I see a lot of “we follow the lore but not with X”. Seeing as this is thus headcanon AND in conflict with the current lore, I really cannot agree with that mindset.
Yes, it is a hassle and a half to deal with, but is two winters per calendar year really that much harder to deal with in your imagination than a portal ripped through space and time to the dimension of the afterlife?
Imo it just sounds incredibly, well, lazy to go by irl years rather than what year it is in the game canonically.
I play fast and loose with the timeline. Never giving my characters specific ages, just generic ‘adult’ ‘old’ ‘young’ etc. I’d generally agree that using IRL years makes the most sense out of the two very bad options.
Ideally, personally, I’d use more… like… five years between cata and mists for example. To recover from the whole “dragons with wings of fire blew up half of Azeroth” thing. But given that would just would just muddle everything IC, the options are blizzards idiocy or irl years.
So IRL years if you’re going to reference age, time and such I feel.
The big problem is that NPCs clearly age according to the official timeline. Anduin is supposed to be 18, and would have a hard time passing for what, 25? Jaina is definitely not over 40 either.
I base it all off of IRL time too. As many others have said, RPing out events for two to three years and then having to condense it down to just a year afterwards is just foolish.
It seems to be a widely regarded “headcannon” on RP servers that things just play out in real time.
Because of the mess of the timeline, time is something I try not to refer to in explicit terms in RP, considering IC most of our characters have existed for longer than the actual timeline suggests.