Forums » Smalltalk » Where did you start roleplaying?

I started, and don’t laugh, on TheBuffySite.com (it’s shut down now) It was all about, as the title suggests, Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I met someone friends there (one I’m still friends with) back in….oh gosh, the early 2000’s.

After that, we built our own site that ran for a while (it was called Sunnyhell) where several of my characters were born. After that, once that collapsed (well, not collapse. The site and Wiki still exist), I actually stopped writing for several years, other than one of my friends on MSN, later Facebook messenger, until I got a writing bug one time, and searched the internet to stumble upon this site.

I’ve now been here since 2017, have grown several more characters and worlds since then, and am still blown away by the character creation of the site.

I actually made a survey about roleplaying since I wanna make a video about it, you can find it here!

If you've already responded to this thread, just lmk if you want your response to be included in the video, and if you would prefer to remain anonymous or not. I wont include anything said here unless I'm given explicit consent from you.

I also started on sites like Animal Jam! Every chat-based game was like prime real estate. Eventually I moved to writing on regular social media sites, mostly Instagram and Tumblr.
I'm very new to forum-based RP but I got sick of the ads and algorithms other places on the web, I just needed to search out single-purpose sites. I'm too tired for all that!!! I still keep in touch with and RP with my friends from those sites though!

Well, I was going to just fill out the survey, but the "when" question requires a year and I don't really remember.

I have no memory of having any social interactions back when I was on Neopets, and I don't know whether that was by choice or if they just didn't have that yet or what (back when I learned of Neopets, Bruce was literally just a guy before getting redesigned into a penguin).

I think I was somewhere around 13-15 when I sort of got my first taste of online text-based rp, and I think that was maybe around 2000 or 2001? I'd joined a writing site called Stories.Com (which rebranded to Writing.Com a little later on) and was able to get access to the site's live chat for awhile (and I was usually/always the youngest person there). A bit of goofing off in that chat with names that quickly became familiar led to one of the members creating a Proboards site that was set up like a little town for us all to basically just pretend to hang out. It was super informal, and we didn't have proper characters so much as go about as sort of alternate versions of ourselves.

I liked the idea of that, though, and started trying to look into similar sorts of things while having to figure out what it even was that I was looking for at the same time. I tried some MUDs and MOOs, but I never really knew what I was doing and just didn't really vibe with the style. (Also doesn't help that I'm right on the verge of having aphantasia, but I'm mostly able to work around that in more forum-type contexts that let me always read back.) What I did eventually manage to settle into was another Proboards site, Embyr Haven, that was properly dedicated to what we'd all be able to fully recognize as rp, with individual topics dedicated to individual rps and all that.

Besides that, there were also other small RP forums I tried out, a really big forum site (GaiaOnline; not the best, but I did set up a little group dedicated to helping people get more comfortable with rp and developing better writing skills) I rp'd on for a bit (though rp was just one of the prevalent things there, not its main focus), some stints doing rp via email, and even a friend I shared a document with in high school where we took turns writing a story in a way very similar to RP, but allowing each other a bit more control over all characters and circumstances. Of the few times I've tried playing TTRPGs, too, the time it's been most successful and that I've had the clearest idea of what was ever going on was a case that was still heavily text-based; we chatted in Skype and managed combat and mapping stuff on Roll20, but the main rp stuff was still written out in a group here on RPR, just like in any other rp. Ah, I also got into OCTs (Original Character Tournaments) on deviantArt for a little, specifically in a "league" (just a group that allowed various at-will pairings when not running a more formal tournament; the one I was in also allowed for different formats, both visual art and literary), and the setup for that has some things in common with rp, though it was definitely its own thing.

Heh, oddly, one of the most commonly noted obstacles to my rping has been the popularity of fandom rps. I feel fine enough with "original" settings that are some degree of "inspired by" various fandom/canon settings, but I've never quite felt right or at ease trying to do an actual fandom setting or playing much with clear fandom characters (especially canon characters), but it's usually felt like that's the majority of RP available. Doesn't bother me that they exist or anything, there's just been a number of times when I wished more non-fandom stuff was available and active. A lot of it is just me being self-conscious about "what if I get something wrong?" and generally having less familiarity with a lot of media than most others, and also just not being much of a fandom person in general - like with all the theorizing, shipping, creating fan works, etc. (Though I do delight in fan music. Heck yeah gimme cool songs about so many different things and concepts and stuff than just romance and sexuality! I don't care if it's for some videogame or show I've never even heard of!)

Edit: Oh, and if you want to include anything I shared in your project, feel free. And I'm fine with being anonymous; I don't expect any of what I said to be uniquely useful anyway.

I responded to the survey, but it’s like Zelphyr, not absolutely sure about beginning date. But it is sure that it can’t be before the release of Furcadia 😁, as I started right there. A totally unconscious one-liner, darn were I scolded in the beginning. But here I am, over 25 years later…. and still unable to write correctly 😆

This one's sort of funny...

I was on Omegle a lot as an unsupervised eleven-year-old (yes, there is not a funny start to the story, but it's sort of humorous in the grand scheme of things!), which puts this story around... 2011-12. One of my interests at the time - though I've long since left it behind - was Harry Potter. I would go through the HP interest tag talking to random people about the movies, and one of them was advertising a Chatzy group chat for their Harry Potter roleplay group (mostly original characters).

I joined with the name 'buckiesbb', which was my usual screen name at the time, and had NO IDEA what roleplay was prior to that. Seeing a bunch of people writing together opened my eyes to a whole new world. I played around as 'buckiesbb' for a while before I made a proper character name, using a HP Name Generator - thusly, Helen Young was born, one of my oldest characters.

Bonus: In this same Chatzy group, I met my good friend Sky! They're the same age as me, we're still good friends, we've met irl, been friends for over 13 years now, and we still talk about our characters from that initial roleplay - though, we haven't written together since we were probably 14.

Lol, I first started roleplaying in the forums through fanfiction[.]net - but it was pretty short lived. I didn't know it was roleplay back then, however I was trying to roleplay in Naruto RP groups there - but I just found each group to be frustrating and annoying because none of them liked story or lore and it was just all. "Here post your very detailed OC form to be accepted, and now here's the threads to RP where folks are only just metagaming and powerscaling with no story or friendliness at all." I was like? 12? 13? And then quit for a little while.

My sister introduced me to omegle and it's tagging system to find fandom folks. I quickly got into a roleplay when my sister was like - "some [fandom] person sent me a message because I don't know what to write" and I read the message like- "oh, they want you to write as one of these characters back? That sounds easy." Except, she was like, "nope! That sounds scary! I don't know what to write back! You do it!" And so I did, and then I mainly roleplayed through omegle until it pushed me make an email, Skype, and Chatzy because I wanted to continue rp'ing with my partner, or to join the group RPs they invited me to, eheh.

And now it's been a main-stay hobby of mine.

Oh my gosh!! Animal jam and Scratch!! My homes!!

I started on a young writers forum and writing class. I role-playing mostly on hangouts after that with my friends from that forum. I also found scratch about the same time and that's where I reaaaaally started role-playing. By the time I got too old for it, I moved over to discord with my one friend I was still role-playing on scratch with and I've been there since

OH MY GOSH another scratch roleplayer?? Amazing. I never thought I'd meet another.

Recently I dug up some of my roleplays from that time, it was from 10 years ago and boy was my writing roughhh. So funny to look back on though.

Literallyyyy mine was lowkey SO bad. and YES!!! Scratch has always cracked me up. It's like supposed to be this super wholesome, kid friendly site to learn how to code, but it's literally just like baby's first social media XDD That's how I met my longest roleplaying friend. We migrated to discord when we both turned 18, but we're going on like 5 or 6 years rping together

You said you played on animal jam too, right? Have you found any other good like online, multiplayer simulation world type games, but like, for adults?

Oh boy. I'm probably one of the few who have, but I officially started roleplaying via text writing in a DeviantArt Vocaloid group way back in... 2010-2011, I think! Before that, I had a friend who I'd roleplay with via calls on the phone, and that went on for like... 3 years.

I first started with my sister. We didn't see it as roleplaying, but as simply writing stories back and forth. We had an old computer that did not have internet, and we'd take turns using the "rich text documents" and either I'd create an entire story and she'd join in as an additional character, or vice versa. We did this for years, but it probably began as us making "what would you do if" plot lines for one another in notebooks. We'd pass those back and forth, too, and it would start as something like "what would you do if the house caught on fire and no one is home". We'd also make comic panels and share those, too.