We have some interesting roleplay threads here,but I’m not quite sure that they’re the same thing you’re thinking of 
>>Type Command
>>Cap’n GG BD typed ‘Get ye flask’
You cannot get ye flask.
…
Why on earth can I not get ye flask…?
Well, I’m not sure the board’s rules allow me to mention specific channels or MUDs as ‘recommendations’ … maybe they do, though.
In any case, you can certainly send an email to me (use the address I’ve provided to the SDMB registration) and I’ll make a recommendation or two. Let me know your genre preference, when you do.
If you’re new at the stuff, you’ll want to just go into a channel (assuming IRC - it’s a wee bit more accessible than a MUD) and just watch the others. You’ll see some that tend to “longer” text “poses”, some shorter. You’ll see a variety of different styles, andthus you’ll be able to pick something you like.
I’ve been playing Gemstone for a while as well. I’m not sure how long, but I think it’s nearing 10 years now. I don’t put much time into it though. If anyone wants to check out it or other games that Simultronics makes, the website is
http://www.play.net/.
I’m not really sure why I like it. I alternate between being fascinated by all the statistics and equations and being annoyed with them. I switch between power-leveling and lounging about roleplaying. There is almost always something to do that fits my mood, except if I want to shoot stuff (then I whine about needing a new computer.)
If anyone cares to meet up in game, feel free to look up Rukenstien (mid-30s half-elf ranger), who usually hangs out around Icemule Trace.
Many years ago, I started roleplaying in an IRC channel called Stronghold. I had never roleplayed at all, much less text-based so I spent a lot of time just observing. The channel was set up with a dice bot for those who wanted to participate in fights. There were also guilds and ranks. As I got the hang of how the channel was run and how to roleplay, I started really getting into the idea of developing a character, creating her history and such and eventually worked my way up to running one of the fighting guilds. I spent a great deal of time there and developed many OOC friendships. It was in this channel that I met my future husband. He and I chatted and roleplayed for about four years before we ever met in person. We’ll be married five years this coming July.
Sadly, the channel eventually fell apart when the guy who ran it decided to move on to other things. I stayed on IRC for a while but lost interest. After some time, I discovered Ultima Online and my main character lived on there for several years until circumstances caused me to decide to kill her off permanently. I’ve got quite an extensive collection of stories/vignettes about her exploits. It was through roleplaying that I discovered I liked to write. I’m probably pretty lousy at it but it was a creative outlet for me for a long, long time. I really miss that.
I’ve tried getting back into RP many times on IRC but the majority of the RP channels I’ve found have been mostly Gor-based, which doesn’t interest me in the least. The few non-Gor fantasy channels I’ve managed to find were so cliquish (sp?) that it became discouraging so I stopped looking.
I was hoping your OP was going to be an invite to RPing Dopers to start up something. Now I’m disappointed.
Say it ain’t so!
I started gemstone 3 back in the AOL days. Me and my cousin used to play for a long time, probably about 7-8 years ago too. I was a dark elf empath i THINK. Can’t remember which race exactly. What were your character’s names back then?
I think what made gemstone so engrossing is the fact that people HAD to help each other to advance in the game. From empath’s healing wounds to rouge’s picking treasure chests for you. I always wished they would make a mmorpg version some day with the same concepts.
I’m actually not suprised gemstone is still up and running.
Question for anyone who played simultronics games. Anyone ever used to play that old game from the aol days they had with the mech robots. That was one of the funniest games. ahhh… back in the day.
I’ve played Granita Smithdott, the dwarf warrior, for ages. She was my first character. Last December, I believe, Simu introduced a new class, the Paladin, for GS, and gave everyone a free character slot for a month. Since I had wanted to play a sorcerer to start with, but figured I’d better get the hang of the game first with a fighter, I finally made a sorcerer character. Her name is Akrose. Granita spent much of her early years in River’s Rest, and then in the Landing. Right now she’s in Ta’Illistim (Elven Nations) and Akrose started off in Ta’Vaalor, where she’s stayed for all 16 of her levels, so far. The system has been tweaked, and now pure spellcasters can use a “runestaff” instead of weapon and shield for defense.
I subscribed to AOL when it went to a flat rate plan. I had been on Q-Link before that, and I knew that I couldn’t be on an online service that charged per minute. Oh, and I was on US Videotel for a while, too.
I was on the Last Outpost MUD for quite awhile, but it was a long time ago. I even tried my hand at writing a new area for it. LO consumed far too much of my time, but led to meeting my best friend, so I still remember it fondly.
Sorry I missed this. As far as sci fi rpgs’ its not text based and its a meld of fantasy and tech type stuff, but City of Heroes is my new favorite game. I still play DR some though. I’m currently playing a fisherman trader, which is kinda different for them.
I haven’t played DR since the AOL days, I started about 6 months before the new races came out. It was a lot more fun back then when you didn’t have to memorize so many things to do well in combat.
I’ve heard of the Gor places, but aside from seeing one or two crop up in a channel /list, I’ve never seen one. I find that “Generic Fantasy Freeform Roleplay Inn” is the most common, followed by “Generic Vampire Freeform Roleplay Bar” is second.
As for starting something - I just don’t have the extra time to run a channel, y’know? But, hey, you could start something.
:dubious:
RP nerd checking in.
I’ve been free-form RPing for the past 7 or 8 years. I started in 1997 in Sierra’s online game The Realm, and migrated to IRC in 1999 when EQ mortally wounded the Realm. I started playing in rooms on EFnet, and then migrated to Starchat, and then to Sorcery.net. Most of the channels on IRC are either medieval fantasy channels, or WoD vampire channels. Others crop up from time to time, but they generally don’t last very long. My primary RP haunt has been around for ten years and is still going strong, but I’ve also played in a large number of short-lived channels in other genres: cyberpunk channels, generic sci-fi channels, Star Wars channels, X-men style superhero RP channels, a non-WoD supernatural Victorian setting, a modern-day mercenary RP, a Hellblazer-based modern supernatural channel, and probably a few more that I’m forgetting. Fads come and go, often influenced by TV and movies.
Another thing about IRC channel longevity is that most channels don’t survive their founder’s departure, so a channel that may be going strong now may be gone in six months if the founder moves on to other things. I’ve experienced this firsthand. I’ve also been an operator in some channels where the channel’s operators work as a team. While the departure of one individual won’t cause the downfall of the channel, the downside is that it can take forever to get anything done because every issue is discussed to death.
I’ve been a channel operator in #BlkDragon*Inn for the past five years now. (The reason for the spelling is that EFnet had a 9 character nick limit, which led to some very creative name spellings. One of the channel founders used the nick BLKDRAGON.) The channel is something of a punchline for bad roleplaying among IRC RP rooms because we don’t require character approval and have many restrictions on what sorts of characters are allowed.
This leads to a very diverse mix of characters and RP styles in the main RP channel at any one time. We have people write very short posts with minimal punctuation and grammar, and we have people who write novels of very florid prose just to describe their entrance into the room. We have characters that come from AD&D, White Wolf’s World of Darkness, anime, novels, video games, and people’s own imaginations. We have players who create characters from the channel’s native setting and revel in obscure bits of setting detail, while other players are only dimly aware of our website’s existence. You might think of it as improvisational creative writing: some players create fascinating, compelling characters full of depth and complexity; others come up with character concepts that are so ludicrous and illogical that they descend into unintentional parody. It’s a very chaotic mix, and you can see the best and worst of online roleplaying side by side.
How does it all work? Better at some times than others. The mismash of character types, roleplaying styles, and player opinions don’t always mesh smoothly, which often requires the intervention of the channel ops to resolve in one way or another. Players create storylines, which can vary in size from small plots of purely personal significance, to truly epic quests where the fate of the world is in the hands of the heroes.
The whole thing hinges on players collaborating with one another to tell a story, and it all breaks down if they can’t cooperate. Sometimes, this is a result of people with incompatible ideas; at other times, it’s a case of people who are trying to win a game that can’t be won. Some people are playing against the others in the channel rather than with them, and are trying to “win” at the others’ expense, usually by killing other characters in RP fights. These sorts of people are annoying at best, and disruptive to the channel at worst.
In a forum where your character can be as strong, as agile, as intelligent, as attractive, and as rich as the player wants him or her to be, there’s a lot of potential for abuse. Due to this, there are hordes of women with the body of Jessica Rabbit and men with rippling muscles and rugged good looks populating the freeform RP landscape.
I’ve found that what a player says about his or her characters is inconsequential compared to what others believe about that character. You can say that your character is the best swordsman in the world, but there’s nothing to stop another player from claiming that their character is even better than yours. When other people start believing that your character is a fearsome swordsman and back down from fights when your character reaches for his sword, then you’ve achieved something through they way you’ve been playing your character.
That sounds pretty much like what I am used to. It was lots of fun, but sometimes insanely frustrating.
What server is the inn on? I might check it out. Seems like the boards I play at are half dying with more ooc angst and real life issues.
Blind Guardian, #BlkDragon*Inn was one of the channels I stumbled across in IRC. What suggestions would you make for a newcomer to the Inn? It seemed a bit difficult to get any interaction with any of the “regulars” the times I visited there. Please don’t misinterpret this as an insult. It’s a sincere question from someone who would dearly love to get involved with a good group of roleplayers again. Thanks in advance. 
I started playing the SocioPolitical Ramafications MUCK back in '96, and still pop on occasionally. As a matter of fact, that’s where my Doper name comes from: my character over there.
Tripler
It’s nothing fancy, just text.
Flutterby, we’re located on Sorcery.net at the moment. Feel free to stop by and say hello. It would be awesome to have other dopers there. I’m usually on under the nick Stygian.
Little Wing, I’m not insulted at all. I know exactly what you mean. Even as a channel op, there are still times when I can’t seem to find people for my characters to interact with. The easiest way to connect as a newbie is to drop into our out-of-character channel, #BDI*OOC, and introduce yourself. There are usually a few bored people looking for somebody to play with hanging around in the channel. Some people find the complexity of our setting daunting since it’s been developing for ten years, but you don’t need to memorize our website to play. All you really need to know is that the inn is located in Drache, a port city on the southern coast of the kingdom of Arangoth. You’ll pick up more stuff as you go along if you want to.
I’ll check it out, if I see you on there I’ll say hello
Thanks, Blind Guardian. I’ll definitely check it out soon.
Flutterby & Little Wing: Cool! I hope to see you there.
Fans of text-based RP should check out Elf Only Inn , a webcomic about an online RP room. The artist seems to have stopped updating the comic, but there’s an archive dating back to 2002. I don’t know how funny it is to non-RPers, but a new EOI update was something to be excited about among the people I hung out with. People from all over the internet swore that he must be a player in their chatroom, and that his characters were based on people they knew. If anything, it merely proves that stupidity is depressingly universal.
Boy, I never thought that I would feel old because of something like this…
Not one post about Genesis? Darn…AFAIK it started the genre.
I played it over 10 years ago obsessively. I had a good time and met friends, etc. But it got weird. I knew a bunch of the other characters in RL, and we often had MUD parties filling up the school’s computer labs all night long. Then people started to have “weddings” between their characters with people out-of-state and they added a special chat room that couples could go to and there were special commands (use your imagination) and and and…
It just got weird. I wanted my fantasy to be fantasical, not a mirror image of my Real journey through Life.
I’d love to be able to go back and play occasionally, but with cheat codes. Sometimes playing a video game in God-mode is fun and relaxing. You just play and walk through walls, etc. But in these games everyone starts out a flippin’ newbie and it takes you forever to get anywhere, and by then I get bored. The descriptions for advanced play are so much more mentally stimulating: Thoron brandishes his vorpal ax and rushes to meet the black dragon’s fetid stench and fire… But the newbie ones suck: Thoron grasps his broken stick +1 and attempts to beat the mouse into submission…
Yeah, I probably will get back into them occasionally, unfortunately they do eat time like nothing else.
-Tcat
I haven’t explored the MUD/MUCK/MUSH community, and this is part of the reason why. I just want to roleplay, and having to hunt monsters and level up doesn’t really appeal to me. I tried playing EQ when it first came out, and couldn’t understand why some people called it EverCrack. I couldn’t see the appeal of hunting monsters and levelling up so I could…hunt monsters and level up more. There was no plot, no rhyme or reason that I could see. It bored me to tears. I tried hard to like the game, because most of my friends from The Realm had moved there, but I just couldn’t get into the game. I suspect that I’d have a similar problem with MUDs.
The other reason that I really haven’t checked out the MU* scene is because I don’t even know where to start, much less how to find a good one. But I’m enjoying IRC play, both for the RP, and the opportunity to do some worldbuilding. At times, that’s even more fun for me than actually playing. Since I’m happy where I am right now, it’s not exactly a high priority to find new places to play. Still, I’ve wondered what they’re like from time to time.