Most if my friends are from other realms or don’t Rp
No and no.
Something new and unique
A few idea descriptions.
Kyragia Inkfingers
You’re Kyragia inkfinger, as a youngster you where truly a bookworm, however after your mothers unfortunate demise in a mining accident and your fathers increased drinking in the grim guzzler you where forced to take a job.
You applied to the bank using your best skills, reading and writing. After years of writing transactions and bills your manager teaches you the basics of rune magic. To verify signatures and other safety concerns the bank had.
However after the bank was looted they couldn’t afford to keep you so you where let go. Now you live by selling magic scrolls.
One eye Holgir
You’re Holgir and hail from a old family of priests, however after your father found out you worshiped the titans over ragnaros you where thrown out of the household and had to live in the lower districts. Living as a pick pocket and a thief.
One day you stole a ornate flask, opening it revealed that it contained a fire elemental named Efrangos. You hid this bottle in your secret stash and a few weeks later you where thrown into the ring of law for a unrelated crime, there you lost your eye. And as your returned to your hideout you wanted nothing more of crime.
You then started to use the elemental in the bottle to melt the only thing you had, sand. After many weeks you where able to blow glass bottles and your life started anew.
Fyrgen Stonecutter
For a long while you lived your days making artistic sculptures and even a few commissions of the richer dwarves, however with war on the horizon, and after your older brother died in the war and your younger being trained for infantry, you decided to try to protect him by starting of as a apprentice golem maker.
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I had the same problem for the longest of times.
What really got me finally establishing and keeping a main character is nailing down the personality, not the concept.
I had a void elf shadowpriest with a very similar behaviour to Lyth, and loved playing him.
When it came time to move on from him, I didn’t really want to, but had to.
So what I did, was just make up another backstory that’d still work for the character made him a demon hunter and just kept playing him.
More often than not I simply start a character as a blank template and let the concept develop as I roleplay and figure out what inspires me.
RP theory-crafting is my jam.
I don’t think focusing on a new and unique concept is the way to go - at least so far as we’re talking about original race, class, and profession combinations. You have to ask yourself how you’re actually going to represent the things that make your character unique in roleplay. Taking your Dark Iron smith as a example - how much of your RP is his or her smithing going to make up? How does their smithing factor into your RP at all? Are you going to emote them working at the forge or selling their wares? How many interesting or meaningful conversations is it likely to generate?
Everything your character is has to be represented through their interactions with others. For that reason finicky original concepts like a rhinoceras-shifting “druid of the horn” or a cup-cake conjuring magi baker tend to run out of steam when the novelty wears off - because the novelty is all that they are. There’s no substance to the character concept, there’s no personality or drama or conflict to get your teeth into. Lytherael gives great advice here:
Your character concept shouldn’t focus on class or profession but personality. A personality that’s entertaining to roleplay is the key to finding a “main” - if the way your character walks and talks and behaves is fun to write, if trying to work out how your character would react to a situation - what they would be thinking or feeling, what their opinions would be - is an interesting thought experiment, then you’ve found a main.
I could write for ages and pages on this but in brief, your character’s personality needs to have interesting flaws (the seven deadly sins - pride, greed, wrath etc. - are a good place to start conceptualising), and it needs to be able to generate drama and conflict. An “original” personality - in the context of a given race or class’s story - will do this naturally. There’s not much point in replicating the personality of an existing WoW character - we’ve got NPCs for that. Your job is to find a new and interesting angle on the lore.
So, for example - you could roleplay a cynical, world-weary paladin, whose faith in the Light, and in humanity in general, has ebbed, replaced by a grim conviction in the righteousness of law. This kind of character would likely be curt and humourless in his or her interactions, and would have plenty to say to any optimistic or idealistic person, or any believer of any faith.
It also gives you plenty to work with when it’s time to
because your character’s personality gives you plenty of questions to answer. How and why would a paladin end up so bitter and disillusioned? You can then start to
to fill out the rest of their background. What kind of childhood did they have? Who were their parents? This is what makes Marf’s example so great -
First of all, care-free, lazy and kind is a great starting point for your roleplay - your dark iron dwarf is a good-natured slacker, so what would they be getting up to? Would they be lounging on the grass by Lion’s Rest, watching the clouds go by? Ambling from inn to inn, absent-mindedly greeting everybody? Losing track of their thoughts In amiable, directionless, rambling conversations?
Secondly, how does such a person come to be in Dark Iron society? Well, perhaps after witnessing decades of disaster and suffering, only for his people to survive the seemingly unsurvivable, and not just survive, but thrive, going from strength to strength - maybe it’s not unthinkable that such a person would be an optimist. After all, from his perspective, no matter how bad things get, everything ultimately seems to work out all right in the end.
Something as simple as those three words - “care-free, lazy and kind” - is all you need for a character concept. I’d actually argue that’s what makes Susanoo’s example a bad concept for RP -
This is too background-heavy for actual roleplay. It relies on too much external narrative machinery (the debt and the debtors), too much off-screen character action (learning smithing), and too many assumptions about the world and the roleplaying populace (selling arms to bright-eyed adventurers).
It’s good writing, it’s a great concept for a story - but it’s not fit for RP. The concept is built around plot hooks that can’t and won’t manifest in roleplay - “bartering, salvaging, smithing” and selling “arms to bright-eyed adventurers” are all varieties of vendor RP that lack any kind of stake or drama because money is meaningless in a world without any defined currency. For that same reason, the “debt” will never pay off - pun unintended - as a plot point. Even if money did have meaning in WoW RP, Stormwind isn’t over-flowing with “bright-eyed adventurers”, it’s populated largely by mimes and statue impersonators.
On top of that, we can already guess that your character won’t have to “learn fast”, because again, learning a skill isn’t something that can be RP’d. You’re not going to spend two hours emoting your character tapping at a hunk of metal, as it would happen in real life - so even if your character finds a mentor, your character’s profession, and the development of their skills and knowledge, will likely be off-screened.
The point is, this character’s backstory is almost dead on arrival - it won’t have any relevance to the actual roleplay, and it doesn’t give us anything about this character’s personality. We might as well skip ahead to “your character is broke because of his or her father’s bad debts”, or even just summarise it as “your character is broke”.
In RP, I’ve found it’s best for conflict to come from within your character rather than without - in Susanoo’s example, all your character’s problems are reliant on un-RP’d external factors. I’d argue for a character that suffers from their own mental and emotional conflicts, as well as one that causes conflict in their interaction with others. Something like -
- The young, naive and fanatical Warsong orc with a zealous belief in the glory of war and conquest, who clashes with the grizzled and jaded veterans
- The guilty night elf criminal who constantly struggles with their own conscience, between the impulses of reconciliation and atonement with his or her own people and Goddess, and the allure of all the materialist Eastern vices
- The kindly old Forsaken that questions his or her own existence, struggling with their potential to do some good in the world, while also reckoning with the unnatural horror and suffering of their transformed state, and their desire for the peace of the grave
Hope that gives O.P some ideas.
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