Time to discuss city RP

Moon Guard
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A lot of people are very misinformed on lore. A lot of cliques group up just to try bully and causes RP to fail.

We’re not in MoP era anymore. Many people need to update their lore if they are to bother with public RP. It’s very unhealthy, I know, I know, group RP is the best way to avoid these issues. However some people can’t take a no.

There’s been a -CANON- time skip after Shadowlands, like it or not, years passed. It’s about time to stop living like we’re in 2016 and Legion just came out when approaching others about thier characters.

I get judge, and I see many things I don’t like. But some people yaps too much just act horrible. Good thing we got a big population and incidents are minor and isolate, and can easily be moved on from.

But nobody is entitled to go ruin people’s night and then asking of them begone, that’s just rude and pitiful to see, and I wish to never witness that again. Here’s an advice; don’t like someone? Move on and avoid them.

Because the amount of time I see profiles with “RP friendly” turns out to be true, but there’s still many that puts that and turns out to be horrible experiences.

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My main would be in her 60s and retired if I acknowledged the time skips, so I don’t.

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To be fair.

I don’t know if the passage of a handful of years would make a lot of people okay with seeing a demon in full demonic raiment strolling around the city and flaunting their demon-ness no matter what developments have happened with Velen welcoming in a faction of refugees.

I do have a Man’ari character or two. One of my most actively played characters right now is a demon, but they very much hide what they are and had to catch a Twisting Nether respawn one time due to being terminated by a Demon Hunter in the city, something that I welcomed and allowed OOC.

My characters have a variety of reactions to demons in the city, depending on their history and circumstances. Some are indifferent, some flip the heck out, some root for and defend them. There is a basic OOC courtesy that should be observed that goes both ways in an ideal situation, that you try and extend some grace for what people want to do.

On the anti-demon side, that looks like your character might make some comments or be upset, IC for them but generally only extending to the tip of their own nose, but you don’t godmode immediately try to murder someone without some OOC discussion and buy-in.

On the demon side, it’s maintaining an understanding that you’re playing a character that many other characters will have a negative reaction to if they’re playing their characters true to their history and personality, and if your interpretation is that a Man’ari would be able to show all signs and decor of still fully being a Legion devotee in the city without issue other people may disagree with that take. They shouldn’t be getting up in your business OOC about it, but also, the IC reaction of “WHAT? A DEMON? IN FRONT OF MY SALAD?” is valid even if it’s been a handful of years since the events of the Legion expansion. It’s not like demons stopped being a pain point after that.

A small faction of Eredar were welcomed back to the Exodar under heavy supervision. Whether they’ve had that supervision loosened enough to be running around to weekly markets and fountain-sitting is up to personal interpretation. But just because the Legion expansion ended doesn’t mean that all demons are cool guys now and the trappings of fel and the Legion would be chill in public, we’ll see this coming up in Midnight a bit more in Silvermoon at least where Warlocks who get too public with their continued use of fel and demons get executed, and that’s grudges held over from TBC. Sure, that’s over there, but it’s a sign of now not everyone in the world is on the “demons are fine now” page.

In the end, it’s up to each person what they want to play. Heck, I’m even fine if someone is like, “my character got isekai’d from the Hazbin Hotel universe and that’s why they’re a demon” or something. That’s their choice. But would my individual characters buy into it and play along? Likely not, even the demon would think they were weirdos.

It goes both ways. Everyone can make their own choices on how to interpret the lore and how closely they want to stick to it. But if you’re playing a public character in public, other characters in public will react in ways that are true to their characters too. Courtesy generally extends to not outright doing a murder, but a confrontation isn’t completely uncalled for depending on the circumstances. If you want to limit that you can specifically note that you’re not okay with conflict RP in your TRP or shoot them a polite OOC ask in whispers when it starts up and most people will observe it, but there’s really no way to ask people to not even have their characters make comments among themselves.

This guideline isn’t specific to demons, it goes for anything that people might have a problem with IC - Scarlets, Gnolls, all the varieties of Darkfallen, Horde characters visiting the city, historically whenever a new race gets added people crawl out of the woodwork to go around the city yelling “A PANDAREN ATE MY WHOLE FAMILY” and wear Pandaren skins or something. When your character is a walking posterboard for conflict, it’s very difficult to completely avoid it. But there should be courtesy and communication in both directions.

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I agree that there is a significant issue with city roleplay. Unfortunately, I completely disagree with you if your argument is about supporting characters which shouldn’t be in Stormwind, like Man’ari. There’s been a trend the last couple of years of people ignoring lore, breaking the immersion of others, then feeling left out or irate when their lore-accurate hostile characters are hated or attacked. - This is the issue with city roleplay in my opinion. You have a ton of people who feel entitled to demand that others abide to their bending and breaking of universes rules so they can have fun, despite how it breaks the world for others.

I see a lot of people saying how optional lore is, but in truth, like in most RPG games lore is the universes rules. In World of Warcraft, Blizzard has failed in making it easily accessible - which means I seldom blame newer writers who simply just cannot find what they need. However, newer writers are often willing to learn.

The issue I come across are veteran writers who are no longer interested in the actual canonical world and want to be something special, then throw fits when other people who are abiding by the rules act accordingly. It is poor sportsmanship to a far degree, which has really damaged the quality of good writing, if you ask me.

Regarding Man’ari, there is no misunderstanding their lore. “For the time being, we are aiding the Krokul and the lightforged on Argus. Few have been allowed to serve the Draenei here on Azeroth.” Please note the word “few”. This alone means someone roleplaying a Man’ari on Azeroth is already making themselves unique. They’re allowed to serve the Draenei. This does not automatically mean the Alliance, nor do we have any indicators of this being even remotely possible, as we keep reading, “I personally evaluate every repentant and vouch for them on my own life, so it is not a matter of distrust. Rather, it is that we have desire to distress the Draenei with our open presence. They are aware of what the prophet has extended to us, but that does not erase what we did to them.” This quest alone completely validates anyone whose characters would act that way. However, it also makes it clear, Man’ari aren’t just walking around freely. They’re likely being kept close to Arzaal and the Draenei willing to give them a chance. - Because that’s what is happening, they’re being given chances.

Someone who chooses to ignore this when it is actually covered in the questline, then point fingers when people are acting accordingly, that is what I believe has really hurt roleplay.

Anywho! That’s my opinion. The community won’t heal until people start caring again. We can thank Blizzard for that.

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This was a wonderful and well written post. I was going to point out some of the same things after I first had read the OP; but then after reading your post I went… naaahhhhh this is written so much better than I could have lol

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Aw! Thank you. Hopefully people read it and don’t just get angry at it lol

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I am going to interact with characters and writers who I feel mesh with my writing style and personal perception of the lore. My perception is generally lore abiding, with a lean towards what makes sense in-universe. Man’ari walking around Stormwind without Lightforged supervision - indeed, Man’ari being anywhere -but- the Vindicaar or under close watch at some Lightforged facility - makes zero sense within the setting, given the events that transpired in lore.

Man’ari are just one example, of course. That being said, Stormwind RP is a cesspool and has been for years. I would not recommend it for anyone wanting to enjoy decent writing beyond the most surface level scenes.

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grabs his popcorn

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Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, see now, this I don’t agree with. I think that people playing characters that are “out there” should expect people to disagree with their presence, but I don’t think that those people are somehow harming others when the option to just do your own thing with your own friends instead exists. No one is forced to engage with or pay attention to anything that someone else does.

There was a time when people said that Demon Hunters would never spend time in the city just hanging around. There was a time when people said that Kaldorei would never spend time in Stormwind instead of being out in nature. These days, you see both and it’s hardly worth blinking at. Stormwind is the RP hub for the server, and telling people that they can’t go there like it’s some kind of exclusive lunch table at the High School and you’re the Lunch Monitor because their presence isn’t “allowed” and is harmful is…a lot. People will work out whatever they need to work out for their specific characters for why they want to go there, up to and including “why not?” and it’s not worth bickering with people over how in this one quest, it said HEMMM and here you are doing HURRRR so you’re WRONG and should FEEL BAD. No one really has the right to take other people to task OOC that they don’t pay the subscription of, and even then, still no.

Everyone pays their $15 a month (or the gold equivalent) and in doing so, they’re the only ones that can say what their character is or does. If they make choices that other people don’t want to play along with they may find themselves with not very wide circles who want to go along with their shenanigans, but it’s still their right to make whatever choices they want to make to follow what they think the lore is (this week, currently, according to a quest from one expansion or a note in another, the lore is a vast mishmash of conflicting information), like it’s other people’s choice to have their characters react badly or ignore what’s happening because they follow a different interpretation of the lore.

That’s not some kind of sign that RP is being damaged in some way or that there’s One True Way, or even One True Version of the Story. RP will go on, as it does. People are absolutely allowed to not like or not engage in RP that isn’t to their personal preference, but declaring RP that isn’t up to your personal standards harmful in some way is

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This game is a sandbox where I can make a human mage and say he lived 500 years and it is perfectly valid. I can say that my worgen character is from an off-branch Gilnean heritage that broke off centuries ago and lived on some unknown island.
If you go by “according to lore” with everything, you won’t even have an rp character because this game has the most contradictory, convoluted, and contrived fantasy world writing out there.
Basically, sticking LOOSELY to the rules is the only real way to go about RP in this game if you ever want to have any cohesive RP at all. This game is basically like 20 different DnD campaigns mashed together. You aren’t going to have anything coherent by trying to select a single one. Because if you try, it’ll conflict with another one. Which will then conflict with another two. And then you get contradiction galore. So save the headache and just do what is loosely based on all of it.

So yeah, maanari can be in SW.
YOU don’t want to engage? Sure, that’s on you. Don’t engage.
But to say they “shouldn’t be there” is a load of bs. Especially when it is the main hub for RP.

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Hello sweet children,

I would like to remind everyone that we have already sacrificed Lloria for the transgressions of the many.

Hope this helps,

Philbert.

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There’s a difference between dancing around lore where lore is missing, and then just ignoring lore that’s provided. I think someone who creates headcanon for something blizzard never touched upon, or hinted at, is loosely sticking to lore. But ignoring lore that is major and a simple google search away, isn’t loosely sticking to lore - that’s full out ignoring it, then getting peeve when people don’t want to play games with your made up rules.

Blizzard has had Q/A panels where they answer questions for roleplayers, with, you guessed it, lore. People saying that if you’re lore-abiding your character wouldn’t exist is a cop-out. It’s quite literally an RPG.

Headcanon is not equal to canonical lore in a game centered around its rich storytelling; a common, but unspoken opinion. I do not think it makes someone poor quality, but I think people should consider where and when to utilize it - and I don’t think contradicting lore is where to do that.

In the end? People can roleplay whatever they wish. My response is to the OP who seems miffed at the result. I’m not of the mind that anyone should dictate what another person does, but expect people who are following the basic game to continue following the rules of that universe, and not bend just because you want a specific thing. Being annoyed at people for following the provided story is just…silly.

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My 2 cents on “lore abiddingness” in RP is mostly practicality. I’m someone who likes to write with/expand on the lore with a lot of fanon (mostly historical fiction-based) and do that quite extensively in private RP with friends. But at the same time, for public RP it really comes down to “how likely are random walk-ups or people at public events going to be to accept this fanon”.

So imo you should try to adhere more to lore or at least whatever the average headcanon of the lore is for something like Stormwind city RP, not because doing so is more correct or whatever but because it’s simply more practical for everyone when RPing in the same space. Of course it’s also everyone’s 15 dollars, this is just what I feel I’ve learnt over the years.

Also imo, people trying to outright police others RP in a literal “no you cannot do that, the lore says otherwise” (compared to “I personally won’t RP this” or how I hope the above comes off more as “you can do this, just a lot of people will turn it down”, which is how I mean it) is worse than any lorebreaking, especially since more often than not people seeming to be enforcing their own headcanon as lore when they do that. Case in point, it probably wasn’t intended by that’s exactly how the OP came off to me.

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Policing RP is definitely the wrong approach. Everyone is entitled to RP whatever kinds of characters they want, in whatever interpretation of the lore they want.

Expecting everyone else to interact with you, however, is also the wrong approach. Find the people who enjoy RPing with you and share like minds when it comes to lore interpretation. Do not come onto the forums and implore those who don’t share your mindset to acknowledge your character/lore interpretation. They aren’t obligated to do so.

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I have no idea on Vulpera lifespans for the time skips. Plus, she’d been in vol’dun until they ran into and joined the Horde. And I’m not sure TRP is gonna work after the add-on apocalypse Tuesday.

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What’s Shadowlands? Was that the non-canon fanfic some Blizzard writers made a few years ago?

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This is true,

But then you have situations where this where the lore absolutely isn’t contradictory. The Man’ari aren’t accepted by the Alliance, only Velen and thus the draenei have shown any kind of welcoming to them and that’s just barely - the Man’ari we ever saw amongst the draenei prior to the Tishamaat hid amongst the Krokul in their Exodar ghetto. Other than that they remain amongst the cosmos, fighting the remnants of the Legion and aiding the Argus Krokul. In Stormwind the presence of warlocks at the Slaughtered Lamb is a closely guarded secret that the city’s warlocks have killed members of the House of Nobles to preserve and per Metzen’s word demons are kill on sight by the city’s guardsmen.

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I mean, fair enough when talking about OOC interactions. But when we are talking about IC interactions… just because some time has passed does not mean every characters’ wounds have healed. Most people on Azeroth have likely gone through some kind of trauma.

This means many characters won’t react well to undead, demons, man’ari, void entities, dragons, scarlets, etc.

That stuff doesn’t just go away overnight, or even after five, ten, twenty years. Especially if some characters are long-lived. Five years is a long time for a human, but a blink of an eye for an elf.

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The game world is a shared space and problems really just arise when there are conflicts between what different people consider believable, and that depends on what kind of world they want. Some folks want to write in the world of warcraft and others just want to use WoW - the game that you install, start up, and wander around in - as a backdrop for whatever else. I think I’ve seen some Warrior cats RPers floating around every so often. Good for them, really.

It’s also completely understandable that people have different views on stuff like timeskips, which for some characters can be perfectly reasonable and workable and for others could be ‘a chunk of your lifespan is over’. I don’t fault folks for ignoring the timeskips. It’s also, imo, important to remember that Blizzard is wildly inconsistent and the world is a mish-mash of whatever the current writers thought it should be.

I prefer to consider the ramifications of portal travel and what I think is the likely reasoning for its presence, plus its impact or lack thereof on every other form of travel. I personally prefer to treat most teleportation as game mechanics Blizzard implemented so we don’t actually have to spent several weeks walking or sailing to locations in game, and not something that lets even a poor SW beggar appear in multiple different continents in a single day…But I also don’t fault people for showing up whenever to attend whichever RP event might be going on. I also prefer to ignore a lot of what I consider to be shoddy worldbuilding that, to me, looks like it’s just there because the writers and designers were lazy/didn’t have enough time/whateverthecause, but that’s just me. I RP with folks who align with the kind of stuff I want to RP and I don’t RP with people who don’t, then I temper my expectations while in public and don’t expect everyone to adhere to how I think the setting should work.

TLDR: Blizzard seems to care less and less about the integrity of their setting and the quality of its worldbuilding, and it’s futile to expect players to adhere to some sort of arbitrary set of expectations.

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At the end of the day the MOST important thing is OOC consent in RP. This is a shared world, but it’s also a freeform world in which literally anything goes. You wanna roleplay an MCU character or a power ranger, pulled through a dimensional rift and landing here in Azeroth? Literally nothing & no one can stop you.

But there’s a need for a sense of community spirit here. And that means having the decency to at least make the attempt to let people opt out of whatever “might be uncomfortable for some” stuff you’re planning to do. We literally control the narrative at all times.

Does character X hate demons? Sure, absolutely. There’s a whole lot of backstory about why, and it’s good stuff.
Does character Y love demons and have “one of the good ones?” Sure, if they want. But they’re going into this knowing that their demon is the exception and not the norm. And they’ve got a cool backstory as to why this exception happened.

Do these people ever have to interact? Only if they want to.
If having a clash of opinions sounds OOCly fun to them, they should go for it. Maybe try not to disrupt the people around them with it, but if that’s the story they both wanna tell together, I’m here for it.
It EITHER of them doesn’t want to engage in that, though? On an OOC level, just not a story one of them doesn’t want to deal with today? The best, kindest, most polite thing those two can do is not ICly interact with each other.

The story is literally whatever we make it, and we DON’T have to treat every last random thing that happens in everyone else’s RP as if it’s canon in our own RP. And as long as people can do that without being a-holes about it, then everything’s gravy.

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