Roleplay is a collaborative environment and that means that there are a whole lot of things that can go into a scene. I don’t want to be a negative nancy, but I do wanna ask: What are your personal pet peeves when it comes to RP?
I’ll start: Pretending the Guard NPCs around the city don’t exist. I get wanting to do cool things in the city, but there’s something off to me about labeling the guard as incompetent for the sake of the narrative. I’d love to see more carefully planned stuff that goes on, acknowledging the existence of guards and witnesses!
Pretending that guard NPCs do not exist is one of my pet peeves, too! I actually mentioned this in the RP guide that I wrote (along with a lot of my other RP peeves).
Thinking about one at random, I have a peeve about players having their characters be unbelievably nonchalant about combat/trauma. It is easy as a player to just kill a bunch of things because to us it is fake. It can be hard to stop and really think about putting ourselves in their shoes. Things such as ripping out a demon’s beating heart as a Demon Hunter or seeing babies burned alive on Teldrassil would usually be a big deal with lasting emotional scars to be depicted in RP.
SW in general, two types of folks tend to stay there: generic edgy or generic stiff. One’s a oversaturated meme at this point about how everyone’s either a mercenary or some kinda war veteran, the other is is a bunch of political squares trying to dictate how everyone else tries to RP.
I’d counter this with some lore: this game’s history is built on war and conflict, and every character in it has been touched by this in some way, shape or form. All major cities have been attacked or razed multiple times, and there’s never a time when people aren’t out on an expedition for the Horde or Alliance. It would be more surprising to me if everyone in this world didn’t have some sort of PTSD. Even the Pandaren pointed it out when they met us, as did those in the Shadowlands.
A lotta people die, and a lotta people gotta take their place. There’s a lotta vets out there.
I mean yeah, I get that it’s maybe a little boring when everyone is doing it, but let’s be real, that would be the vast majority of the people actually living here in this world, so I hazard to call it a meme… it’s just playing into the theme that Blizzard themselves built.
Back on topic!
Pet peeve: When someone tells you OOC that they’re uncomfortable with something your character does, and you tell them “It’s just what my character would do”. I was guilty of this for a long time and it lost me a lot of friendships. Don’t be a jerk-- find a compromise, or knock off the behavior.
When players emote their character’s thoughts/feelings.
Yeah, the insight into what’s going on in your character’s head/heart is pretty nice, but you just typed up a five paragraph essay, and only two sentences are anything my character can react to without metagaming. You didn’t so much as include a shift in facial expression or a nervous tick or what have you to indicate ANY of that thinking/feeling.
[Character 1]: “Hi Bob.”
[Character 2]: “Hi Joe.” Bob stares at Joe stoically. He couldn’t know that today was the anniversary of the day his family was slaughtered. Thinking about it, Bob recalled the horror when he was only five years old, reliving the memory as if it were just yesterday. It was the smell that he remembered most clearly. The burning of the cows trapped in the barn as the orcs set fire to it. The terrified screams of the horses, lashing out with their hooves to break down their wooden walls. Bob was almost six at the time, and terrified. He’d hidden in a bush as an orc ran past, cackling gleefully like a demon straight out of the twisting nether. The monsters had run into the farm house, and new screams had broken the still night, the screams of his mother and sisters as they were hacked to pieces, or worse… After all, Bob had balked and never looked inside that burning house to see just what had become of him. Even now, decades later, his own cowardice sickening him so that he thought he might lose his breakfast on the flagstones of the canal…
[Character 1]: “You okay, Bob? You seem a bit quiet?”
[Character 2]: “Hrmn? Oh, I’m fine, Joe.” But Bob wasn’t fine. He made no outward display of the raging torrents of emotions as he recalled his father being cut clean in half by an Ogre with an axe. Even the puppy he’d loved so dearly hadn’t been spared the savagery of the Horde.
My primary pet peeve is that, if you decide you are going to play an abhorently rude character, you are consenting to combat.
There should be no exceptions to this for a number of reasons.
In olden times, people died quick, rude people died even quicker, hence the heavy emphasis on manners almost everywhere in the world in previous centuries.
Nothing is more boring than 2 people spitting insults, refusing to leave and refusing to fight.
You are going to be affected ooc by things that happen IC, its how we are wired. We process social slights in the same part of the brain we process pain in. If you want to harass people, and then give them no recourse, no one should rp with you.
Its terrible on the community as a whole and creates a garbage environment where things IC are handled ooc behind folks backs.
Just fight it out already, no one needs to be ostracized for something we will all forget by next week.
Also, if you consent to combat, you should consent to injury too, one sided fights develop nobody.
This to me goes hand in hand hand usually with “overly edgy”. It’s usually the overly edgy folks who are usually also the rude ones. Or the politicians.
I’m generally not the kind of person who nitpicks other people’s personal styles, it’s all good and just pretendey fun times and everyone pays their $15 a month and curate your own experience with the people who like the same stuff you do and etc. etc.
But RPing in the conditional tense when it’s not actually attempting actions but for just average actions that don’t need others to buy in, like “he would pick up the mug of ale”, makes my eye twitch a little, sometimes.
Also giant walls of text that are mostly full of filler for the sake of length in crowded areas, it’s just not considerate of others also trying to follow conversations.
One of my greatest pet peeves are characters with completely unrealistic heights. People can play what they want, but I will never be able to take a fifteen foot tall human, or a twenty foot tall Orc, seriously no matter how many wheaties they ate.
Alternatively, strangers who whisper me and give unsolicited “advice” about my characters based off of their own headcannons and opinions about how something should be written or portrayed. I know sometimes people want to help, but not everyone subscribes to the same headcannon. Often times people’s assumptions and “uhm ahkshuallys” are just flat out incorrect or, even worse, incredibly rude.
I don’t have many, tbh. In general, I take a very live and let live approach. There are a lot of styles I don’t jive with and I certainly want nothing to do with people who do wildly inappropriate stuff.
I guess my biggest pet peeve in general is people who put too much of their personal ego into their character. RP is a fun creative outlet and through it we can create some really fun, innovative ideas, but in the end it’s all just pretend. It’s really not that big of a deal.
Most of my peeves regarding my fellow roleplayers pertain to their profiles rather than anything moment to moment. Two of my most aggravating (and hopefully inoffensive) ones include:
Putting long form content into the At First Glance tabs in trp,
I imagine this is done for convenience, but I just find it more difficult to read. It really can’t be that much more efficient compared to just putting that stuff in About.
‘rp to find out,’
While I appreciate the spirit of such a sentiment, it more often feels like an excuse not to write anything about one’s character. I don’t expect a novella or anything (on the contrary, I generally prefer something like that being conveyed organically) but at least provide some hooks to help get things going. I’m far less likely to want to engage with someone if I have nothing to work with.
Two pet peeves that I hesitate to include in ‘RP Pet Peeves’ since they’re OOC things, but I personally find them disruptive to RP;
The first is OOC dogpiling in /say. Like you can have an argument or a disagreement OOCly but the second someone pulls out the “(( ))” I just know the RP is over, and the longer there’s a crowd of people the more likely it is that it’s going to devolve into everyone throwing their 3 cents in ((OOC brackets)) in say, and then it’s just like a bingo game. I personally don’t use the ooc brackets in say, just take it to whispers and either find a resolution or agree to disagree and disengage.
The second is making your TRP your own personal ooc blog. Like I get it we’re all people, we all have viewpoints and opinions etc, but like…the TRP thing is a marvelous tool for RP, and should just be kept to that. Share all that stuff with your guild or whatever but please just have your TRP be about your character.
I would think if anything the NPC Guards would want to pretend that we don’t exist.
“Okay, that gnome has a sword that summons angry pumpkin guys that shoot fire and another sword that summons baby dragons. Whatever nonsense she’s getting up to I’m just going to pretend I didn’t see it. I’m being paid to stand here, not to be flame broiled by angry pumpkin guys.”
My biggest pet peeve is people treating guards as police officers. It’s a feudalistic society. Guards are there for protection/muscle when needed. They are not cops.
Effort. People rarely put any into their writing, these days. I’m not asking for a miles long novella, but add some movement to your character, emote for god’s sake. It makes you look illiterate to just stand there white texting all the live long day.
Also … yeah the guards are kinda weird. Why are they played like cops? City guards aren’t police, why are the majority played that way?
