Where do your RP ideas come from?

[Alexander Bodide]

Many of us often crave a specific roleplay scenario at times, or maybe even keep ideas stored to offer to their partners. But where do we find inspiration for these? Over the years I've found that it can come from just about anywhere...

Sometimes I may venture out onto the Internet with the express purpose of gathering roleplay ideas for plots or characters. And I have a primary method for this, which is browsing hentai image boards. I got my start roleplaying in a community where everyone advertised their roleplays with a sexy picture to grab attention, and so this is how I first learned to find ideas. Instead of having an idea and then finding an image to represent it, more often I'll start with an image and then try to come up with a story for it. "What happened before this? What happens next? What do the characters think of it; what kind of people are they?"

This has definitely affected my image-viewing habits. I tend to seek out images where it's easy to quickly tell what's going on, that leave room to speculate and write a coherent story around. Lately, in addition to seeking pictures of scenes in progress, I also look for character portraits that can tickle my imagination. Again, "What sort of feeling does this character give? How easily could a roleplay partner mold this reference into their own original character, and how might it inspire them?"

Another way that I might use to come up with more involved stories is...browsing hentai doujinshi manga! Or even just reading synopsis for various ecchi anime/manga. A lot of it is pretty samey, but if I spend some time looking I can often find some exciting ideas for new situations or character dynamics. Sometimes I'll even skim fanfics, but...that tends to be reeeaally scraping the bottom of the barrel. I'm generally not looking to completely copy source material or do fandom stuff, but I can find lots of idea kernels here to repurpose in my own stories.

Other times, I won't be expressly looking for an idea, but my mind is now conditioned to find them wherever it can. I might just be playing a game or watching a show, and I'll just automatically think "Hey, what a novel situation or character relationship! What would it look like if I took that idea in a lewd direction?"

Finally, sometimes the ideas happen completely on their own, in my sleep. A couple of times now I've had roleplay ideas quite literally come to me in a dream.

Bonus question: Do you write your ideas down? Since I come up with ideas at a much faster rate than I can roleplay them, I keep a huge document of all my ideas. Most of them are not complete prompts, but instead quick notes I've written to myself. The ideas are not sorted whatsoever and I even intentionally jumble the new ideas with the old ones so that they all stay fresh in my head. It's honestly complete chaos, but...I enjoy it.

[NyxAvatar69]

Sometimes, I get inspiration for ideas from games I've played recently, while others, I could just be doing some random task at some point in time (watching streams, playing rando, not being productive at all) and an idea will come to mind.  While I do try to make them as story driven as possible while trying to put smut on the backburner but not entirely out of the equation (in the past this was not the case), there are times the lewder ideas do come to mind...and then I keep them in the vault of my mind because of a number of reasons, part of it being "I'm literally too shy to approach other people with ideas unless I literally force myself," and playing the waiting game isn't exactly the smartest strategy ever.  Maybe I just fear rejection or something, or I just can't translate the ideas in my head into actual words someone other than me would find remotely interesting.

 

As for the bonus question, if I wrote these ideas down somewhere, which would probably be the smart thing to do, I'd probably have at least 3+ more ideas on my RP searching thread than I currently do due to previously mentioned "ultimate shyness."

[Dominic Dark]

My inspirations usually come from written works I have been exposed to and I add a smutty twist to them. For example, Orson Scott Card wrote a series of books about a world whose inhabitants were controlled by a central computer.  Of course if someone gained control of that computer imagine the sexually nefarious actions they could perform?  Another was doujin based on Ah! My Goddess, where a boy is corrupted by  demonic force and in turn corrupts other boys, who dominate Urd and Belldandy.  Nothing hotter than dom shota action.  A third is there had been a series of stories a couple decades back called Master PC.  Man those were good.  These days it's The App, which allows one to manipulate the minds and bodies of others.  Those are some examples.

[love_and_poprocks]

My inspirations? Besides the dark crooked corners of my mind, many come from smutty books or doujins I would like to play out for myself. Sometimes a really good animated short on TikTok gets me and it doesn’t have to be sexual in any aspect it’s the visual of what the possibilities could be. I’m fucked I’m in the head so I can probably find pleasure in most things that shouldn’t stimulate a person. Video games and DnD play a big role as well.

[Pixel]

I have a sort of over active imagination and tend to like to get my thoughts out into text. Finding partners is sometimes difficult because not every story I want to write is expressly sex-driven like most on this site. My role play ideas generally don't have any single inspiration, for example I have been thinking about a role play inspired by Stranger Things, specifically the experiments with powers that can contact or walk through another dimension, which has heavy Wonderland inspiration. Another is about heavily commercialized superheroes, which is actually inspired by the Warren Ellis written run on Thunderbolts, but the more I look at it the more it reminds me of The Boys in some ways. I have been trying to get a 'haunted carnival' story off the ground for ages inspired by CarnEvil and Silent Hill, and a bit of The Houses that October Built. I really like horror so a decent portion of my role plays will have that sort of unsettling or scary element to them, I like characters to be in danger and not invincible.

Other simpler stories I like to find inspiration from the 90s-00s mangas about young men who are in over their heads trying to take care of a female of some inhuman sort that fell into their lap one day and shenanigans ensue. Maybe I'll get inspired by a movie, or by a single image that I see of a character or an environment. It's hard to say. Just one line in a song could inspire me to write a story.

Rarely do I ever base my role plays on current events in the world, I did have one I came up with about a virus that swept through humanity and killed a lot of them, turned others into mindless killers and bombs dropped to sort of reset the Earth. This has heavy Fallout inspiration behind it, obviously, but I didn't really press it because shortly after I came up with the concept we entered a years-long pandemic and it felt in poor taste.

Inspiration can come from anywhere.

[Aura]

I guess somebody decided to resurrect this thread almost a year later. Well, heck, it's an interesting enough question!

My rp inspiration comes from a variety of sources. A lot of the time, it comes straight from my wandering brain. I'll often think about a particular sensation or emotion and then sort of derive a sort of anime scene that plays out in my head. Usually it's some sort of intense, melodramatic scene. From there, I end up fleshing out the characters, why they're reacting the way they are, where they came from and where they're going. Usually, if I end up getting suddnely really interested in the middle of a roleplay, it's because I've reached the point in the scenario where I can insert that scene that originally popped into my head.

These scenes pop into my head at the most random of times. Often it happens whenever I'm waiting on something, driving, maybe while I'm playing a game or reading something. Sometimes they're sexual, but they're usually more emotionally focused. Scenes where powerful emotions are exhibited, usually they're fairly dark scenarios like a character watching somebody die or fighting for their life in a losing battle. Unexpected emotions are a very common theme in my writing for that reason. I love the juxtaposition of a character realizing things didn't at all turn out the way they expected it to and the immediate desperation that ensues.

One thing that frequently triggers this part of my imagination, though, is browsing the internet or playing video games. I'll often see art of a character and start to imagine scenarios surrounding it. It can often be the silliest things that set off sexual imagination, too. Something about female characters doing that pose where they get embarrassed and grab their left arm with their right hand is really exciting to me and I, honest to god, couldn't tell you why. But also, fightened, shocked, and crying expressions get to me as well. For some reason I've always found myself attracted to exhibitions of negative emotions when it comes to writing stories. I've written a status before theorizing why that might be, but I guess it's not really important to dive into here. It's just that for some reason powerful expressions of happiness and joy don't really seem to do the same thing for me even though sometimes I really wish they did.

Still, that's not to say I don't get inspiration for really heartwarming stories as well! They're just not nearly as perverted in nature. Those sorts of stories always involve more wholesome scenarios like falling in love or family life.

Oh! And sometimes my inspiration comes from other roleplayers! In particular, I'll often read up on another user's preferences, their kinks and preferred roles and my imagination will start churning up a scenario based on those by combining them with my own shared preferences. In such a scenario, I'll often ask that user if they'd be interested in roleplaying and then bounce ideas back and forth so that the scenario can develop as a collaborative effort as we get a taste for what each other are interested in!

[Starcry]

I feel a little silly posting something so small compared to everyone else but here we go:

My inspiration comes from video games, anime, manga, webtoons, and even pictures I find randomly. That and just generally chattering with people who already have bare-bones ideas. I am big on world building too. I have read/watched/played/written so much in my life time that I can pick a setting and just go with it. Sometimes I can get a bit too ahead of myself before I have even written anything and end up letting myself down when my brain isn't mentally allowing me to write! 

[DoggedFellow]

I have an overactive imagination. From a young age, I was lucky enough to have parents who introduced me to the joy of reading. Everyone has that moment where they feel like they've been sucked into a scene and could imagine themselves in it. That was me for so many frigging years, always stuck with my nose in the books and my head in the clouds. 

Whenever I'm hungry for an idea, I ask myself what the point of it is. What am I getting out of it? Am I controlling a massive campaign of over 50 clans and warlords with their own unique ambitions because I want a medieval war epic? Am I trying to satisfy a fetish? Do I just have a wacky idea I want to try? 

Once I identify the point of what I want to do, I think back to scenes in books or scenarios I've run across before or played in games that fit what I need to write. There are archetypes, motifs, and motivations that can easily be parsed into a template that I can fill with my own creativity. After that, it's pretty much down to what I know and how well I write it! 

 

If I'm feeling smutty the. Hentai and doujinshi are my go to. I mean you want porn with a plot? Some doujins are like the game of thrones of porn. 

Any roleplaying partner I have is definitely always a welcome breath of fresh air that can sometimes spark inspiration too! 

[Cute_Bro]

It is a bit coincidental that I also share my source of ideas with the post above me. I could read since I was like 3-4, and had eaten all of Harry Potter in a week. What DoggedFellow says is true, when you read so much, the imagination you have just grows. However for me, another big help to my source of rp ideas has to be games, images and D&D campaigns. To see how games evolve and take a straightforward story and change it drastically gets my creative juices flowing, and I usually invest them more into the modules that D&D offers. That same investment I put when seeing images, be it smut or otherwise. If I see a cave I think 'A romantic scene could be set with two cavemen finding each other, and they become the first humans to understand love.', or 'This seems like the hidey-hole of a terrible criminal; and oddly enough, it's an adventurous boy that has finally found his hideout, and outsmarts the criminal to get out alive and tell the police'. Also, as always, talking about ideas with others is also a very effective way to bring forward beautiful ideas. Two minds will always work better than one!

[ETValkyr]

Everywhere, everything, all the time. Every book I read, every show I watch, every picture I see, every thought I have, and every emotion I feel.

I know, that sounds super cheesy. But it's the truth. It's the same for my other writing. Everything I experience muddles up in my mind and out comes ideas of every kind, all the time. I either do something with them or slowly go mad. It is my understanding that not everyone's mind works this way. Not that I can understand what it's like to live with a typical mind, anymore than typical people can understand mine. And then again most people probably wouldn't want a mind like mine, considering the downsides.

I once read that the creative process is like composting. You need to put a lot of material in, give it time to decompose. Then you plant seeds to grow into new ideas. The plants that grow are made up from the broken-down ideas of the past. That fundamentally resounds with how I feel about it. No ideas are new. They are just a bunch of old ideas, broken down and given new shapes.

[SpinMaster]

My ideas for RPs usually come from artwork and photos, from characters & models, to landscapes, to items, and other things. I actually have a pinterest for collecting things that inspire me, even though I can't find everything there. There's also some TV, animation, and movies that really get me in the mood. Recently, all the babe artwork I've been seeing, mostly on deviantart, is really making me want a sexy rp. (I wish finding partners was as easy...)

On occasion I use ideas from other RPs and mash them up to suit me...it's just...there's more of M lf F threads of what I want than F lf M stuff... *sigh*

[Mini Magi]

Realistically speaking: My head.

But going into details, it can be pretty much anything that has ideas in it. Like games, anime, music. The latter is a very rare one, but anime and games are brimming with ideas~ So what I usually end up with is look at something, such as a character, a concept, a personality, and start looking for pictures of either characters or places, other anime and games, until I end up with what is basically a shit idea. Then I refine it, think about what could make this fun to write, add and remove details, until it is something that I feel can be presented to others. 

Keep in mind that even then, it can still be shit. Like one of my ideas where I made a potential harem of 7 blondes, which sound great at first, but starts falling apart when you consider that they all have different personalities, and having one person be good for 7 different types of people is a herculean challenge for both my partner, and I. Nope! Fun as it may sound, it sucks in practice. It would also be a ridiculously long process to introduce them in character individually. So I'll wait till another idea comes up, refine it again, and see what I can do with it until I either abandon it, or have something presentable again.

Spoiler

The inspiration behind that idea by the way was Saber from Fate, and her different forms such as Alter, Mordred, Saber Lily, MHX Alter, Saber Nero, and Sakura Saber.

 

[Bagels]

Personally, I tend to share my views with a number of people on here, and I think it's safe to say that most people would. Since a young age, I've often imagined what it would be like to be a part of my favourite shows and such. This would often lead to me sort of adding myself to the story, even if it didn't make sense. As I matured, I kept the creativity, but rather than just adding myself, I'd think up a character to fit into the story better. 

Of course, when I discovered hentai, my thoughts processed the same way, and I discovered RP. From there, my ideas were often inspired as "what ifs" of various shows and games, anime and so on. When I became a little more used to it, I would expand into thinking up my own ideas, using genres as inspiration. 

Using genres often let's you keep things open to allow for wilder and more unique ideas. From there, I just kept going, although I still do enjoy using canon characters, be it in a random and new scenario that they shouldn't necessarily be in. Like adding anime characters into a modern day setting, as if they were normal people. I understand everyone is different, and has different tastes, but that's also the fun part. Sometimes you click instantly and both love the idea, and sometimes you discuss and use both your creative minds to make something just as good, if not better. 

There's a lot of hit and miss, but with this site, it really feels like you can share so many ideas at once. 

[WetNoodle]

Typically, just a picture can inspire a literal mini-series of stories for me. Sometimes they're lewd, but not always. The best ones can just come from a normal pic. The body language, the expression... I can start to formulate a character and personality in my head. Any other detail from type of clothing to background can formulate the time and setting... which is usually superficial to me who prefers to focus on character first and foremost. Once I have a base personality in mind, then I figure what kind of torture experience to put them through. And yes, though I've been on a dark/noncon binge as of late, I can take it nearly anywhere... from said rapey darkness to wholesome cuddly to grand adventure with sexy time and time traveling dick aliens!

But with all that being said... it makes no difference how dark, happy or absurd we want to go with it if we keep repeating the same cliches of each one over and over until we're bored to death. I have the memory of a goldfish on crack and the attention span of a gnat on.... methamphetamine? Needs to keep it flowing, mix it up, get some progression cuz what really makes my peepee hard is character development!

What was the question again? Oh yeah. Ideas. Getting high and staring at a pic usually does it. I'll get overloaded with ideas and forget 90% of them a minute later.

[Django The High Shaman]

Dreams, pieces of media like TV shows, movies and even music. It depends on that I consume. Hell one of my public posts was on The Crusades, Gladiator (the movie) and Onward Christian Soldiers by Cradle of Filth.

[PurpleLover]

Generally just from my screwed up horny mind seeing the ways of how stuff in media can be easily twisted into something sexual.  Like there's this one gacha game I play off and on, that has a lore element that very easily lends itself towards lewd scenarios.  But yeah in general a lot of my ideas just come from how porn addled my brain is.

Also what Bagels said about imagining yourself in the media you enjoy.  Always done that since I was young, and now I can do it but with sex stuff haha.

Another thing is just like seeing peoples comments on lewd arts on different sites, like r34 which is where I started doing roleplay stuff.  Collected a good few scenario ideas that sound fun from comments there, but I'd probably tweak them a bit if I ever did them with someone.

[Gangsta Moll Deactivated]

Mine arise mostly from incidents in my real life - things that happened that I sort of wished had developed differently, or that just started me wondering what would have happened if... - even my weird orc gangbang obsession started when I was invited to a Live Action Role Play with orcs...

[Gangsta Moll Deactivated]

On 09/07/2021 at 17:39, Alexander Bodide said:

Bonus question: Do you write your ideas down? 

Interesting question: and yes, I do.

I have kept a secret diary since I was young, and written in it very explicitly some sexual things I have done: and from those I have written sort of short stories that are as accurate as my diary and recollections can make them: my early sexual diary entries were full of the same emotional overheated gushing that I still write.

More recently I started to give free rein to my sexual fantasies: and those too I have often written down, revisited, edited, and woven into similar short brief emotionally overheated stories.

For a while I actually 'published' some of those stories - on the Literotica web site and on a forum that I still visit (KristensBoard) - as a sort of way of 'exposing' myself: but also exploring that side of my sexuality - the fantasy side - through interaction with and reactions from others.

I came here more recently, and find it an exciting place to explore by developing stories and fantasies more immediately, with others who feed my sexual intensity and take it in directions I would not have followed if left to myself.

[Elena Ichinomiya]

Image on internet, but not limited to hentai picture of random character you can think of. It could be a landscape picture, environment, and other picturesque art that nudge my mind. The other inspiration would be some story in (mostly) video game that I think could do some polish. Other time i also inspired from fanfic that was left on hiatus or discontinued. Scrapping their idea and turn it into RP and make the continuation from where the fanfic left of, basically. This also applied to someone RP idea that i think was brilliant, but stopped in the middle of the track for some occasion. You can see one example of it on my private RP idea list #1. 

Sometimes, you don't have to go crazy for an idea.

[The Soreress]

The specific idea usually come from an internet pic or a teasing situation in an actual show that I proceed to work on.

That said, I started RPing mainly as a canon character picked by my RP partners (still is one of my favorite RP basic ideas)

There is something about being able to be the focus of a private fantasy of someone else, either impersonating his "waifu" or "anime crush" (or novel, movie, videogame) that brought me to the world of RP.

But pretty much I'm a sucker for anything that sees my RP partner as a self insert and able to let go all restraints on whoever he wants me to play as.