I’ve been bouncing between characters for a while now, trying to find one that really sticks for RP, but I keep ending up back at square one. I love creating different characters and exploring their stories, but it feels like I can’t settle on just one to focus on long-term.
For those of you who have a main RP character, how did you decide on them? Was it their story, their race/class, or just something that clicked over time?
Also, are there any races or classes that feel underrepresented in RP? I might try leaning into something that’s less common if it helps spark some inspiration!
Yeah, I have a lot of friends that struggle with this and I wish I had better advice. I doubt there is something that could help everyone.
Raton here is my first Rp main. I still play him but he isn’t played all that often these days. Back in the day though I had a concept with some inspiration from a character from a game I really liked. It helped that I would classify myself as a ranger in RL so the character being very close to nature was a plus.
So for Raton, his story, race, and class all fit together perfectly. Its a little hard to describe. Its kinda like the rock cycle. Or maybe a web? Ever detail plays into the others in some way, complimenting and supporting the others. I think that amounts to a stronger and more authentic character.
I started him at a beginning point on no real course except reconnecting with his fellow Tauren. Otherwise his future was rather open for the rp to guide him forward. From their the events of roleplay built him up. He grew and grew as a character. The story is not perfect as parts do get messy but I feel he has become an even better character over time. That time being over ten years.
I do actually. More so races than classes. I think the Horde non pretty races don’t get as much love. Newer races seem to be favored a bit over old ones to a small degree. Not surprising though. Personally, if I wasn’t playing Tauren some other characters, I would be playing my Zandalari. I think their history, culture, and Zandalar are just so rich. Not perfect, mind you! Just I see a lot of potential.
I wish you luck and I look forward to hearing everyone elses’ input. I would like to be able to better help my friends struggling with this.
I feel like I end up making two kinds of characters.
Ultra-conceptual, iconic characters with a thoroughly-defined backstory and opinions on every lore character and event or…
…some schlub with a weird attitude.
I always end up coming back to the schlubs. That’s not to say they don’t act like characters in Azeroth or that they’re lore-breaking. It’s just that there’s a lot of room to play with schlubs. The moment I started really enjoying RPing with Enekie was when I decided to give up her “epic” backstory and just play her as some kind of alcoholic layabout.
I feel like the more I create a solidified “story” for my RP characters, the less fun I have when they fail to live up to those expectations. Whereas if I just decide I want to play, like, an Orc who wants to be a chef, there’s nowhere to go but up.
Kirsy being a main was completely random. It was supposed to be Destrie.
Back in the day, Kirsy was a meme character that I did humorous walk up with in SMC. Her dialogue was kind of like Starfire’s. She didn’t have a backstory or anything.
Destrie had a concept, the look I wanted, and was the class I was playing as main at the time (rogue). But then she got creeped on, so I swapped to Kirsy and she was my main most of the time between LK and SL.
Right now, my main is Larisi, but I still dabble in alts. Larisi wasn’t supposed to be a main, either. But she’s a rude, semi-criminal gnome and I just find her really fun. She does stuff she’s not supposed to do. She drinks too much, steals things, kicks people, can be bossy…but she also has a soft spot for people she likes.
I make every character with RP in mind. Some have really thought out backstories. For some reason, those never make it to being a main. It’s always the one who’s fun. I tend to play them more, so they end up growing a personality and the backstory develops while I’m RPing.
Carmen Cryptstalker was meant to only be a background character to spice up my Tauren druid’s social circle.
Then Cataclysm came out and allowed Forsaken to be hunters, so I decided to kill off my druids during the Siege Of The Firelands to sprinkle on some fun survivor’s guilt, which still amuses me.
So yeah, make a character you love and you would like to see suffer is advice.
Well, I settled on a class that I liked and was “able” to play. First character was druid, then there was a warrior - and warrior kinda clicked for me. That Warrior is Kina. Though I’m really a bad person to be responding to this. I really only have 1 1/2 RP characters. Don’t get me wrong, I have all these ideas and I start characters with good intentions. But, with the except of Greatmother Moon, that’s as far as it goes. Kina is the only character I am consistently able to RP. shrugs
Been there. I had an RP main from 2005 - 2020 then needed a change. It took me a while to feel connected to anything new and my suggestion first and foremost is to roll whatever potential class/race/story combo piques your interest, level/play them through the game, and see what transforms from interest into a genuine spark for creativity.
I would like to offer a few pointers in creating an RP character.
First is approachability. In the high fantasy genre, give your character an occupation. In-game jobs such as fish, archeology, mining, herbing, etc… should be hobbies in-character. Complex RP events, I just attend those OOC as an observer, mostly. Make your character blend into the world. Don’t be a super hero. For beginning RPers, I would do the book quests on LOTRO or a character story on SWTOR for inspiration on character blending.
Second is organic growth. Characters should and MUST change!! My character is ever evolving, gaining experience as time goes on. The older your character is, the better!!
Things that will frustrate new players causing them to get bored / give up:
Having too many Discord servers. I have Wyrmrest Community Project (WCP), Crimson Sun Conclave, and Hand Of Algalon. Those covers about 70% of all the events schedule for this server. Add one or two more to your liking but no more.
Shard system lock outs. Sometimes you will fall through the cracks on these events. The software this game runs one server-side does not support large scale events well. Do not give in to despair!! MOST of my character friends are met because of being locked out. Just round up a few players and make your own kind of music. Missing out on the world market event due to lock out, I just ended up hang gliding around Uldum then camping out at Halls of Origination instead.
well, about that … there’s some of us who jokingly refer to ourselves as “pandaholics”. I’ve got 2 active wow accounts, with a current combined total of around 100 characters. Out of all those, easily 80 or more are Pandaren. Granted, a lot of characters are ones created just to experiment with names, physical looks/mogs, and potential backstories who are still in the starting zone. OTOH even my bank alts have IC characters.
Another lot are actually one IC character with horde & alliance versions ooc to make it easier to play a non-aligned Pandaren, or versions on more than one server to make it simpler to attend RP events. To give you an idea about that, there’s 5 “Kunbo”. Even more of his daughter Shisu because “a cub who wants to be a Pandaren Paladin Shaman Princess when she grows up” covers a lot of territory.
But even cutting it down to the core cast of IC characters I’ve still got probably about 10 - 20 I could consider fleshed-out active RP characters.
Yes, yes, and yes.
Story:
One reason i’ve got so many characters is that as I’ve developed my more important characters’ place in the world over time, creating others helps me think about a mutual background setting. A shared story, such as “how do Pandaren living outside Pandaria help each other?” lead me to thinking about the history of Asian immigrants to North America and Europe. So I’ve got a fairly well developed concept of what I think of as a “Celestial Benevolent Society” which involves a central chair person, a treasurer, characters who provide assistance to new arrivals, people who provide security and protection when the local authorities won’t …
And that’s just one example.
Race/Class:
I’m confident enough that some day we’re going to get Pandaren Paladins that I’ve got a few warriors / monks that I’m using as both name placeholders and as thought experiments for visual style and thinking about backstory while I do content on them.
I’ve also got a DK that helps me think about Shadowlands from a Pandaren perspective.
Clicked Over Time:
Kunbo is without a doubt my most well developed character, and also one of the first I ever created, many years ago. I’m pretty sure most people will never see most of my other IC characters, but one way or another almost all of them are connected back to him. And that makes playing him a fuller deeper experience. He’s got a ship for his import/export business. So if i’m talking to someone IC about that, I’ve got everything I know about the captain to draw on. Some of the “benevolent society” characters keep an eye on his overseas assets. And so on.
well, I think I’ve laid bare my personal preferences, but it’s also objectively true that Pandaren are the least played race. So there’s that.
It’s equally important, imho, to think about where you want your character to be most of the time, and what kind of RP settings/activities you want to enjoy. A Pandaren who works in a factory in Undermine and likes to go clubbing on the weekends is going to be very different from a Pandaren farmer who has never been outside Valley of Four Winds in their life, even if they’re both Fury Warriors.
Remember too, it’s ok to think outside the box. Don’t be limited by the stereotypical depiction of any given class. I’ve never played a warlock, but I keep getting these ideas for an engineer whose machines are plagued with gremlins. Then there’s the fury warrior who’s a hammer mechanic who failed anger management. I don’t think I’ll ever develop those particular characters, so there’s a couple for the community to run with.
When I was more active, I did this too. Even now my elderly druid, Greatmother Moon, was from Kinarra’s past. She had been a seer/healer/midwive in the Whitehorn Tribe since before Kina’s father had been born. Did I mention that she’s quite elderly? Elderly to the point that she might have actually pasted on, and just not really be aware of it? But that’s just a rumor. Anywho, the alts include Kina’s daughter, a cousin, a wandering Pandaren who Kina befriended, and even the Goblin mage/relic and art fence who would turn anything vaguely connected to the Tauren to Kina, for reasons. But most of these character had been created to advance story lines.
The only one I RP now are Kina and Greatmother. The only other one I really play is the Pandaren, probably because he is a warrior. I am actually trying to put together a backstory for him. I think he could be a solid character. I just feel really awkward Rping a male though.
My most-used RP characters are the ones with the strongest connections to my guilds. Otherwise, I just like to mess around. If someone gets an arc, cool. If not, I don’t mind just vibing at an event.
All my past RP mains were chosen largely for connections to friends’ characters. I have no other criteria. Who gets used the most depends on who’s got the most going on.
There’s some really solid advice in this thread so far. I think the best thing I could offer would be to start with a basic concept, dive into RP, and see if it clicks. If it does, don’t be afraid to follow that rabbit hole and see how deep it goes. Sometimes that’s all it takes to create a beloved character who will stick around for years. Find a race toward whose aesthetics you feel a special affinity and go from there.
That’s how I wound up with Maerlyn. The idea of an undead Shadow priest has always been extremely cool to me; I love everything about the Forsaken, from their cultural aesthetic to their history and lore, to their most iconic lore characters (still wish they hadn’t ruined Nathanos and Sylvanas like they did, but c’est la vie).
I’ve also found that a lot of my inspiration for RP characters comes from characters in movies or books, and the former usually means that I can pretty easily pair an actor with a character idea. In Maerlyn’s case, it was Sir Christopher Lee; being able to “hear" an actor’s voice inside my head as I write them really helps solidify an idea of their personality.
Maerlyn has been my RP main for the better part of 7+ years now, and I definitely feel that that attachment has deepened with time. The more enjoyable interactions I have as/with a character, the more attached I become, so I think it’s also a matter of investing the time in order to reap the benefit of that long-term attachment.
I didn’t pick just one. Why be typecast? Best actors don’t just stick with one role, y’know? Just be sure each is different enough from the others to justify the effort.
Norman here was not my original preferred RP char.
I always played Mountain Dwarf Fighters when I was younger, playing D&D. Started that way in WoW, but quickly picked up on the Gnomes. I liked how underestimated they were and yet they always rose above and beyond a challenge.
Norman started life as a Warrior (my favorite class) but it quickly didn’t feel like that’s what Norman should be. I then made Norman a rogue and it fit him perfectly. As I leveled, I felt his story coming to the surface. I spent my entire time playing this game with Norman as my main - from Burning Crusade until just last year. I’ve been wanting to retire Norman since Dragonflight but DF did not entirely feel like the right time to do so. I knew that simply playing, Norman would tell me when it was time.
TWW came along and Norman told me it was time. I’ve been working a story to post on the forums for him as a tribute to a char I spent so many years with. One of these days when it’s done, I’ll post it. Norman now spends most days fishing and adventuring, in a much more relaxed manner and (ic) prefers to spend his time back home in Ironforge and the surrounding areas, but still ventures far and wide, including TWW lands. I still use him to farm up transmog and achieves.
My main at this point is Durgin Frostforge - Dwarven Frostborn Warrior. (Named Frostforge in game, if anyone sees a little blue warrior running about with a horned helm) I loved Glacier Dwarves (which came later in D&D) and when Wrath came out, I loved the Frostborn Dwarves in Storm Peaks. Always wanted one. When Blizz gave us Earthen, I conjured up Durgin and have been playing him since. His story is slowly unfolding and it feels like a good one. I’ve now got a stable of Dwarven alts and as I play each of them, the stories are starting to show up.
I very rarely create the story for the character. Games like this, games like D&D, are absolute magic to me. They are magical universes.
I’m not an extremely creative guy like many of the people who post on the forums here or who play this game. This game though (and D&D), has to be a magic trick.
They can cause someone like ME to feel the story of a character come to life as I adventure along through Azeroth. This universe helped write the story of Norman’s life; the good, bad and ugly. It felt a lot like reading a book - the words and his story were there, I just had to log in and play him to be able to read it.
THIS!
I love wuxia and chambara. Kunbo originally started with “what if Zatoichi retired from the road, with enough gold to open a Dragon Gate Inn style roadhouse”. To turn that into some general advice - if someone’s not sure what kind of character to create, or what biography to give them, WoW has enough of a variety of settings to allow any genre of film as inspiration. So think about what type of story makes you forget yourself and get totally immersed, turn that into something Azerothian.
I already had the character story of a Pandaren who made his fortune overseas by bare-knuckle prizefighting, but first time I heard the live version of “Going Out West” from Tom Waits’ Glitter and Doom, it really gelled Genbuzhi’s self-image. He definitely “looks good without a shirt”.
Juspion started out as a Kronk from Emperor’s New Groove rip off. Then I channeled other muscle himbos into him and now he is the RP Voltron made up of different wholesome goofy guy characters I like.
