There’s many places to go and guides to read in terms of help or advice for roleplay, so much so that it can actually end up quite daunting to some people of where to start and how to try prioritise their search for roleplay guidance.
So! I had the amazingly wonderful idea to leave it to you, the roleplayers and community of Argent Dawn! To leave behind your most preferred, personalised top-tip! By having a person just leave a piece of roleplay advice or two in a concise, easy to read manner, hopefully we can make a nice thread for anyone seeking roleplay tips and advice to stumble upon them easily.
The tip I would leave? Remember, roleplay is all about having fun. Try not to worry too much about how it may or may not go and just have a good time.
Make an engaging concept - your character should draw others towards role-playing with you. Make it so that others want to be with you.
Take initiative! If you want to RP with someone, go to them and RP. They won’t mind. And if they do, they’re jerks and you’ll find a better person elsewhere.
Remember, there is a person on the other side of the screen. Being respectful of who they are does matter. And also have realistic demands: your friends can’t RP 24/7.
Don’t be too hard-pressed by others. Listen to feedback, but always think with your own mind.
These are kinda basic tips, but IMO often forgotten!
I’d say think of an arc for the character to take or aim towards, what are they trying to achieve? and what can they do to achieve it? Based on what’s going on around them.
Whether that be getting in touch with more people, taking a specific course or deciding what sort of person they’re going to be.
Find a guild that’s willing to support the ideas and help build on what it is you’re trying to do.
I would say try to interact with people in Stormwind, but as a singular person it can be hard.
Get out of the RP comfort zone, place your character in scenarios where you’re forced to think about how they’d react in a situation that isn’t familiar to them.
Remember that roleplay is cooperative: you have to be interested in other people in order for them to be interested in you. Learn and ask, don’t just answer and tell.
If you are not RPing within a guild, where circumstances can force interaction, do not make a grumpy loner that nobody will talk to then act surprised when nobody interacts with you in public RP. That’s just the wrong character for the wrong situation. You’ll have more success in public RP with more open and social characters. A more withdrawn or anti social character is fine, but you’ll have more success in a guild with such a character. Characters and RP scenarios are not one size fits all, and you’ll find more enjoyment using appropriate characters in appropriate back drops.
Less can be more. Ideally start with a relatively straight forward character background and go from there. If your character’s history (Prior to RPing them for the first time) can’t be summed up on a piece of A4, it’s probably too much. A very focused character is a very strong character. And don’t be afraid to retcon stuff if you want to make changes down the line, we’ve all been there. Just give your pals a heads up if a prominent detail has changed to improve your character concept long-term.
I usually give my character three.
One which they want to achieve in the short term, and serves as a hook for engagement and current arc. The second, which is a mid-term goal, and serves as something they work towards. The last is a long-term goal, something which they might never actually achieve, but works to characterise them and give them reasons to do things.
A short-term goal might be financial stability, or employment, or learning how to do something new, like a trade or the basics of their OOC/IC class.
A mid-term goal might be to reclaim some family heirloom from a now-lost patch of territory, like the Ghostlands, Duskwood, or Felwood. It might be to master a school of magic. It might be to become an artisan craftsman.
A long-term goal might be to purge the world of necromancy and dark magic users, to restore the Blue Flight as true custodians of the magical world, or just to master a variety of druid forms.
In the short, mid, and long term goals, your character now has a bunch of hooks that give you reasons to interact with people, get involved with others, and create stories of your own.
As for character creation: never focus on abilities over personality.
Keep IC and OOC apart as much and often as you can. It is generally not a good idea to assume that whatever another character does or says is saying so on behalf of the player behind it.
It isn’t about making bad life choices, but always making choices that suit your character’s personality and preferences no matter the consequences you know about OOC. Consistence in character design is important; one frequent mistake bad roleplayers make is to forget about their characters’ conviction as soon as it becomes inconvenient in RP.
A different tip I passed to a guildie recently is related to character goals.
A character without goals, ambitions and purpose is meaningless, pointless to roleplay and will eventually lead to boredom. Between your character’s goals, it is also important to have short-term goals as well as medium- and long-term ones. Short-term goals you can advance towards through social and everyday RP. Medium-term goals are there for multiple weeks’ worth of RP and development.
Too often I see characters that only seem to have very ambitious, long-term goals. EG, “Have vengeance for Teldrassil”, “Restore the glory of Quel’thalas”, “Reclaim the Human kingdoms in the north”. There will hardly be a day after which your character can sit down and claim they advanced towards those goals meaningfully.
Contrast those against short-term ambitions like “Have a new sword forged”, “Visit Silvermoon City for the first time” and “Address my recent encounter with an undead to a priest of the light”.
I started roleplay just over a month or two ago and my naive beginners tip is simple:
Stay! Keep trying, no matter how many mistakes you make, no matter how many lolers you meet and no matter how ignored you maybe feel sometimes. Because no matter how many tips you read before and how much backstory you have, you will do mistakes. And thats ok. Most of us can kinda guess if you are new or not and my experience was that almost everyone i met tryed to help a newby in one way or another. There where times when i thought of leaving, when i thought i think about it all to much and after most of the days i felt that i dont belong there. But that will go away, it only needs time. So Stay! If you can choose between Loktar and Ogar choose Loktar and fight on! It will get better and you will find your place in this community.
Wether you RP a Blue Dragon or a Goblin Engineer, as long as you are engaged in the community with your character you gotta be open to a degree of actions & consequences, both positive and negative. It makes Roleplay that much more fun and engaging for yourself and those around you, this is especially important when playing a character that’s powerful!
Consequences get a bad rep, but if you put a bit of thought to them they can and often will be positive and mad fun
Personally I’d say try to find that balance between taking RP seriously, and learning to joke around with it and not be too serious either. Don’t be afraid to have your character or plotline or whatever be a little camp every now and then. Obviously, this doesn’t mean don’t take anything related to it seriously at all, but remember that it’s not an ultimatum between “durr hurr super edgy super serious no fun just WAAAGH!!” and “wacky woohoo wahaa funtimes”
Also sidenote to this I’d say its especially important to remember to find the balance between serious and not when you’re RPing as a less morally good character… It’s no fun being a villain when you’ve got a strict “no fun allowed” policy in your evil lair.
