymore, and he gives me a hard time because I do rp so much. What can I say? Since I started rping, I’ve also been a member of five rping sites, and I’m currently working on joining another. While I have been on other sites, today I only remain active here on BMR. Well, for not that is the case. I have also carried my rps into YIM and email. While YIM is no longer an avenue I will rp in, I am still open to rping in email. In fact, I have one rp in email right now.

I used to roleplay a bit on IM's, but my partners on there slowly dwindled, so I impulsively signed up on BMR after finding it on google, around three and a half years ago, then didn't return for another twelve months! When I did, it was initially in search for more IM partners, but I was convinced to write on here, via PM, and it's just grown from there. Could never return to IM's, or first person writing, now.

I guess I started as a kid, doing that "natural" RP children do together... Then I discovered chats and later forums.

I started out on forums. At the time I was looking for an MMORPG but was only about 13 or so. I didn't really know about text-based RPing until someone showed me how and it took off from there. I didn't start doing any kind of adult roleplay until I was about 15. I found a couple of roleplay sites like the Harry Potter forums which led to a person's forum, then I jumped to another forum, and so on until I was introduced to Chatzy. It's died down considerably since, or at least that has been my experience. Since that I roleplayed with a select few then quit for a few years before coming to this one in February in search of furry roleplays. Now here I am.

Hello everyone! I like this topic. I generally don't get involved in any group discussions and feel a bit shy and sheepish about my writing, which is odd because I'm quite the extroverted nerd in person...

That's a really cool way to preserve history. Around here, since I live in PA, we have the Civil War reenactments and particularly the Gettysburg group. On a whole, I like LARPs but Civil War is my least favorite part of American History.

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I lived in PA for a while myself and I have to agree, the Civil War is my least favorite part of American History. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I'll keep this brief, I tend to blather on with walls of text if left unchecked...

I suppose my start with roleplaying was like most people. Playing pretend with other young family members or school children. Pretending to be our favorite X-Men or what-have-you. I liked to write as a child, often plagiarizing things from Stephen King. According to some aptitude tests I'm only slightly above the national (American) average with math but in the 99th percentile with reading/writing comprehension. So I'm good with words, not numbers. I moved around a lot as a kid, being in a military family. I got into roleplaying online when I was around 9 or 10 on AIM chatrooms (mostly sexual) and different random non-sexual roleplaying forums, usually with a Sailor Moon focus, where I'd play as a male character, typically pursuing Sailor Mercury with a sweet vanilla romance, if anyone was playing her anyway. That quickly permeated into any online video game I got into and I started to cultivate various other hidden fetishes. Interesting side note for you younger folks: incest and futanari were not as insanely popular kinks on the internet as they are now. I'm hoping more male x futanari hentai (like Futanarun/Kurenai Yuuji's work) starts to pop up though. I suppose I've always had a bit of a hidden sexual deviancy from a young age. But then, don't we all? Teaching English overseas is great, and I can only laugh when I think of how mortified my fellow teachers and students would be if they knew just how depraved their charming Eigo-sensei really is.

I got into role-playing when I was 9 years old and I learned it from being an annoying kid sister pestering her older brother.
My brother used to role-play medieval fantasy stories on neopets and I was fascinated at the stories they were making and how they did it. So I made my own neopets account and joined a role-play with quite literally the most awful character I've ever made ever.

The character's name was my own name and she was everything that 9 year old me wanted to - a curvy sixteen year old with long "raven black hair" and "icy diamond blue eyes". It was a teen camp role-play and she literally came riding in on a goddamned horse because fuck reality and making sense.

I got better once I started to work on making characters that were more original and stopped with the crazy bullshit.

I started sexual role-playing when I was about twelve and I lied to my partners and told them I was sixteen so they wouldn't be weirded out by role-playing with someone so young.

I've kept writing stories, but my brother moved on to tabletop D&D then quit overall when he was about 17 because he was getting bullied something awful for being nerdy.

Wow! So many people started so young! I admit I was playing real life role-playing with those pretend games and all, alone or with friends, ever since I could walk but the actual forum writing didn't come until I was 19-20. Then again, that was also when I discovered the internet had places other than deviantart and wikipedia.

Since life is complex, and coming up with a rational reason to do something that is not in the typical order of society: more or less forces someone with a intelligent mind to role play a rational and practical answer. My reason to role play, is the fact in real life -- the best way to win in society is to create a problem that most people are unwilling to accept or unwilling to think outside the box. The more you understand human nature, the more you find that humans are simple animals. You would be shock what a single person can do or not do that effects and affects society. The best ways to get those skills, is to role play your who life.