Filed under: All the World's a Stage (Roleplaying)

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW.

Much like any other segment of WoW, RP has been seeing a decline in activity as we lead up to Cataclysm. Expansion burnout is no fun -- but unlike PvP and PvE players who are simply getting tired of old content, the RP population now has a whole host of new and interesting things to play around with. Cultists running rampant, odd devices found in Ulduar, the Warchief taking off for parts unknown, elementals everywhere ... All of these things provide some really interesting hooks for roleplay.

Your character may be involved in his own personal interactions with other characters, but you shouldn't forget that there's a whole world around you to play with as well -- and as of 4.0, that world is making itself known in a very big way. While personal interactions are all well and good, how your character feels about the world around him and the events going on can also be a really good resource for engaging roleplay, especially if your character's opinions differ from those around him. This kind of conflict creates a dynamic, emotion-charged setting for roleplay. In light of recent events, these are things your character by all means should be talking about; the events affect everyone. Let's take a look at what's going on in Azeroth and how this can be interpreted by various characters and races.

We've all been there in that awkward moment when a group of players starts a new group of characters together. Everyone rolls his favorite race and class, and the party leader invites everyone to chat. You meet up in Elwynn Forest or Durotar, filled to the very brim with the nascent possibilities for future roleplay.

And then you stand there. And stand there. And time passes until someone finally asks, "So, uh, how do we all meet?"

The adventuring party archetype is as old as roleplay itself. Even the Fellowship of the Ring was little more than a tricked out D&D group where the lucky halfling got to carry a legendary artifact. (And no doubt the whole crew was bitter that they lacked a sufficient healer.)

But to get a good group like this rolling, it really helps to have a good joint story from the very start. So let's talk about my five favorite archetypes for getting an adventuring party started.

Spoiler alert: This post contains some spoilers for The Shattering and Cataclysm.

When it comes to the limits of our character knowledge, we roleplayers are often our own worst enemy. After all, roleplayers tend to be lore buffs. We dig the metastory that Blizzard and its amazing developers and designers have created. We thrill to know the back-door intrigue of Garrosh and Sylvanas, and we love the little hidden secrets of Deathwing. We like to know everything that's happening in Azeroth.

But our characters don't know about any of that. Our characters don't have the advantage of reading The Shattering and thus don't know that Magatha had poisoned Cairne. By extension, your character should absolutely believe that Garrosh is wholly responsible for the death of Cairne (unless you're running some plot based on that discovery).

But we, as players, know better. Balancing these two perspectives have always been challenging for roleplayers who are forced to precariously walk the line between "our characters" and "ourselves." My favorite example of this took place way back when the game was released. Arguments ran nonstop in Westfall about whether the tauren were evil; after all, they aligned themselves with the undead and orcs. Clearly, they had ill intent. But those of us exposed to the tauren lore knew the alliance was a matter of survival and that the tauren were hardly clinging to Sylvanas's creed.

Mr. Gray isn't here today. I heard some sort of rumor that he was competing in a chili cook-off, but that could be entirely fictitious when you consider the sources (he who shall not be named ...). As such, I jumped on the opportunity to cover his column for the weekend so that I could return to my RP roots. Taking over WoW Insider for a good four hours on a Sunday is also pretty fun.

Anyway, I jumped on the chance to write this column today because I actually used to type out an emote or two on my old server, Sentinels. Oh, the good old days of being a tyrannical cult leader; how I miss them! These days, though, I don't do much RP other than a little bit to weird out my fellow guildies (you must make an offering to the god of raiding before you pull a boss!). Despite this, I still feel very inclined to RP, and as I travel around the Cataclysm beta I often found myself thinking, "Wow! This would be a great place to RP!" So I've written this article with my top 10 picks for new RP hot spots in Cataclysm.

Well, folks, it's been announced. Cataclysm is dropping on Dec. 7, 2010. At that time, everything we know about the World of Warcraft will change. The landscape will be altered, alliances will shift and a new rash of brave adventurers will roam the globe. And all of the rules will changes. Talent trees change, abilities change and characters will play differently.

But for many reasons, Blizzard obviously is not going to wait until Dec. 7 to release the patch. Most of the rules and mechanics changes will be phased into the game in patch 4.0.1. This will give everyone some time to get used to the new rules and the changes to their characters. That last bit, however, is what concerns us roleplayers. Our characters will change.
We talked about this a little in April, but now that the beast is upon us, let's do some new evaluation. Let's talk about ideas for roleplaying through these changes.

For all that we tend to talk about highbrow roleplay concepts like how pop culture affects roleplay, as we try and determine the nature of a good story, we should occasionally take a step back and break down some of the very basics of a roleplay game. Even if you've already picked a name and spelled out some character quirks, there's still a long way to go in order to actually roleplay the character you've created.

The first thing for you to remember about roleplay is that "it's all pretend." Don't treat your character as an avatar of yourself. Avoid overidentifying with the character you create. Not only does this help you maintain your barriers later in the game, but it will help you create a more layered and complex character. Ostensibly, the goal of a good roleplayer is to create an interesting and fun character in a dynamic story. The more distance between yourself and your character you can create, the better your overall experience will be.

Last week's discussion about the ways Blizzard supports roleplay was surprisingly controversial. Granted, in this case, "controversial" mostly means "a bunch of roleplayers kvetching about how we wish Blizzard would do a little more for us." It's clear that some people don't feel Blizzard is supportive of our hobby-within-a-hobby. A few of the most common complaints I see about roleplaying in WoW tends to revolve around the lack of guild or player housing. Another common complaint is that characters don't making lasting changes on the world.

Still, I don't think of these things as being a "supporting roleplay" issues. They're simply a pareto issue. The amount of work it would take to create satisfying, Blizzard-quality guild or player housing is immense and only a relatively small amount of the player base would enjoy it. Indeed, it's possible adding effective housing would actively harm the rest of the game by depopulating towns. I'm not saying right or wrong; I'm just saying that I don't think we can pin "roleplaying issues" as being a causal or motivating factor for housing or the lack thereof.

But this isn't to say I think everything is humperdink fantastic. There are some dynamics in World of Warcraft that are actively distracting from roleplaying immersion. However, they're all easily overcome with some old-fashioned know-how.

"Blizzard doesn't support roleplay."

I'm not pointing any fingers, but I come across that statement from time to time. The phrase usually shows up when someone's getting their disgruntled on about how Blizzard clearly never enforces the roleplay naming policy. But you also see this phrase get trotted out when someone wants to illustrated how you rarely see a "content patch" focused on roleplay issues or such.

The phrase tires me out whenever I see it. It's a rather hackneyed complaint that presumes a whole lot about why people play the game, why they roleplay and even how they roleplay. In some MMORPGs, you can barely interact with the environment and spend the whole time in a single pose or two. In Dark Age of Camelot, I'm pretty sure we could only sit or stand. But I have great memories of roleplaying in DAoC.

But, still, it might help if we took the time to review some ways in which Blizzard does support roleplay. If we can count some of our blessings, we might have a better idea of their existence.

I am neither a man of great leisure nor a man of excess time. Not only do I write for your pleasure, but I work a day job, I have a home, a family, more pets than are healthy, and am struggling to find the time to read a book. These are all things that require the expenditure of that most precious commodity: time. So while I'd like to spend every night rockin' out in Stormwind park, randomly chatting with my friends, I rarely have that kind of time on my hands. Usually, I find myself gifted with a single night "off," or with a handful of an hours.

So I do a lot of "one night stories." There are just short modules I play with a handful of other roleplayers. You can do them as complete stand alones, or do them in succession to build a longer story. Whichever way you do it, the goal should be to keep all of the significant action and material within a few hours play. I like to write a little bit about the story before I actually start playing to help keep the pacing moving forward. Getting a sketch out ahead of time to help make sure your roleplay doesn't go off on a tangent will help you make the best use of your time.

My original title for this post was going to be "You got your pop culture in my roleplay!" "No, you got your roleplay in my pop culture!" But that doesn't fit, and it isn't a very descriptive title. Still, this issue of "how many cultural reference is okay in game" is an argument I see come up in roleplay alot. WoW, tabletop, and LARP all seem equally plagued by it.

My example is, of course, the above video. It's not a WoW roleplay thing, but it's still a pretty good illustration of my point. The LARPer is taking the part of Baron Samedi, who is attempting to convert some snake-worshipping vampires to his own religion. I don't know enough about the game dynamic to evaluate it on anything except the obvious; the video's creator is performng a parody of the Old Spice commercials in a very in-character manner. (Thanks to OWbN for the example.) In my opinion, the creator did a pretty good imitation of the vocals, and mirrored the Old Spice commercials pretty well.

With the technical evaluation out of the way, we're left to wonder if it makes sense that an ancient vampire god really spends that much time cruising YouTube. But on the other hand, the video's kind of funny, and probably some people had fun with it. Isn't that kind of the point of roleplay?

In the episode of Futurama titled The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings, Fry manages to swap out his sausage-like digits for a pair of sweet, sweet Robot Devil hands. Using these hands, Fry is able to compose and perform an opera. The problem is that the hands enhance his musical skills, but not the man's imagination. So the writing for the opera is, apparently, pretty bad.

The Robot Devil is offended and screams, "Your lyrics lack subtlety! You can't just have your characters announce how they feel!" And then to provide an ironic counterpoint to his argument, the Robot Devil finishes up "That makes me feel angry!" However, when the Robot Devil finishes that exclamation, hopefully the audience is already quite aware of how the character is feeling. It's useless, it's just underlining the proof of "Show, don't tell."

It's considered ineffective at best or vulgar at worse to simply have your character announce how they feel, especially if that exclamation is the only method you use to tell the audience about the relevant emotion. As such, you should be on the look out for how to convey emotions like grief or love to other players. Let's review some tips for that.

I'll admit I have been known to participate in LARP. (I know, it makes me a horrible person, and I assure you that I'm amply ashamed of myself.) If you're not in that highly elite group of roleplayers who dress up and talk in funny accents, I'll explain for you. LARP stands for Live Action Roleplay. In this sublime RP, you physically act out the majority of your character's action, wear costumes and otherwise go for the deepest immersion possible.

In my own time as a roleplayer, I've had the good fortune to LARP in vampire games, changeling games, steampunk games, fantasy games and even cyberpunk games. I think I've LARPed just about everything you can LARP. And with relatively few exceptions, I've loved it all. If you want to have a good time, there's nothing like standing around in the woods pretending to be a sparkly vampire or an elf.

So, if you're like me, you'd be interested in playing a World of Warcraft LARP. It wouldn't be the first time I've written game rules out of virtually nothing, so I spent some time wondering about the challenges we'd have to overcome to successfully run this game. I saw four main issues. I should say that I don't consider any of these problems insurmountable, but they are issues any gamemaster would need to address.

There's a single primary fundamental to roleplay. It's a dynamic that is so innate and implicit about the act of roleplaying that most roleplayers never give it any thought. Why would they? It's as universal and binding a dynamic as could possibly exist in an activity. This dynamic is not only the building block of roleplaying, it's also the very point and end-goal of most roleplaying. I want to throw in some kind of yin and yang analogy, also, but I'll get to my point.

All of roleplay is based on the idea of being "In Character" instead of "Out of Character."

I know that will seem so simple to most of you that the statement seems puerile. But I think both brand new players and experienced roleplays would be well served to take some time examining the dynamic. What drives in character actions? Where does the out of character begin? At which point does out of character affecting in character stop being "just the way things are" and become metagaming? It can be some pretty deep stuff.

The nice thing about roleplaying in Cataclysm is that the starting experiences for goblin and worgen really guide you to the roleplay. This week, we're going to be focused on the dozen or so character hooks presented in the goblin starting area. and next week we'll examine the worgen starting area. Obviously, since this information is based on the beta, things could change at any time. Additionally, if you don't want spoilers, you might want to skip this article. Lastly, this is based on a surface reading of the events in the starting area. Later lore will lead to different interpretations of events, I'm sure.

You begin life as a goblin searching out your own fame and fortune. You've recently been granted a promotion in the Bilgewater Cartel, and now work with an executive assistant named Sassy Hardwrench. There's even a pair of hardbodied "assistants" who're eager to help out named Candy Cane and Chip Endale. Considering how Candy and Chip are dressed, though, I suspect they're mostly lingering around as decoration.

With three characters inimately involved with your character from the word "go," your goblin will have dozens of valuable conflicts available for regular roleplay. What was your experience with Sassy really like? (Obviously, there's as in-game answer to that question, but you should take liberties to represent your unique character.) Were you a bigger fan of Candy or Chip? We can presume the average goblin at your middle-management level all have similar assistants, so it's not like you're building a Mary Sue empire by writing out your own tea of assistants.