Out of purest curiosity (and the desire for something for me to read), please regail us with amusing tales of distinctly bizarre, wacky or unusual random encounters you’ve had.
Please stick to amusing anecdotes, and please don’t name or shame or be mean spirited. Be complimentary, if possible.
Unfortunately, many of the bizzare/wacky/unusual encounters happen to be intertwined with the person they’re about being bad RPer. The absurdity emerges from them RPing something dumb or behaving in bad way that ends up being amusing for the other side involved.
As such, it’s difficult to recall bizzare adventures or encounters while not indirectly taking crap on the person (even if they remain anonymous).
Going back years and years ago, there was a dude who roleplayed a Forsaken who lived in a bush on the Sha’tar; Bushjack… some say he still lives there now…
Does this necessarily mean they’re bad at roleplaying, or taking it any less seriously?
It could just be a matter of taste and perspective.
Of course, it’s also very important to remove someone’s roleplaying from who they are as a person. Everyone cares about what they make and embody. Sometimes, it’s very personal to them. No one deliberately -tries- to be a ‘Bad’ RPer. And even then, whether RP is ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ is largely a subjective value judgment, based on how it makes you feel.
In my view, it takes a lot of guts to try something that might not work, or be to everyone’s tastes. The two other stories shared above are an example of this. The concepts are quirky, interesting, and unique. They’re memorable because they take risks.
My opinions are mostly analogous to this writer, at least up to a certain point - Roleplaying both occurs within a shared setting with its own established rules, and is primarily a social activity, as opposed to a static piece of fiction, so courtesy and boundaries are things to consider.
Specifically -
‘We don’t fall in love with art because it’s safe. We fall in love with it because it surprises us, thrills us, horrifies us, expands our minds, shows us something we haven’t seen before. We fall in love with art precisely because it is not safe.’
Essentially, the argument is that if you feel -something-, then the art has done its job. Roleplaying’s no different in my eyes. Therefore, it’s not necessarily taking a crap when someone does stuff that’s memorable.
No one tries to roleplay poorly, so it always helps to assume they’re trying their very best. It’s a process of practice, iteration, and more practice. Everyone develops their own distinct style with time. We should applaud those willing to demonstrate flourish.
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I’ll share an example myself.
Long, long ago, back in Cataclysm in fact- I knew this Dwarf Mage. One time, he was asked by our guild to make a portal home, which he did. He conjured one portal on top of the other, until eventually there was just this single glowing mass. This wasn’t just an emote, he used the in-game tools at his disposal. This meant that if you clicked on it, you’d end up anywhere a portal could lead to at random.
By chance, my character ended up in the same place as the Mage (Theramore), and asked why they’d been brought there -
They said simply:
“You’re home.”
And left it at that.
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That wasn’t bad roleplaying, that was using the tools available to them in an amusing and surprising way.
Basically:
Weird =/= Low Quality, either personally or creatively.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s, there are few.”
Shunryu Suzuki
"Every actor has to make terrible films from time to time, but the trick is never to be terrible in them."
It’s super rare for other characters to make advances on Acrona, so I’ll always remember this random encounter with a dwarf woman in Stormwind Mage Quarter who put on the flirts with the tall girl. Acrona was of course oblivious to the hints, which made it even funnier.
I have a couple of funny/strange stories. I have told this one before, but back when I was in Grim Gest, we and Rotgarde were patrolling our way to Pyrewood Village in Silverpine. We were followed by this tauren druid in flight form.
At the crossing where you can turn to shadowfang keep or Pyrewood Village, we instead ran into the said druid who rp walked to us. Us bwing the evil antagonists as we were, surrounded him and asked what his business was.
He proceeded to greet us and asked in turn what were we doing there. One of us pulled a dagger on him to threathen him…
…And he proceeded to emote grabbing the said dagger and slicing meat off of his belly. He further wrote in brackets in /s that, and I quote: “He has a lot of fat”, and then proceeded to offer the said flesh to out forsaken party members to eat, while emoting further that he healed his wounds back to normal.
Everyone at this point, as you can guess, is laughing their sides off, but it gets better: Whenever he addressed any of us, he kept refereing to us by our names, even though we had never met him. When we asked him how did he know our names, this absolute gigachad responds with:
“Easy, I can see them above your heads.”
At this point everyone’s sides are in the orbit, but we take it all ic. We thank him for his explanation (and the flesh), and depart towards the village, our characters afraid he was some kind of an eldritch god teying to riddle us.
Another strange encounter / encounters some people might remember from years ago, early legion there was this campaign in Hillsbrad. It was kind of a conflict between horde vs horde but also alliance.
In that conflict, there was this orc guy called “Oorgrim”.
His title was: Progrenitor of the former Warchief.
His status: Marauding.
He didn’t use capitalized letters except when yelling, and he was alltogether an extremely visceral, raw, and above all, a wholesome individual. The rp-pvp back then was conducted with restricted rp-pvp rules, and poor oorgrim had very crap gear, but everyone made an effort to protect him at all costs, spammimg intervene, pain suppression and hesls on him so he could live.
Long story short we ended up pushing the Alliance out from Hillsbrad after putting our differences in the Horde aside, and he ended the campaign riding off into the sunset on the back of a Black Drake, who spoke IC these closing words for the campaign:
“This was not in vain.”
“For I have not had this much FUN for a LONG while!”
He also attended another campaign but apparently the amount of people and lag bricked his PC, and he was never seen again.
Just the other month, I was doing my due part in fomenting faction conflict, and attempted to have a blood elf removed (see: walk 10 paces) from the border-roads of Duskwood. In the scuffle, the blood elf proceeded to turn into a giant red dragon once caught in my character’s basic aah rope net, firmly tell my character: edited by moderator, call me a bigot (rightfully so), and flew away.
Solid RP overall, would gladly throw a net at someone and watch them turn into a giant lizard again. Hope to find him once again to repeat the experience, soon enough.
This happened a long time ago, back during vanilla wow.
I was RPing a human rogue, I was somewhere around level 40 and I was travelling to Menethil harbour via Theramore for some reason, not completely sure why.
While waiting for the boat another human rogue, who I vaguely know but isn’t really in the same circles as me comes up to me and emotes that they’re trying to hold me at knife point. ‘Oh Cool someone is RPing robbing me’ I think. I go along with this.
They then emote that their character, still holding me at knife point comes in very close as if to whisper something in my ear. Still interesting, air of mystery now - what are they going to say?
Finally they emote biting my ear off and spitting the ear into the sea. “That was because you were sick on my boots last week” they say (my character had been sick on their boots last week).
The boat arrives and they get on. I don’t, I was in shock.
That character had one ear for the rest of their days.
Well, given that the example I had in mind was 19000 years old, 4000 intellect, 8000 strength, firm-breasted red dragon with “Mother” as one of titles and a phrase “let’s be real, she’s a dragon” in TRP landing near my guild as we were off the road in Duskwood talking to one of our local contacts, doing zero emotes to describe her actions and then (after getting ignored because WTF even was that) angrily writing in emotes how “it’s impossible for 95% of RPers to be blind” before flying away…
Yeah, I’d say there is such a thing as objectively bad RP that leaves bad taste.
Although, I admit, there was probably a lot not safe (for work) in her “art”.
Back during early WOTLK I came across a nelf, a gnome and a human who were making their way from Goldshire to Burning Steppes, with names reminiscent of Lord of the Rings. As it happens, the Night Elf was Legolas, the human was Aragorn and the gnome was Frodo carrying the One Ring, and they were loosely re-enacting the movies.
I was a low level human rogue just following em around and decided to jump in. They called me a Haradrim man and all three of them beat me in a duel, one by one, and went on about their quest. I stuck with em in stealth all the way to Blackrock Mountain, where the Frodo gnome and I had a final duel (in which he owned me cause he was like ten levels above me), I threw myself into the lava, and can only assume they RPed out the rest of the story and destroyed the ring.
It wasn’t even WoW RP and it was far from high-brow but it stuck with me, and I always liked to imagine they got a real kick out of having a random guy jump in as their villain, complete with a cinematic duel at Mount Doom.
I tried out Stormwind roleplay as a male priest and after trying to scare away his Eredari babe, he called my character a twink and about a dozen not-so-safe words about wanting to have his way with my character.
There is a difference between those who know what they’re doing and those who don’t and I’ll leave it at that.
I don’t think it’s particularly strange or surprising, but I remember bumping into people playing Kobolds and Catacombs in-character and decided to jump in, that was cool.
We went to one of the taverns in Ironforge to play Hearthstone in-character too using the random deck tavern brawl mode at the time, too.
I also remember the Twisted Metal reference ice cream man clown that used to show up in Stormwind every now and then.