So we've found our way to whatever online roleplaying havens we now call "home," but where did it start for you? How did you *first* get interested in playing characters that weren't *you*? Did it stem from an RL interest in acting or writing or just a desire to escape reality for a little while?

In my case: I've been writing stories that caught up real people I knew since I was a kid in high school. It's actually how I avoided getting beaten up much of the time, given that back then I was small and easy pickings for bullies. Bullies aren't quite as daunting to me now, but I still have fun weaving stories around other people.

So, how'd you catch the bug?

I'm not sure where the first roots took hold, perhaps it was "Choose Your Own Adventure" Books, perhaps D&D, perhaps it was always wanting to be a superhero. In any event, I now am an IMP of the only MUD I've ever called home: Aabahran, the Forsaken Lands or "FL" to those who love her.



And, damn it, I still want to be a superhero.

I got started in MUDs when I was showed one by a neighbor in college. I didn't really take too much interest as the one he showed me wasn't that good. For a few years, I tried to find one that was interesting (and to remember how to log back into them...*grin*...I wasn't the most technologically-adept back then).

Started playing a H&S about two years later, but after a couple years of that, I grew tired of dealing with the immature and childishly-petty people on it and quit. By that time, I was seeking something more substantial than just typing "kill" and had for a year or so been playing an RPI MUD. I enjoyed the depth of designing and role-playing a character instead of just running around killing stuff.

I've always been a creative person with a pretty good imagination. I used to write (and may take it up again) and have probably designed anywhere between 500-600 worlds for use in stories as well as just for the fun of designing everything that composes a unique and original culture. Some of them were designed to be MUD worlds, some were designed for stories. Either way, most of the time, I didn't finish them completely, though about three or four dozen of them are probably designed with more detail than 99% of the MUD worlds out there. Until I started my recent MUD project, I've never before taken the time to actually turn one of them into a MUD. It's not a 100% original world as it has a very close real-life parallel, but it is rather comprehensive in total design of every aspect I can think of. Hopefully, it will be something that appeals to players, at least the player-type I'm trying to target.

Take care,

Jason

It probally all started with a childhood friend who was older than me. I remember clearly running around in a field with him and a few others, and I'd be the princess! or the princess captured by aliens! or the villian aliens capturing the princess!! And it was the grandest time.

This morphed as I got older into plays, first high school plays and then college plays. And then I had a degree and started getting acting jobs with it. AND THEN I married a wonderful man, had an angel child and the walls of my house proceeded to close in on me.

So I turned to my trusty computer, remembering my brief stint with D&D. I did a search for 'roleplaying sprite' and found Turning Point Mud. An RP Mud! I thought to myself, how fascinating! I had had a short affair in the past with H&S, but it was brief and I'm not the witty type to chitty chat on channels. Well, anyhow I was hooked and when TP went down I floated over to another mud and am now doing the RP two-step.

I think there were a number of things that started it for me, anything from the Choose your own adventure books, to Myst, and then several fantasy authors. I was interested in other worlds, and wished that I could be a part of that. Myst particularly appealed to me, the idea that someone could create an entire world within one book (if anyone has read the novels, this concept is further developed and explained).

To be honest, I used to make fun of the kids who would sit in the computer lab in high school and type away at their text based games, but through a series of events, I realized that this was the kind of thing I'd wanted all along.

I think part of Brody's original question was how did we get interested in playing characters that differed from ourselves... I think it might be a dislike of my own flaws (as long as we're being honest here), it could be that I just like the distraction, or it might be that I always wanted to play a character that started on paper, but sprang to life in a world that could be very real. The stories I used to write are now possible, within a set of boundaries (the kind of game I'm playing). For me, that makes all the difference.

Forgive the cliché but for myself it all began with the Hobbit. As a young child my speech developed somewhat slowly so a teacher suggested to my family to increase my amount of free reading. My sister gave me a copy of the Hobbit the dreams of wizards, dragons, dwarves, and an appreciation for the art of storytelling developed soon after. From that point on I have become obsessed with the telling of a good tale. Be it tragedy, comedy, drama, or suspense I love it all.

I think it all started with Greek mythology for me and then spread to other world mythologies. I was very, very, very intrigued by what could have inspired people to invent these great stories and what these great stories represented. In addition, I've always wondered how these stories managed to last for thousands of years as compared to the ones that must surely have been lost.

Then, I got involved in text computer gaming. (Zork and other Infocom games, anyone?) What an innovative way to tell a story! I have to admit that "Plundered Hearts" was my favorite Infocom game. I was really interested in what the heroine (the person you played) was up to and what motivated her. Then came King's Quests and Might and Magic!

Then I started writing fictional stories in school and reading eveyrthing I could get my hands on. Next came college with a Bio and English major and IRC! Then, finally, in law school, I found MUDs via some of my real life friends. and I logged onto Threshold. So, my first (and current) mud was an RP enforced mud with a crazy admin. I jumped straight into RPing, and learned to mud around that concept. It was a pretty nice relief to be able to roleplay without someone saying, "Hold on. I gotta go get some Cheetohs." which is what I experienced commonly with my DnD group or my IRC group. (Not that I don't still love table-top gaming.)

The end!

I was playing Threshold. Where i got this name from, when I found the body of "ack" So I "Sac ack," thought it sounded fun, so I entered it into another website and mispelled it to "sacac." Anyways, watching some of the players Rp really got me into it. Morrowind just wasn't doing it for me and so I I tried threshold, played it for a month or so and decided to move on. Been addicted to Crackageddon ever since, but Threshold will still be in my thoughts.

*bump to get more answers*

I got a GEnie account back in '86. Played a space colonization/battle game called "Stellar Emperor" published by Kesmai (it was a better version of Maga Wars III). The game withered and died, so I started playing Simutronics' latest offering, a game called "Orb Wars," which was the best online multiplayer game ever made. I gave Gemstone III a try when it went live, and it hooked me. But it never really left beta, and that, coupled with a 24-level ceiling, Sim's split with ICE and the influx of AOL snerts, drove me to a great little game called "Legends of Futures Past" developed by Novalink. Nova emphasized roleplay and maintained a great atmosphere for it, the place where I learned how.

Pretty weird. I guess it started with reading Jaws. That because Jaws was my first novel.

No, it goes back to the first book I remember ever reading that had no pictures - "The Biggest Bear on Earth". And I'll tell you why. The Biggest Bear was a story told without any sort of conversational intercourse at all of the inner life of an Alaskan brown bear, or Kodiak (They apparently didn't call them that back then). It was more or less my first experience in really losing myself in a story and taking on another role, even if only by virtue of being led through it by someone else. I wish I could find that book.

From there, predictably, Tolkien, D&D. Then GURPS, and then sort of in a parallel fashion, SPI hex based war simulations and Avalon Hills "Diplomacy" plust rpg's dragging me inexorably towards miniatures, which culminated in a great deal of time and money spent on the now largely defunct "Warhammer Epic" or something like that, which was Warhammer's answer to mechs and which I found supremely more fun to play because of the elegance of the system making a lot of the paperwork unecessary.

I got out of the Navy in '93 and immediately tracked down the 'internet' I had been hearing about. MOO's were my first distraction, and coding a few objects on BayMOO made me think for ages that sooner or later I would get into a mud or MOO and code a lot of stuff, but alas, so far I have never done so.

I played Ancient Anguish, which is still alive and kicking if not any longer truly at the cutting edge as I percieved them to be back then. Due to a spate of mass mud-mail advertising invasions perpetrated by the admin, I too fell into the Threshold trap, and played there off and on for years, but there's something more than a bit off there, and what with it being pay to.. keep the admin off your back or whatever, well... Let's not get off topic. I've tried dozens of muds now. I discovered MUSH'ing just in the last three or so years, and enjoyed it a lot more than I would have anticipated, but I do prefer to have the game to play along with my rp.

Coffeemud has been promising, and I should probably check back in there more often than I do, but right now I am addicted to Accursed Lands, a sort of spinoff of Dartmud (which still exists and is as abominably hard to wedge yourself into as ever, it seems). I love it, but the complexity of what they are trying to achieve seems to keep it in perpetual Beta. Still, as an online community, it is my favorite to date.

Yeah, I also enjoyed drama in high school, was in several plays and a couple of musicals. I like writing, but lack the discipline to crank out lots of stories and even so much as save them. I have a collection of my least embarassing poems that I have transferred faithfully from hard drive to hard drive for over a decade now. =) Muds are my outlet for my daydreamy, creative side I guess.

My friend introduced me to mudding when I was a sophomore in highschool. At the time I diddnt have the internet so I only got to play for brief times when I did labs or was in typing.

Finally I did get the internet and played the hell out of a different mud, one with a decent balance of rp and just killing stuff.

Now I play rp muds pretty much exclusively, I love being able to create a character in a believeable world and just be them, anytime I am enjoying the game I an enjoying that world and the person I have created. It usually completely takes me out of this world.

Muding, like most gaming, is easy to just do. I just went sailing today and it takes hours to rig the sails, get the car, drive to the lake, get out in the lake, hope the winds are blowing right. Then when you are done you have to haul it all back.

In a good mud I can make a character with a story I like, play them, and if I get bored with the character or mud I can just make a new one\find a new one. Mudding is also the best extraction from life I have ever found.

My mom says I was born with an overactive imagination. I had an invisible best friend when I was three, and kept her around til I was maybe seven? Eight? Something like that. I never got into the Barbie thing, and always found reading stories more entertaining. I have always been a horrible liar, because I'd make up huge complex stories around my lies, unbelievable stories that were just so far-fetched that it was -obviously- more of a "if I had my druthers" than a "this is what really happened."

Even when we were doing the Dick and Jane stories in elementary school, I would wonder what Dick and Jane were like, outside the books. I'd make up things in my mind about their dog Spot, how he'd run away on adventures with Dick and Jane chasing after him (see Dick and Jane run after Spot. See Spot fall in a hole, and end up in China. See Jane wear her pretty new silk kimono.).

In Junior High, I had this fantasy in my head that the woods behind the local playground was a secret lair for lovers to hang out in. Sometimes I'd skip school and climb up into the playground's ENORMOUS weeping willow tree, stare out into the woods, and allow the stories to just come to me about knights and damsels in distress and dragons chasing each other through the wild strawberry bushes.

So in answer to the question - when did I get my start on roleplay, the answer is: I've been doing it for as long as I've had cognitive thought.

Bumped for more responses.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

Me Too!

I got into RP playing Dungeons and Dragons. But interestingly (at least I find it interesting), I never really "got" the whole RP thing until I became the game master and decided I wanted to tell en epic story. Then I started creating characters (as opposed to just rolling dice) to help me tell it and move the plot along, and it forced the players to develop personalities of their own too.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

My story is sort of bland I guess. I started roleplaying at 12 when I was getting into Harry Potter, I liked the idea of playing a magical student for some reason. XD I had other sisters so we usually got into everything at the same time, so first we would do "live action" rp like pretending to fly on brooms and cast fake spells on each other and then we progressed into playing rp games online. The first rpg I play was Hogwartsmoo which was actually pretty fun and got you into the whole rp atmosphere really quick (since all there was to do on the game was to roleplay). So yeah, that's my story. Since then I've moved on from harrypotter and such and moved towards fantasy, but it's still pretty much all the same. ^_^

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

They Harry Potter world is extremely inspiring, imo, and I actually love it much better than I love the stories or the characters. It seems like an excellent place to start.

I know one of the books that really got me into worlds is Island of the Blue Dolphin, a story that I read when I was really young about a girl who gets stranded. Dragonsinger, by Anne McCaffrey, kind of follows the same theme. I've always been obsessed with thoughts of surviving, and I love apocalyptic scenarios. What would people do to survive? What adaptations happen? How would I survive? What would the struggle to survive be like?

Books are definitely a great inspiration for RP, and RPing lets us explore some of the struggles and hardships that we imagine. We get a more difinitive conclusion in a game than we do in real life. I know that I wondered how well I would do at Hogsworth when I was reading the book. I'd probably fail at Quidditch. :D