Note: This is a crosspost from the original post "RolePlay 101: What is Roleplaying?" on our affiliate site, RolePlayAcademy.com. You can comment there or reply here.

This is the first in a series of articles designed to cover the basics of Roleplaying, and we will be covering what roleplaying actually is.

In its most basic form, roleplaying is just that: playing a role other than yourself. The most prevalent and well known form of this would be acting, where someone becomes a character either for the stage or screen. They study the character, his/her personality, accent, thoughts and then throughout the film/play, the actor essentially 'is' that character. Another place we can see roleplaying, and perhaps in its most 'innocent' form, is in childsplay - a perfect example would be when kids play 'house.'

However, what is more pertinent to this site is Play-By-Post Online Roleplaying. This is generally played on forums, and takes upon itself a role similar to acting, in that you are taking the role of a character (or several) and throughout the roleplay you essentially become that character. The major difference, of course, is that online roleplaying is performed through writing, rather than playing the actions yourself.

Writing the varying aspects of your character with other players who also are writing their character, you work together to create a story. Each character's actions and individual histories come together and through each post your story develops. It also is the job of each player to not only write their character, but also the environment in which the characters are in. In this sense, then, online roleplaying could very well be more aptly defined as 'collaborative creative writing.'

You are working in collaboration with other writers to write creatively - each person taking the point of view of one character in your story. That is what Play-By-Post Online Roleplaying truly is.

You rock for comparing this to acting. I never thought about RPing like that... but that makes a ton of sense...

I'm an actor, so.. yeah, but like in writing. :D

My two great loves: Acting and writing combined = Role Playing.

:)