I made a night elf rogue named cora. She was raised in an orphanage just outside of stormwind. She was left with a note without a name, and the humans in the orphanage named her.
You can name any race/class any human style name if you can story it. People should just ignore people instead of grief about names. You dont know peoples stories without taking wirh them. Why report
I had a Blood Elf with a similar type of backstory. Her parents were killed under mysterious circumstances, and she wound up in the care of a small caravan of travelling Paladins who travelled where the light took them. They named her Stellamaria. After she was old enough to strike out on her own, she took her sword and went in search of her people to find her identity.
Yeah, because your names are against the server rules? Where’s the confusion?
The server rules for a role play server is that you role play. Is that not obvious?
1.) Pick a good name, but don’t sweat it too much.
2.) Just go at it and have fun and encourage others to have fun!
That’s pretty much it.
Roleplaying truly isn’t mandatory, I feel, but you’re going to see people out in the wild doing it. Just don’t be like “Hey, guys! Your way of playing an online video game sucks!”
As long as you pick a non goofy name and don’t grief people, you can do what you want on rp servers. That’s pretty much it.
Don’t pick a goofy name and role play. Because it’s a role play server. Seriously - is that… is that not obvious from the name role play server?
Nothing is obvious in the wow community.
I’ve got a couple questions. Let’s say there’s an in game wedding and when they get to the part about “if anyone has cause why these two should not be married, let them speak now or forever hold their peace”.
What if a random does just that? Carries on about how he has loved the bride since they were kids. What if he challenges the groom to a duel for her hand?
Is this grieving or RP’in with a dash of PvP?
Let’s say there’s a coronation of the server King being RP’ed. My character does not bend the knee to anyone unless they can best him in honorable combat. Is it RP or is this griefing If I declare I won’t bend the knee unless you can beat me in a duel?
The first is easily RP griefing. For one, you’re “god mode” and writing a shared backstory between you and the bride without her consent. Normally when people have a shared backstory, they talk to each other and agree on it together. You can’t just go up to someone and say “and he was my family servant and promised to always do whatever I say”. For another, let’s say you didn’t even try to come up with a backstory, in which case you’re just a babbling crazy person. Babbling crazy people that ruin weddings might not be OOC, but is anyone IC going to like you or put up with you?
Second one is almost certainly fair RP.
Lots of work goes on in the background of RP - many events are staged and the RP comes with how people react and fill in those events. Sometimes wackos do crazy stuff though, and you see all sorts of off the walls stuff when you’ve been around for awhile.
Good RPers will live their characters AND weigh their actions with how it will read in the overall story line.
That’s griefing. Out-of-Character consent and getting on the same page is hugely key to roleplay. RP is made up of ongoing character interactions, not pure improv scenarios. If the interrupting character hadn’t actually RPed with the “bride” at any other point they’d probably just get ignored or called crazy and asked to leave in whispers. And even if you had been a long-term part of the characters’ ongoing storylines, the etiquette of it is that you’d touch base with the players OOC and coordinate the interruption to see if they consent to it.
Yooooouuuuu pretty much aren’t going to see a “Server King” being crowned. Roleplayers by and large stick to the lore of the game - Anduin is king. No one RPs as Anduin because there’s a degree of OOC consent to it where you would be forcing people to play along with your premise. Because of these consent guidelines people mostly avoid going around giving themselves roles that would make the general uninvolved population do what they say, and the assumption is that if they do become, say, head of a guard unit, or part of SI:7, or a general, that anyone they encounter can opt out of recognizing their authority. Power structures are more common inside guilds, where the people there go out of their way to apply and join and are giving their consent to be part of the storyline of someone’s assumed power, or in server projects - multi-guild or participant alliances who follow common storyline and rules.
These are all conventions that have been built up over time to keep everyone getting along, since RP servers don’t CRZ or shard they still have “server communities” where if you’re a yahoo and wreck things for people, it’ll affect your ability to find people willing to RP with you going forward. And since RP is a group activity, if you can’t find people willing to play along with what you’re doing you might as well be writing stories instead.
That makes sense. Basically for events you happen upon you shouldn’t try to interact unless you’re asked to.
Now does just spectating for a bit ruin immersion for some?
Are there any kind of public walk up events? I’m glad for these discords that are setting up events too.
These threads the past few days got me thinking a lot about how you’re supposed to act in an RP setting. Although the one came off a bit meh I don’t want to be the idiot that walks up on something and announce I’m Ugg of the Zug tribe and ruin others RP.
At the same time I want to be able to interact with the world. I mean if you log in and your character is in Org. You just appear in the middle of some RP the thing to do would be just walk out of it and not say anything?
Think I’m starting out as a mute Orc. Fits with the raised by wolves. Lol.
I’m really excited for this!
Watching Varian die was heart wrenching. He’s one of the only Alliance characters I’ve ever really liked. Think some of it is because of Goldrinn. The wolf is my spirit animal.
At least he got his warrior’s death. He earned it.
Ahh. This makes sense.
Thanks guys.
Padre lights hand crafted cigar and contemplates his back story
I think I read this all wrong.
Did you mean to say: RP servers rule!
Because they do. See ya on BB.
For those of you who have never been on an RP server, RP servers are all about community. The community generally is very good about policing themselves and blacklisting griefers. The naming policy is handled by the GMs, but the rest of the strict rules are not needed (and not enforced anyways).
the only rules they have is that you have to name your toon with some sort of RP name. Otherwise you can be reported and will be forced to rename. So names that sound “funny” but are not RP will likely get changed.
There are no other rules really.
RPers use their imagination to turn a bunch of characters in a video game into something real, the same way D&D players turn pieces of paper into a game.
People who aren’t RPing and are standing to close or saying things not IC are annoying because you have to mentally ignore them while you are translating between the game and imagination.
That said, spectating in real life isn’t always bad is it? If people are talking in a town square and you are sitting on a bench - well that’s a normal scene isn’t it? The real issue is when people are having a private moment or conversation and you are following them around when they don’t want you to etc.
So uh, TL;DR; listening in is usually not an issue - oh and sometimes people use whispers when they are saying something IC that no one should be able to overhear because they are speaking quietly. Whispers can be IC or OOC based on context.
If you just want to follow someone and listen to them RP you can also just always ask them. The worst they will do is politey say no.
I mean, for a reasonable, normal person it doesn’t, as long as you’re not like, between someone and the person they’re talking to. There’s that one dude floating around in the thread who has a chip on his shoulder about it but honestly…I think it’s just him. 
So many. SO MANY. The default go-to is if you walk around Stormwind or Orgrimmar on a populated RP server people will just be hanging out, standing around, that you can walk up to and engage maybe like 90% of the time. Because you literally just walk up to people, they call this “Walk up RP”. Then sometimes there will be open public events at scheduled times that get announced on the server forum or shared server discords. Like, on Moon Guard the Tournament of Ages just got done last week, an annual week-long festival that uses the Argent tournament grounds in Icecrown with vendors, competitions, events, a ball, and RL charitable donations being raised. More commonly you’ll see like a regular bar night, a regular storytelling night, a regular street market, etc.
Hopefully people set up that kind of stuff on the Classic servers also.
There’s often an awkward moment of “oh man I’m standing on top of someone” when you log in in the city, it’s all good. Happens to everyone! But yeah, most of the time people just run away and it’s never spoken of again, unless the people involved feel silly and roll with it. And really just because it’s a RP server doesn’t mean everything is dead serious all the time, you’ll still occasionally see someone swoop down out of the sky, jump around on top of their friend, hit them with a couple of toys, emote biting them and then take off again. The key differentiator there being “their friend” though, it’s not usually received well by a rando you don’t know. You get a feel for when someone is probably doing something In-Character and when they’re just being a dork fairly fast, although even with long term experience questions like, ((Uh…is this IC?)) are common, or even occasional bracketed OOC commentary on what’s going on, like ((Wow I’m full of fail today)) after a string of typos. It’s courteous to not have too much OOC communication in /say though because it can quickly turn to spam…
Especially when people start bickering OOC at each other over IC stuff, like ((You couldn’t have dodged my attack!)) ((Yes I can all actions should be attempts!)) ((But it doesn’t make sense with my character’s mastery of the shadows!)) etc. etc. That part of the hobby is, uh…always fun.
And happens a lot.
I can see why you might feel that way, but you have to understand that the people classic WoW is being marketed to (people who played at the time and have nostalgia for it) are hoping for a much different experience than the one you seem to be looking for. Hopefully you can see why you might be in the minority opinion here
If you want the rules enforced you MUST report violators. Don’t expect another guy to do it, everyone has to. Blizzard GMs aren’t going to sit in chat looking for trolls and people with non-compliant names.
RP servers biggest enemy is RPers friggin’ complacency.
you probably got away with those names because Blizz stopped enforcing the rules like they use to.