We’ve all experienced it, and a lot of us are even guilty of it.
You’re roleplaying with strangers, friends or your guild, you’re playing out a particular storyline and you can’t help but notice how one particular player in the group seems to be downplaying the threat posed by an adversary you’re facing.
Or maybe you’re engaging in RP-PvP or emote-based combat and you find that your adversary doesn’t seem to acknowledge certain abilities, to the point where attacks using that method hardly seem to hit or harm their character.
Perhaps you’ve even been the recipient of OOC feedback, in which someone declares that certain abilities that your character uses shouldn’t be half as effective as you make them seem, when you describe them.
What aspects of the setting do you find that roleplayers tend to perceive as weak and ineffective, in your experience?
Conversely, what abilities and types of magic do you find that roleplayers tend to over-hype and exaggerate the strength of?
I’ve seen both ends of the ‘size and strength’ aspect being underestimated.
You have those who think that despite being smaller, they can overcome far stronger foes. A gnome who can solo a tauren or dragon in a pure strength contest, for example.
Flipside, I’ve encountered others who think that their size means they can just auto-win any encounter because ‘they are bigger’. This applies to both growth-pot addicts, and bigger characters who go to pick on smaller characters. Saw once an orc go to ‘punt a vulpera over Orgrimmar’ and when the vulpera took the kick, stumbling forward a bit and hurt, the orc then went on an OOC rant, saying they should of been kicked out of the city and they ‘are a god emoting furry (slur).’
Fel and Void for their destructive nature. You have Ren’dorei in lore but in RP everyone handles the Void just fine. Same for the Fel, the addiction and soul burning is often overlooked provided the character is nice to interact with.
One of the more grating examples I can recall was a dragon OOC thinking that because he was a big dragon, he should suffer zero damage, not even a slight scratch from a juiced-up Chaos Bolt crashing directly into his face.
The dangers of magic, particularily the darker versions like Fel and Void are the things I most commonly see underestimated, though often for valid reasons, as nobody wants their characters to suffer permanent grievous injuries every time they lose a defense check in an event. Not to mention some classes and races have some busted regeneration, and if you’re going to acknowledge one side of the coin, you might as well acknowledge the other side of it as well.
Another thing is the size aspect of things, as Tenasa mentioned.
I’ve seen Vulpera bragging about always beating tauren in strength competitions (HOW?), but it seems far more common that smaller races are treated like a harmless joke in a world where goblins exist, while treating size as the ultimate trump card to win everything.
But no matter how many growth pots certain Dracthyr chug, they’ll still be the smallest dragons.
On a more serious note, it happens both ways. Sometimes you over or under-estimate, sometimes the DM.
I think it’s just another case of communication error between the parties. The DM may have had something grueling in mind, but for the player it was just a tuesday.
I think everyone underestimate how high fantasy the setting.
even blizzard does it sometimes.
you got drustvar which is pretty grim dark low fantasy vibes but also floating mage cities with ancient shapesshifting bank managers, dragon council members, casual demon forges, warlock portals, borderline modern or even futuristic steam punk levels of technology and every shade of civilized spellcasting race under the sun.
That’s all thanks to the devs, who include a fully corrupted race but forget to add the drawbacks, even in their own quests. Imagine the Ren’dorei having some acrually horrendous mutations like extra eyes, tentacles or fin-like ears, at least on the level available to the DHs with their fel-cracked skin or even scales over the body, and include at least as many named, Void-fallen NPCs as there are Illidari defectors in the Legion. This would’ve made the situation far more compelling and sensible. Also, the whispers. If every once in a while we heard something from beyond in-game, like it was with N’Zoth in 8.3, it’d add quite a lot to the immersion.
I think how certain types of people are viewed is ignored too much.
People shouldn’t all be super buddy buddy with void elves, Forsaken, death knights, warlocks and demon hunters. And yet they are.
I’m not saying they should be chasing them with pitch forks, but distaste and aversion should be a lot higher. Needs more friction.
This is a huge one for me.
“But the Low Fantast eleme-”
Ok, first, there is NO ‘Low Fantasy’ in WoW. It’s. A. High. Fantasy. Setting. There are lower POWER level elements, for sure.
But even (Classic style) adventuring in Elwyyn, you are dealing with Murlocs and Gnolls (a real threat at that point, and for non-adventurers. Not just ‘pests’) and shady wizard types, the Defias thugs in the forest have an etire island of rogue/amateur mages who are quite a threat, and everything jus trends upwards from there.
Swords and Sorcery is the basic power level for Azeroth. Scaling right up into the Dimensional level threats. Sure, not everyone is going to experience that full range, but they’ll have heard about it at least.
When I made my Nelf Hunter in Legion, one of her things was her being weird for getting on fine with Demon Hunters.
Nowadays thats really not that strange
Fel and void, part demon (or actual demons with eredar) massively reviled by most people… but it’s fine, cause that person seems nice!
It’s lame. Give us some distaste!
I’m not saying anything about you personally, Kay. It’s just nice to have around.
Probably grinds my gears the most personally out of all these tbh. Azeroth is a setting where the average citizen usually thinks a genocide is a sensible, rational solution to most dilemmas that crop up. See: the recent Arathi questline and the normal citizens of Stromgarde being confused that you aren’t just… wiping the Orcs clean from the Arathi Highlands. That’s the average citizen’s views, that’s considered normal in Azeroth. Protesting a 2025 democracy and 2-state solution is weird, people just don’t think like that in Azeroth, it doesn’t happen.
Alternatively, I think a lot of people overestimate the general impact of Magic on Azeroth. Is Magic quite prevalent in Azeroth? Yes. Does it impact 90% of the common citizenry at all? Well, no actually. Most of them think Mages are these mythological creatures and that Paladins are a once-in-a-lifetime thing to see strolling through your home when an actual problem comes up.
… Uh, source? Because that is a wild take given you can literally wander into the HQ of the Silver Hand (the OG human version, not the Legion meta amalgam…) in SWs Cathedral, and the Defias - who were very much a Street Level problem - have a whole cadre of mages on call.
On the contrary, I think people underestimate just how “low fantasy” the setting can get - if it isn’t the actual norm for a majority of its inhabitants.
The overwhelming amount of NPCs that we do interact with are living unremarkably mundane lives as miners, farmers and trademen that have absolutely nothing magical attached to them. And this is something that has been consistent throughout WoW starting with Classic up until now. And this isn’t just about Humans, but every other race outside of the highly millitarized (and numerically low) likes of VElves and LF Draenei.
Hell, the majority of each faction’s manpower is manned by lowly Grunts and Footmen, Raiders and Knights (and racially-themed equivalents), whereasthe amount of spellcasters deployed on battlefields often being miniscule and negligible, almost always as specialists and officers.
This isn’t even going into book sources, like Knaak’s or more recently Traveller that imply sorcery is extremely rare to be witnessed by your usual, average pre-industrial peasant or peon’s life.
Much like Warlocks running amock in the cities its a case of gameplay permitting enough mobs with enough variety to exist that players aren’t waiting 1 million years for the elusive Defias Pyromancer 1% spawn-rate to pop into existence - I think we can all agree that would be kind of terrible.
As for sources: Traveller covers it a lot! There are whole swathes of Feralas with Night Elves who’ve never even seen Humans, or aren’t aware the Alliance is a thing yet. Similarly, it tells us that most people in Redridge aren’t used to seeing non-Human Alliance races, and are even less used to seeing a bunch of eclectic magical heroes running through their agricultural peasantry town. Stormwind does have access to these heroes and this magic, but even it is toned down from what we see in-game (which, again, makes sense because nobody wants to wait around for their Mage/Paladin/Shaman etc. trainer to return to Stormwind after walking all over Azeroth that’d be a real hassle for gameplay).
Other novels such as Day of the Dragon give us insight into what Southshore is like, in which case it was largely an agricultural and fishery centre and the people were immensely surprised to see Rhonin the Mage and a Paladin rocking about it and even more shocked to see an elusive High Elf with them.
Arthas Rise of the Lich King depicts Lordaeron and its peasantry being absolutely befuddled to see Jaina Proudmoore the Mage just… rocking around like that. They think she should be in her bubbled, isolated city of Dalaran with every other Mage and the Magi in Dalaran react poorly to Arthas’ presence as a non-Mage, they think he’s a weirdo.
The Shattering depicts Ironforge as a largely non-magical city almost entirely and when the Cataclysm hit Loch Modan Anduin was the only-magical healer they could spare to help.
People have this vision of seeing the word “Priest” or “Paladin” etc. and thinking that they’re all high-level versions of their classes, throwing around max-level spells that destroy continents but the truth is 90% of them are more like Brother Paxton in Northshire - throwing around the occasional lesser heal at most.
TL;DR the Player population is a terrible, terrible indicator of what actual Azeroth is like.
Counter to that, we’ve had various examples (from better read people than me) on how wildly inconsistent the novels/non-game literature has been over the years - does it take weeks or even months to travel X distance, or does it take a few days? Well, both, depending on which book you read, apparently.
And don’t get me started on how Chronicles were originally ‘Word of God’ on the setting, and then suddenly just… Weren’t.
People often cite the Traveller novels as evidence of how there are plenty of backwater villages out there without any exposure to the weird and wonderful elements of the setting.
However, people need to acknowledge the difference between World of Warcraft, and the Warcraft setting.
World of Warcraft features a shrunken version of the Warcraft setting, the most important 1% of the setting, with the less relevant 99% being relegated to some place off-screen. There are likely hundreds, if not thousands of villages and towns throughout Azeroth that will never get mentioned because the game isn’t interested in simulating the setting in its entirety, it only focuses on the most interesting and impactful parts.
So while it’s true that the vast majority of Azeroth’s inhabitants will never meet someone who isn’t of their race and view magic as a rare and wonderful thing, as soon as you make a WoW character who is from one of these countless off-screen backwater villages, you consign them to the fate of never visiting it again. As soon as an inhabitant of Azeroth becomes a WoW character, they become confined to the most fantastical 1% of the setting that is represented by the game.
The low-magic, backwater, mudcore 99% of Azeroth is inaccessible. The only times our characters can ever go there is when they go off-screen. For that reason, that side of the setting is somewhat irrelevant to playing a character in the actual game we roleplay in, in the high-magic, fantastical, gonzo 1% of Azeroth.
