Forums » Smalltalk » Where did you start roleplaying?

I’ve been lingering around on this site for a few weeks, and it’s so fascinating to see where people started with this hobby! There’s such a huge range of places, especially between the older and younger role-players.

So, where did you start? Bonus points if you mention all the RP places you’ve frequented over the years! Give your opinions, which place was best? What place do you miss most?
Please, no drama. If you’ve had a bad experience on an RP platform we don’t need to hear all the details.

I’ll start! My RP journey began on animal jam with the popular warrior cats RP scene at the time (2014-ish?). After that I found a way to roleplay on every game I played; minecraft, roblox, scratch.mit.edu, and jumpstart (RIP).
It later evolved to Amino (so glad it’s gone), Discord, and now this place! I’m getting tired of discord, so RPR has become my current favorite roleplay hub

I started text-based roleplaying (though I didn't know what it was called at the time) on Google Hangouts with my friend, in the mid to late 2010s or so. I'm not sure when/how I found out that what we were doing had a name and that it was something I could just... do, with other people, as a hobby. But I must have, because one day I was searching for Warrior Cats roleplays and it brought me here. Still kind of nostalgic for those old groups we'd make... I think I briefly used a couple of other sites dedicated to the series too, but I don't remember them clearly. The vast majority of my roleplaying has been here on RPR. Some on Quotev, too (*shudder* what a nightmare), specifically with some joke accounts based on Fawful and Dimentio from the Mario games... And like one (1) very short-lived RP using my (at the time) favourite OC. My aforementioned friend had one or two of those silly character accounts too but I won't call her out; she'll come over here and talk about it if she wants to :>

Edit: Oh yeah I specified the text-based thing because I was doing in-person roleplay, aka making stories with plushies, improv skits, playing pretend(TM) etc faaaarrr before that and continued to do it alongside the text-based stuff later, whenever I had friends who wanted to partake in my shenanigans. Including a three-person group on Google Hangouts (again) where we did this all over voice for hours on end. We called it Improv but it was basically an un/barely-structured tabletop kind of thing. We just talked through what our characters did, and voice-acted them, and sometimes had dice rolls to add ✨randomness✨ and ✨suspense✨
RIP Google Hangouts...

Me?
I started RPing something like 2001, quite late as I discovered RP in my twens (if I remember well) on furcadia. I have been on and off for multiple times, had like a 10 OCs and started around 2006 or 7 to develop my little doe, after having played many years with my Max and other. 2012 I made an F-List character sheet, still have that one. I came across RPRepository multiple times as character host. But my biggest decision to quit Furcadia was just after really registering at RPR, like one year ago. Little problems here made me look for other sites, but none accepted my little doe. So I took my courage and stayed here, without regret.
I have an active Discord account, but haven’t yet played there. Else, all is here, Lizbeth’s story and adventures, and many many things have changed. I managed to get one, and only one Furcadia friend here on RPR, I’m so happy about that one.
I only play text based RP, as I do this for fun and for learning.
Guess that makes me old huh?

I also got my start on Furcadia!

I started way back in the mid 90s on AOL and stayed there until it died. 🪦

Like Andy, I'm from ye ole AOL days in the mid to late 90s. (Red Dragon Inn, anyone?) Where I rped just slowly progressed/morphed from chat rooms as time went on.

Hurray for olds, we class up the joint. 😎

World of Warcraft babyyyyy (Started in ... 8th grade around uhhhh 2010-2011-ish?)

I stuck inside WoW up until a few years ago when I stopped playing, but during that time I also RP'd on tumblr a bit (with a few friends I made through making art of WoW ocs) and here, of course!

But I haven't traversed outside of RPR really for a long time. c:

Actual role play I started in person rolling dice with my friends during lunch in high school. That would have been...98/99? Somewhere in there. Got my first taste of online written roleplay on an rp server in WoW. After kids though I couldn't do much in the way of mmos any longer though (We'd switched to Old Republic by then) so that's when I basically googled places to rp on line. Several places popped up but RPR was the only one that seemed really welcoming and accessible to someone who'd never done forum rp before. That was 8 years ago now and I've never looked back.

I started with "comics" with my best friends IRL in middle school. We would draw a bust of our character's expression (or sometimes full bodies/scenes) and write their dialogue in our sketchbook. We actually had a following, and our sketchbooks would get passed around for people to read as we filled them up. I later transitioned to text RP on AOL/AIM.

Neopets anime group 😂

I started on F-List, but I'm not proud of that because I flailed around not knowing what to do and got banned from there.

Omg. Neopets.


Not anime but I started on neopets too!

I get stupidly excited when I see that's where someone else started.

The warrior cats were SO popular but I mostly did like the gifted rps

I’m so fascinated by all these answers. I didn’t know anything about Furcadia before this, now i’m researching it and it’s such an interesting old online community?? AOL had a roleplay scene?? You guys were roleplaying on Neopets? That’s so cool!

I’m not a YouTuber by any means but man, now I’m kinda tempted to make a video essay about the history of text-based roleplay. It has such a vast community and a rich history, but I never see any content that talks about it as a whole.

I love this idea! Nardwuar and Sean Evans give me great inspiration to interview people about what they love. I am 110% down for a lengthy video or series about the history and culture of text-RPs.

I started RPing around 2006, maybe 7? Started on a little Vampire site called Ravenblack -- still around, but the chat is dead. Found it taking a "What kind of Vampire would you be?" Quiz on Quizilla, an ancient and long since decayed website for little quizzes like "What color is your soul" or "What would x random think of you".

It's cringy thinking back on it, but I stuck with that site until... I wanna say, 2015? Then I moved onto The Keep, a Nexxus RP site, and lurked there until.. Gee, the 2020s? Was still phasing out Ravenblack, so it must have been a few years. Then to The Lair. After The Lair went down, I came here. I don't really know if any of those times are accurate, though. This is definitely the best site, though, even if my main experience outside my main 7-8 year long RP is that I've been ghosted by more people here than anywhere else. ><

WAIT I ACTUALLY DID THE SAME THING TOO WITH MY FRIENDS WHAT. From the bust and everything. I think it was around early middle school, we'd start by someone drawing their OC somewhere, then pass it to someone else and they draw their OC and their reaction + dialogue. And we just went back and forth. Then I started roleplaying more on Animal Jam, then to Minecraft, then Amino, and Roblox (it was crazy). Then I discovered roleplaying servers on Discord and tried doing group RPs. And later I settled on 1x1s. Now I mostly roleplay on Discord, but recently for the past month, I've been hanging around here in this site!

I started my roleplay journey on tumblr! It has a pretty big roleplay community depending on what fandom you're looking to write in. My first character was an OC of Harley Quinn's son, which is kinda cringy but hey I was ten. Now, I roleplay here, of course, but I also play DnD and go to LARP events.

I started on Y!Messenger. Then moved to forums after it died away...

Oh, boy. I started roleplaying around 2012-ish on Minecraft creative servers. I was about nine or so at the time. Took whatever I can get - I'd already been writing for a few years, having taken a pretty quick passion to it the moment I figured out how to actually read.

Later on, I moved on to Wattpad. Gross. It was only slightly better, honestly, and I was still averaging maybe one or two sentences in a "Long" RP post. But, y'know, I was... Twelve.

Closer to fourteen, I started moving on to Discord, and actually putting a little bit of effort into improving myself. I couldn't really understand the para-posters and stuff, but I did like reading, and I liked writing, and I was at the point where I was starting to actually get really into writing stories. Discord was a home for a little while, and then it was... Actually, back to Minecraft, weirdly enough, with a specifically-designed roleplaying server. Honestly, the quality was pretty okay. Still kind of is. I dig it sometimes. Y'got people on there who've bene playing that one server for ten years now. Time-consuming, though, and I moved right back to Discord around eighteen so I could get some actual post lengths in. By that point, I was pretty consistently writing paragraphs, and good ones, too.


Through Discord and an NSFW roleplaying client for furries, I kinda kept that up for another... Four years. Til recently, really. I still play there a lot, but I've warmed up pretty significantly in the last while to longer-term, slower-paced plays. I found this forum on a random dive while looking for something to settle that itch for good roleplay, and... Well. Here we all.