Friday DE

[bjornwilde]

Good morning, Milliways. Sorry I haven't been around much this week. I'm doing a staycation and things that haven't been getting done are now being so, which hasn't left time for me to sit. Perhaps next week?

Anyway, I was wondering...what trail lead you to Milliways? What path lead you to journal based role playing? And do you have a favorite role playing story you'd like to share, whether it happened in Milliways or not?

Comments

[never_promised]

Oh lord, I was at, um....what was it called. Theatrical Muse? Zillions of years ago, on LJ, where Camwyn also was. I don't remember how I first started there, but probably from...reading fanfiction stuff? Heck if I know.

Anyway, lol, from there I went to Sages of Chaos (oh lol, oh lol) and then Dear Multiverse and then various spin-offs thereof, and then just kind of settled in with one RP partner, who I eventually lost to Homestuck. (Only temporarily lost! Now she's publishing novels based on some of our RP settings, it's kind of trippy.)

So like when I was hanging out with Genarti one time I was like Hmmm, you do RP? and she was like Yeah, at Milliways, and I was like Fffffuck is Milliways still alive?

Which I'm very glad of.

[onceaviking]

Oh, Theatrical Muse. Those were the days.

[never_promised]

Oh man, were you there too? I only dimly remember it!

[onceaviking]

I was useless with the prompts.
I played Clay from Darkly Noon which was - an experience.

[genarti]

I am still SO SO DELIGHTED by that conversation and all the ramifications thereof :D :D :D

[ceitfianna]

In college, I ran tabletop and LARPs in a White Wolf setting called Changeling and one of my players was Danii who used to play Garion. She invited me out to her birthday party and I met all these people who were talking about something called Milliways. Then she came down to visit me and introduced me to Slings and Arrows and Supernatural while talking more about Milliways.

At the time I was really into Lord of the Rings but on the train to Philly, I realized I could play Will Scarlett. Danii helped me find James McAvoy as PB and I apped him then moved to New Zealand for graduate work. And now I have ten characters.

I forgot to add that my very first RP experience was D&D at summer camp then I came home and got pulled into a Vampire: the Masquerade LARP in high school along with playing tabletop versions of all the White Wolf games. I've also played D&D and White Wolf at cons through the years.

[cottoncandypink]

I had just got into role play properly. I'd dabbled here and there in high school, but had never really found a place I liked. This was when all of the big communities were on Yahoo! Groups and Invisionfree boards. It was a combination of 1, I was bad and had no idea what I was doing, and 2, all the ones I found were really restricted in terms of what was allowed and where the setting was, so I didn't really last.

Jump forward a few years. Hot Fuzz was my big fandom, and I'd started this... thing that wasn't really a fic, but wasn't really a role play with a friend. It was just us making up weird scenarios for Danny and Nicholas and posting them to the community. Eventually, it did turn into proper AIM role play, which lasted entirely longer than it should have done. At one point, I started looking for other places to fiddle around on, because I'd heard there was RP on LJ, and I even found Milliways, but it was scary. Previously, all my experiences with large groups were really sour, and I didn't know that OOC communication was even a thing? I thought it was just like those big Invisionfree boards where everyone went in, and then got bitchy because someone else did a thing they didn't like.

But when we finally got sick of the thing we were doing on AIM, basically ending it with rocks fall, everybody dies, I came back here and started really looking into it. It turned out, there was another person from the Hot Fuzz community who was playing here as well, and she told me, "no, there's an AIM chat, and you can set up stuff with other players in advance and make sure what you want to do is okay." That was really all it took. I still had no idea what I was doing, because at that point I was used to a completely different type of game, but most of us probably spent some time at the beginning embarrassing ourselves, and I'm still here.

[manythorned]

After I saw Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers a google search led me to MESPT, one of the first and biggest RP games ever. It had no rules, no application, no mods. It was wonderful.

I played there for a couple of years and then someone I knew from the game started talking about Milliways. So I read it for a while, had to get used to this posting in a community journal thing and wanted to play! Easy peasy.

[inlovewithwords]

A middle school friend got me into text RP on the internet, OCs and original or fan settings. I know I played at and I think once even ran a Pern game. Through that made a friend who eventually introduced me to Milliways in '07. I tried app'ing, playing Diarmuid from Fionavar, but everything was far too large and overwhelming and I dropped off the map fairly quickly.

The in '09 I made my way back and was floundering around with some characters, none of whom I play now, and kind of vaguely trying to play and have fun and not doing so good. Then I read Codex Alera and picked up Tavi in summer of '09 and, well, I'm apparently still around, so that's frankly bloody terrifying.

As for my favorite roleplaying story... gosh. Mine are definitely all from LARPing, and it would be a choice. I am, however, happy to share them. I offer choices:
a) That time I played Lois in a LARP
b) That time I played a Japanese Alanna the Lioness and steamrolled game
c) That time I died and still singlehandedly blocked a large bad guy block in a Babylon 5 game
d) That time I convinced players a ship was an oracle in an Asimov Robots game
e) Romana got a hat from the Doctor
f) Two of the three times I've played a Jedi padawan were the same role in the same game. The second time in particular was epic.

If anyone would like to hear any, by all means, pick one and I will wax eloquent.

[i_am_your_host]

I first started playing in a Cabaret RPG. Yes, it existed on LJ. At first I played Herman, then an original character (we allowed original characters as patrons and staff at the Kit Kat Klub), and then the creator of the game gave the Master of Ceremonies to me before handing over the keys, so to speak. So I kind of oversaw it for a while. But other players were Milliways members and occasionally I would lurk and read threads and marvel at all the stuff going on.

Then Hot Fuzz happened, and GypsyJr lured me into playing Danny Butterman with her Nicholas Angel. That was my first Milliways character, so at least I wasn't coming in alone. Aw, we had some really fun times and some cracktastic threads. (I know Zed took over Nicholas when she gave him up, but I still have Danny, and I've been meaning to give him a pre-Nick reboot.)

[bjornwilde]

I finally have a few minutes so I'll take a stab at this.

I started roleplaying when TSR was a thing and D&D was the big kid on the block, but me and my step brother had pretty much been LARP/Freeform RPGing years before that; we just didn't have a name for it. I loved table top and moved from D&D to WOD's system after I took a break in my 20s. Started with Vamp cause that's what my gaming group played, but quickly moved to Mage (which I loved much more) and then Changeling (which was so my jam).

Never got away from tabletop though, until my group parted ways and by best friend told me about a Hunter email game. I tried that for a bit, though I didn't really fancy Hunter as a concept, so when I stumbled across a Changeling group email game, I jumped right in. Eventually dropped out as my style of Changeling didn't fit the group's dynamic.

After that I pretty much dropped out of RPGing until I spotted an old Milliways player talking about the game on her journal and decided to check it out. SO glad I did as RPG keeps my brain happy.

So many RPG stories but I need to leave soon, so I'll do brief examples and see if anyone wants me to expand on them.

1-My first Changeling character was a red cap whose demise occurred when he decided to challenge an entire bar to a fight and his party ran out on him.

2-Ben Grimm and Clint Barton nearly getting into a fight over a spit ball.

3-The time I got to use "It was a dark and story night" in an email intro for a character.

[misslucyjane]

Blame silveraspen and vivien529.

[dwellsinthedetails]

I had Nny, the game's founder, on my LJ friendslist because of a Discworld RP we were both in. So I got to see both her initial 'I HAD A GREAT IDEA' drunk post, and her sober post the next morning of 'so that was a thing I did last night but it still sounds like a good idea, so... :D?'

This looks like a fun way to pass the summer before I start college, I thought.

As for fun recent stories, the game I'm currently helping mod has a fun feature where you can chuck your character into a dungeon, either to reclaim them after an idle period or to address some much-needed personal growth. I ran one in the spring that was a LOT of fun as well as catharsis. (NB: major Persona 3 spoilers, as well as the CWs at the top of the post.)

[cameoflage]

I honestly have no idea what pointed me in this direction. I don't think it was a specific pup or a specific mun. Maybe someone else recced it to me, but if that's the case I don't think they were a player, just a lurker. I also have very little idea of when that happened, although looking at the archives seems to point towards May or June 2008, because the first pup I saw and recognised who was still active was Gordon Freeman and when I got here he was post-HL1 but pre-HL2.

I lurked for years before I actually apped anyone, eventually graduating to hanging around crackchat and the DEs while not having any pups, because I'd never done journal RP or fandom character RP before (only OCs, in the linear medium of a forum or a chat) and I had to basically start from scratch on figuring out how to do it. I really wanted to participate, because it looked like so much fun, but at the time I didn't know how to write for a character I didn't make up. (I also didn't really write fanfic as a teenager. I barely even drew fanart.) I did make a few attempts in the sandboxes; none of the characters really stuck and I struggled to post replies in a timely fashion, but at least it was practice.

Eventually the dam broke on that and I apped Aradia from Homestuck (a canon I was introduced to by our excellent Karkat mun showing up out of nowhere in the old Mixed Muses, a year or two before Homestuck became megapopular so I had no idea what it was) after the Allpocalypse, because someone offhandedly suggested it in crackchat and I thought to myself "Hey, I could play her!".