The podcast brought up GTARP and it reminded me of my own experiences with in-game RP, and I wanna hear if anyone else had experiences with it too

Back around 2012 I got into WoW through a friend of mine. If we weren't playing games together he was playing WoW and I wanted in on that action.

About 2 weeks into playing with him after school, I noticed these "RP" servers listed and decided to give one a try. At the time I was doing a lot of RP on forums as a kind of fan-fiction (this got me started on my path to writing stories and playing TTRPGs honestly) so I felt I could keep up with some RP while playing a game.

My first instance of RP will forever be burned into my mind as a cringe memory.

I think I picked a human hunter or ranger, one of the classes that starts you off with a pet. I did some quests and ended up in one of the starting zone taverns. Trying to RP, I stood by the counter then IRL took a break to have a coffee.

Someone ran up to me and started talking, saying I had a cute dog. So I RP'd and spun a quick on the spot story about it being my dad's dog, but he gave it to me so I wouldn't be travelling alone in the world. And they said, "oh that's nice. I'm just playing on my boyfriends account" and I fuckint Alt-F4'd my game out of cringe. I felt so embarrassed, even though in retrospect it's not that bad.

It didn't deter me though! I gave it another try and actually found a guild of RPers. They used teamspeak for Out Of Character (OOC) talk, and everything in-game was meant to be RP.

We ran through the story, they had experienced players helping to make a sort of loose RP narrative on why we were doing dungeons and all these fights. RP reasons for PvP. It was actually really really fun, even though some of the RP was flimsy and some people can't write for shit, it was a good time.

I remember I finally had unlocked Death Knight with that group and wanted to switch class. So in-game, I "died" during a dungeon and made my Death Knight.

It's worth mentioning that most of the players tried to read as little OOC as possible, so they could treat all the RP as a kind of running story and not be spoiled on any person's plans.

So when my character "died" and returned as a death Knight, I got to RP being a "darker and hollow person, who is slowly brought back to themselves by their old friends."

However shit WoW may be, I cherish those memories of spontaneous storytelling.