You guys slay me.
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It’s a discussion. You’re the one who said I’m telling you that somehow you’re wrong for roleplaying that way, I’m simply telling you that the narrative was always bumping the player up as the next great hero.
There are a ton of people who claim that the RP is somehow flawed because the characters all share similar stories quest wise, when they were always one way - there is no choice in those quests, there is always one outcome. Whether you engage in that quest is your personal decision, but everyone who does has the exact same story happening to them.
This whole belief that Vanilla WoW ever had more sandbox features is woefully misguided.
The best part about social roleplaying is being able to ignore what’s presented to you and substitute your own reality.
Difficulty: I GM in real life for an in person group, so with gaming I want to use what’s presented. You aren’t wrong, I’m just saying it doesn’t quite work for me.
And that works for small groups. The large number of roleplayers in the world, do so on tabletops, where there’s a controllable number of players and their characters.
There’s certainly groups who level together and roleplay going through the quests together. They treat WoW like a tabletop, and within that sphere, that works.
The issue is when you have a full community of roleplayers, who weave together their stories. Not just 5 players, but a hundred, a thousand, or more. The communities on RP servers grow beyond the confines of what would be appropriate for a tabletop or a small group.
The issues of a single person’s roleplaying experienced based on the game as presented versus accepting the game’s lore and also being able to interact with thousand of players through that narrow lens.
They can’t all have slain Van Cleef and cut his head off without either nullifying someone else’s story or creating that Yowler situation mentioned before.
For a lot of those people, the answer is simply that a lot of folks just accept that the outcomes of the quests happened, but don’t acknowledge anyone in particular as having accomplished them.
Are we the same person? Because i swear this is word for word what happened to me, I stop playing in wrath, got back into actually playing during legion as a warrior. Just swap out Tauren with Dwarf and I could honestly claim this word for word.
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And you keep repeating that as if saying it once wasn’t enough. It’s a very one-sided “discussion”, frankly, especially after I’ve told you that I know this but I dislike it and I choose to ignore it in my own mind. And in fact, it’s one of the reasons I look forward to Classic. You can repeat it all you want, but that doesn’t change how some of us view things.
Again, you’re the one who seems to think I’m telling you how it is. If it’s one-sided, it’s because you’re cutting off the other side of the discussion.
There is no one right way to roleplay, but the way this game was set up is certainly a singular perspective. Again, Jeff Kaplan was the lead quest designer and wrote much of Vanilla WoW’s quests and story, and based on what he has said about it, it was exactly as I said - it’s a story based around a singular character’s perspective.
If you’ve got an issue with that, that’s on you. Vanilla WoW is a social game, but written like a single player game - because that’s how Blizzard wanted it. A player can solo most of the game, and is built to be experienced from a single player perspective, but the subjective nature of that experience doesn’t jive well with the plurality of the MMO itself.
And there you go again.
And I’ll keep repeating it. Or you can hear Jeff Kaplan’s words on it, or Mike Morhaime, or whomever you like.
The story in the broadest sense is the story of all of the different races of Azeroth and their places in this world gone crazy. The individual can play it like there are 1K people all playing Skyrim on the same server and it works just fine and the quests are worded in a way that expresses that.
However, RPing is the game within the game and the rules are different. The other players are NPCs that compete for mobs and resources. Sure, you and 5K other people killed Van Cleef in Blizz’s world, but in the smaller RPer world, a million other things could have happened that result in Van Cleef’s death that the player took no part in.
P1: “Hey, I hear somebody got Van Cleef. Was it you? I know you went out looking for him.”
P2: “There was a collapse in the mine that blocked the entrance. I went back and looked for another entrance, but the surrounding hills were loaded with Defias. If not for a dagger I found on one of the bodies and the coin I made, the complete thing would have been a waste. Now it’s just a learning experience.”
P1: “You’re looking at it wrong. Whether you got Van Cleef or not, the Defias you killed have made the region safer and the people will appreciate it. You did a good thing. Be proud of yourself.”
Simple and easy. The world state is as Blizz intends it to be, the loot and experience gains are explained, player has avoided first step down the road toward being the hero and if some other player(s) in the RP group wishes to be the one that got Van Cleef, it doesn’t change anything in the RP world.
If somebody chooses to let the wording in the quest log dictate how they play, more power to them. However, I don’t see how Blizzard telling me the story of me is me doing any kind of role playing.
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They definitely are not worded in that way, especially the outcomes of those quests.
And this is fine, in groups who confine themselves within a couple guilds or a close-knit roleplaying group. If a handful of guilds want to split the game’s narrative among themselves, that can work. I suspect there’s a lot of roleplayers who would consider this approach in what is a more close-knit group.
However, the biggest problem is that this works less and less when you are in a community of thousands of characters and players with dozens of independent guilds, yet who are all part of the group, who share fiction across the community. A decentralized community doesn’t take someone claiming something like being the sole participants in a battle against a lore character very well.
In the game? No. In your community, yes.
Just imagine if 5 random people were declared to be the people who completed a quest in lore. Against a community of thousands? You might not have ever heard of those 5 people before, and now you’re expected to treat them as something special. Why should it be those 5?
World first? Because they say it was so? Is there some sort of council who decides what fanon becomes server lore? Now, you cross from developing a large community and watching it fragment into small groups.
That situation creates a lot of friction between people in a community to make some individuals more important than others. OOC, we all want to be a part of the story, and in a community, they can. Otherwise, it’s just small fragments who roleplay to themselves.
I am not disputing you, Jeff Kaplan, or Mike Morhaime on this.
I’ve never heard of that kind of RPing having been done before. Seems to me that it would be an awful mess.
World first in a roleplay? Unless you’re using the Yowler logic, how could there be a world first? I can see an only, but a first implies there will be a second.
P1: “Congratulate me. I’m the first person to kill Onyxia.”
P2: “The first? Are you anticipating her eventual resurrection and another slaying?”
I personally couldn’t stand the idea of thousands of people trying to make one shared RP. It’s great if people do it and have fun with it, but I don’t see how there aren’t so many disparate threads that the end result is anything but a schizophrenic’s dream.
This is how the RP community on Moon Guard gets on, and a lot of Wyrmrest Accord, the two largest RP communities in WoW.
There are thousands of roleplayers, in a shared narrative. The only central storyline is the actual game’s plot. Everyone is going on with their lives, weaving their stories between each other.
Alliance has their storylines, Horde has theirs. Each side has their own guilds and individuals and shared storylines, and then occasionally has inter-factional stories and conflicts. From which, more stories can be created and developed.
If you want to talk about a living, breathing RP world, those two servers have that in spades. Some people RP as bold adventurers, some as simple soldiers, others as the common folk. It’s an actual community of characters and players who work with each other to form a complex, interwoven narrative.
That’s why anyone claiming to be the important connection in the game’s singular plot can be problematic. If someone does claim to be a major factor in lore, it could create upheaval in that community, and therefore those communities do not claim to be involved directly in the game’s stories directly as presented.
What these RP communities do is fill in the world, walking side by side with the game’s narrative. Someone killed VanCleef - who that is unknown, social roleplayers only deal with the consequences of VanCleef’s death, or the situation that originally led to VC becoming the head of the Defias Brotherhood, etc.
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I made a character on Moon Guard, but it was only to check out the Goldshire Inn. It was… educational… to put it politely.
So they exist sort of in the world and outside of it at the same time. Interesting concept. That would certainly clean up a lot of the potential mess. I can see the appeal in it, but I don’t know if it would be for me. While I don’t want my character to be in the middle of the action, I like the idea of circling the perimeter if that makes any sense.
I like paladins. Knight in shining armor. Helping people and buffing them “kings honor friend” and stamping out corruption the only way a real man does, with a hammer.
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Gotta say, I do have a very big soft spot for the classic Paladins. It’s shame that the old fashioned “I shalt smite thee, vile Daemon!” type of knight went out of style, I miss my knightly paladins, I hope we see more of them in classic.
Much like what people say will get out of Classic, you get as much out of roleplay as you put in.
I’m looking forward to stories of my characters who’ve I’ve been playing for 14 years get a little origin rewrite in the past.
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I definitely bounce all over class-wise; it would be hard to pick a favorite. Instead, I’ll just pick one that I created specifically because of a pre-determined idea of the class and love to this day:
Paladin. One of my favorite books is Oath of Gold (or Deed of Paksenarrion) for its depiction of a paladin who started off as a warrior, a mercenary, but was shaped and tested by many events until being essentially called by a High God as a paladin.
I have a female human paladin named Paksennarion, and try to hold her to the same kind of temperament and spirit as her namesake. It’s probably some mix of tank (taking the damage and the focus of the attacks) and holy (healing herself and others). I get that paladins weren’t top raid tanks in vanilla, but that’s irrelevant to who she is and what she is like.
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Depends, this guy was pretty much a child soldier, who has PTSD, after going through all the brutal wars, and watching artillery shells land on his mate in the trench’s, before somewhat getting his life back together before some Ally killed his wife.
Man, this guy has such a grusome backstory… I guess that’s what happens when you main the same toon for like 15 years, well at least in RP Cannon he died before Legion.
On a serious note, i do actually think warriors are uncreditted in RP sense, to me the whole rage thing comes off more as a berserk / Sith kinda vibe, while you’re struggling constantly with the power of instinct, blood lust and so on, NOT to cut down your friends when the battle turns good. Instead they’re given the casual fighter kinda trope from DnD
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