Reposting this tl;dr-bait for the new forums! Still packed with gallons and gallons of advice on how to think about, and RP as, your characters.
Now, I’ve marked this thread as a guide, but I’ve tried – really – to purge it of all hectoring, grandstanding, and backbiting. It is your prerogative how you read the following however-many-thousand words (4.8k, actually). As a roleplay handbook? Great. A catalyst for further discussion? Works for me. As an unprompted babble? Well, it’s probably that too. But more than anything, I’m writing this for and to my fellow RPers – and not to finger-wag.
Submit yourself to this lumbering body of text, and I’ll show how to create believable characters whose minds are their own. They will not be beholden to plot or arbitrary devices, and you’ll be able to sustain them through the dry seasons of RP. I’m an advocate for characters as people, essentially, people who think and act based on their own circumstances, looking within for answers and impetus. An RP character, if you’re really going for it, should be a whirlpool of thoughts, allegiances, ties, contradictions, and feeling. Nothing about a character should be too neatly packaged.
Finger-wagging, sorry! Hm. Let’s see what we have to gain from continuing down this thread…
(by the way, this both is and isn’t a repost. I’ve heavily expanded upon a previous thread of mine, adding, in total, two thousand words to the existing body. Passages have been rewritten and rearranged. So as not to surpass word count limits, I’m posting this in a fresh thread. Enjoy!)
AN INTERESTING PREAMBLE
Online, MMO-based roleplay has its limitations. At the end of an evening’s RP, once the last person in an encounter logs off, the record of what occurred instantly evaporates, leaving “not a rack behind”. Screenshots of the night might exist, if some diligent archivist has been poised over the print screen button throughout, but this makes for fractured, impractical documentation. And even before this point, the intrepid roleplayers have, like as not, had to deal with DCs and AFKs, OOCers, movement mishaps… debilitating hurdles aplenty. Take all that into consideration and RP can seem very throwaway.
Yet it isn’t: it’s an enthralling hobby, which some of us have been engaged in for years. One critical reason for this is the abundance of memorable characters you bump into when RPing. In an environment where everything else is either ephemeral or inert (the more things change in RP, the more they stay the same… in the game world), characters are what persist, night after night, living in pseudo-real time. If the world cannot be changed, then at least the characters who reside in it can.
(did you spot the Tempest quote? Yes or no, Prospero’s words, whilst obviously applying most readily to theatrical productions, do a fair job of encapsulating our own medium too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNTAsC8qQ0 )
So, you want to be an orc, elf, gnome, troll, etc. What do you want to play, and why? What itch is it that you are raring to scratch, and how will your character differ from others of their type? Where to begin?
WITH BACKGROUND
A good start, yes! Background helps, greatly, and before setting down to RP, I earnestly recommend thrashing something out. Your character’s history is a fixed point to which you can return for guidance, indispensable assistance for keying into their feelings and convictions on whatever confronts them. Backgrounds are a record: of who your character is, where they hail from, what they’ve already been through, and why they’re here. To make headway with this kind of material gives you an excellent leg-up.
Chances are, most visitors to this thread will’ve made an RP character before; you know your realm, or at least some people residing on it. A canny roleplay will see the advantage in this: with permission, they’ll intersect their own character’s background with those of their friends’, unearthing ready-made connections. Blur the line between background and RP: let former fountain into the latter. A character that knows no-one, and must introduce themselves to everyone, is at a disadvantage: they feel not entirely of this world, as if bussed in from another dimension.
Construct a background with some good hooks. Perhaps you can weave in incentives to join particular guilds and communities, to pursue one or more agendas. Arcs are nice, but they have an unsavoury habit of compelling characters to act in seemingly predetermined, scripted ways. Give credence to the rule that character should define arc, and not vice versa, and remember that any quest you do set your character on is just one of thousands, on a roleplay server. Don’t be in a rush to focus exclusively on yours.
Particular characters might be ruled by their backgrounds, acting in accordance of what’s expected of them, while others may rail against their past, the boxes that circumstances have put them in. The universal truth here is that all characters, to their individual extents, are products of where they came from. Even the free spirited are turning away from something, and oh-so conscious of it.
That’s my personal view: that background matters, and you benefit from knowing your character’s. I’m far less opinionated on how you do this, how thoroughly you go about it, and if you share it on a resource such as Argent Dawn. It can absolutely be private to you, so try, if you can, to suppress any suspicions that you’re writing pap. To some roleplayers, committing their creative thoughts to paper (even digital, word processor paper) is very much an intimidating prospect. To these RPers I can only say that, chances are, once you get going, you’ll surprise yourself at the abundance of ideas you have, and the clarity with which you’re able to express them. Get this stuff written down (“do they feel aligned to any particular people or location?”; “what impact do they wish to make upon the world?”; “what would it take for them to leave their corner of Azeroth?”, etc) and you’ll be making all the difference between a rather flat character and a much more robust one.
I speak in favour of backgrounds because they can be a great aid to another contention of mine: that you should think of your character in the same light as you would the main protagonist of a novel.
WHAT WAS THAT? THAT BONKERS YOU JUST WROTE?
…interpreted the wrong way, that is of course bonkers. The RP scene doesn’t need a crush of characters vying for the spotlight, exploiting every opportunity to go one-on-one with the baddy or defuse the bomb single-handedly. It doesn’t need the selfishness, the self-regard. Happily, that isn’t my suggestion: this is much more about instilling your characters with all the thoughts, desires, motivations, and internal monologues a character is host to in their own novel. So you see why I am an advocate for functional backgrounds: to achieve that kind of robustness of character, you need a deep well to draw from.
Mulling over your toons (for sake of a synonym, you know) in these terms can be illuminating. Irrespective of other considerations, while you’re playing them they are your main (and only) protagonist, and as you continue to play them, they get more screen-time than any character in any TV drama (save perhaps soaps, which go on and on and on and…), so thinking of them as protagonists is only logical. While deliberately assuming the role of a background or bit-part character is a noble enterprise, it is also misguided if this is a character you’ll be playing a lot. Substance is key. Substance doesn’t mean dominating scenes, or blocking out other roleplayers.
There’s a big caveat to this: introverted characters are riskier in RP than in many other forms of storytelling, due to some incontrovertible truths: so much of RP is in the dialogue, and if it is your aim to establish character connections from random RP, then your characters must be willing to approach and be approached: to talk, sometimes at length, on any old topic. I like the term “social animal” here, because it does not imply, as I do not intend it to, that characters have an obligation to be friendly. Nope. They should, however, be open at least to the prospect of conversation, and it should not require Hyjalian efforts on the parts of other characters (and their roleplayers) in order to get half a conversation from them. The brooding, the taciturn, the pathologically shy: these are concepts that can work stupendously in fiction, but their success in RP is mitigated somewhat by the core principles of the medium. To reiterate: this does not equate to happiness and amiability, and neither is it a call for you to drop your Death Knights. But have a care, always, for the other RPers around you, and the deterrents to roleplay you may inadvertently be putting up with an anti-social, or asocial, character. What might seem at first a fun concept - a cold, emotionless killer who only speaks when necessary - can result in a situation saddling you with fewer outlets for expression.
Be careful around those aforementioned arcs. Certainly, characters should not be defined by events still to come, and played right they should only be able to perceive what’s immediately ahead of them. This is the message I was conveying in my opening paragraphs: characters should be people first, people second, and people third. Only once you know them well should you knuckle down to think of them as vehicles for plot.
And as vehicles for power fantasy? Well, we all indulge in that, given that combat is almost literally the name of the game (Warcraft…), but these characters, the uber-champions, do not flatter their creators. There is no particular effort involved in creating someone mightier than Ares, for example. In this arena, everyone can do that, and it is not what impresses your fellow realmites. Be measured about the power you afford your character.
With all this in mind, I want to drive it home that you best serve your characters by framing them in your mind not as representations of a thing, but as people. Give them impulses, and allow them to err, even in small ways to self-destruct. We humans do things all the time that are inherently stupid: our willpower breaks and we find ourselves flirting with disaster for myriad reasons; we harbour vices; we try to be magnanimous or self-possessed but fall short. We also break habits, and patterns of behaviour, at certain crossroads, only to take them back up again the next day. We are not automatons. Neither are our Kaldorei, our Forsaken or our Pandaren. Don’t put too much stock in ye olde alignment systems, devised for quest-and-encounter-based tabletop roleplay rather than free-flowing MMO RP.
Investing your character with both a background and a main protagonist’s sinew, you will come to find that they have more than one stake in the world, and more than one lens through which to view it. Your Draenei is a shaman; your Draenei is a daughter; your Draenei is a citizen of Stormwind; your Draenei meets with the Earthen Ring; your Draenei’s powerful affinity with music has led her to learn the art of the lute, her tutor a dwarf; your Draenei has never been back to Azuremyst; despite this, your Draenei always keeps a shard of it with the rest of her belongings, and observes all the festivals on the calendar.
Characters pass through different societal planes, interacting with and becoming party to other cultures, and subcultures among their own kin. Azeroth is a glorious setting for all this transcendence of experience, with its raft of playable and non-playable races, and all those continents, explored, mapped out, settled on. Patriot characters, who refer to lesser, savage, or fragile races, are not immune to this either: they’ll have picked up things that become part of their being, even if those things are prosaic and material: a spyglass from Pandaria which can only be said to be exquisite, a whiskey habit from Ratchet. Allow your character to be a magnet for these influences; don’t be wary of them, don’t assume they’ll diminish your central conceit. The important thing about traits like these is that they’re not always on show, or even detectable. A person’s touchstones can come out all of a sudden and surprise you. One orc character of mine, Vragran, is an orc who spent six months on pre-Shattering Kezan. He doesn’t wear this on his sleeve, but from that tenure he picked up quite a lot of goblin vernacular, and a fair understanding of how goblin society functions. He doesn’t become more goblin than orc: this is just an underlying part of his persona.
Persona, and a sense of belonging, can be derived from many different sources, and some of the best RP revolves around how characters grapple with and rank their sometimes competing influences, and what sides of them comes to the fore at any given moment.
BE WISE TO GIMMICKS
On especially crowded roleplay servers, one might be tempted to seek fame and plaudits through unique, larger-than-life character concepts. Daring departures from the norm. Something with pizzazz. Reading this guide so far, and bearing in mind my advocacy for main protagonists, you might think I’d condone unorthodox takes on what a character can be, but, no, about them I’m much more ambivalent.
My contention is this: you can’t cheat or shortcut your way to a good, memorable character. Flash, in your eyes, might spell obnoxiousness for someone else. But, I should, at this point, expound on what I mean, for the avoidance of doubt…
Examples (from my own mind): a demon permanently in possession of a player-character’s body; a goblin in a Darth Vader get-up, with all that entails; a dwarf who has so pleased the Dragonflights that they’ve given him a dragon form; a tauren who communicates entirely, ENTIRELY, in caps lock.
These wilder ideas deserve a proportionate amount of scrutiny, because, happily, there’s no need to sand askew from the rest of the roleplay fraternity like this – especially when it is at the expense of the lore. Sanctimonious as it may sound, the lore is what binds us, as roleplayers, to the same evolving game-world. Perspectives on that lore may differ, and clever subversions of it can brew up great things, but play too fast and too loose and your TRP won’t exactly be held to be the cream of the crop.
In the same sphere as gimmicks, are other universe-sourced character templates. While I advise against the practise, if, as an RPer, you like to use a character from a different canon as a loose template for your own, I do have some counsel: don’t opt for the obvious ones. If your chosen character features in a major publisher-published RPG released within the last ten years… the influence will be glaring, and you’ll be one doppelgänger among many. Do not look to what’s popular, or to what has a lot of fan cross-pollination with WOW, so that show with the dragons, you should avoid wholesale. Better, I think, not to use templates at all, and dream up something entirely your own.
AUTHENTICITY
Here’s a big one. How closely matched is the concept of your character, and their in-roleplay execution? Tales abound of Sin’dorei generals who communicate with YouTube comments thread parlance, but that’s just the extreme end of the extreme end of the wedge. We roleplayers, 21st-century types in our teens, our 20s, a smaller number upwards of 30, are all fallible to revealing the limitations behind our characters. For the elven races in particular, with their elongated lifespans, all we can do is strive for approximation. Elves are hundreds of years old: what that must do to a person’s psyche, we can only bluster over.
It’s not particularly inventive advice, but to achieve plausibility for your characters, get yourself to a bookshop/library/ebook storefront. Reading extensively will help immeasurably. Fiction, non-fiction: anything that will help you develop an understanding of your character’s vocation and circumstances that goes beyond the superficial is goldust.
Do not be leery of reading outside the sci-fi and fantasy genres, either: historical novels in particular are a varied mass, and there’s more to them than notorious bodice-rippers and swords-and-sandals japes. With depth comes insight. Always make sure you’re reading what your friends are not: it’ll give you something new and surprising to bring to the table.
So. Look to knowledgeable sources. And also, discard from your roleplay what is cheap. Avoid modern-day colloquialisms, and modern, stuffy, terminology. If you opt instead for lyricisim, be aware that this stuff can sound tortured and insincere. Most commonly, there’ll always be a dissonance between how you intend (and wish) for your character to be seen, and how others do perceive them. Don’t bother trying to strongarm this paradox away: your character’s actions are the only means by which the realm’s other personalities are obliged to judge them. If your vaunted tactical genius is seen by the majority of their peers and comrades as an abysmal blowhard, then short of upping their game quite considerably, you have to accept this reputation. The same applies to noxious ladies’ men, criminal geniuses, and arcane savants. Everyone has their own take. MMO roleplay is anarchy.
A word of two on IC rows and arguments: when a participant in one, and no matter how tempting it might be, never supplant your character’s voice with your own. In the rush to be right, don’t forget their mannerisms, their modes of speech, their own intellect. The illusion of RP shatters most commonly in these kinds of exchange; anachronistic terms rise to the surface from the real world… essentially, you sound OOC. Remember your priorities! You’re here to play a role. Don’t go for the quip if your character wouldn’t also think of it.
FILLING THEIR XP BAR
Good character development is one of the golden geese of RP: everyone wants it, everyone, ideally, is on a heading for it.
Yet just as there are no shortcuts to a fine, compelling character, the development of your warrior/monk/mage is best set to a slow, steady burn. Overnight causal changes brought about by major events are prone to strike a rather artificial and mechanical tone – like an Azeroth-themed episode of Stars In Their Eyes (hyperlinks, where are you…). Except in extreme circumstances, a believable character will always have to process events and new circumstances over time, gradually refining this new material into perspective and sentiment, so that they can begin, for example, challenging/reinforcing their own beliefs and premises.
Disillusionment, waning love, newfound affection, charity where before there was selfishness, a swell in confidence… let these evolutions in your character’s outlook germinate in their own time; make it noticeable, unlike them, even, but remember that their mind isn’t so malleable that their old ways of thinking can be completely swapped out.
As a counterpoint, you could make the assertion that for development to even be noticed in RP, it has to come in these significant, loaded bursts; people not in a position to roleplay substantial sessions every night have to resort to jolting their characters ahead; the alternative is never getting anywhere with them. I don’t dismiss this view, but I’d counter it myself somewhat by contending that development need not happen on-screen all the time. If you think about your character daily – or hey, weekly – whilst not RPing them, you can still see how their personality take on new traits over time.
To facilitate this, see if you can make time for scribbling, each week, a concise-as-you-like summary of what your character has been engaged with. Lesser-played characters of yours will retain their three-dimensional forms if you do, as that time afforded to other characters or indeed other commitments isn’t turned into vacuum for your character. By tapping into their ongoing life like this, you can even chuck them into situations, say, with other groups, which would be impractical to RP in-game. Even characters on hiatus ran still rack up their, ah, XP. Just as your character has their backstory, you’d do well to permit them an off-screen life, and give it some momentum, some punch. And, having some material to work from during those times you are RPing your character works to court the interests of other roleplayers, who are more easily able to accept your tauren/dwarf/paladin as being a fully drawn character, and not as a toon to bring out now and the, subject to intermittent desires to RP them.
In either case, our characters will not always be conscious of how their opinions and demeanour are changing. Someone who has been holding out for peace, for so long, between Horde and Alliance, might finally be resigned to city-razing war, and they won’t be able to remember when that even came about – long before Teldrassil? It’s that build-up of events, the jar filling up, that really changes people.
THE CHARACTER IN DECLINE
You may take this all on board, accept it as wise and well-observed (a rogue bit of grandstanding there…), yet still find yourself adrift, in some ways, with a long-established character you can’t connect to. What to do if you’re clueless as to what their goals are, what they care about, or how they feel about certain situations?
First of all, make a point of keeping hold of the lore you’ve already built around your character. In discarding that, you’re all but pulping the character in their entirety. RP contacts, especially those who’ve been invested in the character’s first iteration, may be reluctant to act as if certain sessions of RP didn’t happen, and the development of a new background for them might be a difficult, thwarted task, and will no doubt feel arbitrary. The ideal solution would be to introduce a whole new concept to your character whilst retaining the things that you loved about them. In all other regards, be radical: transport them into a totally new area of the world; take a Forsaken character rooted to Silverpine and the rest of Lordaeron, and throw him over to Stranglethorn Vale; see how he copes there. How does he get on with the Darkspear of Bambala, or the goblins at Hardwrench Resort?
Comfort zones need not be rooted in geography, though, and for characters who’re signed up to an active RP guild that sort of dizzying change of scene just isn’t feasible. So: look to those guildmates, and see if you can foist a new profession, or new concerns, onto your character. David Mitchell’s adage (the novelist David Mitchell, OK) that great fiction can be derived from bad things happening to characters you care about can apply here, but what faces your character need not be disadvantageous: it might be that the guild needs a particular errand run, or role filled. Throw the pieces up, see where they land.
And, since RP is other people, one of the most salient parcels of advice I can impart is: get a muse. Uh, that is, someone with whom you can ponder up ideas for and about characters. Creativity can come from both within and without, and a second opinion can help to perfect an idea that was previously just yours. This applies to characters old and characters new. Make it reciprocal, too: ask to hear your friend’s ideas, and see if within them there is a kernel of something you can both tackle. I make it sound very formal and high-minded, I know, by saying “muse”, but it can just be someone who you already do a lot of roleplay with. Like as not many readers do this sort of thing already, but disseminating ideas among your friends can lead to trebles all round.
BATTLE FOR NOT OUTSTAYING MY WELCOME
Onto some BFA-specific considerations. They’re really stacking up, these considerations.
The new expansion is here indeed. Not without reason there’s a splendid amount of huffing and puffing about it, as highly invested players scrutinise every theatre of war, every actor within them, every show of heroism or villainy. No one wants their faction to flounder, or to lose moral equivalence with the other side. I was… elsewhere… for the launches of Mists of Pandaria, Warlords of Draenor and Legion, so I don’t know if the extensive data-mining and spoiler-happy fansite posts (running readers through every questline in the expansion) is new for BFA, but a lot of roleplayers are uncovering all they can in advance of actually playing the new expansion.
Of course, this is only prudent: scrying ahead gives your own player-made storylines insurance against the massive plot-holes that can come from in-game lore moving in mysterious ways. But in so doing, try to keep your characters in quarantine, separate from all the insights you’ve amassed. Remember what you have is more or less omniscience; they’re left with intuition, and whatever the powers above them will divulge. For them, Zandalar and/or Kul Tiras consenting to an alliance isn’t a done deal; in the specific case of Zandalar, there’s still ample reason to suspect that imperious cradle of troll civilisation will reject the Horde’s approach. Your character lives their day, not their expansion.
BFA being a faction-on-faction slugfest, do not make the mistake of seeing a setback or calamity for your faction (and character) as a bad thing for your RP. The great fantasy saga from which the modern genre spawned (I mean LOTR!) was all about the decline and misfortune suffered by the likes of Gondor and Rohan. It was not about two equally-matched superpowers locked into a stalemate. Some folk see the faction conflict in WOW through a different prism, in that they believe that the faction that has the upper hand must be Blizzard’s favourite. But the gloom of being on the backfoot, even if just temporarily, is a stupendous catalyst for good fiction. That alternative LOTR would have been very boring if the defence of Helm’s Deep at al wasn’t so desperate and tumultuous. The same here: so, as a roleplayer, embrace your characters’ hardships, even as they rue them. See what your character is actually made of, when they’re beset by the events of Battle For Azeroth. These events, like the Siege of Orgrimmar, the destruction of Theramore, and everything that occurred with the Shattering, can have awesome impact, and you should regard them with that in mind.
Do not let big developments in the lore pass you by. I mentioned before that, due to the conventions of the MMO, Azeroth can be a static world (and Cataclysm’s scenes of disaster around the two original continents have in a sense inflamed that feeling of suspension), so seize on what we do get. See if you can’t get your guild to Zandalar/Kul Tiras, look hard for an opening. Enjoy the novelty while it lasts, because halfway through every expansion we see dwindling roleplayer numbers, a reduced spark in the population. Try to shore up what you have, for when that occurs, because it can have a detrimental effect on your RP, that downturn.
Use the world to its fullest, and see it as larger – much larger – than it is portrayed in-game. In Wrath times, I remember reading an article asserting that the whole of Azeroth was around the same size as the English city of Newcastle. The additions of Pandaria, the Broken Isles, and Cataclysm’s array of zones will hardly have shifted the meter. So a lot goes on in Azeroth that we don’t see (and all credit to the world design devs: we do see a lot that is charming and lively). Consider how trade, war and disaster can affect livelihoods, and can change the atmosphere at street-level. Appreciate, too, just how unprecedented the age is: how many races and civilisations have been rediscovered in a matter of decades? Not that Azeroth even had many old certainties to begin with, but even those have been swept aside as the world keeps on unveiling its secrets.
It is now abundantly clear that there is to be little to no reprieve even after Sargeras’s banishment. Use it all, for your character will not emerge unchanged from what lies ahead.
I’ll leave it there, before the word count makes an RP pariah of me. I hope I’ve been insightful with all my advice, and that you’ll forgive the insouciant headings. Much in this guide is subjective, and to old pros there may be v. little in the way of new material. May it serve, though, as a port of call for anyone who’s uncertain over what they should be doing when creating or playing their character. And I’ll see you in Zandalar!
(Kul Tiras, too, if the world quests are any cop… )