TBF Silvermoon is also an absolute dream and was a little more geographically accessible at the time with the whole ‘translocation orb’ business. (YES, I KNOW THERE WAS A BOAT FROM THE EXODAR BUT DARNASSUS WAS ALREADY IN NO MAN’S LAND AS IT WAS. ← that was for the pedants & ackshullys )
Honestly, I wish I wasn’t an awkward weirdo or I’d dip my toe (hoof?) into RP, I create weirdly elaborate back stories for my characters literally for my own amusement and immersion but I’m just too …
Yeah I do, all too well. I haven’t been an active WoW RPer in… Well, at least a decade by now. Wrath for active, early Cata for very semi-active, and when I did RP, it was mostly just light stuff.
Every one of my alt-army has a full backstory, personality and stuff. But nobody but me will ever see it because as soon as I think about RPing, I get all Shylynsa.
I’m a quick two or three para backstory with the most pertinent facts up top, I’ll say hello and do some casual RP up to an hour or two a few times a week and that’s it. I’m just not invested in the story anymore and haven’t been since Cata, so I don’t do storyline RP. But I really enjoy immersing myself in the character brain as a player and being a flavor NPC for other people running around Stormwind.
I always try to make my characters archetypal members of their culture and class with twists and personalizations to keep them interesting to talk to and provide a baseline for others to play their special characters against.
I do that too. It’s like playing with Barbies. But I learned when I was young I’m not very good playing Barbies with friends because their narratives disrupted my narratives.
“No, Ashley, my Barbie can’t come to your Barbies party. It’s 3 am in my Barbie world, and she’s having an existential crisis because she watched her fairy pony die to the Swamp of Sadness.”
This is probably what I need to do when I finally hype myself up to RP a bit to be honest. Small steps and interactions here and there. I’m very much a loner both IRL and in-game, so it’d be nice to branch out to find a bit of community since I spend a lot of my time in Azeroth.
None of my character’s have ground-breaking or bizarre stories like ’ I HAD TEA WITH SARGERAS AND CALLED HIM UGLY RIGHT TO HIS FACE’ or something. They’re just average ‘adventurer’ types whose stories converge with their actions to relate to the content at the time.
One of these days I’ll get the gusto to not just panic that my character isn’t set to ‘OOC’ when someone approaches me and stay to interact instead of running away or panic typing /AFK and staring at the screen until they go away.
This is so painfully relatable (Except I was a beanie baby kid, so just swap the Barbies with various over-priced animals with complex issues like who tried to sabotage the vote on the new Mayor of Beanieville)
The two main approaches I use for dealing with shyness are to play an attractive race and be observant and reactive in a busy area or play a hat race and have a loud personality in a quieter area where lots of people are waiting to be interacted with.
When I’m observant and thoughtful on my blood elf in the Valley of… I forget Org Valleys, but the main RP one, I get a lot of people welcoming me into conversations. When I’m loud and boisterous but nice as a gnome around a bunch of wallflowers in the Blue Recluse, people respond well and I make friends.
When I reverse these things it doesn’t go well for me; being thoughtful and observant on a gnome mostly leads to people ignoring me, and being boisterous on a blood elf often means I’m competing with other people who do loud and boisterous elves better than me.
Your tips are super helpful and definitely ease some of the anxiety I have around it! Thank you!
Speaking of RP’ing with NPCs… Is it considered taboo for player characters to have relationships with NPCs? (By relationships, I mean just general friendships, acquaintances etc.) or is that not really a thing?
I ask mostly because Naovi particularly is a Student of Nobundo, as most Draenei Shaman tend to be. Would it be weird to say that he was her mentor? (I dunno if that’s even a weird question.)
Polyamorous Khadgar is now canon. You heard it here first!
I am not part of the RP Community anymore so I couldn’t really give you a firm grasp on the pulse of the community anymore. When I was active in server forums and story guilds, I was on the side that is often complained about as boring, gatekeepy, and controlling as far as my preferences, though I tried hard not to be a jerk or enable jerks. As such, I think I provide a good floor for setting expectations even if I’m out of touch.
So here’s my perspective personally, as a boring person that hates fun: as long as nothing you’re doing has monopolizing power that is highly likely to interfere with another character’s RP, go nuts. Nobundo having students isn’t monopolizing imo, as he is canonically a teacher of many students. I wouldn’t bring him up in heavy detail such that any RPs would raise the question “why doesn’t Nobundo do X”, but I think that’s pretty easy to avoid.
Some people will still be unhappy, though I don’t think many. And that’s fine. Let them be unhappy. You can just politely move past each other when that happens. A lot of profiles I see aren’t my cup of tea, like former demon paladins that never did anything bad in their lives and were humble cookie bakers… but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with what they want to play and it’s the kind of character and humor the game enables. I just politely interact and don’t go in-depth.
He barrowed a deep frier from a friend of his. When he went to take the turkey out all the meat just slid right off the bones and started dissolve. Once we fished the turkey meat out though it was very tender
I’ve overtenderized meat to the point of nigh-disintegration by letting it marinate too long and let me tell you, at least by that method, it may look awful but it tastes great if you can still wrangle it to cook it
I should probably change my posting toon to Gurda, since Diamict has taken the throne as my boss warrior… And Dragonflight isn’t so dismal that I feel no desire to do anything besides level.
But Sledgehammer is named Sledgehammer and that’s WAY more fun than most of my toons.
)
(Except I was a beanie baby kid, so just swap the Barbies with various over-priced animals with complex issues like who tried to sabotage the vote on the new Mayor of Beanieville)
That’s both disgusting and fascinating.