double plurk, but colster's post suddenly shotgunned me in the face with nostalgia for some of my old RPs. All of them are long gone, though. Gone to dead forum/IRC chat heaven.
I still remember my first actual "game." Zoids rp forum in probably 2004. We had dumb characters and dumb ooc drama, but like... I sure hope all those other kids I used to know are doing well out there.
My very first online games were on MSN Groups. They were all probably pretty awful. There was a pair of FF ones I was a part of (One of them was straight up FFT, the other was basically 'Sephiroth is leading a group of OCs and FF characters into a tower made of Chaos' and there was a whole dedicated stat and XP system.)
I did play in a Zoids game, but it was only zoids on the surface. I basically played it like it was Robotech because I never saw Zoids in my life but giant robots I could get behind.
There was one big zoids rp that everyone knew, and the one I joined was this little podunk splinter game that happened because the kid who ran it had a major personality dysfunction with the staff of the big game.
See, our Zoids didn't have any sort of personalities or anything. They were just animal robots we bought points for and then had this epic factional battle that was really just a bunch of fourteen year olds trying to one-up each other.
grabs you by the throat and slams you into the wall, punching you in the gut over and over for a solid ten minutes because someone told him I was talking trash.
I moved to EZboards after that. Got involved in a Marvel RPG, a 1970s-era X-Men AU where everyone was West Side Story gang members, a prison AU of the Marvel RPG, a Kingdom Hearts RPG where I played Sephiroth, a DBZ RPG... Ran a game there that was basically a knockoff of the X-Men except everyone lived on a dude ranch.
We used to do stuff like that in the shoutbox above the forum, incredibly intense water balloon fights where everyone had an incredible contingency plan and OOPS YOU FELL INTO THE TRAP I HAD ALREADY SET and now i'm behind you
Yeah, they all had guests, sometimes from other EZboard games that my players were a part of, and they had to keep the fact that they were mutants a ~secret~ while also using them for chores.
It ended up a little like Nanoha in terms of scale, which is probably why Nanoha hit me so hard when it came out because that was my game, i played that.
Me and this one friend I only got to know for one school year kept passing pieces of paper back and forth, writing this epic length thing where she had like... final fantasy canons and star ocean canons and I had whatever my goofy childhood furry and dragon ocs were.
And then in high school me and this boy I was friends with verbally rped so much goofy shit based on xiaolin showdown and kingdom hearts where we had two ocs that were best friends and went on adventures. But then my family moved away. Another person for the "I hope they're prospering" list.
There were two kinds: On the one kind it was a thing where you would post a thread that was your "adventure" and the mod would respond to tell you what happened during your adventure, and there were different subforums for every route you could progress along. Collecting and trading items and pokemon were a big deal.
I tried Pokemon RP in chat rooms for a while, but I quit because they were dirty cheaters who said I couldn't possibly have Articuno because they had Articuno even though I caught it!
The other kind were wild pokemon rps where everyone just gradually amassed the weirdest possible collection of hybrid pokemon ocs, complete with carefully handcrafted custom sprites.
I only ever did two proboards games. One was a Smallville game where I played Oliver Queen (I never watched a single episode of Smallville at that point, so I was just playing a teen Ollie) and one was a Matrix RPG.
Like, in pern rp you were essentially making ocs and handing them to the game's staff to make you a dragon, but the subtext of that was always that if your oc was good you could have a special dragon but if your oc sucked you got a shitty dragon or no dragon at all.
Also Pern games were super cannibalistic. Like, all forum games fed on one anothers' player bases but it was really common for a pern game to start up, people join, the first set of dragons hatches, and then it dies because everyone faffed off to join new games and chase the shiny dragons there. (Especially if they didn't get the shiny here.)
I grew to hate them because suddenly you had these badass characters like Cloud and Wolverine and Sephiroth cuddling their fire lizards and they weren't like that raged fourteen year old plat
The bedrock of ancient pern rp fandom. I'm sure those were really interesting in their own way, they always sounded that way based on the fossils I would dig up. (And those fans were brave because those were the days where Anne would send C&Ds to your house.)
God honestly even on pern games the pet collecting aspect could get silly. Some people would have like 3 fire lizards, a horse, a cat, and then a dragon!!! Who has the time???
And God forbid anything happen to them, which of course meant that bad guys were constantly killing off people's pets because they couldn't kill characters and causing drama that way
I was going by Yakumo or Allerum for a while there, and pretending to be a girl because everyone thought I was a college girl and treated me better when they thought I was, so.
that turned into a gal im still friends with doing LOTR lol randumb Mary Sues because we were Teen Girl In Love with Legolas and Frodo and then by the time I met Korel I had something of a sense of plot and adventure and introducing something besides "endless double date with best friend and our respective lust objects," so I softballed an RP starter at
I had a Totally Average Guy with a cool katana that he bought from the mall and the ability to create dimensions in his pockets. A girl who stole the Dusk suit out of Aunt May's attic and turned into a sneak thief. The magical girl whose saga is long and vast and I'm probably forgetting half of it. Someone who totally wasn't just Colossus for my dude ranch
like there should have been a 90s vaguely homoerotic "love you bro ur my best friend I've never had a friend like you before but we're totally just guy love between two guyyysss" soundtrack over our entire friendship that first year
and actually I did take some basic ideas I developed during an OC aim RP with another middle school friend and turned them into one of the books I've written, so.
that was absolutely the most unnuanced self indulgent wish fulfillment original story either of us could have come up with and it was funnnn and it set the stage for like. Nuance.
I was talking to Zita last night and we both agreed that there was a spontaneity to chat RP that I missed. Not that spontaneousness is impossible for DWRP, but we tend to overplan to the point where sometimes it's like "Well, we've practically played this out already."
Also a kind of lack of judgement, because I miss being able to do totally self indulgent stuff like "Okay, they've been tortured, turned evil, turned back, barely escaped, sealed the dream devourers off into their own negative dimension now they get to hold hands and have a birthday cake"
('course, I've turned around and poo-poohed self-indulgent RPers, but there's a difference between hogging the spotlight and just wanting to do something you want to do and enjoy doing.)
I briefly thought about setting up a Discord channel for stupid fun having, but I instantly realized that unless I vetted people, it'd end up on WG somehow. And even then it'd be like "He has a private fun zone, what's he hiding" even though museboxes are just. A thing. That people still complain about.
On the one kind it was a thing where you would post a thread that was your "adventure" and the mod would respond to tell you what happened during your adventure, and there were different subforums for every route you could progress along. Collecting and trading items and pokemon were a big deal.