The Divide between Roleplay and Gameplay within WoW

Argent Dawn
1

I wanted to open this thread as a reaction to Lethality in RP.

Somewhat which has always been a bit of a let down for me, is the devide between World of Warcraft actual gameplay, and the Roleplay community.

What I mean by this is for example, when someone plays the game to level, or gain gear, they perform powerful spells, die and resurrect, do epic quests, travel the entire continent, to eventually roleplay a shady baker on the same ol’ Stormwind streets.

Everything about our characters, we made up, their gear, their stories, yadayada, and have no much connection with the character of gameplay. And although I don’t want to criticise the fact it’s an alright platform to tell stories, I did notice that for example Hardcore Classic servers, people sometimes actually RP a character who could die if the mobs get them. It felt way more versatile and real than doing the good ol’ RP on the AD servers.

At one instance, my Dwarf went fishing next to another, and we exchanged stories and advice together how to survive within the wilds. As the player said his goodbye, I saw from a distance he got attacked by three wolves. My character rushed to his defence, and if she wasn’t there in time this character would’ve died. Not only did the character thank me in RP for saving his life, he actually ment it as it ment starting all over again.

I also share the same feeling of RP reality with games such as Project Zomboid and Book of Travels. In Project Zomboid, if your character get’s bitten it has a high chance of being infected with the zombie infection, from there it’s just a slow game over. Also all the items you gather, have their uses. The OOC conversations with my friends feel real as we discuss actual stuff about surviving the Zombie apocalypse, as choices do matter. One wrong move and you could be locked up in a toilet with no way out with a horde of zombies slowly bashing the door open.

In Book of Travels, you play as a humble merchant that moves from town to town to trade. All the items have their worth. You can meet other players on the road and talk with each other by sending symbols. Without using a lot of text, the roleplay feels a big part of the game itself.

Now coming back to AD itself, it always feel like a different beast. One I don’t want to push beneath the rug, but the RPG elements of World of Warcraft feel so distant between it’s older days, and Roleplay can sometimes feel more like me introducing my wacky character to someone else’s and vice versa. Again and again.

And it’s not that I dislike the system, it gives a lot of freedom as it’s just pure RP, and a lot of the systems are based on social values in stead of gameplay. But you’ll be more dependant on how well someone is in storytelling, the taste of storytelling of that person, and in the end how real does it feel when a character get’s wounded or dies?

This is just a mindfart I would’ve liked to share, nothing worth much of a discussion, so I won’t end it with a question, although I would like to hear your opinion.

Ok Cheerios.

4 Likes
2

The disconnection between the gameplay character and the roleplayed character can sometimes feel jarring. I agree that on Hardcore Classic servers, the roleplay can feel more immersive and real, as the threat of permanent death adds a layer of tension and authenticity to the interactions.

4 Likes
3

I disagree. I think it’s entirely sensible that an apprentice or squire character can walk into the Molten Core within Blackrock Mountain and sneeze on the firelord to extinguish his flames.

4 Likes
4

What you´re describing is entirely different type of RP that cannot be compared to the RP that´s going on on AD. It would be like comparing Hearts of Iron 4, World of Warcraft and League of Legends and asking which game is the best.

The Classic style RP you´re describing is more akin to playing a game in character, doing the tasks that you´d be doing anyway, but with certain mindset where you create your character´s story. This RP also doesn´t rely on having dedicated servers, or a community taking part in it, as it´s mostly internal mindset.

The AD RP is instead a form of collective storytelling (at least if you´re in a guild or taking part in things beyond casual RP in Stormwind) where the game only serves as a means for people to be able to tell their stories instead of being part of them.

Yes, Retail is terrible for what you´re describing, but Classic on the other hand is absolutely garbage for the style of RP that has existed on AD for many years now. There´s a reason why Classic RP servers died quite early (before being revived by HC due to them being their own, dead cluster), and why RP on them died even before that.

17 Likes
5

To be fair, I’m reasonably sure that the original intention of a roleplay server was to play through the game while speaking and acting as your character, rather than the collaborative storytelling that MMO-based RP actually ended up becoming. I doubt Blizzard originally expected us to definitively separate our roleplay characters and our ‘actual’ characters.

So, in that sense, Blondie’s fishing friend is probably closer to the original vision than we are. Not that it especially matters, we the community/people decide how we do things, but it’s kinda interesting to think about.

5 Likes
6

closest you can get is saying you resolve conflict with /duel

7

I see what you mean and get at, and as others has mentioned it’s not quite fair to equate those different kinds of “roleplay” and “immersion”
I will start and state that i dislike hardcore WoW with a passion, and this is coming from one that did hardcore D3 back in the day.
even if d3 is sloppily made for hardcore with many errors but less errors and stupid decisions like those in d4, the game mode is semi designed for it, with emphasis on “semi”

Now, while the idea of a hardcore WoW experience sure is a breath of fresh air the game is not designed with permadeath at all, god awful leveling speed, griefing galore, bugs left right and center, and finally someone bit the bullet and killed their Guilds hardcore big boy raiding team on stream for the lulzin one of the actualy dangerous and obnoxious fights, 4 horsemen.
i dont condone griefing of course, but i imagine playing WoW hardcore in doing d3 hardcore without any cheat death passives slotted, you only use blue gear and your experience rate is 10% of it usually is, Misery in short. even if fresh. granted it’s kinda fun to see people die to stupid stuff, schadenfreude as they say.

However, i understand your point in the immersive sense, hardcore WoW forces co operation as much as it does self preservation if a group is wiping you beter believe the hunter is feigning, the rogue is vanishing… and the palading gets banned for Bubble hearting, because that’s illegal shrug

it can be a nice experience if you play with people you trust. but it’s more of an immsersive experinence as compared to real Roleplay and storytelling, I can understand your frustration if you mostly do random city encounter Roleplay in AD without a guild, or guilds that creates a framework for you to invest into, Plus as my final note, WoW is full of magic, enchanted items, potions that literrally knit a sliced liver and maybe even heart if imbibed quickly enough, Canon ressurections although rare, aswell as it’s counterpart, Necromancy. Undeads running around making Metal handsigns, Dwarfs that can turn their skin and flesh to stone periodically, Elves that can fade from sight at night etc etc,Even in the relaitevly low fantasy start of classic’s setting getting attacked by three wolves in such a setting is not the same as real life.

2 Likes
8

Hello Blondie!

I don’t really have anything to add compared to what others have answered. Unfortunately, it’s two very different ways to RP from a very different base board.

The RP you’re talking about isn’t possible on WoW’s retail servers right now. The game is too easy in PVE and it is not turned in this direction.

But the RP you’re talking about is one of my favorites. I mostly practiced it on Conan Exiles. Your example with your dwarf perfectly transcribes this feeling of a very immersive RP or even when playing in PVE we find ourselves doing RP. Like old RP games. And I who like it, I am in love with it. And a World of Warcraft like that, I’d love to.

But World of Warcraft offers another gameplay and another way of working. The game is really very simple now. And we no longer feel this immersive and dangerous atmosphere in PVE. But it’s up to everyone to make their RP as dangerous as possible! I love survival RP. And in a way, we practice it with our guild. If we find ourselves in a desert place, we will suffer from hunger and thirst. And it is therefore a priority to solve this problem before dying.

It’s up to the players to choose their character’s life limit! And the level of difficulty of their RP. After all, it’s a game so we can change the limits and settings ourselves too! Long live Hardcore RP.

2 Likes
9

On retail, detaching your roleplay character from your player character is par for the course. The player character is an exception to every rule; socially, ethically, technologically, magically.

The level at which the player character interacts with their environment is decidedly not the norm, especially in later expansions when you fight alongside the elite of the elite, literal gods, kings and titans.

Being able to detach yourself from that is, for me personally, what sets a good roleplayer apart. Reject buzzboxes and laser rifles, return to messenger birds and blunderbusses.

And ultimately you have to curate your own experience. Find likeminded people and set your standards together. I roleplay mostly with my own guild because, aside from being a niche in and of itself, I know what I can expect from other characters and their storytelling.

8 Likes
10

Well said!
You expressed my thought on the matter just right.

1 Like
11

The gameplay of the game isn’t always indicative of the lore and people should recognise that. The roleplay you mention is only really doable if you’re playing an adventurer character, and it’s essentially just doing content but talking in-character before and after, instead of emoting and so on.

For example, one would think that some of the biggest settlements in Azeroth only have about 40 soldiers if we are to go by what gameplay tells us, and it would be very jarring to say that this is the way that it is in canon.

1 Like
12

“you have angered me, let us walk 1.5km to the city entrance and settle this!”

13

it gives both parties a good amount of time to settle their differences and become friends

1 Like
14

You reminded me of vanilla times. It did feel that way to me then, it was amazing :slight_smile:

With the way the story has unfolded throughout the expansions it makes sense it doesn’t necessarily work out for rp characters tho. It has created a potential gap between an adventuring character and a champion who is on first name basis, and on speed dial, with the most influential npc’s of Azeroth.

That gap is usually the space for rp stories these days. I agree that it is odd in a way, a bit detached from what is happening gameplay wise.

1 Like
15

I think we lost the connection to the game when the themes of the game changed. The player character was forced into being a world-conquering hero just to get through the content. We physically can’t roleplay the champion of Draenor or one of the handful of heroes that rode on Deathwing’s back onto the Maelstrom, so by virtue of the traits of our hobby we all need to roleplay a shady baker and take a step back from the gameplay. There’s no way around that, and it’s been that way for years.

8 Likes
16

I also want to add to that and say;
One of the first things when, at least I, got into RP was focusing heavily on how to create a character.

A tip that often comes for new players is:

  1. Make a relatively young character who, have the whole world to explore and learn.
    With their achievement’s yet to be realized and completed.

Now, this is an easy entry into the world, and your character gets to be shaped according to events, and have character progression from 0/100

Meaning, great plenty of adventure to be had!

The other side is, like Clylaris and Iolenthe touched on;

If you are the Champion of Azeroth who’s saved the world, and other universes multiply times and got all the big folks on speed dial… what more is it out there to be done…?

You have achieved the highest possible feat there is and now… what do you to with your life?

You start at 100/100
Why would you bother helping farmer Joe weeding his garden … who turned out to be hungry lashers?

This is what Blizzard is making our PvE characters out to be for many expansions now.
And in my humble opinion, that’s a dull thing to deal with in RP, because there is no more challenges to be had.

There is little to no character progression to make, it’s BORING in the long run
it’s so detached and unrelatable as it gets.

Long live the shady baker!

4 Likes
17

I created a thread about the potential for RP on the Hardcore Classic servers over on the general roleplay forums a few weeks back (Do you think there will be an active RP community on hardcore servers? If so, what will it look like?) where I also talked about the potential for a closer link between gameplay mechanics and roleplay in that context.

About 5–6 years ago, there was a goblin guild on here (might still be around) with a sort of “qualified always in character” approach that I found kinda interesting. AFAIR, their approach was “everything you do gameplay wise is in character, but it is probably not the exact scenario presented by the game”. So if you ran Razorfen Kraul, your character wasn’t literally killing Charlga Razorflank (the final boss), but perhaps they were taking down the leader of a quillboar presence somewhere else. Or if you were doing dailies for a certain faction, you weren’t becoming an extremely well-known champion of that faction, but perhaps you were doing odd jobs for them. As far as I recall the guild was of a quasi-mercenary character, which lent itself to this kind of approach to the link between gameplay and roleplay.

2 Likes
18

I cannot help but to feel that this is in due part to our own restrictions.

It is a bit two fold when I think about it, but then again I need to enjoy the gameplay of the MMORPG, before I can get deeply invested into roleplaying my character within its world.

Thus when I play Vrayth through gameplay, I feel like I am still playing him, despite not actively engaging in an act of storytelling.

In this case I have a natural divide between game storytelling, and RP storytelling, since gameplay seamlessly flows into the combat prowess incharacter.

M̶o̶m̶e̶n̶t̶u̶m̶ f̶e̶l̶ r̶u̶s̶h̶ z̶i̶p̶ w̶o̶s̶h̶ d̶a̶s̶h̶!̶

I don’t think it is far fetched to weave a narrative into everyday gameplay, even spontaneously. All it takes is a good reason, and write-off for canonical events in which the character would have no presence in.

As a recent example here in Dragonflight, Vrayth was a part of long campaign with few his fellow Illidari, that took them to the Dragon Isles. At random (and not IC) I was doing one of the primal storms in the Azure Span, and stumbled upon a Hunter & Shaman RP’ing out the very storm, getting overwhelmed with elementals ect.

A simple whisper of “Hey, mind if I join IC?” was all it took for my Demon Hunter to suddenly engage with these two and help fend off the Primalists. It was a solid couple hours of spontaneous RP, and while it might not have lead anywhere in the grander scheme of the campaign Vrayth was engaging with, or his personal development, really. What it did however, was to offer a nice moment to engage with folk that isn’t explicitly his own, two people whom, (as one should when one plays a Demon Hunter as relentless as Vrayth) had completely different ideals of how to view the Isles, and by extension the Primalist threat it is facing.

It was cool, and it wouldn’t have happened if not for the active gameplay event.

4 Likes
19

If the open world offered more challenge and sense of adventure, I’d probably RP on the road most of the time.

Something me and a few friends have been doing is taking an RP approach to M+ runs where we RP as mercenaries/heroes for hire. It’s lighter on the RP side, but gives our characters something to talk about when we’re doing regular RP.

1 Like
20

To counter point this, there was a period on AD where this was literally taken to the extreme. You had public adoration and exultation of people playing frankly boring 0/100 characters more suited to Second Life.

Thankfully (or perhaps not so thankfully) they all migrated to the European Final Fantasy 14 servers, but the point remains. Why in a world of dragons and magic and interdimensional threats would someone want to play bob the baker or lizzy the peasant? Sure I can see there being value in playing something that is of a humble background, and building up your character through lived experienced in roleplay but the majority of low power ‘peasant characters’ deliberately went out of their way to remain as weak, feeble and bland as possible.

Yes, we get it, you are expressing your high humility and moral goodness by playing a character that smells of horse manure.
Its not hard to see why there has been a backlash against low powered rp when people who play high fantasy characters in a high fantasy setting were being belittled and mocked for wanting to play their high fantasy… fantasy?

That is not to say no one can play your ‘small time’ character but like any character it needs to go hand in hand with good writing, not using some bizarre attempt at virtue signalling that you are a ‘superior’ player as a substitute for good writing.

2 Likes