How awful was your first RP Character?

Wyrmrest Accord
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None of us like to talk about it, but it happened to all of us.

We were all horrible at RPing once upon a time. Maybe we were a Gnome that was the son of the Lich King. Maybe we were Ragnaros in mortal form. Maybe we were a Paladin but instead of the Light our Light was corrupted by evil shadow or something else edgy.

So, what was your first (or worst) RP character and what were some cringey things you did when you first started RPing?

So this character wasn’t my first, but he’s the first I can remember. His name was Mitte on Moon Guard and he was a Forsaken Death Knight. He was also a pirate that ran his own little guild of pirates. Sounds simple enough.

Well it takes a turn south fast. I claimed my character was possessed by the ghost of King Terenas Menethil… Nevermind that his soul was in Frostmourne. I also claimed that he was possessed in Stranglethorn Vale. Why? Absolutely no idea.

So I told this to my guild during an IC meeting and one of my guildies said something along the lines of “I’m sorry, the RP is kinda bad, I’m done” and left. I didn’t know this at the time, but he was absolutely right.

I told my little rag tag group of pirates I would kill the Lich King single handedly and become the new Lich King, and my ghoul would run the guild once the mission was completed.

Anyone able to top that mess?

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Hmmmm…I’ve had so many false starts with this game I can’t honestly remember what my ‘first’ character was, or how to quantify them. Like I made a ton. Some I wanted to RP with, some I just made.

I guess my first was a draenei paladin. that was like…all I had for him. He was a paladin. and a draenei.

i guess the worst was a worgen rogue on moonguard who I made and joined a criminal guild. i think i went to one event where the leader wanted us to like…sell fictional drugs ic to people? like literally walk up to random people hanging out in SW and try to sell them like magic pot i guess? idk i bailed and burned that character pretty quickly

so i guess she was the worst

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I’ve successfully repressed the horror stories. You can’t make me relive them.

I was pretty bad, lol. Still am, sometimes. Varying degrees of bad.

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Well, I’m so glad you asked.

Let me weave you the tale of the characters I made over a two-year period, ages 11-13. I can’t decide which is the worst, so you get all three.

The first character I made was a night elf warrior. He was the old, wizened age of 16, and had a talking nightsaber whose only personality trait was that she made lame one-liners. I decided to retire him when I tried to do a story arc with him, and as an impatient 11-year-old, scheduled a guild event every day of the week for an entire week. I was incensed with the adults with jobs and families and other commitments didn’t come, so I left.

The second character I made was a night elf druid, who was the sole and founding member of the Azeroth Feminist Union. I am sure that from that concept alone and my age you can predict the sole defining features of this character - she wore a giant button on her shirt and would proudly tell everyone unprompted how much men suck “because they do.” The guild she was in eventually got tired of her after eight months of that.

The third and final character I made before my break from WoW was a human death knight in a death knight military guild, and was unconsciously designed to be the last person you would ever want in a military guild. She thoroughly abused what little authority she had, talked back to her COs constantly, and went around randomly threatening people in bars with her tabard proudly displayed. I’m pretty sure I left in a huff after I got demoted, but they might have kicked me.

Eventually I aged ten years, learned how to think about stuff, and stopped living with my father, so I like to think my characters are at least 1% more bearable now.

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wouldn’t it be crazy if my first RP character was still my main RP character, it’s just that a lot of stuff is soft retconned just in the way of it just NEVER being mentioned ICly anymore because you were ‘rule of cool’ way too hard without a lick of foresight or editing or contemplation

like who would even play a paladin that’s died 2 and a half times, haha

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Heh. Tbh I can’t tell what was my ‘first’ or worst rp character, since I didn’t just go “I’m going to roll a toon on WrA and rp!” one day.

Anyway.

Cringe moments I do remember are:

  • when I wanted to rp elements of the BC story with my warrior…in Cata. I was genuinely sad that I didn’t get to rp the BC story, by virtue that I started playing in WotLK. The guild I was in, was understanding/playing along with it, and to this day I’m amazed at this. Then again, one of the other officers was RPing a ‘daughter of Lor’themar’ and the other dude was a viking elf.
    I’m by no means shaming here, because the one who was RPing Lor’themar’s daughter was very talented and I still get sentimental when I think about some cute things from back then.

  • I still have my flowerpicker DK. I think when I first made this character, it stuck with him. Or am I going to try and rework him again…? I’m kinda too lazy.

  • Keyás was such a crybaby sue, it’s not even funny, he got bullied and everything! How did he survive without his family is beyond me. He’s matured a lot since then, though - plus I gave him a family now.

  • I mean I could go back to the warrior character too and say: he’s died of broken heart, then love brought him back to life, and recently I just changed the story in a way that retroactively makes him a dragon. I still love and rp that character btw. I just cannot…sense. You know. How? I don’t.

  • My very first attempt at a dragon OC was one who couldn’t fly. That…was her thing, and how she made it work anyway.

  • And in the veeeeery beginning, you could say that I was RPing myself. But that was before I came to WrA.

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My first WoW rp character was so bad. It was a DK. I was going for a creepy undead monster pretends to be totally harmless and sweet, but actually makes people uncomfortable because she’s totes dead and crazy. Missed the mark completely and ended up with basically an undead Disney princess who constantly had randos falling in love with her. Then she magically came back to life because reasons. So much cringe, but also the most fun I’ve ever had in game so whatever.

First RP character in general was much, much worse. It was a message board vampire DBZ game and I made a pink-haired alien turned vampire who was shipped with Piccolo. The past haunts me.

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The earliest one I remember was a Worgen DK I made. Technically I rped a bit before that but those moments were excessively rare. The DK I don’t think was too bad, more just…tame and generic; mainly because I was just going off personal speculation based on observations from the starting experience. That is pretty much how I operated in regards to rp in general at the time; no particular concept or anything in mind or much of an understanding of what I was doing, just raw improv.

As a result she started as a broody silent person who stood around in the tavern looking dark. I eventually moved to a Worgen Mage as my main and by that time I was just beginning to look up lore a bit and actually write backstories and the like; so the Death Knight benefitted from that. She never got a huge amount of depth but she did get better.

I did briefly have a relatively worse character for a very brief time, but it’s not quite relevant and hardly worth mentioning regardless.

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Not me. For me was very simple since the beginning, just do and say what your character will. See the situation and imagine what my char do according to his personality. Also i knew about lore already, that’s a basic thing that everybody should get in mind.
Actualy the first time did RP i abandoned the group because y noted how ridiculous and exaggerated was the plot.
You just need common sense and knowledge about the lore in order to do a good and acceptable RP.

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I had an adopted daughter of VanCleef, but thankfully that was her ~dark secret~ so I was able to retcon before anyone found out. Also her age went through some wild swings as I learned what a timeline was.

But the worst was probably the paladin I had in the same guild for two years, the “lore focused” guild that had gone off to speculative fanon ages ago so they were teaching him shadow magic and his mind broke in eighty different ways.

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If that character were a gnome or a goblin, instead of a night elf, you would have had a quality comical RP.

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I was also a pirate, apparently a popular choice among young rpers…

Nothing too embarrassing, it was just kinda aimless. Hung around saying arrrr a lot and collecting cutlass shaped swords. And yes, I started a pirate guild so that people would call me captain.

It helped that I was a dwarf and people are particularly receptive to doofy speech affectations when it is coming from a little hair man.

My worst came a little later when I played a human whose cool dark secret was that he was raised by dark irons in Blackrock depths. Because I wanted to use the dark iron language that came with the tongues addons mostly.

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Let me tell you the tale of three rogues and stupid teenager stuff. I liked rogues, I still do. But each one had serious problems with their stories and only 1 still exists, but heavily retconned.

So my first true RP character was a human rogue named Valdus(Valadus?) Either way I was really nervous and hesitant to get into this ‘RP’ thing and I rolled on Wyrmrest Accord because I did research and it sounded like the best one at the time.

I actually had an amazing first RP Experience. I don’t know how many people can say that, but I wandered into Goldshire inn and there’s this guy in Bandages telling war stories to everyone around the fire. Everyone’s invested. I sort of walked up and listened for the most part, rarely interjecting.

He later asked if I was new and I said I was, so he was more than happy to show me the ropes. And, I got suckered into joining one of those kind of Scarlet guilds for a little while. I only casually was around, I went on maybe one event and then one day the guild dissolved due to a ton of drama so I wrote off RP for a while and that was that.

Cut to a year or so later, I’m curious again and my standing on my current realm is not good. Almost everyone was gone during this period of time. There was only 3 people my rank or above who even logged on, one who was slowly siphoning the guild bank as he was the same rank I was. The other one barely logged in. To make the story short, it was a ton of drama involving me taking over the guild and being harassed to give it back only for said people to quit pretty much literally right after again. It was ‘their’ guild, even though I’d been around for years and for over a year was far and away the most active member.

I removed the feeder, I cleaned up the guild, and started to recruit again. I always planned on giving it back to the old GM who said they would come back until then, but they got really bitter when they found out and I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong in trying to improve the guild since I couldn’t do much in my old position beyond recruit people and slightly use the guild bank.

It was complicated and emotional. I was still young, I didn’t know much better and I certainly wasn’t great at handling it. So, I left that guild and was fed up with PVE guilds entirely, in the mean-time I had a second rogue alt I made on a RP server.

Which leads to perhaps the worst character I ever made. I went there, the ultimate taboo. The long-lost son of a lore character, long lost sibling of another. A VanCleef.

Why. I don’t know. I wasn’t open about his heritage. He didn’t have a super strong connection, but for some reason I thought that was ideal background for a moody rogue. And of course I was moody. I spent a lot of time RP’ing with a grab bag of randos, none of whom ever stuck around much. There was a Draenei priest who I spent time with up on the Stormwind Bridge.

But eventually I realized, boy this character is a bad idea and since people I knew rarely logged in, I figured might as well go for round three. I deleted the character and gave it a few months before going into RP again.

Which leads us to Xanleth. A long-standing member of my cast of characters with a dubious and messy past. Started out joining a few people’s random RP events each week that they were advertised. 1, shot adventure stuff y’know. That was pretty fun and I sort of made some friends.

I sort of had an idea of what my character was. Former defias rogue, whiz at engineering who made himself a mechanical arm that sort of worked. Didn’t speak a lot of words. I’d often get typed entire paragraphs for the character to come back with a line, if that of acknowledgement. Sort of a roll with the flow guy.

So then a few friends made a guild and New Gilneas Happens. And I could go on and on about all the great and terrible things that happened in New Gilneas, but I do consider it largely a positive RP experience and building for me and of the higher echelon I probably had the best time as I avoided most of the drama by choice or by accident. Lots of young people as officers and such, that went over as well as you could expect.

I had to cut off some parts of things that happened, especially the first time Xanleth died which I felt like I got coerced into and then committed for a while until being harassed on the horde and I was like ‘Horde sucks’, so I went back to Alliance and pretended it never happened.

But now Xanleth is dead again, beaten to death by a fishing pole! His soul was resurrected by a Lich who he now does dirty work for, albeit because he’s forced to. And that’s where he’s been for like the past 4 or so years. I haven’t really touched that story-line again, but it’s in the back-ground moving at a snails pace.

So, Yeah. Made a lot of mistakes early on in RP.

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My first WoW RP Character was a Mage, but I had joined a really fantastic guild at the time on Feathermoon. Cheshire Cats. Thieve’s guild, but I stumbled upon them RP’ing, thought it was cool, and asked if I could join. There was some OOC drama surrounding it that I learned about later, some rumors and all floating around, but I never saw anything bad while within the guild, and the guild leader was very determined to clean up the guild’s image.

As far as embarrassing RP ouchies, I was very well coached and avoided most of them I’d say. About the only thing I can think back on and question is why a Mage would join a Thieve’s Guild in the first place, but my character was obsessed with magic, so even today it’s not hard to imagine them being interested in obtaining magical knowledge by any means. She was a bit more cut-throat than would necessarily make sense, I remember in one event where someone who left and came back ICly (a traitor), the leader asked the guild at a meeting what they should do with him and my mage yelled, “Cut off his head!”

I’m really grateful to those players though. They really helped make sure I didn’t have a crazy character. Being a mage was crazy enough.

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Super awful. Worgen Warlock during the tail end of MoP who ICly wore the full Betrayer’s challenge mode set with the Dark Apotheosis wings out, speaking demonic in front of the cathedral with no clue as to why it was bad. I also personally only deemed people to be a ‘threat’ to me if their item level was as high or higher than mine.

WRA is very, very patient since I was never flamed or anything.

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As a former Cathedral Square regular, I have a weird fondness for characters like this.

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My first wasn’t too crazy. It was a typical self-insert with no real background and no personality outside of being the class. I had the full on “amnesia and doesn’t remember the past” explanation and all. I took IC and OOC and blurred them to death. Thankfully, I began to pick up on how things are done pretty quickly which resulted in a lot of retcons, re-writes, and clarifications. Ultimately the character became so convoluted that I killed him off.

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My first character was a human DK named Rechido. I only started roleplaying when WrA opened up in wotlk, you see, but I was very excited to give it a try because the story was so good at that point.

I frequented the pig and whistle in Stormwind and soon fell in with a nefarious bunch of highwaymen and derelicts who had the high standard of needing to type in complete sentences to join their guild. They had to remind me of that while recruiting me.

I don’t think I had typical sue stuff, but my friend and I would sit in the tavern and offer to buy people drinks, only to tell them once they drank it that it was poison and then we would drag them into the basement, relieve them of their possessions, and hightail it out of there until it was clear to do it all over again. Morear, if you’re out there, I miss our good times together.

Anyways I’m pretty sure that guild ended in some multi guild massive battle across Duskwood where the leader died and several people got hung from trees. That was pretty upsetting so I moved on to a different toon, though to this day Rechido may still be hanging out somewhere causing trouble.

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First bad RP character ever was a half elf in the Middle-Earth Online RP forums. Like, anime mixed with Gandalf-power levels bad. I eventually did fix myself and became better at what I did, even collaborating with some of the RP’ers I highly admired and learned a lot from.

First bad WoW character? They didn’t start out bad, but I allowed things to get extremely dumb. IC race change right when race changes first went live? Half-breed children? I didn’t have it so bad as some, but it was still very rough.

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Worgen warrior who was… for some reason somehow a failed Forsaken experiment. Except he didn’t have any traits that signified this? He was guilty about it for some reason too.

He was also the second in command in a feral pack that rampaged across Silverpine until both the Horde and Alliance took them down. That was the backstory. How he ended up having drinks in the Blue Recluse is beyond me.

Even then actually RPing him was just criiiinge because he did the typical short-tempered self-loathing monster thing and kept getting in pissing contests with death knights over who was more haunted.

Then there was my nught elf druid who liked mages so he just pretended to be a mage. But animals liked him. Also part time on the same toon had another profile that was a stag.

Yep. I RPed a stag father and his fawn daughter. He couldn’t talk. Couldn’t do magic. Just a stag. :grimacing:

The rest of my characters following were less cringey and I slowly refined my way to my current generation of characters, which I cringe less when thinking about.

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