People have been using forums to role play since they first emerged on the internet.
The idea of communicating with other people across the world to tell a story, using shared words, was an idea that blossomed early, and has always been a part of the nature of the World Wide Web.
The forums that people use to participate in these games have changed only slightly over the years.
The addition of things like avatar pictures, background profiles, and fancy fonts and text colors has given people more control over their creativity.
While some people consider these to be a distraction to the actual storytelling, others delight in indulging the multi dimensional nature of these new elements.
Modern forums can be entire self contained social networks, with blogs and chat rooms all integrated into the mix, in order to support activities that happen on the forums.
This allows the creativity to be much more dynamic, with stories stretching across a variety of media sources.
There is also often the ability to embed videos or pictures into a forum thread.
All of these are options that allow you to tell your role playing stories in new ways, to express yourself in exciting new media.
This allows people with different creative talents to work within whatever art form they feel most skilled and comfortable.
The nature of forum role playing is that each person participating assumes the role of a character.
They then interact with one another, and as they do, the story unfolds based on their actions.
Unlike in table top or live action role playing, forum games usually only have loose rolls, and will often not require any dice at all.
While traditional games can be played in a forum, people generally prefer to leave those spaces for more literary pursuits.
This is because forum role playing isn't so much a game, as it a creative experienced shared between many different people.