NPCing: Giving life to the Role-play World

[Umay-argent-dawn]

@Karzam-argent-dawn

This is very important tbh, you can play your hero character, your soldier & still do this ‘npc’ roleplay, from selling & buying interesting trinkets and trophies you’ve found, to a bookstore your mage might maintain in an effort to find rare arcane tomes to the hunter selling his pelts, there’s so many opportunity for your guilded ‘hero’ character to still have fun with this too!

I think this is the best way to do this kind of roleplay - as something to supplement the roleplay of a main or alt, not as the basis for a new character.

Back in Legion, I was RP’ing a night elf civilian character in Astranaar, whose background had her hunting and foraging for the community. For my own pleasure and for the sake of immersion, I spent about twenty-thirty minutes one day RP’ing out the dressing, butchering, and curing of a deer carcass, not far from the main inn. I’d like to think this added a sense of life and authenticity for any RP’ers who caught the emotes in the background. It’s not something I felt the need to repeat regularly, though - every so often she’d come into the hunter’s hall with a basket of herbs or a sack of nuts and berries, just to create the impression that life is indeed happening when these characters are off-screen.

@Diamantia-argent-dawn

• Take on the role of a vendor. You will be able to sell food, items and other fun things of your own creation to the people in the streets.
• Be an old grumpy man, who walks around asking questions in a stereotypical manner to the ‘young’ people.
• Be a Lightforged Draenei who is attempting to figure out how citizen life is suppose to be like, only for them to unable to cope.
• Be a humble street sweeper, finding strange items as you pass people and make comments about it.

I think the main difference between the examples O.P offered and her own case is that the role of town-crier naturally instigates interaction, drama and conflict - when you’re yelling out politically-charged, controversial headlines, it acts as an invitation to RP. It gives people the opportunity for characterisation - articulating their characters’ views and opinions establishes them as personalities for everybody watching/ RPing. The Lightforged Draenei/ Old man characters seem like great concepts, but they’d work on their own as the basis for full characters, never mind NPCs.

The same can’t be said for vendor RP or street-sweeper RP. It’s something that sounds good in theory but, I’ve found, isn’t remotely rewarding or engaging in practice. In the street-sweeper example, you’d essentially be RP’ing with yourself, relegating yourself to the role of background extra or prop for the setting. As a vendor, your interactions are (probably) going to be linear, formulaic, and very limited in their scope, on both sides of the exchange. There’s no real reason for conversation beyond the transaction itself, and RP isn’t the Sims. Basic needs and money are meaningless, so shopping RP exists only for flavour - and its a very bland flavour at that. There’s a reason we don’t RP out our characters brushing their teeth, sleeping, or paying their bills. It’s not dramatically interesting. There’s no stakes, no conflict, no entertainment to be derived. Speaking as someone who’s done bartending RP, retail roleplay just seems like an exercise in masochism.