I'm not sure exactly when I started role playing. Somewhere around the year 2000 I think. I haven't seriously rped for about a year and a half. It's been like there's a wall keeping me from all of my creativity and imagination, so it's just about impossible for me to come up with anything. Hopefully it won't last much longer.
I roleplay a lot of different things. Most of it is centered around modern fantasy. I started out playing girls mostly, but eventually that changed to guys. I am a girl, and I know it probably seems strange to a lot of others (mostly guys) that I'd role play as a boy. I don't know why i'm so partial to guy characters. Maybe 'cause growing up I was a tomboy who hung out with her older brother, and guys most of the time? Most likely.
I started rping around the time when I was getting too old for toys, and "playing pretend". I love to role play. You can really use your imagination to it's fullest in rp. It was great for me when I was just starting to live in another world (T9W).

RP, short for "roleplay", is basically story writing collaboration. People have a character they come up with, and roleplay with others and their characters by writing about what they say and do. This is done mostly in chat rooms, though there are a lot of online forums devoted to this.

It is usually in this format:

Hey, how are you doing? ::walks over and does this and that::
The characters are the ones speaking, and the :: :: are used to point out that what is typed out inbetween them is the action the character is performing.

Here's a list of common rp lingo:

Mun - The person playing the character.
IC - "In Character". People type this to let others know that what they are typing is what their character is doing, and not the real them.
OOC - "Out of Character". People type this to let whomever know that whatever they type isn't their character, but them.
Spar - When characters have friendly fights with other characters. This is used for "training" and combat practice for the character, and the person playing it.
Dice - Dice is used when people want to make sure no one "godmodes", and fights unfairly. It's a lot like dungeons and dragons where the dice is used as scoring for each action taken to see how successful it is. There are a lot of small programs that can be used for dice, but AOL's dice is what's most well known in it's chat rooms.
Godmoding - Where a person pretty much makes their character invincable by pulling unfair actions like " ::kills your character:: ".
Stats - A character's dice stats like EXP, or little information of a character such as "Married to...", and "Character is (in whatever state)".

Here are my rping rules:
Godmoding= Lame.
Please be respectful.
Please be mature, and have a literacy of at least a 6th grader.
Do NOT kill my character without my permission.

I've had a lot of rp characters. I'm only going to list the one's that I really got to role play with though. Most character pictures were used from other places. That's what we rpers do. Use others' pictures. I'm not taking credit for their creation or anything, so get over it.

Rea - Neoka - Felicia - Blaze - Phyrrah - Jake