Character Building Retcons

Moon Guard
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So I have been thinking about returning to WoW RP after, may as well say a two year break. I was part of a guild in 2018 to 2021, but we didn’t get very far in 2021 before everything fell apart.

In the past, my guild has fissured because of senseless OOC drama, but most of my RP Main’s development was in that guild. I admit it was bloated because I did so much in the guild, but almost everything I did was retconned drastically. I also was in a pretty big guild in 2015/2016, but that guild also fell apart, but I didn’t do as much with them that was character altering, so it is easy to keep that canon, not to mention I loved everyone in it.

I feel like Shadowlands was a great ending for my character given that he is a Paladin and all the affects and breaking point for him was the Third Age, but looking back, it feels like I’ve done nothing with him because of the retcon.

Do you guys think it is best to just make a new character at this point, or completely remake the character as if I have never RPed him at all?

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So, personal opinion incoming; apologies if people don’t agree! But I HATE retconning things! Honestly it drives me crazy to just erase history especially when it’s so crucial to character development.

Usually what I do when something falls apart but I want to keep the history is I’ll just change names and perhaps some minor details. At the end of the day it’s YOUR character, and you should do what feels right to you! If this history is paramount to your character’s development then I wouldn’t scrap it entirely; but that’s just my two cents!

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If the retcon makes you happier in RPing then you should go for it. If you want to replace the people you had some issues you can just make them NPCs or something and keep the storyline elements in place? I don’t think that is unreasonable.

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It’s really difficult when people retcon things that affect your characters, and at the end of the day, if the RP was very involved, it can be hard to move on past that. In some cases, I have killed off characters because the stories were going places that I no longer was welcome in or wanted to be a part of, and it can make for some …interesting stories moving forward with other characters.

At this point, there’s been enough fighting in wars and such that killing off characters isn’t that hard, and sometimes starting fresh can be really cathartic.

That said, what others have suggested here is also great advice. In the long run, it really depends on your feelings and how you feel you can move forward in a way that is going to make you happiest.

As an aside, when I have killed off characters, I have sometimes deleted them entirely. I would not suggest this. Buying a name change and then heading over to the barber shop tends to be good enough. Alternately, you can race change the character, but the name will still be the same, and I tend to have a lot of attachment to character names; so,…YMMV.

My last resort would be to just create a whole new character, but leveling up can be a real pain. Still, it might allow you to clear away the gunk and cobwebs of the past and move on.

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There is no test or grade at the end of this journey.

No one of consequence is sitting there comparing your stories to see what was altered and what is the same.

Honestly, if you liked the growth of your character just not the guild it was tied to, just change the name of the guild or whatever in your history that caused it and keep the growth. If every time you look at your character, you are given bad memories, start over.

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There is nothing wrong with changing, deleting, rewriting, etc. things in a character’s backstory. Particularly if all the other people from that RP are no longer playing or are no longer playing those characters. It’s your character, and you should do what you want with them.

That being said, if the others are still playing and are interacting with you it would be a good idea to talk to them and let them know about whatever you’re changing that involved their characters - in the interest of clarity, friendship, and not having an awkward moment in RP of “Hey, you remember this?”.

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Unfortunately the only person who will be able to give you a clear answer on whether or not you should retcon portions of your character is you, but here is my two cents as someone coming from a server with far less “external lore” generated by players that affect one another. While as players and writers we have the benefit of unknowable information to our characters, as well as the burden of taking events that are unrelated to Warcraft and trying to contextualize them into our characters’ stories (such as no longer having the means to play the game suddenly.)

If you feel like you want to keep your character as they are currently, but no longer what to be involved with these guilds, then you should “soft” retcon by removing descriptors and names to leave the themes intact while giving more wiggle room.
If you want to alter factors of your character but do not wish to cut contact with members of your guild I would say do not retcon. It’s fine to just say “my character made a mistake and left” instead of applying our outside influence and rewriting their story completely.

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Sometimes a retcon can be good; though in my case, the only retcons I’ve done are cases of “early RP, poor writing”.

In this character’s case, back in WoD the concept was “Paladin banished negative emotions to The Void. Negative emotions formed into a humanoid and returned. They fell in love. And he tried to kill her.”

Yes it’s cringe. Later on I decided to not go 100% retcon and kept the other character in the story as a non-Paladin… but decided they broke off, decided to become a Paladin out of fear, then went to the Broken Shore and never returned.

After Blizz started adding more lore about void shenanigans, I started to slowly form new ideas and eventually the character developed into something solid… and before I quit, he was definitely at the peak of his RP ‘career’ of sorts.

Anyhow I’m rambling. I think the first reply has a valid answer; if the guild is entirely defunct and the like, change the names and such and re-write it so a new backstory full of your own characters.

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Thanks everyone. And yeah, no one plays or interacts with my character anymore or they moved servers. While I didn’t end up on anyone’s bad side, everything else just crumbled around.

I was mostly wanting to see other opinions. I think to retcon everything back at least the beginning of BFA would be the correct move since I had a 2 year break on RP and didn’t really do anything with my character between 2016/2018.

But retconning everything from the start, I can reuse every character. Which I guess would also be considered using a new character lol. I will probably wait till pre patch to see everything that happens.

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One thing to remember with RP is that most people really don’t care that much about your character as much as you. I don’t say that to be mean but as long as it’s not a material change that has major or lasting impacts on others around you, do what you want!! Chaos! Anarchy!! No one can stop you!!

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This would be a good time to reboot your character. When 9.0 hit, I decided it was time to “retire” my old characters. I did that through renaming and recustomizing. The 10.0 patch has a time slip so you can definitely start fresh.

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This, yes. I have a few tweaks that I’ve made to my longest-standing characters that I rolled up swiftly approaching two decades ago, on another server entirely, and literally none of the affected characters have been around since almost that long ago. Most of it is smoothing out backstory and making it make more sense as I only had a very loose understanding of the lore at the time and was brand-new to RP beyond playground “I’m a unicorn, you’re a ninja, let’s fight!”

Notably, though, the bad choices that my characters made, I’ve kept. Even when the results were disastrous. Important character growth came from those learning experiences that shaped who they are today. It can be hard to keep really bad blunders where you just totally biffed what, on reflection, the character should have done or that had huge, undoable repercussions within their relationships and social circles, but they were also experiences that those characters had to learn from, to learn how to do better next time.

And for me, as a roleplayer, they were good lessons in not shotgunning my characters into any situation that seemed fun regardless of what kind of effect that might have on larger stories beyond just my character’s, tying them to whatever fleeting bit of lore that seemed cool until their history was a Gordian knot, getting slippery with a character’s personality, motivation and established history when it was inconvenient, etc.

Which isn’t to say that This Is The Way or anything, that’s just how I’ve handled it. If someone wants to excise relationships, history, decisions that their characters made, organizations that they joined, whatever, that’s their choice! If someone wants their character to wake up every day and be a 50 First Dates tabula rasa, born anew with every new encounter, do it. I am not the boss of RP, we’re all just playing dress-up dolls in the sandbox here. There are no rules, just what makes sense for you personally.