Category Archives: rp

rp

A Wee Confession

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I have a confession to make.

I am a horrible roleplayer.

“But wait, Pike, don’t you only play on RP or RP-PvP servers? Haven’t you scrapped every single non-RP character you’ve made precisely because you miss the RP? Don’t you come up with vastly deep backstories and personalities for all your characters and view them as being about as ‘real’ as they can be without actually being real? Isn’t the ‘What toon do I feel like playing today?’ question usually answered by ‘What character story do I feel like exploring today?'”

Yes. And all that is 100% true.

But stick me in an actual roleplaying situation and I’ll be completely at a loss for words. I don’t know what my character is supposed to say! She’s not me, she’s herself. I don’t want to put words in someone else’s mouth.

Oh, I can probably fake it decently well. Especially if I’m allowed to throw in knowing puns and anachronisms (“I heard this crazy story that the world was born out of a Great Blizzard.”) But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t guilty of bursting out into a rather infamous song mid-RP-session. (To be fair, the other person was a blood elf and didn’t know what I was saying.)

I guess that’s one of the things I like about my main servers, Silver Hand and The Venture Co. They aren’t exactly shining star examples of roleplaying servers; people are more relaxed and passive, but you still do get the sense that people care about their characters. And of course, once you do find the underground roleplaying community, it’s quite expansive.

Really good roleplay can be a scintillating thing; a showdown between Tawyn’s guild and an overzealous all-Paladin guild in front of the Cathedral of Light comes to mind as being a bigger adreniline-rush for me than Karazhan ever was. But I still think I feel much more at home trapping and pewpewing than wondering if I’m roleplaying correctly. It’s simply a matter of which I think I am better at doing. I enjoy doing things that I am good at.

All that said, I couldn’t dream of not having the roleplaying element in the game, even if it’s more of a passive background thing for me. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the vast majority of my interest in this game comes from the fact that you can invent your own character. Give her or him a personality and a story and a life of their own. If that element wasn’t there I think I’d quit playing.

I’ve had e-mails or comments or tells in game from people wondering how to get started on a roleplaying server. To be honest, if you’re making characters on my servers it’s going to be just like a normal server except you might see a few people with roleplaying-addons running around, and once in a blue moon you’ll catch snatches of roleplay. That’s really it. I think there’s a misconception that people on roleplaying servers talk in Shakespearian English or use grandiose words in Trade Chat on a regular basis. I’ve never seen either. Don’t be scared to roll on an RP server if you want to try it out; at the most, you’ll be underwhelmed.

Who knows– you might be better at roleplaying than I am. (Heck, I’m sure most people are!)

operation hug, rp, screenshots

Just A Little Personal Victory

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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.

blogs, rp

Roleplay & Character Choices – Combining my Comments into a Post

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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

rp, server types

Born and Raised on an RP Server.

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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!