Tell us your roleplaying story! All of us must have started somewhere, whether it was in some long lost board when we were wee little tykes, or here on GC when you simply couldn't resist the allure of a certain storyline! There are so many different ways, it will be fun to hear them all! Share with us your beginnings!

Mine started about three years ago. I was writing stories on a site called Quotev, and most of my fanfictions were of The Legend of Zelda. Through those stories, I met an amazing, sweet girl named Danielle, and the two of us became online friends. She was a TLoZ fan as well, and I ended up getting her into Sailor Moon. Anyway, after knowing each other for a while, she asked me if I wanted to do a TLoZ roleplay with her. I had no idea what roleplaying was at the time, but I accepted and she walked me through it. I thought roleplaying was so much fun - I mean, my whole life I've been wishing on stars and obsessed with fairytales and dreaming that I could be a fantasy character. Who doesn't want to be their favorite character? So I fell in love, and that roleplay is currently being fashioned into a story (by moi).

I just looked up the Yahoo Groups where I started my first ever RPG in the Charmed universe and my first post there was in 2001. I... I feel old. As with many of my first fandom experiences, it was introduced to me through the online community for the show. I had no idea what RPing was but the ones who did taught me, and soon we were writing stories together.

There were a lot more Yahoo Groups after that, then I got to know message boards through VBulletin boards. I spent 10 years in a Charmed forum doing more RPs and then branched out to RP-only forums. In these forums I started creating original characters as most of them have non-fandom RP settings. Then eventually there's GC, and obviously by this time I'm already obsessed with RPing so I jumped right in! I don't think I will ever stop RPing to be honest.

There were some epic posts that we created together in one of those forums, and I have in fact thought about us making it a novel and publishing it. The trouble with that is the point of view constantly changes with every post so it's a bit tricky. But yeah, there was one epic fantasy roleplay that really brought the best in everyone. Such long posts with so many feelings~

The first roleplay that I participated in was run by a user called "Sailor Nakitama." I had just finished writing my first Sailor Moon fanfiction, so I signed up for the game with my fan-made character, Sailor Aran. I have no idea when that was... but it was probably in the late 90s. XD It's been a long time.

I was a young kid when I started to RP, but it wasn't through message boards. My friend and I would play in the backyard pretending to be the characters from Cardcaptor Sakura. At that time we knew it as Cardcaptors. We eventually progress to Yugioh (even Teen Titans!) and eventually made our own characters inspired by the world of InuYasha. By the time we made our own characters we would either RP like we did as kids, RP on AIM or over the phone. This all seems silly as I look back.  

We also RP Tokyo Mew Mew as well! Then got back into CCS when he discovered the lie of Cardcaptors. I'm rambling now....

You know what? Sometimes my friend and I still RP over the phone or when we're hanging out at each other's houses. But this is rare we mainly message RP on skype these days. HAha You all probably think this is weird. XD 

I didn't start RPing on message boards until GC opened up its RP section. Now I'm hook and can't stop joining RPs. 

If we're counting playing around as kids, I guess I was "roleplaying" for a super long time. XD But in terms of online and tabletop stuff, I started RPing sometime in middle school on Gaia Online, but that didn't last long. In my Junior Year at high school, I joined the anime club, and they had made a nice forum they role played on sometimes. They dragged me into joining one, and I've been doing it a bunch ever since! ^^ Now I RP on TvTropes and here, though this is the first place I've ever done a Sailor Moon RP.

If you're pretending to be fictional characters it's roleplaying in my book. XD

I got involved with a place called One Piece HQ around 2006. We started a One Piece RP that still goes on today. I've always been into escapism, so I found roleplaying to be a very rewarding experience. I'm glad to do it again here. I tend to like to play powerful characters that are too timid or weak minded to understand their own strength or strong willed characters who should be powerful, but aren't. I don't know why but most of my characters tend to fall into those two categories. I guess I just like contradiction.

Yamichan16 wrote:

Then got back into CCS when he discovered the lie of Cardcaptors. I'm rambling now....

The lie of Cardcaptors xD

Ooh well I play-act as well with my cousins when I was little. I think we mostly did Power Rangers though.

Don't be embarrassed, I think I ran around as a Fraligatr at school a few times. And a Digimon... 

At school another friend and I would pretend be pokemon. I was jigglypuff......

Well, if we are considering playing as other characters as a kid as roleplaying, then I remember doing Beast Wars (transformers) in grade 2 and Pokemon in like grade 5.

As for roleplaying, I started a few years ago on some forms and on msn, and live journal. I got back into it on GC when I returned from my extended LOA in june.

I was 11 and on the AOL Kids message boards for Star Wars, the obsession I had before Sailor Moon took over my life. I actually found my diary from that time about ten years ago, and wrote a whole entry about discovering RP and how cool I thought the whole  thing was HAHAHA. I must have started there and just about never stopped

Sailor Mercury wrote:

I just looked up the Yahoo Groups where I started my first ever RPG in the Charmed universe and my first post there was in 2001. I... I feel old. As with many of my first fandom experiences, it was introduced to me through the online community for the show. I had no idea what RPing was but the ones who did taught me, and soon we were writing stories together.

[...]

I can top that one   .

I also started role-playing in a Yahoo Group I had been invited to for non-role-playing reasons.  I was invited to that Sailor Moon-based Group, and joined there, in summer 2001.  Right about when I joined, one of the other members there asked about starting an RPG on that Yahoo Group.  Even though the founder/owner of the Group had never done any RPGs before, she agreed to start one on her Yahoo Group there.  It got underway there (with me playing Ami/Mercury) in autumn 2001.  In the first half-year of that RPG, I was so helpful with answering questions (like from those new to the Group) and especially with providing summaries of what had happened recently there, that I was invited to become a moderator of that Group.  Soon after, the other moderator of that Group left the Group completely due to becoming too busy in Real Life.  But Jen (the founder/owner) and I never needed or wanted to quit like that.  So there we were, two people who had never even been in an RPG before summer 2001, running the whole show, trying to show that we knew what we were doing     but also   .

And I can make Sailor Mercury (the admin here) feel young again by adding one little fact to the above.  As I'm sure all of you have noticed, both of us got started the same year.  Well, I'm the one really feeling old, because I was about 30 years of age at that time   .

I can really thanks my buddy Mercuryfan for getting me into Roleplaying. I too started in yahoo groups once I found some stuff I really liked. I stared with WWE but then got into the Sailor moon rp's when i started watching the shows and getting more and more into it. Then I found the CBC, the cherry blossom club and joined there and was there with Mercuryfan for a while and we helped each other with ideas and posts and stuff. sadly when that group went under Mercuryfan, me and some other friends stayed close and made some RP forum of our own...one is a sailor moon Pokemon crossover one and its pretty fun. I love it here though and I never plan on leaving...

So in other words..Thanks Mercuryfan...

I started with roleplaying thanks to Puu and Uranus

When I joined GC back then I was super insecure, I was always like: Oh my god, what if they don't understand me because of my bad English? Or what if I say something wrong and they misinterpret it and think I'm a complete weirdo?!
So yes, as you can see I was even afraid to just post a regular post xD

However, time went by and I got more confident - yayyy. And gradually I got also interested in RPs. I was always wondering what these "[Relaxed]" and "[Advanced]" could mean and why there always were so deep titles for the threads, so one day I decided to just look into one of these threads (if I'm not mistaken it was Light and Darkness xD). So I read and read and read and I enjoyed reading this so much; so much that I wanted to do it myself. There was just one problem: I couldn't do it because...bad English xD

At the end, I just talked with Alyssa about it (since we were PMing anyway xD), telling her about my worries and such. She told me that this shouldn't stop me and that, if I wanted to RP, I shouldn't hesitate to do so. I felt reaaaaaally relieved and happy - really, you can't believe how much xD - and so, her encouraging words slowly got me into writing my first RP texts.
At the same time I PMed Kyra about the same problem since I wanted to sign up for February's event but wasn't too sure about it. Kyra encouraged me as well and so I eventually decided to follow their advice and do it ^-^

AND THIS WAS ONE OF THE BEST IDEAS EVER xD On that note: THANK YOU BOTH! <3 Without your words I would have never started!

I'm sorry but I really like the fact that this place offers many first experiences to a lot of people and I simply congrats the staff for making it happen.

I started roleplaying when I was very young in fact and it's probably the most embarrassing period of my life because the writing was already bad but the character creation was a shame. Nevertheless, I've always loved roleplaying ever since and I don't think I really ever stopped doing it. I began with OCs creation, but soon switched to playing canon characters (which is now the only thing I can do in a roleplay) because the idea of writing for my favorite characters was too good to just pass over it. I know some people have roleplayed on facebook, myspace, twitter, etc, but I've never been on one of those platforms; I started out on normal RPG forums going from the usual HP frenzy to more fantasy based - original creation forum. I was then roleplaying in french.

Then somewhere in 2012, I discovered tumblr roleplay and it's where I started roleplaying in english for the first time (and I'm glad to say it wasn't as humiliating as the first time I started roleplaying in my own language). Tumblr is an all freedom platform, so there is many thing you can do, many forum obligations you don't have to do, it's there for serious roleplay and many features are awesome. It allowed for things I didn't think about before (roleplay with various writings for the same character), deep exploration of many storyline and a ton of crazy like crossovers (when Supernatural's God and Hermione Granger roleplays together it's what I call wtf moments but it was awesome).

So I guess... since here it's in english, I've been roleplaying "englishly" for 3 years.

...You guys got me rolling on the nostalgia train. ((Also you guys and your posts are too sweet the end)) BEWARE MY TRAINS ARE ALWAYS MULTI-CAR.

I started roleplaying back sometime in 2001 (8th grade, lol) on Neopets. I was 13, Neopets were cute, and they had a message board system. I loved to read fantasy stories, so writing in their quick moving roleplay threads was really fun. I had characters I liked to use and a plot i continuously tried to get moving (to no avail XD) and one day I came across a DRoP roleplay (Dragon Riders of Pern). I loved those books and the world and jumped right in, was taken under a more experienced person's wing, and brought into a guild where my - lemme tell you, super original first character (her name was my name and her build was my build and she looked like me and acted like me XD  But then, a good way to start roleplaying is acting like you were put in that situation, right? ... well anyway XD) - was bonded with a white dragon named Aeraryth and I had so much fun.

And so many shenanigans. Holy cow. We moved from Weyr to Weyr - one time our characters dressed up like bandits and started a dragon war with a rival Weyr, too. lol. I created another account and pretended to be a guy, so I could roleplay guys under a pseudonym without feeling embarrassed about it. ((My username was Lessa_ ((and many, many others wow lol)) and "his" username was frog_with_a_gun)) After playing with and as him for a while (btw: success, other girls in the guild asked if i knew him irl and if i knew he was dating someone because he was cool XD) Feeling more confident, I started roleplaying guys under my own name and stuff. It was a fun few years. 

RELIC OF RELICS::

After/during that phase (further into high school) I started more and more fantasy rp's. One of my friends at school didn't have internet, and so we started passing a spiral notebook around between/during class to write and reply and plan our story; eventually we added another friend in to play and it became this huge sprawling deal. We never finished, but we ate up two 90 page spirals and more than half a 180 page one. I have two, but not the third. u.u (which was sad because I wrote two scenes in that one that made my friend's mom cry when she read it XD (her mom liked the story and wanted to keep up with it ^^)) I started rewriting the roleplay as a story a few years ago, but didn't get very far with it. And when my friend did get internet, I made my own site for irl friends to roleplay on XD boop here it is i found it; ((I'm Seraph there)). 
OH GOD I FORGOT LAEL'S CRYSTAL STARTED THERE I totally started rewriting that one as a story, too XD Have it all plotted out and everything. just... notactuallywrittenahahhahaa... oh god, and vampires, angels and slayers. and labels. XD I feel like one's missing - one that started out in a maze and people having to fight to prove they were worthy... 

x.x i went looking for it, opened a board from Lael's Crystal, read a post mentioning character names and i'm currently dead.


goodbye. the nostalgia feels were too strong for me. i can't even.

Bump! How did you start roleplaying?