Years in RP - Your opinions

Hello there, everyone!
I’ve had this in mind for quite awhile now, so I have decided to write a post and see what RP community has to say about this.

I’ve been asking friends every now and then, trying to understand how years go in RP, but we all got our opinions on the matter. Some say one thing, others another, but even so, I’d like to see how all of you go about this.

I see many people RP celebration of their character’s birthdays and anniversaries every year. But people keep saying there is one year passing IC between each expansion (but Cata and MoP apparently?) and to me that never really made sense. Mostly because we usually got approximately two years per expansion release, but also because of the events in Lore that I feel some would take longer than just one year. But that’s me.

How do you go about RPing years? Do your characters age by real life years, or do you RP it by expansion?

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It doesn’t, but that is the timeline Blizzard marks as official.

Yes, it’s a mess.

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Ah, didn’t know Blizzard marks it as official… is there any website or somewhere where they say that? I’ve just been going what people tell me. I was mostly curious about this due to aging the characters in RP.

https://wow.gamepedia.com/Timeline_(Ultimate_Visual_Guide)

That said I age my characters once a year and all that anyway.

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If there is one thing that could ACTUALLY use a retcon, that’s it, the timeline… Contrary to all the other stuff. cough

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Blizzard timeline = canon timeline, no matter how much time passes IRL. Between Vanilla and BfA’s start there are apparently 8 years.

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This timeline thing throws a bit of a wrench into some of my characters as I’ve played some of them for nearly a decade now. What should have been nearly 10 years of development and gaining strength has instead been actually 5 or similar, which looks kinda whack.

Starting to think I might just do ‘double birthdays’ on my character birthdays or something. So the age v actual experience actually lines up better.

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They really need to work on their story telling XD… Thanks for the replies!

just use actual real life years

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The Blizzard timeline is one piece of lore I wouldn’t mind headcanoning out of existance, tbh. It’s dumb, it complicates things for roleplayers, it does not make sense. Just give up the idea Blizz, no one likes your weird timeline.

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We are busy calculating how much earth years it takes for azeroth to cycle around an’she.

This is what I do, tbh.

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A world shaking event every few months. How everyone on Azeroth hasn’t learnt to fight for survival yet is confusing.

Real life years. I don’t care what Blizzard says about how much each expansion takes. For my characters, three years have passed between the start of the Legion invasion and now, and I stand by that.

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I go by IRL years.

I know, I KNOW, the official source says otherwise. But screw it, I’ll follow all the other bad lore, just not that.

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It’s so incredibly stupid and arbitrary to have expansions play out uniformly once per year that like others say it’s best to just ignore it and use real years if you engage in any sort of long-term RP.

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Every expansion there is a thread about how long there’s been between expansions, in the end we end up using IRL time = Ic time anyway.

If you want to believe that one expansion is one year, then you are just telling me that Winterveil is not canon.

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Thats a good point there :joy: along with all other holidays.

I was going by IRL time myself but discussions I had with friends made me wonder. Thank you all for responding x)

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An Azerothian year has three Winterveils in it. Obviously.

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I cant or rather wont wrap my head around Blizzard’s Timeline.

its IRL for me.