Other When you go back to the time when you first started RPing and are like damn...

[A Guileless Fable]

I decided to go see my old RP post and damn they are bad. I wanted to cry at see how cliche I made my characters ;A;...

 

[Nutter]

Makes me kind of sad because my first rps were on another site that got taken down


I still go through old character skeletons I've saved and cringe though lol

 

[A Guileless Fable]

@Nutter


Aww that sucks.


I don't know whether to


say that your lucky or not.


I know I can't bare see to read


my old posts... urgh...


I used to roleplay on


gaiaonline and I look that shit


up and I say to myself:


"You're in a better place now,


a better place." *Cry.

 

[Fawndapple]

Yikes..I've had my fair share of cliche characters..in addition to my one sentence roleplays.

 

[A Guileless Fable]

@Fawndapple


Ohhhh! One liners.


In the past they were our friends,


but now our worst enemy.

 

[farewell]

That's one trip down memory lane I won't be taking. Maybe one day, if I want to cringe at myself.

 

[Negative Zone]

Luckily for me the sands of time have obscured my very earliest RP attempts. However, there are some old logs from back when I did RP on MUSHes that I wouldn't mind being able to read again, but I never was the best at saving my personal files. I don't even remember if I logged back then or not, actually..

 

[Xyshurondor]

My very first characters were on DDO: Eberron Unlimited, and they were sisters, both "LOOK AT ME" damaged types. People roleplayed with me, but I think it was because there were others that were even worse. For example, my main never smiled and had premature arthritis because she was too weak for her armor; other people's characters cut themselves in public and yelled about how they had demon blood and everyone hated them. My grammar was also decent, so I ended up the better option.


I also learned that if you establish give-and-take, if you really try to find out about the other characters, people who are worth engaging will reciprocate. That's the greatest part of RP to me, that exchange of the characters gradually coming to understand and know more about each other through difficult/dangerous circumstances.

 

[Colt556]

When I was young and first started RPing I already saw the problem with special snowflake types. Even back then I knew the best way to stand out and be truly unique is to be generic as all hell. So I'd always play generic characters. The soldier who was good at his job or the smuggler who just got by. Nothing fancy, nothing edgy or mystical, just normal dude's doing things normally. But when surrounded by edgemasters and mary sues I believe I stood out most of all.


So in terms of content I'm not ashamed of my past RPs. They do leave a bit to be desired in terms of delivery, but eh. I'm just thankful I never had a phase where I idolized final fantasy characters or something.

 

[Xyshurondor]

When I was young and first started RPing I already saw the problem with special snowflake types. Even back then I knew the best way to stand out and be truly unique is to be generic as all hell. So I'd always play generic characters. The soldier who was good at his job or the smuggler who just got by. Nothing fancy, nothing edgy or mystical, just normal dude's doing things normally. But when surrounded by edgemasters and mary sues I believe I stood out most of all.
So in terms of content I'm not ashamed of my past RPs. They do leave a bit to be desired in terms of delivery, but eh. I'm just thankful I never had a phase where I idolized final fantasy characters or something.

In my experience those characters are in high demand! When everybody is "special" nobody really works, so a well-played straight man is gold in a high-drama RP environment.

 

[A Guileless Fable]

@Colt556


Interesting. I was probably made the worst characters ever.


All of them were cold and lifeless and had overly depressing backgrounds.


That messed me up so bad, because I couldn't


really grasp an overly serious character since I myself wasn't serious.


That made my character rigged and awkward for the most part


Now I just make goofy character that I can easily crack jokes with


and make everyone laugh or hate me. Although I do remember a time


I simply loved making characters with amnesia ... Bad times.

 

[Knightling]

Like most, my first RPing bits were rather cringy, so I'm rather comfortable leaving that behind. Speaking of which, perhaps I'll try to reuse some of my first characters to see what it would be like, lol.

 

[Beware the Boa]

Oh, jeez.. My first roleplays were absolutely horrifying. I'm surprised anyone even interacted with me, I was so cringey. Sometimes I start to think of those days and I just go down the rabbit hole of how horrible I was. My future self will probably think my present self is cringey, too, though.

 

[Jay Fox]

I can forgive myself as a teenager for having slightly wobbly characterisation and heavily emotional plotlines, but what's more surprising is when I go back and see aspects of the characters that I thought were traits I'd plucked out of nowhere for the character but later turned out to be things I didn't realise about myself at the time but are now so obvious.

 

[Scatter]

I stumbled upon some of my roleplay posts a few months back from when I was like fifteen, and I only read about three sentences before closing the tab and wishing I hadn't looked.

 

[i love nick check]

I remember when I first started rping and damn was I an idiot.

 

[call me rae]

lol you make me want to look up my old chickensmoothie account and see how far i've come.


dude that should totally be a topic. post your embarrasing n00b posts and see how far you've come. like a really mortifying before and after picture.

 

[i love nick check]

I was a fucking moron dude! Still am!

 

[A Guileless Fable]

Yeah, mines weren't something I'd like to see again.


Although it is funny to see what I used to write like compared to


now. Hilarious.

 

[The Spider]

I started RPing in 2005 haha. Looking at my characters objectively, they were actually rather cool and had a lot of potential. My main was a tall dual wielding warrior -- very Final Fantasy-esque, with modern dress and style and personality, but with rather odd looking swords on his back and a very out-of-place dagger on his hip. But then again, he fit what we were doing in the RP so it wasn't that bad. My writing and godmodding, however? That's another story.


I still like all of my characters and I've scrapped the obvious carbon copies of the video game character I was obsessing over at the time. I actually just read a few of my posts from a couple of years ago and cringed pretty hard at the redundancy and confusing descriptions I used haha.

 

[Tenebrous]

Wow everyone else started off decent.


While I started off in club penguin. LMAO

 

[TheBusDriver]

If I ever want to cringe so hard, I take a look at my old RPs because boy were they something else.

 

[The Spider]

Wow everyone else started off decent.
While I started off in club penguin. LMAO

Haha I tried Club Penguin so hard. I really did, but I couldn't stand the amount of barriers and "protections" they had on it to keep children innocent. Then of course as soon as they allow free communication between users, everyone just uses "n***er" to be a jerk


I started in a children's forum called "kids world" with *asterisk action* style, such as *slashes with sword* *dodges* or *opens door*. No idea what it was but I wanted to do more of it, so I instantly googled "RP forums" and found another page that I practically lived on for about 4 years haha.

 

[Tenebrous]

I spent like 3 months on club penguin(never tried forums) then I moved onto Roblox then Kik, then skype, then finally here.


I'm quite surprised at myself. To be able to convert from asterisk style to writing paragraphs. I guess I'll have to thank literature classes for that xD

 

[Ulysseus]

Well, this thread will definitely make me a little self-conscious about all my rping going forward; hopefully I'm not being too much of an amateur, now that I'm making my first serious attempt at forum rp. ( )


In all seriousness though, after rping for the last three years with my friends, starting on Minecraft, then moving to Skype, then a brief stint on another website, even in that short time I have to acknowledge a good deal of personal growth. That's really what I love about rping: working on my writing while also interacting with others! I remember the first time we ever rped, I was actually a rather weak character, nearly freezing to death on an ice world and constantly needing to be dragged to warmth. That soon changed though; I became the genocidal multi-personalitied Ozymandias, and that character has kinda stuck with my group of rpers since. I'm curious, based on your guys and gals' initial experience, how did you come to balance making interesting characters while nor depending on "final fantasy" levels of "powers"?