It is pretty much confirmed that there’ll be a three year timeskip between the end of shadowlands and the prepatch of dragonflight.
What are your thoughts, are you for or against it? And how will this effect your characters’ stories?
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It isn’t too much time but I am really tempted to replace Zanbor with a gnome and just say that Zanbor retired.
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Now is a good time to consider retiring old characters and setting up new ones to be ready for the jump forward.
I’ve brought my warlock out of ooc retirement just for this.
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Something interesting to point out is that a lot of 20+ year old characters that fought in the war of against the Lich King will be nearing their 40’s now.
Lot of you ain’t youngins anymore!
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And characters who were in their 20s during the opening of the Dark Portal would be in their 60’s now.
As for the timeskip, I will be salty about it until I die. That’s really all I have to say at this point about being forced to press the fast-forward button on RP that I wanted to play out for the sake of Danauser wanting to futz around with his new batch of “Warcraft: The Next Generation” OCs that were a bit too young to do what he wanted to do with them instead of being patient.
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On a lore side I think they should really be doing something like Cata or MoP had with more short stories to actually set up what’s happening in the background. Major things redefining active storylines don’t need to be hidden in books, but short stories to elaborate on minor things our character wouldn’t have to be involved with but might not be plausible for a game to every circle back to would be good, rather than leaving important things in limbo. After all: this time skip is equal to the skip from The Frozen Throne to Warcraft launch, and tons of things happened in that time. Leaving things essentially on pause, outside of a marriage story (because we know thats what that short story will be) stifles a lot of interest. When, honestly, HAVING something to have been doing IC and actually moving on would be a way to give some life to certain communities of fantasies they essentially killed interest in with their own writing.
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And any Troll born at that time would be dead because trolls on average live to somewhere in their 40’s or in rare cases 50’s! 
100% for it. Absolutely love it.
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Uhhh, I dunno. Little bit annoyed by it. I just recently reactivated my account with the intention of returning to RP, and then the whole timeskip thing came to light just as I started some guild browsing. Now I’m feeling I should hold off.
It’s gonna be awkward if I actually find myself in the middle of some good character development and story, only to have to slam the fast-forward button just when it’s getting interesting. This is happening with my boyfriend right now. He just got his character into some very interesting development, but now he’s going to have to skip all of it or else rush through all of it in the span of a month or so. It’s actually pretty upsetting.
It would also feel just as awkward if I join a guild just before the timeskip, then have to come up with an excuse for why my character’s still a lowly initiate with a company they’ve been with for years. He’s just that incompetent I guess :S
I guess that latter concern makes for an interesting question to pose to RP guildmasters: how will you handle new members who join your guild not long before everyone does the timeskip? If they’re still in initiate/recruit roles before the skip, will they still be on those positions after? Or will you allow them to have been promoted during the timeskip, at least ICly?
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These are great questions you should ask potential guilds you are interested in.
My guild will be recognizing the time progression. We are also a capped guild so recruitment is not always open. Because we keep ourselves smaller, it is easier to tell if a member will fit or not and people shouldn’t really be an initiate longer than 2-4 weeks. We fully intend to stop recruitment before pre-patch. When exactly? Depends on the announcement. So then we don’t have any of these weird transitions for ranks.
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I always try to leave in-game lore out of my RP. Both a mixture of it being all over the place and, well, it’s all about the characters! In regards to Tynne, she’s never been to the Shadowlands.
This leaves me confused as to what I’m going to do with her. Do I have her age 3 years when DF drops? Do I just retcon what she did during that time?
It’s just another pitfall in an expansion that has nothing but narrative pitfalls…
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If y’all are confused or upset about a timeskip, I will just take this moment to remind you that literally nobody has the potential to force you to push the fast forward button on your own roleplay. We’ve PLENTY of time between now and the start of the expansion to start tying up loose ends for small stories and planning what your characters would do in the three year downtime between the end of this expansion and the start of the next.
It’s not hard. There’s nothing to be livid over. There’s nothing to be confused over. Just take a moment and think, then write.
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I’m curious where you found this number. I thought they lived around the typical human lifespan.
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This will push me into my 70’s, but I’m dead so I can still hit the front lines 
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If my stories existed in a vacuum, that would be true. Even if I only did private roleplay or wrote stories I could ignore the timeskip like people ignored that the afterlife got opened for tourism or portals or hearthstones or the time shenanigans of WoD or whatever else they didn’t want to incorporate into their storylines.
My RP doesn’t exist in a vacuum. My RP is made up of about 50% loosely plotted events with small groups and 50% random happenstance from walk-up encounters. It is inextricably intertwined with the RP of a couple of other people, and in a looser sense to dozens more. I participate in guilds, server projects, and even just standing-on-a-ledge day to day random encounters that all depend on a sense of shared continuity and time.
If someone walks up to an IC friend and goes “How about that afterlife, huh?” It’s easy to patch over a mismatch in personal canon with a “What what now?” “Oh, you know, the afterlife, and how people are going there now.” “Oh. I don’t know about that…” and an emote that they look suspicious and the conversation moves on.
If someone walks up to an IC friend and goes, “Wow, I haven’t seen you in three years!” And the other one goes, “What do you mean, I saw you yesterday?” That’s a more significant disconnect. A discussion of the esoteric state of the world is easy to gloss over, but a timeskip affects those specific characters personally. Or what about IC couples who just started dating? Now they need to figure out if they assume that the relationship has been going fine, skipping all of the interpersonal development, or that they broke up for some reason. What about, as someone highlighted above, someone who just hired on to a new organization? Is the assumption that they kept their rank as a newbie for that long? Or did they get moved up to a trusted role despite not actually earning a trusted role OOC?
They are items that can be resolved, yes, but I’ve likened it elsewhere to a narrative hand grenade, sending plotlines and projects and every link in the myriad of webs that link RP together scattering to be gathered up and pasted back together in the context of the sudden passage of three years. People who think it’s going to be easy and care even a little about continuity are seriously underestimating how complicated it’s going to get. And because the general consensus is, “Timeskip, neat! I’ll give my character an eyepatch and a mustache to show the passage of time!” if I want my characters’ stories and lives to still fit in to the larger network of personal and overarching stories, I pretty much have to go along with it or it will be a constant struggle to fight against the tide and artificially wall my characters off from the overall shared continuity.
So, yes. My hand is being forced to the fast-forward button on my stories because Danauser couldn’t wait a few years for the proper passage of time to tell his stories. And that makes me mad. And I will stay mad about it more or less into perpetuity. I have time to do it. I can do it. But I resent having to do it.
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I remember when I used to main Horde back in TBC, the general consensus on a Troll lifespan was about 40/50 years for some reason. I never really questioned why, I assumed it was coming from people who knew their stuff, but if I had to guess it probably came from old retconned materials like the RPG books or something.
Everything I was able to find now says “unknown” or “70/80 years max” or “up to 200 with a Loa’s blessing”.
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You’re thinking way too hard about this, and are taking this far too personally.
Here’s how you resolve it: we’ve three or so months to resolve any lingering plot threads that may exist. We’ve three months to converse with people in our RP circle on what would all happen in the three year downtime where our characters would finally have a moment to breathe. We’ve three months PLUS an additional four or so after the launch of Dragonflight to actually push towards those interim goals, which is just enough time for people to properly experience and level up for the expansion, and for them to come to the conclusion that they’ll just ignore the lore of the expansion entirely because “it’s weird/bad/I don’t like it”
On a more personal note, there’s a huge irony of you being livid about this while posting this on what I can presume to be your main roleplay character. A draenei. A race whose entire backstory is “And then we traveled space for several millennia where we know nothing that happened.”
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My ongoing storylines, including a variable of randomness introduced by other players, are something I look forward to, and continuity is important to me in terms of story, both within that individual storyline and as it connects to the game world. I’m not going around telling people that they’re not taking things seriously enough, I get that this stuff just plain won’t matter to a lot of people and they’ll just wing it or they’d be fine with propelling their personal stories through three years of sealed-off autopilot instead of getting to play things out, and that’s fine. But with all due respect you don’t get to make a call on the things that should and shouldn’t be important to me on a personal level and what I find to be an irritating and unnecessary imposition on the hobby that I enjoy.
I don’t get what that has to do with anything? I mean, as a side-note, Nili’s about 250 years old, she only ever lived on Draenor. But I have at least one Draenei character who’s older, I filled in his backstory with headcanon and stories and gray areas for future development. That space before a character became playable doesn’t bother me, though, because that was my choice in where I picked up on their story and my choice on what periods I skimmed over, left vague or specifically spelled out.
I’ve also done story summaries in my active game time, especially for alts who aren’t as connected to the active world, to touch base on what they’ve been up to for periods of time longer than a few years in some instances. It’s not like I’m unfamiliar with the concept somehow. It’s not like I’m floundering around going “but how will I KNOW?” I know how I’ll know. I know I have time to prepare. None of this is news.
Like I said, I can fill in the timeskip with stories, and I will work that out with my main RP partners who are the most affected by making sure we’re all on the same page. I have an entire Tumblr and Discords full of more stories than you can shake a stick at. Amounts that I think legally need to be qualified as “oodles”. But I would’ve liked to actually play out those periods of developing relationships, growing children and ongoing nonsense instead of just hermetically sealing off those stories and periods of time from the active components of roleplay, and having my hand forced for no real good reason? Yeah. It chafes at me. It grinds my gears as one might say.
It doesn’t bother you? Good. Spectacular. I’m glad for you. I never said it has to. I could probably find reasons to pick at you for it, but I won’t. That’s your preference and your choice.
I, on the other hand, choose salt. As I still go about the business of doing that pre-work, as I prepare to get my characters’ stories to a plausible-ish enough “pause” point, but it’s up to me and no one else if I’m allowed to be like:
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I think it’s a bit strong to say Jalanili is ‘livid’, or taking it personally. Everything they said involved their character. And mimics my concerns exactly! Not all RP will be affected by this of course, but some people now have to conjure up three years of backstory to fit in the universe proper!
And a lot of things can happen in three years.
Shadowlands itself is different, for you only have three ways to get into the Shadowlands: Be buddy buddy with Bolvar, be a super champion of Azeroth, or death. Tynne is none of those things so it may as well not exist. But now the entire game world, SL or not, is moving ahead three years.
Sure I can say, “Nah, I’ll leave that out.” but what if characters who interact with Tynne don’t? They moved ahead three years and I’m just left wondering what to do next!
It’s just a change I’m not seeing any real point in and it just complicates potential RP scenarios. Maybe there’ll be a neat reason for it, I hope? I’m only seeing the problems so far.
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I am curious, how long have you played Tynne?
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