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Honestly for me it's been so long that I don't remember why I started or how I came across it, but I know why I continue to do it! I'm an aspiring writer. I don't have as much published as I'd like, but I have my fair share of positive reviews on fan fiction. And role playing provides this really invaluable skill when it comes to getting into a character's head and learning how to express them. So, why did you start and why do you continue?

In another thread, @kay expressed this sentiment and I really missed that. It can be impolite to go onto someone's chatbox and start talking, so I thought it might be cool to do that here. This is a thread where you can talk about your roleplay. What's going on in your neck of the woods? What are you dealing with? Did you have a fabulous roleplay thread? Are you excited about your grand opening? Did you get a new staffer who isn't looking so good? Are you disgruntled or disappointed? This is a place where you can just talk. And it's okay to have a side conversation, too! Maybe there is knowledge to be shared, wisdom to be gleaned, or just a smile to be had.

I think this would be a nifty thing to do every month. As the month goes along, chatting about site accomplishments - Boards hitting X amount of posts, successful plots, happy site-family moments, whatever you consider "important" to your board/your members. Post multiple times, drag your members in to post, brag about stupid things! Whatever strikes your fancy. Cry Wolf hit 33k posts this month! We also trapped another one of the "I'm done making characters" members into another character. xD

Shenanigans continue to happen but now we have a spreadsheet that tells us what happened when. Some things are kind of fixed to happen at a certain in game time (shenanigans willing) so those events are penciled in. I've never used spreadsheets before so it's fun to experiment with. There are a couple of game systems I'm toying with to make them simpler and more player driven, but all in all, I remain pretty cheerful about where things are at and how they're going.

I started because I stumbled across an RP site and was so excited by the prospect of creating a character being able to control what they do! And other people controlled their characters and you don't know what they're gonna do! It was super exciting and scratched that RP itch that Baldur's Gate had created.

I roleplay because I don't write for myself. I'm very insular, to the extent that I keep most things locked up inside my mind instead of executing them or putting them on paper. Roleplay forces me to not do that.

Studying for my midterms, and was reading up on programmed cell death. Apparently when the cells go through programmed cell death they shrink and form lobes, this process is called "bleb-ing". Of course since I was pretty tired at this point I misread it as blep-ing... ' I had to snicker at that mental image of a cell somehow doing a blep

My "active" board is trudging along. We average only a handful of posts every day and the chatbox is only open to members - so that moves a little slow. However I really expect as much from a panfandom board - it wasn't made to be a "serious", in depth world of its own. It was created to be a fun "half way house" where people could try out new character concepts and RP "episodic" type plots in order to relax and recharge between the more serious places out there. So in that regard, it doesn't matter how small we are, the board is doing its job. On the other hand, I'm excited about being able to open the modern fantasy board I've been working on for over a year (hard to find time to do mass amounts of work in one sitting because of my job and being a mom on top of that). The idea behind it is to take the classic genre of "magic and unhuman creatures just beyond your normal sight" and instead of a "buffy", "lost girl", "Grimm" type action concentrate on Political Intrigue and the question of whether or not the "other world" should stay secret any longer. Unfortunately, my RPer buddy circle has grown quite small as of late, and I'm having a little trouble finding interest beyond "oh that's a cool concept!". But I'm going to open it anyway when its finished being tweaked, and if I RP with myself, I RP with myself lol. It's been something I've been wanted to do for a while but never really found a board that matched what was in my head.

*aggressively karaokes while writing essays*

I started tabletop RPing before forum RPing, but I got into both in entirely different ways. I got into tabletop RPing when I was at a convention, I was 13 and it was a fantasy convention. One of the rooms had this roleplay set up, it's called Fabula and it was a group of 5 + a DM playing. It worked that you got handed a pre-made character, played until you died (which could happen fairly quickly) and then someone new got to play in your place. I loved it, and it had me hooked. So I went and bought myself Dungeons and Dragons books and corralled my friends into playing with me. A year later I was bored one summer, all my friends were on vacation so I was just browsing the internet. I used to be a huge anime and manga fan so I was just browsing around looking at Bleach related things when I stumbled upon a Bleach RP forum. I had no idea what it was at first, but after taking a look around I was like "Oh it's kinda like tapletop RPing only over forums! I should try this." Looking back at it that forum wasn't the best place to start, it had an enormous app, and writers who could and would write a thousand words for a post. Tiny noob me was pretty intimidated. Why I got into both? The storytelling element, I love playing around telling stories with others

I started roleplaying because I tricked myself into it. Way back when I first started RPing on Neopets in a time long ago, there were these things called "guilds." They were just like little clubs, basically, where you could chat with other folks interested in the same thing. Well, I noticed that guilds that had RP as a feature tended to be more successful. So, I decided to include RP as a feature of my guild. However, I had no idea what "RP" actually was. Either way- it worked! People joined! And then everyone started sitting around, getting bored, and someone wondered: "So when are we going to start the RP?" And like 11 year old me mentally went "oh, shit. O.O" And then I said: "Just go ahead and start!" And so folks did! I watched for a little while, and after I figured out what they were doing I was like "WOAH! This looks like fun!" and I joined in, too.

Because writing with others is more fun than writing alone. You have the opportunity to communicate, to get advice and ideas on plot points and character development, and brainstormed plots are better than those any of us could have come with individually, because they have all the best from each side.

I'm in the process of trying to gather interest and feedback for an idea!