I’ve found that a lot of RP characters in WoW prioritize the heroics and high fantasy flavors of Warcraft.
Every Paladin is righteous and heroic, except the huge scarlet playerbase. Warriors are either seasoned fighters who love lifting and drinking, or berserkers that get mad at the smallest things. Half if not more than half of the Evoker RP community would rather be full blown dragons ICly than expand on ideas posited by Dragonflight… can’t say I blame them there but my point is thus.
Aside from some Rogues, I’ve noticed a lot of people just love to RP as powerful pseudo-masters of their archetype. It’s obviously a lot more in depth than what I say it is, but so many seem to have their “main character.” Strong, capable, heroic or villainous but still the best at it.
Where’s the middle-class?
Where are the miners, blacksmiths, architects and engineers? Bartenders, homeowners, street cleaners, chefs, etc. There’s not a lot of people that seem interested in playing any of those roles. The closest I’ve most commonly seen are stormwind guards, nobles, bards, mercenaries and soldiers… and “ladies of the night” sometimes.
It feels like there’s something of an untapped gold mine in this area of RP. But I think people don’t want to do it because a role like that is primarily viewed as an unchanging or uninteresting narrative. All these other Main Character types surround you and in theory their stories have more opportunity for intrigue and growth than the low fantasy alternatives you’d strive for in that scenario.
What are your thoughts on this?
Do you think that low-fantasy roles in Warcraft RP are under-represented in the RP community or that I’m just spitting out nonsense?
I want to know what the people think of less grandiose characters, and not just seeing them around but actively playing them and engaging in active RP with them.
That’s because many of us play to escape the drudgery and bleak reality of the real world, not to take identical drudgy roles in Azeroth. If I wanted to play a Rat Catcher, I’d be playing Warhammer Fantasy.
This game runs on heroic fantasy and that’s what most are paying their 15/month for.
I’m sure that’s the reason a lot of people have for it. For me it’s not quite so. My life isn’t bleak and sad, I like RPing as a hobby and my favorite thing about RP is the potential for character growth.
Now I’m not any different, my main RP characters aren’t low power run of the mill working class citizens. I have a simulacrum that is trying to exist among mortals who will never understand her, and since she’s a being of pure arcane, of course she’s the best magician ever with absolutely no room for argument /s
I like the idea of those lower class roles however because they have the opportunity to grow in radically different ways from the standard high fantasy roles that are more commonly played. They experience a totally different story.
Besides that, I can almost bet being a rat catcher in Warcraft would be way more entertaining than being an exterminator irl. Haha
I love both ideas. I see the appeal in both forms of RP both from observation and experience. I’ve RPed as a tauren soldier on leave of duty, I’ve played a carpenter, a bagmaker, and the very character on which I post under on these forums is just a Miner for Khaz Modan.
But that doesn’t answer my question because I didn’t ask what I think of it, I asked what others think of it. I want to read peoples opinions and experiences with that niche of RP. I want to have a discussion, not just parade my own experiences.
So have you RPed a character before that fits that archetype or were you only interested in referring to why there’s so few of them?
Either’s fine, it’s not like I’m disappointed in the response anyway.
At the risk of repeating a sentiment already expressed here, it’s easy to see why powerful and potent characters would be more appealing to most people. While I agree there is potential in portraying comparably more mundane seeming roles, I doubt the majority of people see that or care; it’s much easier to see the appeal of being a warrior worth a thousand capable of downing foes left and right than it is to see the appeal in, say, being a bartender in the same setting. At best you’re more likely to have characters who do these things in addition to the more grandiose stuff.
As someone with a couple lower-powered characters myself (two authors, a vintner and some others I’ve written but no longer use), I do personally wish there were more, but I generally understand why there aren’t many. Exploring the possible lives of relatively normal people can be interesting but assuming the role of someone greater is more instantly gratifying.
If there’s under-representation in these kinds of characters, I’d be a bit more inclined to blame the game itself, as much of what the rp community does is, more or less, influenced by what happens in the game. The game focuses on grand heroes and villains doing their thing, not so much the common man doing theirs. Perhaps if there were official media which highlighted more characters like that things would be different, who knows?
Almost all of my characters fall under this umbrella. I’ve been playing these sorts of everyday civilian characters since BC.
I think the biggest issue is that most people simply don’t know how to create interesting storylines or meaningful conflict within the confines slice-of-life roleplay, especially within a high-fantasy setting like WoW.
They are and they aren’t. They are under-represented in the sense that there are only a handful of scenes / guilds at best that actually cater to that kind of RP, but there are still many people that RP low-fantasy roles. And some, like the ladies of the night, are better off not RPed in general.
I think you’re seeing the tail end of the maturation of a number of storylines from individuals, or folks jumping in with characters that have to meet the power level to both be relevant to the warcraft universe, and to the individual stories they are participating in.
For those hoping to RP and put together a story arc, the mundane is where they begin and spread out from there - nobody wants to stay at the beginning of the hero’s journey forever. Now, on ER and over on Wyrmrest, there are plenty of more mundane guilds and groups using things like Guards of Stormwind as jumping off points, but folks get bored if you do the same thing over and over again.
Take the following example:
“John the Blacksmith forged enough nails to sell to his customers, and his customers bought his nails. He made enough to buy his meal for the evening, and went to bed.”
versus
“John the Blacksmith decided to forge more nails than he normally would today. He just felt like it. It was a risk, because what if he couldn’t sell them all?
When they all sold, he had some extra coins in his pocket and decided to save them to purchase his real ambition: enough iron to forge a sword.”
The first is homeostasis, which is needed if the character isn’t intended to go anywhere. There is no drive except to keep the character exactly where they are, a de-facto NPC. Whereas the second, though, introduces something else, a spark of ambition to propel the story forward. When a player is roleplaying a character, they intend to move the story forward, everyone wants to be the main character in their own narrative, otherwise it becomes stagnant and you might as well be pantomiming in front of a bunch of mannequins.
Now, those ambitions build up. John’s desire to forge a sword is anticlimactic if he never advances forward again, so he has a few more good days, maybe a couple of bad ones to create a short arc (oh no, the Stormwind Tax Collector came by and said he owed more because he sold more!). There will come a day where the story dictates he needs to finally achieve something, so he gets his materials and forges the sword… so now what? One could argue the story is over, and John should just go back to making nails for his coffin, but the player is actually fond of the character, so a new goal has to be made… and the stakes have to be made higher because otherwise you are just repeating the same story over and over again.
Repetition is a storytelling method, but the repeating elements are supposed to build off of each other. Next John makes a set of gloves, and then a helmet, and then some boots. Now, he has a full suit of armor sitting in the corner, built up over the repetition of the same story elements again and again, ready for his story to advance.
Suddenly a knight comes in looking for armor because of some emergency, and now John is thrust into a higher tax bracket… but the stakes of his story need to jump to meet it. By the end of his blue-collar tale, John becomes the pre-eminent Blacksmith to a contingent of the seventh legion - perhaps even taken out on forays to gather rare reagents.
Any time a new character is introduced throughout John’s tale, it is easier if they have a similar pace to his heroic journey, otherwise their goals and the narrative as a whole clash and John is back to making nails in his forge, boring the player. This is good as a setback, but then the stakes have already been escalated way beyond just piece by piece retelling of the tale so far, so oftentimes the narrative puts the player right back into the action after they learn their lesson.
Anyways, there are plenty of low-stakes and low power-level RP opportunities, but you have to get there early, otherwise they will eventually develop into higher stakes, higher fantasy naturally as the story develops. Trying to drop into a story already in progress means folks have to match the level of stakes (and thus the power and fantasy level) to be relevant. WoW itself has developed so much, that if the player wants to RP and be involved in the story, that the base fantasy and power level is set exponentially higher. Dragonflight was good for a bit of a reset on that, so I recommend folks wanting to RP lower fantasy elements focus on the Vanilla or Dragonflight periods as the starting point for their tales.
That’s basically how I play my own characters. In history, they will largely be forgotten except to those closest to them. Like family. Even my main character (this one I’m posting on) despite being a paladin/cleric, he’s not some holier than thou, super champion of the Light, who has killed so many undead. Nope. He goes on occasional missions to help the small people, will heal when he’s at the Cathedral, etc.
Same goes for my other toons. I have a bartender, an engineer, two hunters (human and kaldorei), an automaton (think robot/android), a priestess who’s basically a pacifist, etc. While they are all low key characters, I try and make them unique, but without being over the top.
As they all exist as observers of history, rather than history makers, I’ll RP in WoW, but a lot of times I’m RPing on a Discord server that was built specifically for people with the same mentality. They all play low key characters just going about their ‘smaller’ stories and let the ‘heroes’ do their thing elsewhere.
I think the angle that needs to be addressed is that even the most mundane characters within Warcraft are pretty fantastical. Rexxar isn’t just a hunter/trapper, dudes a half ogre, built like a brick house, and has several wild companions. The Defias on their own are pretty mundane, but even in vanilla you had goblins in big mechanized shredders, a grimtotem, Vancleef is still considered an accomplished rogue archetype (Even though at the end of the day, he was the leader of a builders union). Low power characters don’t have to mean powerless ones, if that make any sense.
I think the issue isn’t neccesarily that people are unwilling to be humble bartenders/janitors/architects/chefs, it’s that people don’t make the effort to engage with them on those things. If you make a Chef character (Who also happens to be a fire mage) but then no other player like, looks at your hooks and goes ‘hey talk to me about spices’, or your character is never taken seriously ICly by anyone, it can be a bit annoying.
People also I think are uncomfortable playing characters who don’t have solutions to problems. It’s hard to sell people on the idea of playing a character who can’t contribute to a guilds combat/fighty focused campaign. Being a low powered janitor when supernatural stuff starts happening (“I want to do something to help this, shame i’m not a priest who can cleanse the ghost ez pz”) can leave you twiddling your thumbs, which people aren’t happy with.
And he’s far from mundane in any sense. Hunter/trappers themselves by nature tend to be exceptional people. They’re skilled in wilderness survival far above the norm and tend to be good woodcrafters.
I never even considered that. Very good observation. Looking into my experiences I’d say the same, I’ve been in a lot of RP scenarios over the years and I’ve come to realize that nobody was ever powerless in those scenarios. But at the same time the scale of power tends to be pretty high.
There’s such a dichotomy between a scene where low-powered novice adventurers get together to fight kobolds and troggs versus mid-powered excelled adventurers fighting a bunch of insane mages in a void cult where the guy pulling the strings is capable of controlling the Shadowflame and gifted some power from Xalatath herself.
Realistically, what’s a humble dwarven excavator to do in that scenario? Sure, with the right people nobody gets left out, nobody is unimportant to the story, but put the excavator next to a practiced student of the Kirin Tor with 18 years of practice behind them… yeah there’s a conflict of power levels there I’d say. The player of the excavator is likely to feel unimportant, so they’d make a stronger hero instead.
In the case of Warcraft 3 I have to agree but World of Warcraft itself is host to mundane characters that can’t be as strong as Rexxar. Van Cleef is nowhere near Rexxars level because he was designed for WoW and not WC3.
Even still I see what you mean, Van Cleef isn’t a strong guy compared to Rexxar, but he’s not incapable. His humble beginnings thrusted him into something greater.
Of course even in WoW’s seemingly very mundane cast of NPCs there’s still characters that are highly important. Elling Trias is the best example I have. A guy who sells cheese for a living but is also either a member of SI:7 or knows so many people that SI:7 recognizes him as a highly valued contact. (I don’t remember which)
Characters like Trias have a mystique around them that characters like Anduin, Thrall, Jaina, and Varian don’t. We kind of know everything we can know about the heroes. But what do we really know about Elling Trias? Is he a dreadlord? lol
WoW RPers prefer to make their characters more like WC3 hero units. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s a unique experience in exploring the simplicity of being a Leatherworker and growing into something bigger from those beginnings I think.
I never even considered that. Very good observation. Looking into my experiences I’d say the same, I’ve been in a lot of RP scenarios over the years and I’ve come to realize that nobody was ever powerless in those scenarios. But at the same time the scale of power tends to be pretty high.
Yeah. It’s not even really a dig at ‘oh those silly rpers want power fantasy’ but everyone wants the chance to contribute to the stage - and I think people also forget there are supportive niches outside of being the Swiss Army Knife With All The Answers, or the Character With The Most Dramatic Backstory. Everyone’s looking for healers, but no one wants to be stuck playing the healer (Or the DM, or the dude playing the Excavator with specialized knowledge but not much aptitude in a fight or solving magical problems.)
I have no data to back up my claim/opinion, but I think the issue can be solved with the RP community getting comfortable with the idea that they can play a character that may not always have all the answers. Swiss Army Knife Mage of 18 years should be comfortable taking a back seat going ‘golly, I know little about Titan Digs’ to allow Mister Excavator to Rule the Stage for a moment, and Mister Excavator can find a niche in the RP (mentor figure, Mister Exposition, etc) outside of how much they can fight or be ‘useful’.
To be fair, there are niches for that. With as many taverns as I see opening up, there’s a severe demand for staff. though frankly like guilds and bards with too many up and running it really dilutes the quality.
Quality over quantity as the saying goes. If any of you want to make a cook, bartender, teacher, etc… I’m more than willing to offer em a job.
But yeah… we literally just killed a Death god, we’re officially at DC/modern Dragon Ball levels of power creep, and that is never good for a story. Because much like with time travel, there’s just too many unknown variables to really write realistically for when those are involved. This is one reason why the Greek gods are more HUMAN than they are infallible, cause it makes them more relatable (and easier for folks like Homer to actually write them than if they were to say, try to write a god as infallible, which is impossible to conceive to a human writer).