If you are Alliance, and I am Horde, and we run across each other on an RP-PvP server…

If we are about the same level, or if you are a higher level, I will fight you.

If you are blatantly attacking a fellow Hordie or a horde NPC or town, I will fight you. (About ten minutes prior to this I went and took care of a level 50 night elf hunter who was harassing Crossroads.)

If you make rude gestures at me or are otherwise acting annoying I’ll probably fight you.

But if I am level ?? to you, and you are all alone, and you are being polite… I will hug you. And then mount up and continue on my way.

Because you never know when you might run across someone who just might be a real bone-fide roleplayer, and those are scarce, even on roleplaying realms.

I like to think I had a really neat little in-character moment today. And those are some of my favorite moments in WoW.

I am a geek, and a carebear, and I like it that way.

I’ve seen a lot of blog posts around lately that seem to be hitting on sort of the same note; that is to say, the idea of playing a gender different than your own (the subject may or may not involve roleplaying).

I’ve been responding to a lot of these posts and I noticed that a lot of my responses were coming out pretty much the same so I figured I would turn it into a full-fledged blog post.

On Roleplaying: Roleplaying and things related to roleplaying (coming up with new characters, giving them stories and backgrounds, imaging their life in Azeroth, etc.) is pretty much 90% of what draws me to WoW. The other 10% or so is the mechanics of playing my hunter. And I’m sure you all know how much I love playing my hunter, so you can definitely see just how important roleplaying is to me. That’s just my personality and how I am– I like imagining things. I definitely understand why roleplaying isn’t everyone’s thing, in fact, I don’t think it’s most people’s thing. But, it is my thing. It is a huge, huge part of what makes WoW interesting to me. (Yes, I’m a geek, I know. =D) If you were to take away Tawyn, Night Elf Hunter who I’ve invented this huge story for… and replace her with an equally-leveled but different character that I did not invent, it would be very, very hard for me to keep playing the game.

And where is this leading to?

This:

On Playing as a Character That is the Opposite Gender:

For a long time, I’ve been just a little confused on why so many people play as the opposite gender. It wasn’t that I had a problem with it, it was just hard for me to understand why someone would play as a character that they couldn’t identify with on that base level. Yes, you could make the argument that the opposite gender looks more attractive to you, but for me that wasn’t nearly as important as being able to play as a character that you could really identify with. (And I say this as a very, very tomboyish female. My characters are tomboys, but they are still female. Like me.)

And then, thanks largely to an excellent article at Big Bear Butt Blogger, it hit me. I’m looking at the game a lot differently than most people are.

That is to say, I am a roleplayer and a daydreamer and I imagine my characters as extensions of myself, and… avatars of myself in a parallel universe, so to speak.

The majority of you guys, I imagine, are a bit more normal than me, heehee =P And you play the game as just a game, or as a movie. Big Bear Butt said that he liked playing female characters because he likes watching female characters kick butt, like in a movie or TV show, for example. It has nothing to do with creating a character that is an expression of yourself. And that’s a very normal thing, and it makes a lot of sense. I had just sort of forgotten that, and assumed that everybody was like me and into the whole roleplaying thing.

So, thanks Big Bear Butt for hitting me back into reality for a few minutes and helping me understand a lot of my fellow WoW players better. I’ll try not to dig myself so deep into the RP-hole next time. (Even if it is a lot of fun down here!)

P.S. A lot of roleplayers actually play the opposite gender too… because good character ideas are not limited by gender. So it’s not a roleplayer thing, I think, so much as it’s a “Pike” thing. =P

I’ve made a post before concerning my personal experiences with PvP servers, and I’ve been thinking I’d like to revisit that subject, as well as discuss another one. So, without further ado…

I play on a roleplaying server.

I play on a roleplaying server because my boyfriend picked that server, and he picked that server because it’s where one of his friends plays– as far as I know, that particular friend does not RP in WoW, so it’s sort of ironic that the three of us wound up on an RP server.

RP servers are interesting places and they have their own little “culture”. They have defined WoW for me and, I believe, sort of spoiled me because I was born and raised on one.

Now don’t get me wrong– for the most part, RP servers are really a lot like other servers. Not everybody is “in-character” 24/7, in fact the vast majority aren’t. And contrary to what you see on the WoW website about RP servers, I have seen people “in-character” on the general channels maybe… once or twice. We have hardcore PvPers and hardcore raiders, and we have lots of casual players, just like most other servers. I do, on rare occasion it seems, see people roleplaying. I do see a lot of people with the FlagRSP or MyRoleplay addons, though not everybody with those addons roleplays. Perhaps my favorite part, off the top of my head, is that you don’t get as many people named stuff like “Lolpwnsyou” or whatnot as you seem to get on non-RP servers. I don’t want to chalk this up to something like “maturity” as much as I want to chalk it up to how I think a lot of people on RP servers, whether or not they actually roleplay, sort of see their character as a real character in a story and thus want to bestow their character with an interesting name.

Now I have to admit, when I first began playing I didn’t see an RP server as a particularly viable choice to me, and I ended up on one mostly because I wanted to play with my boyfriend. But as time has gone on… I’ve discovered that RP servers fit my style perfectly. I do have a personality for my character. I do have a backstory for her. I do think about her life and adventures in Azeroth and how she would react to them. And, as I’ve mentioned before– pretending like I’m actually in a fantasy world is one of my favorite aspects of this game. (Yes I’m a nerd.)

My boyfriend, who has roleplayed via message boards and forums in the past, really jumped onto the WoW roleplaying thing and even though I was a bit wary at first I’ve started to roleplay myself as well. I don’t do it very often, but I have fun when I do and I’ve started to do it more frequently.

All of this has actually made it hard for me to play on non-RP servers. I miss being able to read so many interesting RP addon descriptions that make characters more than just pixels and polygons. I miss those random bits of good roleplay that I occasionally stumble across on my home server that make the game seem more real to me. And I miss the general attitude… it’s hard to describe without exaggerating, but RP servers are like the bright yet clumsy and picked-on kid in the back of the class who has loads of personality if you get to know him. We’re a bit different, and we know we’re a bit different, and we’re the brunt of jokes on occasion, but we like it that way.

And now back to my opening sentence– PvP servers. As much as I hate to say it, it’s true, I’m a carebear. =P My poor level 26 tauren hunter, who I love dearly, hasn’t been getting any playtime at all recently and it’s because she’s on a PvP server and I just can’t get into PvP servers. I’ve kept her on that server for so long because she is in a ridiculously awesome guild. But, sadly, a lot of important people have been leaving that guild and I think it’s on the verge of disbanding. If that’s what it comes to, I’ll be transfering her. To an RP server of course!