Hello children it’s me fellow children. Tell me the tale of your first RP experience. How did it go? Knowing what you do now, what would you tell old you?
My first RP experience was getting the password through ILLICIT means and not understanding it was an RP server until a week or two later, at which point I thought it'd be epic to go to a randomly generated world and post a distress signal in global. Nobody came. I think my first actual rp was with elroy when I found out there were hubs and I was confident enough to actually socialize but it didn't consist of much other than dicking around and my very lame attempts to seem cool. I wouldn't tell old me anything cause it's funny to watch new people squirm.
Never really done any of these fluff threads before, but here goes. My first RP experience was in late 2017, on some Gmod RP server. I played an edgy soldier guy whose entire platoon was wiped out during the 7-hour war. He was gruff, pessimistic, and reclusive. Decent-enough character idea, yeah? Well, it would've been if I wasn't a complete newbie, and was too socially awkward to ask for help. Long story short, my inexperience combined with my terrible social skills made the character an utter cringelord. Highlights of my time that server include: Me standing in front of a door for half an hour because I didn't know how to claim a room. Me unironically using the words "lol" in-character. Me getting banned from the server for an hour because I accidentally spied on two Civil Protection units trying to apprehend a suspect, and walking away in the middle of the ensuing interrogation. Me getting beaten to death by said Civil Protection units after being found with a contraband later. Me logging off to avoid an arrest. Me getting shot in the chest after standing in the open during a shooting. Spent about 2 months on that server until it ended up being gutted, at which point I didn't feel like joining another one. If I had one piece of advice to give to old me, it would to be yourself. Don't go out of your way to make your characters "hip", or "unique". Play someone you're comfortable playing with. I feel like that's one of the biggest mistakes I made when I started RP.
My first RP experience was in GMod. I don't count DarkRP. I was in some Starship Troopers RP server. I think it was a TacoNBanana server if I recall correctly. I did pretty well. Sort of. I wasn't too understanding of the whole action posts and all that shit at the time- I was like 14 years old, but I listened to instructions well enough in-character since it was on GMod and thus not entirely text-based. I went on an expedition with some others after I became a Private and was assigned to be the shotgunner in some run-down underwater facility filled with zombies. Needless to say I was fucking honored and did my job, and they thought I did it pretty well so I got a promotion. I went from Private to Private First Class- or so I thought. Apparently they never updated the roster. When I changed my rank to PFC I went walking around the space station and an admin apprehended me and said he didn't see me in the PFC roster. I told him I got promoted yesterday, because I could have sworn I did, and that I'd change it back to PVT if it's really that big of a deal. Without responding though, that admin permabanned me from the server. And that's how I got banned from TnB in 3 days for nothing while being totally cooperative, thinking I was rank impersonating a fucking PFC of all things. I'm not really sure what I'd tell myself. It was kind of an unavoidable permanent ban.
My very first roleplaying experience was on Starcraft 2, of all things -- A game I only owned in the first place because family had given it to me for Christmas somewhere in the very late 2000s. Among the many "custom games" publicly available in multiplayer was a series of maps built around a sophisticated mod called the Cortex Roleplaying Engine. It turned the RTS into an open sandbox controlled by a dizzying number of text commands, where all players could freely spawn in any entity in the game and modify them to their heart's content. RP quality was schizophrenic at best -- the majority of public games around the time I played usually devolved into excuses to smash hordes of units into each-other. Ideas were rarely more involved than tropes of military empires, swarming monsters, dark overlords and unstoppable badasses; all generally just given a simple rename from whatever they originally were and leaving it at that. There were no moderators beyond whoever was hosting a particular match, and there was no canon unless two players recognized each-other. The few good roleplayers became fairly tight-knit once they encountered each-other and regarded the "pub" lobbies with distain. Looking back, my own experience with the whole thing was mostly negative. I was in a pretty dark place for the latter half of my time there, for reasons I won't disclose. I gained a reputation for being a joyless, grumpy jerk who almost never had the motivation to participate in stuff. I also found public lobbies insufferable and boring, but I lacked the RP chops, social graces and skill with the Cortex engine needed to keep pace with all the actually decent players. I like to think I've mellowed out considerably since then. Around 2014-2015, I finally ended up getting fed up with the whole thing and quit. It was around that time, actually, that I noticed a friend of mine from those days playing Starbound an awful lot. I inquired, and they pointed me towards Galaxy Citizen. The Outpost Bar era was in full swing, with its chaos and goofiness and lazy bar-RP, but frankly it was a breath of fresh air compared to the abysmal standards of Cortex's public lobbies. The rest is history.
First RP that I really remember was over Pokemon Showdown when I was 13-14 (?). I played Dracka, a garchamp, and I have next to no memory of what she ever really /did/– she just sort of wandered around and got into fights sometimes. I wasn't super good at pokemon battles but I had an okay time. I never made any consistent friends, IC or OOC, because people left and joined the particular server i frequented almost constantly every day. I have no idea what the appeal was- RP is only interesting to me now if the people your character meets are still there the next day. After pokemon showdown I played on Roblox. I didn't consistently meet anybody there, either. My character was a mary sue dragon hybrid with bullshit superpowers that made no sense, but I distinctly remember /not/ being the worst RPer there somehow. Like I never really got into CRP and I recall someone saying their character kicked a rock at another character at the speed of light– even at 14 I knew that was total horseshit. I honestly don't think there's anything I could've said to my young self that would've made her any better of a RPer. I just learned shit over time. Maybe I would've told myself to stay out of OOC cliques on GC because it made me into a huge asshole for several years.
I started in GMod playing HL2RP; i knew the staff for a lot of servers that came and went over the years (typically the same staff team). Eventually I left and did shit on the Bay12 Forums, and some time in 2016 I joined GC after just randomly joining a server on the server lister (good thing i didnt pick bacons). It took me some time to adjust and be not cringe. Not really sure what I would say to old me; I could say not to get involved in shabazz, but tbh it was pretty funny at the time when all we did was dick around on server
