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How did you first get into RPing? - Printable Version +- Zelda Universe RPG (https://zurpg.sephiroth.ws) +-- Forum: Community (https://zurpg.sephiroth.ws/forum-17.html) +--- Forum: General Discussion (https://zurpg.sephiroth.ws/forum-20.html) +--- Thread: How did you first get into RPing? (/thread-551.html) |
How did you first get into RPing? - WindStrike - 06-12-2014 Thread title says it all. Just wondering how people here first got into RPing. Maybe ZURPG is your first experience, but I know a good number of you started elsewhere. So share how you got in, what game it was, and your experiences. Mine... I think a few of you have heard this. Prior to ZURPG was its previous/broken version called ZCURPG, but that actually wasn't my first. Back in middle school, my parents finally allowed me to play games online, so naturally, as my favorite PC game was Starcraft 1, I played the crap out of it online. Lots of custom games, many of which are very outdated by now, but I still have a lot of fun memories from then. Honestly, I don't know how I even got drawn into it (clicking into it, that is), but I ended up playing an RP map one day. Some nice guys taught me what it actually was, and I thought "hey, I want to build up my own cities and characters and interact with others with my own stories too! This sounds like it could be fun!" I ended up gaining a few dedicated Starcraft RPer friends, and we generally played the Ticonderoga maps. That's when I created my first set of characters, some of which I continue to use to this day (see: Roka). To those of you that don't know how Starcraft RPing works, now that I think about it, it's actually a very unique style of RPing. You get an invincible flying unit that serves as your spawner. On the right side of the map, you have a bunch of options of units you can summon under your spawner, each with various names and stats. There's generally some cool effects and spells you can do, too. And then you can create whatever you want, and interact with others however you want. It's as broken as it sounds - everyone can be both the DM and the player. But there's usually some house rules in effect if there's a good set of players, like what kind of combat, what everyone wants to be (hero, city builder, or both), and if there's a bad player that just spawns a bunch of big units and tries to kill everyone else, vote kick 'em. It's been a long time, and I honestly don't remember that many of the house rules. The two major problems I remember the game suffered from... players disconnecting and the game going too long and players having to leave. And my god, it happened a lot. Like, 80-90% of the time. But for that 10-20% of the time that we got the games going, they were definitely worth it. I was generally a city builder; yes, everything used Starcraft models, but hey, that's what imagination is for, right? The majority of my cities were moderately defended... I think at one point, one of the heroes ended up firestorming an entire city (in Starcraft terms, it means dropping a ton of nukes). Villains, ya know. As much as we attempted to avoid godmodding, by the ends of every game, it was a god fest, which is typical when you throw multiple DMs into the same game without more defined rules. I did my best to avoid god modding with my characters, and they were fair..... up until I couldn't stand the thought of them dying, lol. And honestly, that is the number one cause of godmodding - not a result of people wanting to be stronger than everyone else, but because they don't know what they'll do if the character dies. All in all, despite all the obvious flaws and issues, I really enjoyed it, and when a certain person started up ZCURPG, I was all for it, to the point where I attempted to hijack the game multiple times... then the creator actually gave me the game. Then a mixed bag of things happened... until the game hit its stride a little over a year ago. IT ONLY TOOK ME SIX YEARS TO FIX IT! Then again, work on the game wasn't consistent at all until April of last year. Can't say it's fully consistent now, but hey, whole lot better than before, and there's multiple people making/DMing quests as well as working on development. I'd say it worked out. Those Starcraft RPs still exist, though on a much more complex level that I personally couldn't get into, courtesies of Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2. Instead of using a bunch of buildings or a section of the map to define what you can do, you instead do it via commands, similar to IRC commands. The issue is... my god there's a ton of them, and I didn't feel like memorizing them all. Not to mention, for the Starcraft 2 version especially, there was zero love for medieval style. I guess that's what Warcraft 3's version was for, but I still had trouble getting into it. Game design wise, the concept of all players being both the DM and the character is really cool. Will I revisit such an idea in the future? Most likely, but I don't know how it'd play out, due to its obvious flaws that could easily break the game. I don't think I'll try it with ZURPG or Vast Frontier, that's for sure. Maybe for an actual type of God-like game, possibly similar to Black & White (if anyone here knows what that game is). That thar be my story and ramblin'. I know Starcraft RPing is definitely very different from the norm of RPing, not to mention it's a rare way to get into the genre. I'm guessing the rest of you got in via either this game, forum RPing, or traditional tabletop games like D&D and Pathfinder. Even so, every experience is completely different, and that's one of the many things I love about RPing. Sharing those experiences and hearing about others' makes it even greater. RE: How did you first get into RPing? - Darklink42 - 06-13-2014 I actually started on that ages-old butt of jokes that is Gaia Online. I think a friend invited me into the site itself, and once I was there, I kind of had fun doing the avatar dress-up and the other stuff (I think the site was only maybe a year or two old at that point, so it wasn't as convoluted or developed, per se.) I don't even remember how it happened (a friend of the original friend perhaps) invited me to a thread he was in, where there was a sort of ongoing story. People made characters, and then they did their best to build into the story ongoing. I made a mysterious loner character (I hadn't yet been introduced to anime, so the concept seemed original...oh the early teen years...) named Aerosepius. While there, I met a couple of other people who were fun to Rp with, and when the original thread died, one of those players made a new one. We carried that thread well and on into the 500 pages mark. But, alas, between new people who were more interested in the Trololo (this was during the rise of 4chan. God I'm old,) some severe god-modding, and the inevitable drama that arises from gathering a bunch of teens in one place for too long, it had to end. Other threads were tried, but they never had the same energy. I also realized that, as a writer, I was getting too good to keep playing along. I'd write little plots and arcs for myself (Aero gained an evil brother named Kirran. No relation to the current iteration) and other characters who wanted to join, where most people would write one action and a line of dialogue and expect me or someone else to really carry their character for them. Not so fun. I didn't Rp again for quite a while, although I did try a shared story model once or twice in high school (see above about teenage drama llama to know how it ended though.) I was perfectly content never to go back to it again and just work on my own fictions, until Windstrike (who I think I kept getting into sniper wars with on the OCR TF2 server or at the very least met there) contacted me out of the blue a while back and asked if I was interested in this little adventure you guys had. I saw it more as a Dungeons and Dragons fix more than an Rp, but over time, I've come to see it more as a nice hybrid. The great thing here is that there's a DM, which really makes all the difference as far as I'm concerned. |