Characters whose sole purpose is to be an extension of a person’s OOC libido. No thanks.
On a less serious note, people using the word “edgy”/“edgelord” (or similar meme words) in IC chatter; it completely takes me out of the moment and makes me sigh.
How 'bout if they say “Thou be-ist a man of many edge”?
Talented writers can have a character express displeasure with the way another character is behaving or otherwise expressing themselves and make the whole encounter interesting. This is because talented writers are able to put themselves into another person’s shoes, envision a pattern of thought or personality distinct from their own, and comprehend the same for other characters they did not invent.
Bad writers call things edgy because they do not jive perfectly with what the bad writer believes should be happening in a virtual chatroom at all times. Bad writers roleplay themselves in this virtual chatroom, but with some meaningless ‘backstory’ tacked on that does not reflect the character’s behavior, or really anything at all. Bad writers do not exit their comfort zone under any circumstance.
Trying to denounce things as ‘edgy’ out of reflex is no different from the other irony-poisoning that has petrified peoples’ creative impulses on the internet. Unless the guy is literally spamming slurs, I would rather put up with an eccentric roleplayer than one who has no fear of calling things cringe or edgy. They are always, always more interesting to be around than you.
People complaining about Man’ari.
Especially the ones that are clearly not drooling, frothing Khornate bloodletters in WoW Tiefling form.
Some of us have a justifiably more important purposes than picking rubble out of it Ere’dath.
Using prominent lore characters in their RP. I don’t mean as someone in their character’s history - I mean, they could have passed Khadgar in the world and maybe hearing about how cool he is inspired your character to get into their studies. Heck, as this character being of the Shen’dralar Highborne sect, it’s very believable she’s been under the ruling of Prince Tortheldrin long ago and then onto Archmage Mordent Evenshade - but they aren’t written for, nor a heavy part of my character’s on goings outside of simple mentions in biography. But getting firm direct orders and recognition/praise from prominent lore characters tends to make me want to avoid those types.
I have to agree, a recent event made me want to avoid an entire organization/group due to them being given orders by a particular Windrunner sister. In the roleplay in of itself they used a hologram/ apparition of the Windrunner sisters to give orders directly to this group. Had they kept this in house to guild specifically this would be no issue but they had other groups with them as well and had essentially in their RP given themselves so much authority in lore to work directly under her. No matter who you are in a roleplay community you never have the authority or ability to simply force or do something to give yourself authority over another person’s roleplay.
Also in line with this I have ran into people playing direct descendants of Lore characters. Some Roleplaying being a lost brother to Anduin, cousin, or any such other relation to lore characters. Those characters have lore for a reason, you don’t get to add to their line when it is established in lore who their family is. It is also never acceptable to in open world RP, to RP that to another and expect them to treat your roleplay and backstory as true. Also I have ran into some Roleplaying complete nonsense by claiming in their TRP being the “Princess of Stormwind” which generally you would think is a funny joking TRP profile, but this woman actually Roleplayed being the ruler of Stormwind and disregarded actual lore, which you don’t get to do.
Editing this to add another thing into it.
I suppose another I should add as I thought about it after the fact is people that demand real PVP for RP combat resolution. PVP has nothing to do with RP and if you demand PVP stop Rping. In choosing to force PVP for resolution you are effectively “cheating” to not have to have a chance at losing a fight. I do not Pvp at all, im not good at it nor do I enjoy it. You should not have an “upper hand” in roleplay because you are good at pvp which has nothing to do with Roleplay ever
On top of this, Roleplaying a world enemy/known hostile force…Scarlet crusader, cult of the damned, defias, syndicate, twilight’s hammer…if you RP any of these in public, especially in Stormwind, that is you accepting that people can fight you, there is no exception. If you don’t wish to engage in hostile RP/combat, don’t RP a hostile force openly in lands you aren’t in lore allowed to be in.
I believe many have issue as in lore only a small handful were given amnesty so far, and on top of that in lore they were not inducted into the alliance. Only Velen gave them permission to be at the Exodar, the Alliance as a whole did not accept them yet.
I do want to make a counterpoint to this. Being Rude/a prick IC does not off hand mean combat should be automatically accepted. Being rude to demons in Stormwind for instance should not be grounds for automatic combat, as demons are not generally accepted in RP conditions to be within city grounds, also if you DO go into combat you need to accept that the laws of stormwind have consequences. I know many brush past those, but being rude is not a crime, but hitting/attacking someone for them would be.
I mean, there’s a difference between IC and OOC complaining. IC is perfectly fine and justifiable, same as people having IC complaints about Death Knights, Scarlets, warlocks, any number of people your own character would have IC reasons for not embracing. I think part of the OOC issues people have is a sadly too common thing with Blizzard writing, in that a major thing happens and it’s only partially acknowledged, or done in a hamfisted way. I try to reserve judgment based on an individuals ability to believably RP a character, but I think it’s frustrating for people on an OOC level because like–this is a thing that happened on Turalyons watch and he had nothing to say about it.
For clarification, it was mostly OOC complaining in bracketed speech.
That made me snort, but it would still be silly.
This and the whole post… well-said.
Vaguely reminded me of my character passing by Anduin when he visited Netherlight Temple… but that was it, the poor lad was focused on his task and wouldn’t have given any random player any second thought.
Take the modern out of my fantasy. My peeve is about ruining the RP atmosphere. I am in WoW for fun and RP, not so three people can stand on the corner of the cathedral and talk about the latest episode of whatever show they watched in /say. Want to talk about IRL stuff take it to whispers or something. Realmers are trying to push the RPers out, and it seems to be working from I have seen since coming back.
Real talk, the overreaction to man’ari being part of the game made me avoid rolling a draenei when I initially came back to WoW after a break of a couple years. I wanted to roll a drae warlock because I thought it’d look sick but the amount of ‘I will blatantly ignore if you are man’ari/a drae warlock’ I saw in TRPs really put me off it.
Like I get that there is probably some justification there - I’m going to guess that, like when DKs were added, there’s a grimdark aggressive contingent that really makes pretendy fun untenable - but that’s not my goal nor has it ever been.
Anyway I got over the anxiety and here I am lmao
A pet peeve of mine is when people equate a made-up belief system, or political faction, in a fictional world with their own personal beliefs/allegiances.
It makes for some very hostile “roleplay” when one party takes any criticism as a real-world personal attack.
Quite a bit use to grind my gears but really at this point it’s all make believe and for fun. Even the modern gripes are minor ones.
The only thing that bugs me is when someone posts a several paragraph wall of text when we’re having a light chat. Or the flip side of it when things are getting super deep and introspective and someone rolls in with a “Sup homie.” And even then these are minor gripes that would never cause me to not RP with someone.
Oh, and when I can’t find the droids I’m lookin for.
To be fair, general chat/say chat is for all to use. You can’t make rules about what people talk bout.
My gripe with man’ari as a hole is the fact that they in lore were not inducted to the alliance. Velen took some in, but the alliance did not take them into their ranks.
We can’t as players, but Blizzard certainly can, their old RPing servers policy actually did include a line saying:
Absolutely no out of character (OOC) or Non-Fantasy related dialogue should take place in the /Say, /Yell, or Party Chat Channels
They’ve since relaxed those rules and only ban or suspend people for breaking the name-related rules these days, but general etiquette is still don’t use /say for OOC.
That’s a mood, I’m glad I’ve mellowed out over the years.
Also more self-aware; at first I rose an eyebrow at Man’ari being playable, but I was like “hi, self? You RP/RPd a literal void creature that happens to be heroic rather than evil. Man’ari are fine,” haha.
That’s a fair cop. I think I’m just so easygoing when it comes to this stuff after going through a few expansions of “somehow Palpatine survived” levels of logic that I’m willing to go “well this probably… happened in the background… or something”