Your personal story

I acquired a hatchet. With it I killed chickens and chopped wood. With the wood and feathers I fashioned bow and arrow.
With my bow and arrows I hunted bears and llamas and other critters. Out of their hides I fashioned leather armor.
Getting better at hunting and crafting I began selling arrows and armor to other people and killing stronger monsters and was able to buy a tiny plot, where I built *my* home.

A simple story. A simple character progression. A million times more personal, exhilarating and immersive than most other games offer.

What's your short story that immersed you into a fantasy world more than any game that came before (and maybe even after)?


ps: shoutout to Catskills shard

 

Used to be Catskills player here, I've since moved to Atlantic and love it there, it has the old warm feeling I used to have in Catskills.
I was....*takes a breath*
Charlie, Daniel'le, Kitn'Boo, Here Kitty, Aoshi Elric, Naubol Dalhar, Aura, Najara, Purist, Anish'Lem....and others but those are some of the regular ones.

 

One of the early ads for UO said you could become mayor of a town. That intrigued me. Got the game at release and it became quickly apparent there was no such mechanic for that which kind of had me a bit dismayed. However, the gameplay was fun and was unlike anything I had played before so that little issue was niggling but trivial.

As I carved my niche in Britannia, I made friends, formed a guild, and placed a large forge in a clearing near Yew that became our guild house. Over time more and more of the guild placed houses there, and it wasn't long before we had a tiny village of homes and shops. It wasn't until maybe a year later, while attending a roleplayed meeting of guild leaders at the Abbey, discussing the politics and issues of the surrounding area that it suddenly occurred to me, "Holy shmiz, I'm... well... mayor of a little village!"

There were countless moments like that in UO for me, where the breadth and depth of what players can truly do would hit me, and that crazy virtual world would just become that much more immersive and real.

Our village - http://themess.com/gamestuff/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/opv_logo.gif

 

I played many of the original Ultimas on an Apple IIE, then quit computer games for several years after high school in 1992. I bought my first PC in late 1997 or early 1998 for the express purpose of playing Ultima Online, which was like a dream come true to a former DnD and Ultima player. I learned how to both use the internet and play UO at the same time.

I started on Napa Valley with a character named Percy Blakeney (big Scarlet Pimpernel fan). My intention was to become a knight in shining armor type. I selected Yew as my starting city. I was using dial up at the time and lag was terrible. I had no idea what was going on, and recall getting advice from a few people in Yew, then ventured into the wilds. I participated (uninvited) in a few mass attacks on monsters, and ended up accidentally attacking a couple of players and ended up with a permanent gray status, which remained for some time, leading everyone to attack me, often. This became something of a joke among my friends, who would sometimes get killed trying to protect me from blues when we ventured out.

I eventually settled in Moonglow, and made a few close friends with whom I would often adventure. I felt like something of an misjudged outlaw until I eventually lost my gray status after donating tons of bread and doing other good deeds. My other goal was to be able to wear full plate armor, thus fulfilling my role as a knight. I chopped down every tree in Moonglow several times, and took up every skill that I thought might increase my strength. Finally the day came that I had reached 80 strength and I donned that suit of platemail that had been lingering in my bank box. It was an amazing, rewarding experience. Shortly after this I met a fellow named Kazeneko, a ranger, and it was here that I began my love affair with roleplay.

I eventually migrated to Europa when it opened, and created a new character, a swashbuckling bard named Percy Bandello, and had my gold moved to the new shard. This has been my main character on a few RP forums. I was nominally and briefly associated with the player run town of Deepwater, and even more briefly, with another character, in the Drow guild on that same shard, and also a pirate guild on Atlantic (I think). Shortly thereafter I quit about a year and a half after beginning that wonderful journey as it was interfering with my real life.

 

I know this thread is kind of dead at that moment, but I feel the need to share some stories myself, as I have only just started becoming immersed in these worlds of Lord British and am back in my "Role-Playing" mood.

My story is less of an actual story, but more just sort of a jumble of memories from some of the first RPGs I really played. Strangely enough to say, my first major RPG was Runescape. I started playing back in the 5th grade I believe with a few friends in class. I was no good at the game. I'm still no good at the game actually, but I was worse back then, and even then it was much simpler than today's Runescape 3 that's trying so hard to be a modern MMO and not what it was. Well, anyway, what I can say about what I actually did in game was this. I used to mine quite a bit. My goal was that I could become a smith in game, make all my own armor, maybe even sell to a few people. I also learned to cook, so I could keep my health up. Then, even though my combat levels were drastically low, the most fun I would have in that game was to fill up on food, bring the best armor I could use, and bring a few runes along also, and then go into the wilderness. This felt like an adventure to me. I was traversing in a land that I had no true knowledge of. It wasn't safe there, no matter the level that you were, and even more so with a low leveled idiot like myself. But, it was more fun that anything that I've done in recent years in MMOs.

Everything has sort of lost its wonder now. I play WoW on a private server, and it's all about leveling up the fastest, having the best gear, having the most money, having high ranks. It lost its sense of adventure. When I first started playing WoW also, I would have the most fun exploring the different territories or completing quest lines that I actually paid attention to(yes, I read the quest text). I'd find out more about the history of a dungeon, discover why the mobs were here, what the purpose of all of it was. That was when I truly loved a game. Fun gameplay only carries me so far, but a world that I truly feel like is real, that is what sucks me in to stay. Azeroth feels real to me. I read all the pages on the Blizzard website about the lore, I've read a few of the books, it's not like some MMOs where one event shaped the whole world and that was that, it was a living, breathing world, and most people forgot about that.

Anyway, those are my major moments of when I actually felt like I was Role-Playing. Heck, I just started playing Ultima IV for the first time, and it's honestly more immersive than modern RPGs like Skyrim or Dragon Age. I feel like I heavily missed out on the golden age of RPGs.

Edit: I realize this was probably just an Ultima Online thread, my apologizes if I simply just hijacked the thread.

 

I'm from earth, and I walked through a lunar rift. Poof I'm in New Britannia. .... that's my story, but in the future.

Let's just pretend I initiated an inverse tachyon pulse from the forward array and it opened a rift in space-time causing me to see future events.

 

This thread's a great idea, thanks Kai (-:

My little story took place many years ago when an old friend of mine kept urging me to join a strange game called "Ultime Online" which I found exceptionally boring and useless. However, it was this evening when I was wandering around aimlessly in a town called Trinsic, trying to give this weird game a very last chance before my subscription would end on the very next day (giving me the relief to delete this pointless piece of gaming software eventually).
Just minutes before I wanted to log out for the very last time two strange characters approached me. Uther and Cija, I still know their names. They weren't just mere representations of their players in a piece of computer gaming software, they were rather played as fictional fantasy characters in an ad-hoc story unfolding right before my eyes. They approached my character as if it was another fictional character with its own background, history and goals. I was completely baffled by this unknown kind of gameplay ... but I gave it a try, joined in this surprisingly unfolding story and tried to play a role as well. What followed were five of the most thrilling and compelling hours in my whole gaming live, when these two figures kidnapped my char and lead it to an unknown area called "Felucca" where an epic story began.

Of course I didn't cancel my subscription on the next day. Instead I kept it for many, many years, spending countless hours experiencing indescribably mesmerizing storys - some epic & large, some touching & small - meeting the most thrilling characters I could have ever imagined. It was the time when no book was as fascinating as this strange little game called "Ultima Online" with its wondrous magic called "fantasy roleplay".

Allthough all of this happened many, many years ago in long forgotten times, I never gave up this strange concept of "fantasy roleplay" in all of its manifold facets. And I never will (-;

 

My old Ultima Online character was August King, a warrior with 100 str., 100, dext., and damned good with the band aids. I do not boast but merely inform so as to enhance the humor of the story I'm about to tell. You can imagine a much younger me thinking my boy August was bad assed and not to be trifled with.

A bit of a loner, I was exploring the coastline, killing monsters and collecting regs one afternoon... basically minding my own business in a remote location. A boat pulls up to me and all of the sudden the Murderous So-in-so* attacks and kills me with only two spells!

So-in-so gets off his boat, loots my smoking corpse of gold and regs. Then he built a camp fire, carved me up, cooked me and ate me! While he was cannibalizing my corpse, I hurled abuse at him through the keyboard which, of course, caused my ghost to say, OoooOooOoo! The Murderous So-in-so commented, "Nothing like dinner and a show", then returned to his boat where he resurrected me, told me I taste like chicken and sailed away.

Pk's can be a bloody annoyance and you can really get to hate the bastards but a pk with class and style? Awesome!



*Can't recall what his name was... perhaps someone here also encountered him?