I'm curious. ^_^

When I first started RPing, it was an Avatar rpg and I did it a little differently. We were in a forum on TV.com and each of us made little Avatar-land characters. We weren't planning anything with them, but I got the idea to put them into a story. It wasn't a collaboration effort - I put everyone's characters into a script-like story that they really liked. Then a new proboards forum was advertised on the same site. An actual avatar rpg. So I joined it, and discovered I could make at least two paragraphs even if I'd never rped before. (Go Creative Writers!)

But I made one of the WORST Mary-Sue's I'd ever pushed upon myself. She was a firebender and an earthbender (we had tweaked the plot so that people could be a double bender if they wanted) had been abandoned by her village because the elder found out she was part firebender (her homevillage was Earth) and cut her badly on the arm, then cast her out. I think she was seven or eight when this happened. She was raised by wolves and developed all these powerful techiques. No one could get the better of her, she was tough, she was strong, and at the age of fourteen (the age I made her when I started) she had ridiculous endurance.

So, what are your rping memories? Mary Sues? Bad posts? Grammar? Tell all!

I would have had to put myself in pending if I tried to join a game I'm admining today, because... oh boy, I sucked.

Post length was awful: I was (and still am, to a certain point) a very concise poster, but I must have been a friggin' nightmare to reply to, because I never gave others anything with substance to reply to. Sure, I got the reply out there, but it was always just a short response to what had happened, and absolutely no attempt to move the plot along.

As for Mary Sues... yeah, had those too. I think most of my early characters had something that would classify them as Mary Sue, at least in the way that I described it back then. I just didn't know how to make a balanced character. I never consciously tried to make them perfect, but they just came out that way a lot.

But, despite how much I sucked back then, I miss those days, when I could post several times in one day without it being a Project that would take forever and zap me of creativity and will to do anything else for the rest of the day. I miss the days when RPG's were all about fun, and not so much about politics. Don't get me wrong, I still love RP'ing, but it was a lot easier back then.

Me and a friend of mine were learning together- and ohhh boy. We started out RPing verbally- and it was kind of scary. I admit, my first Version of Aeris was so mary sue-ish I would reject her on any of my RP sites.

She was perfect. I swear at the age of sixteen she was an adept level mage, and kicked her mage master's butt on a regular basis. She was a mindspeaker(telepathic) and had healing abilities. On top of other things.....

She had no flaws. She had the perfect history. She had the perfect boyfriend- and her entire clan LOVED her.

*dies* Yeah- I went there....

Anyway, as we progressed we restarted about a hundred times because things kept getting boring- we both played perfect characters, of course it did....

Anyway, it took me a LONG time to get to where I am, and I still don't think I'm a roleplaying master. I'm just better than I used to be, and in a few months I'll probably be better than I am now.

*reminisces* When I was but a wee lass in the fall of 2002, I stumbled across a rare and wondrous place that was affiliated with a Harry Potter fanfic forum. It was called Virtual Hogwarts, and it was a massive RPG. And I had no idea how to do anything. My first character was a fabulously wealthy French pureblood with a snobby name (Guinevere Iris duVeau) and a "tragic" past and a family curse who was good at everything. She could even sing gorgeously and recite Shakespeare at 12. My posts were typically half the size of this paragraph. I was so clueless, that a few weeks in I accidentally posted a snowball fight thread in spring. The members pounced on me and ate me alive. I was angsty, and left.

I then moved on to an adult HP site which someone had illegally advertised on the other site, and I was there for a long time. During that time I really cut my RP teeth. While I was RPing there, I was creating my own sites, learning how to be an admin, and also learning a lot about post writing and character development. Eventually I became admin on that adult HP site, but the administration was so awful and lazy, the site so sloppy and ugly, and the member base so stagnant and immature, that I left that site as well. Besides, I was still using French Mary Sue With the Tragic Past and my posts were still pretty awful. (Ever since that site, I've had a dream of creating a post-grad HP site that wasn't freaking awful. I didn't think I had the experience to pull it off until a few months ago.)

It wasn't until about two years ago that I really started to see improvement. I think when I entered college, with my career path made official, that I started to take all writing seriously, including on roleplays.

Man, but do I miss Diamond Court and Atlanta's End! They were awesome RPs, even if the characters and setting were silly and the writing was pretty darn bad.

I really don't know how long it took me to get into the proper RPing shape. I guess it was because I joined enough sites with Nazi-like admins that forced their members to post like pros. I appreciate them for that, because if it weren't for them I wouldn't be able to shell out three to four paragraphs. It's why I like harsh critique.

If I want to be completely honest, I started RPing when I was 9/10 years old on...*coughs* a My Little Pony chat room. Granted, I didn't know that's what we were doing, just that it was fun pretending to be Pony Pirates. Arrr!

Ahem.

I don't really count that, though. I officially started RPing when I was about 12 or 13, so roughly 11 or 12 years ago. I only remember because I started RPing when Titanic and Final Fantasy 7 came out. xD Anyway, I discovered my first game browsing Discovery Online's message boards (they did have message boards back in the day =O) and I found this thread on wolves...and it was a mod posting a link to some wolf RPG saying the people who used to play on Discovery Online's message boards were no longer allowed to, and here's the link to the game one of the members created to continue it.

So I clicked the link...and was instantly enamored. <3 It was a great wolf/dragon/unicorn/horse RPG with magic and mayhem and a lot of rich lore! It was tons of fun. And me? I was not shy at all. I whipped up a character (there were none of them there application thingies and no posted rules; the community regulated itself) and hopped right into the middle of a war. :B Then since no one was on, I created a second character and played with my first for a while and had them fight and stuff. :B *cough*

Anyway, I was pretty darned atrocious, but I also wasn't at all shy and was very proactive...and the people there were a lot better than me, but they put up with me. x3 Heck, one person even let my character kill his two weeks into the game. They were really laid back, tolerant folks which is good because anywhere else and I would have probably been chased out.

So yeah. My first character ever was a female wolf who...man...looking back she was such a Sue. xDD But she was FUN! But let's see...by the time the game died (I was part of it for about four or five years, spin-offs included) she had 7 kids. :B One had an unknown father, three were by some wolf she got with and then kinda left, two were by a wolf she genuinely adored and they had much drama between them, and the last was...uhh...another one of unknown father-age. O_o Not even I knew who! xD Because the kid just sorta...popped up and I rolled with it. *laughs* Her life was one drama after the next, and she died about...twice? And came back of course.

The second oldest character (that I created with her to fight her xD) was eeeeeevil! Back in those, I did the good vs. evil thing, and he was eeeeevil. *groans* I basically created him to be the baddiest baddy that ever did bad, and I remember a lot of instances where a bunch of the eeevil wolves were sitting around telling stories about their evilest deeds, trying to out-evil each other. xDD It was serious business back then! Also, because I was young and lame, when my baddy took over one of the packs and decided everyone should train for war, how did he have them train?

...Dummies. |: Straw dummies.

I wish I was kidding. WOLVES. EVIL WOLVES OF DOOM. And he had then beating up on straw dummies.

It hurts my brain on so many levels. Oh yeah, he also died about...two or three times and came back. Ahem. On the plus side, after a few years of playing him he evolved from that and became a well-rounded character (for me at the time, that is).

We all also made up lotsa corny names for spells and stuff...I remember a few names of my spells because I still have a lot of my old RP stuff written down for nostalgia's sake. Some winners included: Fatal Flare, Ravenite, Agony, and Light of Darkness. *nods* Hoo boy. I didn't have bad grammar I don't believe, but my RPing was lulworthy. I have some old posts still. They were much better at the time. ;D

OH YEAH! And in one of the unicorn flocks, I decided to play a female deer with a fawn. I don't know what I was smoking (again, I was like 12...but still...*cringe*) but I had her kid get captured and thrown into a volcano (...why there was a volcano there suddenly I have no clue), conveniently landing on a ledge. So mother deer had to rescue her fawn before the volcano exploded, so she jumped inside it and out of it and ran from lava and stuff.

.....I wish I was kidding. xDDD I was a strange, strange child.

But irregardless of all that, it was epic fun and we had a lot of fun plots! :3 It's where I learned how to play, and I got better from it. Plus, again...it was fun. And I'm still friends with a number of the people. Heck, one is co-admin of both my games. I miss that game. x3 Even though I know I could ever go back to that style because I've changed so much as an RPer.

I played on a number of different games after that, all magical wolf ones and a few big cat ones. When I created Spirits of the Earth, that was the first time I ever attempted to RP humanoids and I was hooked.

Oh yeah, and I still play my eeeeevil wolf guy. x3 I missed him so I revamped him for my game and updated him to fit my style. I've been considering doing the same with my other first character because I miss her, too.

I wasn't even close to being a master XD. My posts rarely hit more than a short paragraph, maybe 2-3 sentences, and if it did, it was because there was a lot of action going on. I used to write in present tense, then had a change of heart after doing poorly on a short story that was a mix of past and present. My first roleplays were all medieval fantasy, as the place I rped at had basic forums and you created a topic and went from there, writing whatever you wanted. There was plenty of bad grammar, many overpowered Mary Sues (I had one, but she's evolved out of that since then), and a lot of random. I also remember all of those Rps being really fast-paced and energetic, because the posts were so short and we were all so eager. We flew through plots. It was a blast. Now... Haha, it's all MUCH slower and I seem to be lucky if I make it through ANY large plots. It almost makes me want to regress back to the old days, with no word limits and a small group of people who you could always create some wacky plot with.

Well, when i started...i wasnt sure what i was doing. I didnt have any muse really...and i wrote literally word by word without any feel, without any character. But i did have characters that i considered different from each other. But when i put them into play...they all seemed just the same.

Of course, i was 12 at the time, so i wasnt sure about all that stuff. But i gave it a go.

Also, the characters took a lot of characterization from me. I had little backbone at the time, so my characters were push overs and i could never lead plots correctly.

But then, i didnt roleplay with the nicest people. Of course, being the silly kid i was, i fell upon their trap and i just was in their complete control.

Now, i've broken off from that ^-^
Thank goodness...it was so annoying being their puppy with his tail between his legs.

I've been RPing for nearly two years now, and I can say that I've come a long, long, long way from where I began. Why? I'm on the same sight that I started on, and I get to see my old posts whenever I want to. Or whenever someone else wants to rub my nose it them.

I could turn out the site's word minimum, 150 words, two paragraphs, without ever having done this stuff before, and I thought I was AWESOME. The first character I ever created was Kiora Adpressa. She was so horrible, I don't even want to go into it. I still have a fair amount of affection for her though, just because she was my first character, and I made a very good friend by writing her.

I had been on the site for six months when in rushed this crowd that at the time seemed so much above me, I was totally floored. They all immediately became my idols and I religiously stalked all their threads. Yes, I was a creepy little girl. Of course, everyone did it, so I didn't feel creepy.

I still didn't think I sucked [though I did], I just didn't think I was on the same level that these people were. I learned a TON by just reading their posts, and writing with them. You know those people who can drag you up to write closer to their level? Yeah, that's what these FOUR people were like.

After about four months of that, I left the sight for a few reasons. I started to feel steamrolled by the amazing ability of these writers and everyone else around me. It seemed like they were all improving by leaps and bounds, while I was movign at a crawl. Plus there was creative burn out, problems with another member, and RL biting me in the butt. When I DID come back after a couple months, I didn't go back to that site, just because the problem member who'd scared me away in the first place was still there.

So, by googling, I found this place, and thus, a whole other world of RPing. I joined sites, RPed a bit before they died, and moved on. Frankly, I was shocked. "That wasn't was how RPing was supposed to work." I kept searching for a good site, but hey all either kept dieing on me or the attitude of the board was just not right for me. I was use to this uber open, friendly, any level welcome and we'll help you improve sort of thing, and it wasn't there where I was looking.

I went back to my first sight at the beginning of the year after finding out the problem member was GONE, and it's been up from their. I love it. It's really a board that has made it's members improve. Even in the last MONTH, people have gotten better.

And that's my slightly off topic story.

3 or 4 years ago, after convincing my dad to sign and fax in a consent form, I began my roleplaying life on Neopets.

I was... rather bad back then. Mary Sue, not so much, but I was an attention hog (and I admit, I still am). I'm fairly sure I had decent grammar and spelling, having read so much... but the memories I have of half-elven girls with pet dragons that went into seizures, dragon riders with dark pasts, and angsty wolves are not fond ones. The fact that I improved from these roots is rather heartening, and it's probably the reason why I try to be friendly with people who are new to the genre, in the hopes that they'll improve to. :>

It was also rather hard to type particularly long posts, due to the character limit Neopets puts on things (300 characters? BLASPHEMY!). For a while, you could bypass it by simply writing in another program and pasting it in, but eventually you HAD to split your posts into pieces, and this wasn't exactly fun for me to do. It's probably because of that limitation that I ended up being a person who prefers concise posts that get my point across.

I began to improve after starting a one on one with a person I met in one thread. I was able to get into a medium where I could do a continuing story, with a person I knew and a medium that didn't delete your post and warn you if you so much as dared to mention a real life company. On the other hand, it got me rather hopelessly obsessed with the crossover genre, since we both were interested in that and it was fairly easy to plot out.

I still talk to the guy, even if we don't roleplay as much. It's pretty cool to know someone that long. |D

After that, I began to get into Pokemon roleplaying forums, and these were probably my first experience with forums. They were fairly simple, being a one on one conversation with a mod, and they didn't involve much contact between individual players. Later, I branched out to other forums, and... eventually I managed to spread myself a bit too wide and everything just sort of collapsed. I ended up losing my muse due to that, although I'm getting better.

I'm still trying to get better at roleplaying, and more importantly, I'm trying to get back into it after a rather long hiatus. I don't exactly roleplay up there with the stars, but I try, and I have fun while doing it.

...boy, that's like 3 times as long as I expected this to be.

Well, when I started out rping it was at a tabletop game, because we didn't have internet back then. Yes, children, gather 'round and I'll tell you of the many wondrous adventures we acted out gathered around the fire in the cave while we waited for the mastodon to finish roasting ...

Looking back, I wasn't really too horrible in those days, though I wasn't nearly as good as I thought I was. On the other hand, I wasn't nearly as bad as most of the other players, nevermind the DMs (that's Dungeon Masters, for you youngsters). I really only had about three characters. Oh, I had dozens of character sheets, but every one was just some variation on one of the three, with a different name and different history. In my defense, D&D at the time didn't really lend itself to character development -- characters were a pile of HP (hit points), possibly armed with spells, in an AC (armor class). It wasn't until I moved into games that at least had a mechanism for skills other than weapon skills, and some which took a stab at defining personality traits, that I really became something resembling a competent rper.

Note: much of the above should be read with tongue firmly in cheek.

Now I know who posted that nasty comment about VH on mugglenet. Don't worry, I know where you're coming from. There was a huge problem for a while with elitists jumping in threads, telling off ickles and then having the gall to say "I don't RP with firsties".

So yeah, my first (and most adored) character was also at VH. That's why I feel so much more comfortable on a board with a thousand members or more.

Coraline Lacrimosa Diamanda Depyr started out as a vampire, but got upgraded to human when the site rules changed. She was recently described to me as "such a badass", which I take as a compliment, because that's the way she was meant.

But she did some really screwed up things as well. In the early days, most of the RPing on the site happened in the third floor corridor (because it was before book four had been published) and EVERYTHING you can imagine happened there. One of Corrie's friends was Sirius Black's daughter and a "time walker" so she could travel in time without needing a time-turner. And take her friends with her, luckily. She went back in time and had an affair with Tom Riddle, while Tom tried to kill Corrie and the two other girls who'd come along.

But then the canon rules came in, which got rid of amazing powers like that, along with Coraline's vampireness. After that, the only thing that made her stand out was her affinity for spiders, her loathing of just about everyone, her abuse of prefectly powers (when she got them), her neverending quest for ickleslaves, her abysmal grades, her inability to duel or play quidditch and my willingness to RP with newbies.

She actually wasn't that bad for a first character, now that I think of it.

Oh goodness, no.. I was legendarily bad.

I read a lot of fantasy when I started RPing, high fantasy sort of stuff... but my first board was Talsquash, an Australian Magical school upon which Tally is partly based. The board closed and reopened several times, I was very sad to see it go.

My first character ever: Kalethira Tianne L'Ameru.

Go figure.

Known as Kallie for short, she'd spent time in a muggle school which had blown up after she put a complaint in about her science teacher (of course the attack was aimed at her!) and she was the daughter of Ameliana Athrose, followed by Lillera Athkira the Talsquash librarian, and had no idea she was next in line for the throne of a country she didn't know existed.

But my crowning achievement in bad is my second character, who was Lillera Athkira... this seventeen year old professor/librarian was constantly drunk, had degrees for just about any job she ever wanted to do, had been working as a music teacher at the school Kallie was at that blew up, and knew the girl was her half-sister from the royal blue eyes both girls had. Lillera's full name was Adelerathkiaraellra Ellareisse (insert about twenty other second names) Athrose-DeVylissea.

She had an evil stepmother, of course, and found out at seventeen when her 'father' died, that she was adopted and is REALLY a sorceress. She took the Talsquash students to her homeland, where her grandmother had just died, Kallie was murdered, and Lilzie took the throne reluctantly, and in her pyjamas. Since then, she has died twice (cause sorceresses can come back, see), developed the world's biggest tolerance to alcohol, had two children and another on the way, and is generally known as the town bike.

She's known as Adele now, and I'm not ashamed to say I still play her. She's a heck of a lot of fun, especially when you add in the things I've learned about making characters through the years... she's generally recognised as being pretty stupid where people are concerned, makes rash decisions that often turn out bad, hides her other lives (the royalty and the events of her past in the outside world) usually at the expense of getting close to others...

My following characters were much better, but I still love Kallie and Del.

Back in March of '01, I must've been 11 or something -- it was this dragon RPG called Mystics and Fury, with either Boards2go or Voy boards. I can't remember anymore. I joined a silver dragon named -- guess what! -- Silver Shadow, and my posts were one/two-word posts like ~*she smiled*~ and um. Okay, so it was bad.

I went through nearly all of the phases of roleplaying, including the one-word posts, wolfspeak & excessive apostrophes, the huge posts full of nothing in particular combined with six-syllable words...

My friend put it this way:

Sure, I think I've been through more than just the phases listed. I don't know. But as for me, I've decided to stick with "simple and concise," and to hell with the people who think that 1) short posts can't possibly be good, and that 2) posts that sound all pretty and eloquent are always better than everything else.

Master? Pff. I don't even consider myself a master now. It took me a long time to find my feet and only REALLY did it in my most recent years. I produced characters that, thinking back, make me cringe, put them in even worse situations but developed along the way. My writing improved, so did my grasp on plotting, but I still do things that other people would turn their nose up at. However, the game is for me and other people whose cup of tea the set up is. I stick up advertisements, but I'm not hell-bent on making my game, or my roleplaying, for the benefit of guests who may or may not join dependent on it. I'm so tired of hearing people say, 'I want to do this but I'm afraid of what people would think...' Just do it!

So no. Not a master, still a newbie in some respects and probably not as 'seasoned' as some other people, but I like to roleplay to enjoy myself. So long as I'm doing that, whether I'm a master in my trade is irrelevant.

I was sort of throan in with a mixed crowd. Some of the horse role play site I first joined were experts while others could barely string two words together. I found that I never did one liners but did often do two lines.

When one first starts role playing obviously they're not a master at it. It takes time and practice really, unless you're an extraordinary writer to begin with. It just takes time. I wouldn't sweat it.

This is my first few years. I'm on year number three, which really isn't much since some of you guys have been RPing for seven years and the like. I won't say I'm a bad RPer because, despite the fact that I don't like word minimums and pretentious people, I think I'm pretty decent.

1. First RP was fantasy actually about six years ago. I was only on there a month and I couldn't get anyone to RP with me. n00b.

2. Started RPing for real about three and a half years ago on a board I created. That's right--I actually created a board before I knew a whole lot about roleplaying. (Guess what: it's still going though I'm no longer there.)

3. Now I just float around because I've run into so many sucky admins it makes me want to die. Or something.

Oh, man. You have no idea how terrible I was at the whole "role-playing" thing. I was maybe 11 or 12 or so and I knew next to nothing about good writing or character creation. I believe it was a board based off the Redwall books, and it was great fun before it closed.

I improved a great deal by playing with an incredibly tolerant group of people who were better than me and knew how grammar worked, and simply growing up a bit helped. I'm 18 now and quite honestly I still have no idea what I'm doing sometimes, but I'm getting there.

I did some of the worst one-liners ever. I think I once actually a post that just said "She talked to him more." And other things along the lines of "She said yes."
It was awful. Of course that was also more then five years ago and it wasn't long before someone decided to give me some advice and guidlines and it really helped.

Of course I also wanted every character I made to be flawless. Independent but kind. Open but good at keeping secrets. Stuff like that. It was aweful, pretty much everything I once did, now would annoy me to death.

Oh God! My first roleplaying still hurts to look at. I've saved all my old sites in my bookmarks so that I can remember how muh better I have gotten.. . .

I started on Neo but my first site was a HP during school times but didn't include any of the canons. I played two originals that weren't really original at all because they were based and named after two of the main characters in the movie 'Final Destination', 'Clear Rivers' and 'Alex Browning'. I did one-liners like mad, didn't know to space my commas, and I was downright awful. But, then again, I was ten/eleven! No one was perfect at roleplaying when they were ten anyway or even when they began.

My second attempts at roleplaying still ended with me making characters based on those in books or tv shows. My characters had a name change, but they were played by the same PB or had the same abilities. My characters were always frigging crazy. They'd use illusions to juggle chainsaws or do some quirky stuff that was unrelated to the real problem. It was very sad . .. But now I've been at it for about five years. I'm not really a master and I doubt I'll ever be. Though I like to think that I'm a hell of a lot better than I was when I was ten.

I first started RPing in 1994, the time when dinosaurs walked the earth....

I came across a group of people who were playing characters from Piers Anthony's Xanth novels. Being a fan of the book, I thought it would be fun to join. Little did I know that would start my journey into the world of role-playing.

I have to admit that, back then, I was a terrible writer and wrote in the first person all the time. I was just beginning to understand what it was to play. Because of how I was, I don't look down upon those who are starting off.

Same boat as December, still in my first few years of RPing. Just coming into year three now I guess. I'm no master, but I started older than most (10 or 11? O_o, I didn't get going until I was fourteen), and I guess being fond of creative writing helped me in that I ironed out a fair few RPing problems before I actually started.

So no, not really a master, but I started off a bit better than a lot of people here have been sharing. Like I rarely one liner(ed) unless I have(had) absolutely terrible block or lack of muse. Although I'm sure I must have had at least one Mary-Sue, I don't think I can identify one specifically. I'm not pretentious enough to say I've never made one of those characters, but in that case, it probably wasn't as bad as most are.

i started RPing back when harry potter RPG's were popular... like where u could be a death eater, etc... but then book 7 came out and now good harry potter RPG's are dead, so now i RP in highschool RP's

but I can honestly say.. my first RP was called Phoenix Tears.. and I was absolutely TERRIBLE

Oh dear...

When I first started roleplaying, I was horrendous. I think I can attribute this partially to the fact that I was eleven. I've since had seven odd years to improve.

I didn't write horribly. I wrote decent-length descriptions and had more-or-less acceptable grammar. But I was painfully wordy, and sometimes misused words or phrases whose meanings I didn't realize I didn't understand.

And I wrote Mary-Sues.

Looking back, I'm sorely tempted to vomit in my mouth a little...

Sixteen year old Jedi Masters with perfect force control AND piloting skills – Beautiful, über-powerful mutants with tragic, incredibly angsty pasts – Insane and feisty hackers who fought the authority of the Matrix while seducing everyone else aboard the hovership...

... Yeah. I was that kid.

I'd like to think I'm improved since then. I've tried a lot of genres in the past several years, and pushed myself to attempt a variety of characters, along with in-depth research. I still have loads of room for improvement, but hey – anyone who doesn't isn't human!

hahaha. wow. when i first stumbled upon RPing, i was bad. like omg-one-liner-mary-sue bad. and the worst part about that was i thought i was pretty good.o.O i didn't think i was doing too shabby, and now when i look back on those posts i blush. it's embarrassing.

i started RPing on a harry potter website called HEX, and then it just went on from there. i'm glad i stuck to it, because i feel a lot better about my writing and stuff. i'm glad that i had people to put up with my suckish posts and stuff. lol.

I can't actually remember where I started roleplaying; probably the neoboards. I remember the first site I made, which was rubbish but actually got quite a lot of members - and I remember a couple of roleplaying guilds which I was in on neopets. But apart from that? I have no idea. I know the first Harry Potter forum I was on, though, which was called Waddiwasi. That must have been about a year after I'd first started roleplaying, and I played Snape. I remember myself as being quite good, but of course that's what I thought at the time: if I looked back at it now I'd probably want to kill my eleven/twelve-year-old self.

But as for general roleplaying quality? At first I was... well, pants, but I had correct grammar and spelling and un-Sueish, although incredibly undeveloped, characters; and my usual posts were shorter than this is so far. Then I made a roleplay guild on neopets based on a haunted school. My character was pretty but tomboyish. She was an orphan. She'd never been to school before, and she was dreading it. She'd lived on the streets with her mum, who'd either disappeared or died; then she'd lived in an abandoned cinema. She'd had to steal food to eat. Reading her old intro post makes me want to weep - I was truly terrible. She was truly terrible, and the person I was roleplaying with actually told me that 'my character was too emo'. I was horribly offended, not to mention shocked, and online-stormed off in a huff...

The main site I roleplay on now is one I've been on for about - one and a half years? And it's horrible because I can go back and see how awful I was. Also, it's a really slow-moving board now, so even the topic's I'm in... my first post can be from months ago, which is always horrendously embarrassing. Ugh.

Yeah. I've been roleplaying since I was ten or eleven, and I'm fourteen now. So it's not that long. I've been writing since I was about six, though.

Heh... When I first started roleplaying, it was on (brace yourselves) Neopets forums. And I have to say, even as a beginner, I wasn't horrendously bad. Sure, my posts were very short, and my characters were dull in how broadly drawn they were (had the good sister, the evil brother, and the other brother that was comic relief) but even as a newb, I had always tried to be descriptive and correct in spelling and grammar. In fact, I think my descriptiveness has suffered a bit since then; I no longer care so much about the tiny details, so I don't bother adding the fluff to my posts.

Haha, I was terrible, but I never started Roleplaying on an actual RP board, I started Roleplaying on a VP site almost three years ago when I joined (I'm still a member, but I no longer RP on there, as they're all one-liners nowadays).

I never did one-liners, as I was a pretty decent writer, and I tried to keep them at least a paragraph or so long, but when you roleplay with users who only posting one line, it does tend to get difficult.

I then made a forum, dedicated to roleplaying, for members of the site to use, with more flexible rules where you didn't need to roleplay as your pets, this led me to joining a few different sites, but I'd say I pretty much learnt everything from writing Fan Fictions.

Different I know, but I push myslef to keep my posts long, just like I try and keep myself going. I describe things as best as I can, and sometimes it takes me days to post, but I think thats what makes you a better roleplayer.

I set goals for myself, and try to achieve them, I'm just a nerd though o.O

The site I run now has been open for nearly 2 complete years and I look at some of the posts that I made with my original character from the start. He was a character that was taken from my days of room/chat based MSN RP (Anyone else play in those places like Frostwind etc?) and making the jump from the basic description required in a chat situation to a forum based game was big indeed. My posts were awful.

I compare them to some of the threads I am in now and I just cringe at how awful they were. I have got so much better. I am really tempted to re-write my character sheets for my old characters. But that might be a bit yada.

I've been RPing for 10 years. I started when I was 12 and my dad taught us to play DnD. My first game, I got killed because I had missed a trap. That has since instilled a healthy sense of paranoia in checking everything in a game.

My first online game was a couple years later. It was a Star Wars Jedi Academy. I played a Padawan named Alaxia. She was a bit Sue-ish, but not horribly so.

I've definitely gotten better over the years, especially the past five years or so where I've been playing in more serious games. I still do primarily tabletop RPs, so paragraph length and all that stuff just goes right over my head. But mostly my attention to detail and ability to catch little things that are relevant has gotten better, as well as thinking quickly when stuff is happening quickly...and strategy! I've become the group's planner, more or less, because more than once things have come down to "get out immediately or your doomed" and I've managed to cobble together a plan that got us out relatively unscathed (if you're not dead, you're fine!).

Yeah, I sucked when I first started out. I think my first RP was my brother's friends board, or something like that. My character was a typical Mary-Sue for a first time player. Tragic past, family who cast her out, smart as could be, sang like an angel, looked amazing, blah,blah,blah. I would probably hurt myself if I made a character as bad as her now. My posts I think were longer back then, than what I do now, rather than shorter. I thing my first post was about three or four paragraphs, no lie, but then site died a few days after it opened, cause no one RPed.

I've gotten better, but I know I've still got a long way to go.

oh haha, my first character! it was on this shaman king/star wars cross over roleplay and it was just filled with one-liners and godmodding, but we didn't care, we had fun. her name was keisha (i was a sugababes fan -cough-) and she was pretty, but weak, so her boyfriend had to save her ALL the timeeeee. and she was an attentionwhore.

my first REAL character was bridget yokosami. she wasn't even japanese, she just had this weird made-up surname xD i was eleven, i think. she was beautiful and she could sing and ice skate and omg! suddenly she was a vampire. with wings.

my first year of rp-ing was crap! i didn't get english grammar at all (i'm dutch), but i've gotten better over the years. i'm ashamed of my first posts though, they were soooo bad.

and then my first real rpg board was this high school board where everyone was gorgeous and emo and everyone had so much drama going on. we were all friends, but they decided to shut me out in the end, so i moved on. it was my best move ever to leave x]

so yeahh, that's about it.

When I started RPing I was worse than bad. I think the dust on my computer screen could have written better than I did. It took me a while to get into multi-paragraph shape, too. I didn't push myself at ALL so I was in one-liner mode for a good year and a half. Then I found a fun site with an awesome plot so I started making myself write more and more on the site I owned with my friend. We both turned ourselves from one-liners to two paragraphs in approximatley a month and then we joined the site we found and slowly got better with out writing.

Now we can each do 3-4 good solid paragrphs per post no problem. I'm quite proud of my accomplishment, too., RPing actually really helped improve my writing for English class and such.

When I started RPing, I was a tricky little bastard who thought they could get away with playing LotR themed roleplays at a strict Harry Potter world rp site, a.k.a. WB (harrypotter.com). It was six years ago.

Oh, and I was banned several times of course. But I didn't let a silly thing like that stop me. If WB really wanted to get rid of me, they ought to have just banned my IP anyway.

I feel a bit inexperienced compared to some people; I've only been playing for two years! when I first started, I joined on this proboards site that wasn't even made for solely rp, there was just an rp category that I lurked in. I had two characters; My first was pretty sue-ish. I mean, she had her faults, she fit in the plot, but she was an orphan and shit. The next was... actually pretty good, I think.

Then, I didn't really know that you were supposed to post more than a sentence per post because that's what everyone else was doing. But lately, I've gotten to a decent-sized post, around four or five paragraphs average. more or less, you know.

But really, if my two-years-ago self signed up on my forum today, I would have denied them. sorry, little me.

I remember my first time of rping.

Also, that's how I got into forums. Anyway, I was that High School Musical obsessed fan girl, I was on the IMDB forums and someone had posted a link to an HSM rp site, after that, I was hooked. Later, the staff members gave me a hard time, I didn't do anything though, the site was becoming in-active and I was trying to help promoting for more people to come. I wasn't ban though, I had left the rping scene. Until spring 2008, I've stumbled onto other rp sites on and off.

I wouldn't say I've improved, since I'm an on and off roleplayer, that's why I'd like to rp again to improve more.

I've been an IRC rper for my entire 8 year rping career. Some of my most memorable moments came from a Star Fox RPG I played in, under a GM named Ashe. He had a flair for the dramatic that was unparalleled, I've never seen anything like it again.

Tragically, he was shunned by the group he played in because they wanted a more REALISTIC setting (realistic setting with anthropomorphic furs, battleships, set in a galaxy far far away) and he left IRC.

I can only aspire to be as good of a gm as he was.

PS: Most comedic moment comes from my first table top gaming session. The above quotes summarize it. (Cedric is an orc character from a guy who really doesn't get orcs)

<Cedric> Maybe the cave.. is the werewolf.

<Cedric> *after being offered a fresh sword by a young child* Cedric...appreciates your entrepreneurial spirit.
<GM> .......................... NO. YOU ARE AN ORC. ORCS DO NOT KNOW THESE WORDS.

<Mage> So the wolf likes sheep? I'm going to use burning hands and explosives and make a molotov sheep.

*Polgara sat on the cough, waiting for someone to talk to her*

That pretty much was how it went. It was a Hogwarts RPG, not sure how I found it, but everyone was a lot older then me. I was nine, they were 17+... but didn't know how old I was. xD They were all cybering and have chatrooms with characters playing strip truth or dare or whatever and I sat there, my "love interest" hooking up with another character because I had no clue what was going on!

Yeah, it was weird. And I stopped for a bit after that. But it was too fun making a person and being them- NOT YOU- that I needed it. <3

B2G was the boards of choice, when I first played, though. No forum games whatsoever. And I went through many, many different stages of RP.

Wasn't a master then, I'm still not. I'd like to think I suck less, though. =]