Thread: Roleplaying in MMO's

Any of you do this, tried it in the past or always wanted to try it? I find it tends to be something where the idea is more appealing than it is in practice, because there's a lot more factors in play, chat box is way smaller and you often have to micro manage your character while still typing out the actions because there has yet to be a game where you can rely on the visual aid for descriptions and actions. VR games may change this in the future but honestly that just sounds eh. That said, every year I'll hop onto World of Warcraft for a month or two to play and I do play on an RP server. RP there is really hit or miss more like miss, miss, miss, oh that's kinda fun, miss, miss... but I have had the occasional good storyline more often when I get into a guild There's always that craving to run into people in the wild and for cool stories to unfold but sadly it just doesn't work like that. With the help of modsadd-ons, you can actually make WoW pretty roleplay-friendly. Like an add-on that removes the chat box character limit so you can type as much as you need and it auto breaks it down into how ever many posts it needs. Which is super helpful because otherwise the character limit is super crippling. Another mandatory add-on is the profile mod that integrates an interface which makes roleplay more seamless in the world. Character creation isn't the most diverse in WoW, but with the mod you can construct a profile, with a first and last name, description, other possible details, a backstory if you prefer, and then theres a page for 'at a glance' where you can include some details other players would notice upon viewing your character. So when they mouse over your character, these 'at a glance' icons show up which gives each player character a more unique flair. You can also include a 'current' note and an 'OOC' note that would also show up upon a cursor mouse over. This allows and encourages for more world interactions. For example you could write there is a bounty on this characters head. there are posters around town then anyone seeing it playing a guard, or mercenary could react appropriately. It's these sorts of things with this add-on that allows for more immersive roleplay and interactions within the world, but again it works better in theory than in practice, because there's still and always will be cliques, and the best and most immersive roleplay is the organized kind, so most people will stick to RPing with guild members or in taverns which really saps World roleplay of all its endless possibilities. Now that I've explained all that I have a story I kind of want to share, and it's a story about how WoW RP or MMO RP in general really is a vastly different animal than forum RP or even group chat RP, and how-when it works, it really does offer an exciting experience. I'll preface with how I've been in a rough place lately and sort of took a break from my active roleplays. I've had a hard time clearing my head. So I decided to re-sub to World of Warcraft, mostly just to play the game, not to RP, but the other day I was bored so I turned on one of my character profiles and took a stroll through one of the main cities and the most amazing succession of events happened of which I'll explain below. Before I start, I'll guess that not EVERYONE plays or knows much about World of Warcraft. I know it's big enough that most people have atleast heard of it but before I start my story, I'll explain the basics. There's two factions, Alliance and Horde. For the most part they are at war with eachother. Players can choose to create a character in either faction. Humans, Dwarves, Night Elves etc for Alliance, Orcs, Undead, Blood elves, etc, for Horde. So my story begins with me taking one of my Night Elf characters for a stroll through the capital alliance city Stormwind. Her profile and details had already been made since last year but I never really got a chance to play her to her fullest due to no one biting. The basic concept was, she was a Night Elf sentinel guarding the Night Elf territory of Ashenvale bordering Orc territory In a skirmish, she and others were taken captive by a horde clan and tortured. It is explained that she was tortured and conditioned to the point where she responds to a new name and is obedient to the Horde clan Leader, a female orc named Glaive Tornfist another character of mine So anyways it's mentioned in her profile that she sports some scars, missing some fingers but the horde brand and major scars are covered by clothing and armor and I mention that if anyone had a character living in ashenvale during a certain time frame approx ten years ago in game story timethey may choose to have their character recognize her since it would have been a big deal for a bunch of sentinels to go missing. This was the hitch that made playing the character rather uninteresting when I first made her. Basically she's there in the alliance city spying for her horde clan because she's a brokenconditioned horde loyalist now. and I basically play her walking around, subtlely eaves dropping in on conversations, and no one ever really cared or took the bait left in my profile description, until this week when I took her out for another spin that is, and the amount of things that happened reminded me how MMO RP can be a wild thing. I apologize for the wordiness of the story as I have to keep filling in context, but if you're still reading cool. 3 So I'm walking around the city, doing my traitorspy thing, listening in on conversations, when I creep by to listen in on another night elf and a human talking about Night elf and Human politics. This is when my character reacts to something said because in these ten years she's been conditioned and brainwashed to essentially despise her own people. The other night elf brushes it off but starts to inspect my character more closely, while stating she looks familiar. She begins to ask my character questions about events ten years ago which sends my character into a panic. Because she may be trained and conditioned to obey, but she's still a very broken being something the Orc clan leader didn't take into consideration when sending her on this spy mission. So my character starts to panic and decides to lure this other night elf into an alley, where I promptly pull out a knife and try to stab her. The other night elf responds quickly and manages to trip my character to the ground, this is when three other characters walking by the alley stop to see what's going on. Now this night elf is fully interrogating my character while more and more players show up in the alley to see what's going on. There were 12 other players in the alley by the end of the confrontation Three of these players were roleplaying as Guardssoldiers of the alliance so they immediately respond with Whoa, this is a traitor? We need to bring her to the stockades! We need to interrogate her! etc Mean while the other night elf is like this is a night elf matter, screw off! So my character gets dragged to a less populated area where this other night elf and two of these human soldiers take turns interrogating her. They learn that my character is serving the horde and that's when one of them runs off to fetch someone of a higher rank. They return later with another player who is roleplaying as a Marshal, who has two other players with him, one roleplaying an interrogator, and the other is a telepath. So now more interrogations begin, and more players from many different guilds keep getting invited over via players guild connections anyone whose character would be relevant. Finally three IRL hours later a player gets brought over and he's roleplaying as some big wig alliance commander and has the other player connections to back it up. He decides my character is not in her right mind so instead of the stockades, opts to bring my character to the hospital, which just so happens that there was a guild roleplaying as an Emergency Response Unit, functioning outside of a building and behaving like a proper hospital. My character gets handcuffed and brought to this place where there is a queue of other players inline at this hospital waiting to be seen and mended by other players roleplaying as nurses and healers. My character gets admitted and then two of the hospital guards chain her to a bed while the hospital psychiatrist gets to work trying to calm my character down in an attempt to help her. All of that took place over the course of another 3 IRL hours. So it was quite the ride of encountering player after player who also just so happened to be relevant to the story all due to the number of uniquely themed RP guilds functioning and operating within the city. With the number of characters I interacted with and the number of events that took place you'd think it was a scripted event, but no it was just a consecutive number of well timed coincidences and player-character connections. I've since popped back in a couple times this week just to play out more of my character being in that hospital and being treated for her mental condition where ive encountered a vast array of players playing as the staff with their own unique stories all contributing to helping my character 'get better' Anyways that's the story. 99 of the time, random RP doesn't play out like that in WoW, but it was a great look at how amazing it is when it works. You can't really get an experience like that in a Forum RP because even in a group chat setting you have to plan ahead most of the time. This was several different group RP's functioning seamlessly together to interact and deal with my character which served as either a threat, obstacle or condition for them to deal with. My character probably interacted with over 30 different characters during that 6 hours all of whom contributed something to the story. and those characters were each affiliated with at least 3 separate groups. There was the other night elf which was the catalyst to everything then there were the men affiliated with guilds focused on roleplaying as alliance soldiersguards. Then there was the second guild which was a more specialized war focused RP between the horde, and ofcourse the third guild which was the hospital guild focused on roleplaying as healers aiding random player characters in the day to day. These three guilds with their own focus and story came together due to the social encomy of the world to aid in my own characters story and this is often how I envision World of Warcraft Roleplay to play out in my head, but rarely is does it even come close to being this cohesive. I hope you liked the story, maybe it bored you, maybe it interested you in a game you never cared about before who knows. I think the over all point of this post was to share a story about how different Roleplay can be on a different platform, and how cool it can be if it works in all the right ways.