Hence, “doesn’t have to be an issue”, of course, it usually always is.
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Honestly anyone saying their character is on par with the PC is… actually fine* to me.
But that’s a BIG * I put on the end there.
Before Legion it was quite feasible to just be on par with the PC. They rarely solo’d anything significant by themselves, didn’t have super close ties with major lore figures (Though this changed from Cata onwards), didn’t have magic McGuffins and weren’t basically demigods leading entire armies/classes by themselves.
After Legion suddenly the PC became a significant but vague lore figure that’s both canon and also not. Plus they went from being “Really, really good at their job” to “Literally a super hero” that seems incapable of failure or dying (but they still take more L’s in questing than your average super hero RPer heyooooo!).
If someone says their character is on par with PC, I take it to mean without the artifacts, azerite neck and all the connections and perks that come with being a Champion of Azeroth. And to me that isn’t actually the worst thing ever, you’re just a higher level DnD character there.
But if they start claiming to have influence on major events beyond being one of many background faces in the army, or have, god forbid, put themselves in the boots of -the- PC… Yeeeeeeah, no. No thanks.
I fully confess I RP my characters on the upper end of the heroic scale but by god I keep them as far from the PCs spotlight as humanly possible just to avoid that entire mess.
That being said, for public events that aren’t stated as being ‘heroic’ tier, I will willingly depower my characters to avoid scenarios like this. If you play a powerful character you need to accept that most people aren’t, and you don’t have the right to steamroll other people’s problems just because you can normally cleave through twenty ogres during a guild event.
Really the only problem I have is when the DM tries to massively nerf my characters with their own headcanon, like mages only being able to cast a few puny spells before being exhausted. How about no?
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I am of the exact opposite stance. We have to keep our power in check, otherwise we start breaking apart the setting. If your character is as strong as the Titanslayer, minus neck, artifacts etc, what is stop everyone else from RPing the same thing? You can’t lay exclusive claim to any concept. And when they inevitably do RP the same thing, how do you explain any of the lore difficulties being so great when we had countless thousands of OP heroes who could slaughter through the Scourge hordes like nothing or mow down the Legion like so many blades of grass?
Look at the average DM event. Lesser undead get trivially oneshot regardless of numbers. Imagine if we had thousands of such characters around in the lore. All conflicts would be trivial.
Way too many people conveniently ignore that the character you play in the actual game isn’t the average or archetypical member of their class. You play the very peak, a mary sue who masters everything they touch in moments and gets admired by even many the greatest of lore characters.
It’s a peak none of us should ever really be at, either. It’s the cap, not the average. As RPers, we are essentially part of the large NPC body of our respective factions, the many characters who are not the godlike Player Character™.
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There are elements of which that does happen. But imo it is up to the individual behind the character rather than the setting itself. WoW has always been a game of big spectacle and amazing feats, and if people want to RP such feats they need to make sure they know exactly what is the process and the consequences.
I’ll use one of my own chars for an example. My tauren monk entered the Celestial Art’s tournament, he won the previous one in the master bracket. Now, during the next tournament he decides to ask to go all out with a rival of his, which is allowed. Technically I should of won the event based on rolls, however one of the strikes wasn’t allowed cos I didn’t touch the other character (which is part of the IC rules)
Now, there’s two options here. I can either contest it because “I want my character to have his awesome move hit”, or move on. ICly it made sense, he didn’t follow the rules - and alongside that his loss was due to the drawbacks of his particular style, which again I lost on rolls - but I adapted and decided that’s the reason he was unable to defend himself.
Now, if I was to follow your advice - the action would be that he suddenly decides that he doesn’t have that ability because of the risk it “breaks the setting.”, which ironically would break the setting since one moment he’s performing the move, the next he’s fighting like a normal person. It both breaks the scenario that was set up with them being able to go all out, and will likely just confuse people.
It is up to the roleplayer themselves to work out what makes sense and when to apply certain abilities. If you want to charge straight into a horde and cleave a ton of baddies - just remember that it cannot always be guaranteed. No-one should feel ashamed to have their characters do awesome things, just make sure it makes sense in the context of your environment, and know what sort of drawbacks it could have on your character.
To finish here’s a lovely quote from an old RP friend of mine. “People who act a fantasy try to fit cool stuff in their RP all the time. A person who is acting out a character will know when to apply the coolness.” (He really wasn’t a great quoter)
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Well the thing is that the PC was able to pull off the majority of their feats in Legion onwards because of a McGuffin (Artifacts or neck) and also the literal army following them around everywhere.
Before that the word treated you as someone who was just pretty good at their job, and had to band together with about twenty four other guys who’re really good at their job to do fight significant threats at all. However the raids as they are presented (25 murderhobos ripping a boss apart for a shiny new pony) aren’t wholly canon, to my understanding they tend to be massively supported by allied factions that orbit the raid. iirc in Chronicles the credit for each raid boss tends to go to a whole faction, not a group of individuals. Suggesting it was a huge effort of a few leader figures that are canon, such as Tirion, and their respective faction army. But I may be mistaken there, feel free to correct me.
As I said, BEFORE Legion (And maybe Cata if you want to go that far back) saying you were on par with the PC wasn’t actually that unreasonable. But from Cata onwards you started buddying up with major lore figures much more often until you were on a first name basis with Genn Greymane at lv1 with 0XP. Irksome but you can just say your character doesn’t know Genn themselves like the PC does.
Then, in Legion onwards suddenly the PC is basically an unstoppable demigod showered in literally THE strongest weapons and items in the entire setting, and the NPCs are going down on the PC 10x more than ever before. AND they have a personal army doing everything at their whim (Arguably this started in WoD but let’s face it most people pretend WoD never happened).
Suddenly, to say you’re on par with the PC is significantly less ideal. Since it implies you have near enough demigod status among a world of mortals, with your own personal army and have every single major lore NPC fawning over you or orbiting your mere existence.
Which sucks for a number of reasons that are off topic, but what’s on topic is that I don’t see an issue with someone claiming to be on par with the PC Pre-Legion. Which is basically as they are but minus the artifacts, the azerite, the personal army, the lore figures fangirling over them and so on. Which puts them right back down to being some dude who is just really, really good at their job and happens to be in the right place at the right time. Without all of that they’re no longer the gods among men that the game portrays them as. If the PC didn’t have the Azerite neck right now they’d probably have been dunked by Old God stuff or something.
That seems quite reasonable to me to RP out so long as you know how to reign yourself in when around people RPing normal grunts and footmen, and to not wave that IC power around like a knobhead. Nobody likes that.
Before that the PC was still a mary sue who mastered everything they touched in a matter of hours and butchered their way through endless opposition with ease.
The PC was always a protagonist with enormous power, punching very far above their weight even as a trainee - in the starting zones alone they are solo-killing monsters that menaced entire groups of NPCs, dealing with invasions and clearing out keeps on their own, and so on.
We had no artifacts or anything in WoD. We still absolutely slaughtered everything we came across. Simple, normal game play results in borderline solo genocide.
Characters like that are just so far away from the realm of what we RP that it cannot be compared.
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We did get Khadgar’s magic ring!
And Wrathion’s cloak in MoP. Plus all his sha-touched stuff.
Those weren’t even legendaries until later on!
The PC was always a protagonist with enormous power, punching very far above their weight even as a trainee - in the starting zones alone they are solo-killing monsters that menaced entire groups of NPCs, dealing with invasions and clearing out keeps on their own, and so on.
That sounds like your average lower levels in a DnD campaign to me. At least in my experience, within a few levels the DM is already stacking you up to be a local hero of sorts and throwing the party at enemy keeps and obstacles that NPC red shirts can’t deal with. Plus it’s not often even in DnDs most RP heavy groups that I’ve been in do we roleplay out gradual training or mastery. We level up, then wake up the next day suddenly knowing a new technique.
But at this point I think it’s fair to just agree to disagree, but for what it is worth I can totally see where you’re coming from. I think it just depends on your own personal definitions and expectations, and where you draw the line as ‘exceedingly powerful’ in the setting. Which is something that will always be a topic in RP, as some people consider magic classes in themselves to be ‘overpowered’ in the setting, while others might only draw the line when someone is outright being an untouchable Mary Sue. (Some might not have a line at all… which is gross)
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I guess it comes down to where you draw the line between an extremely capable individual to a downright super hero that makes every challenge seem a triviality, since that distinction seems to differ between people, too.
There’s plenty examples of pretty average protagonists throughout fantasy and other genres who just happen to be extremely driven, often compensating with some more personal flaws which they have to overcome throughout the course of their story.
Don’t see much issue for folks who wants to play out a hero fantasy in that way, so long as it doesn’t step on toes and is downplayed during situations where necessary (usually when there are characters around who aren’t on par with the ‘hero stuff’).
Each to their own, though!
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WoW isn’t DnD. Yeah, DnD has you play protagonists murderising everything. But if everyone did that in WoW you’d very quickly run out of things to murderise.
I have yet to see anyone do this. There are settings where magic is massively powerful and a total dealbreaker against most things that lack it, such as Warhammer. But this is not Warhammer.
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Every class is magic except for Warrior, which honestly is on some Might Guy 8 gates steroids so you might as well call it ‘muscle’ magic too.
First off, I didn’t say that.
Second, warriors may or may not use magic too. Their abilities aren’t really explained or detailed in any lore.
Also, a central reason for why I think it is important to treat the PC as the peak rather than the average is that it gives us far more space to work with as RPers.
If everyone is at the power cap by default you can’t really do much from there for variety other than go downwards a bit.
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We don’t need lore, we’re too busy killing everything to write it down
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Pretty much this. You’ll have some people insisting that if your roleplay anything more than a normal soldier, you’re automatically a Mary Sue. You’ll have others that are okay with you basically being Dante from Devil May Cry (Fwiw, I’m not that far towards that extreme and I would hope not many are). Best that can be done is just acknowledging not everybody wants to be a super hero, or wants to have to prepare for super heroes to show up in their public events and have to cater to them over everyone else.
Well, not everyone has to roleplay a hero-type. Do they? Plenty are content to roleplay normal soldiers, in fact most are. There aren’t many I know of who do stretch into hero territory. So even if you threw roleplayers at every killable problem in the setting about 90% of them would die in the first few minutes.
While WoW itself is not DnD, there’s a significant amount of crossover in roleplaying mannerisms and expectations between the two. Even in DnD where the DM is actively making you a PC, you’re still not gods, and are still very much mortal against certain threats. A good DM will remind you of this fact. And many NPCs can and will dunk on you. And (In a good campaign) you simply can’t always murderhobo your way to victory. It doesn’t do much good to be the ultimate fighter when you desperately need to persuade a dragon to not burn down a village.
It’s not until the very highest levels that you start becoming outright unstoppable killing machines that can make mincemeat of everything in the monster manual. And frankly VERY few RP characters would even get anywhere near that before straying into outright Mary Sue territory.
But again, we’re at a point I think where our expectations and roleplay styles just differ. My background is mostly DnD, as are most of my friends and guildmates who I play with. So it stands to reason I use that as a comparison point.
It really depends what each person wants to get out of RP in WoW. Do you want something closer to a heroic fantasy ala DnD (Within reason) or do you want to fully immerse yourself as an ordinary citizen of the setting?
It’s something that definitely happens. On more than one occasion I’ve had DMs insist I roll on a ‘miscast’ chance, which if failed I instantly blow myself up or turn into a chicken. Or they insist I’m too exhausted to cast more spells. Or that it takes multiple hours and a crap ton of reagents to just teleport. That’s what I was on about.
If they spent maybe two seconds looking up magic in Warcraft they’d find a laundry list of ways to mitigate, but not completely gut, magic if they think it would make an obstacle trivial. And frankly, not taking magic into account at all when designing a public event where a mage will probably show up, is a pretty bad idea.
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I mean, those can happen. Mana is a thing, and spells can absolutely go wildly awry in WoW as well. It sounds like heavy-handed DMing perhaps, but not wrong on principle.
I have a kind of personal bias against hero-type RPers for this reason, since it feels like they just grab a lot of power for their character while simultaneously acknowledging it wouldn’t work if everyone did it - basically ‘I can but they can’t’.
DnD is a game. You try to win, not just on an IC but an OOC level. Sure, if you’re a good roleplayer you try to keep what makes sense in mind, but I have played DnD too. People try to make strong characters.
Hell, DnD even has a challenge rating system to help the DM ensure that every encounter has an appropriate amount of challenge - ie, one the players will probably win but that they will have to put a bit of effort into it for.
WoW RP is not a game. You are not supposed to treat it like one. The goal is to create stories, not to win or grow in power. They are fundamentally different mindsets.
More and more I realise I have the best D&D group. We play for the adventure, not to win. Some even nerfed their stats because their characters felt too OP for their image of them!
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Then you have a better group than I do.
I even caught one of my players cheating once (emphasis caught, I don’t know how long it had been going on). One of many reasons I’ve moved away from tabletop.
Maybe. But I’ve never seen that handled well. It’s always been to cripple the resident caster as much as possible because the DM forgot mages were a thing. Or any other magic class.
It is a really tricky balance, and it does cause a lot of friction. But there’s no real answer besides asking the hero types to dial it back when in events or campaigns with citizen type characters. Which is what they should do, I must emphasize that. You have to respect not everybody plays on that ‘tier’ and you shouldn’t force people up to that nor should you tread on the fun of other people for your own power fantasy.
Be as powerful as you like among guilds and friends, but if it comes public, reign it in. It’s unfortunate that quite a few refuse to do that simple thing.
Well that can really depend on the DM and campaign. Most I’ve been with these days push for an emphasis on story telling over gaining power and ‘winning’. We’ve had entire sessions where all our characters did was talk or travel. Even if our characters are heroic in nature, that doesn’t stop them being people that we want to flesh out and make stories with.
In fact, in a recent game a player who literally just made a walking character sheet that was minmaxed to hell (Which the DM had no issue with) but didn’t RP at all (Not fine with) was asked to engage more with the plot or not bother coming back next week.
Now that just sucks. I can’t fathom why you’d want to cheat at DnD. The whole reason we use rolls in RP is to add risk to things we do, however slight. If you want to focus on winning go play Warhammer or something.
Real broad generalisation here. Yes there is people in every single community that will sweat over character optimisation. But in general I don’t think anyone would play a DnD campaign where all that happens is your Mr. Farmer boi gets trashed because he doesn’t want to play the hero.
You have just stated that you don’t like characters that win or grow in power. However that is just another route of storytelling. If you win, you should be given a chance to grow, and if you lose you grow too.
I’m sorry but you can’t create story out of staying the same.
I think this is the best way to go about it. Don’t give your characters too much power too quickly, that’s the crux of making a good character. But if you just want to tell stories about how your character is just doing the same thing day in, day out, go ahead. But don’t be upset when people who want to explore a different type of story don’t do it the same way.
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