Scar tissue is often thick, rigid and not as stretchy as skin. You can compare it with a zipper on a sweatshirt/hoody. The fabric flexes but the zipper is much more rigid. So you can imagine bigger scars being noticeable. Especially big one’s that cover like a chest, upper leg or general places which see a lot of flexing.
Scar tissue is still scar tissue though.
Maybe the wording was a little rough but Orcs are more like green humans now. Slowly their clan centric culture feels being replaced by human morals and society structures. I’m talking mostly from how they’re presented in-game with this.
Rule of cool is fine but I rather see a little thought in it. Maybe IRL factors in a bit I guess. Nowadays people glorify disabilities a bit too much without really paying much head to their downsides. Can I even use that word?
You didn’t read, I said it doesn’t make sense for wounds to not be treated and turn into nasty scars when they can, just so they have a cool scar to show at the pub.
I think starting off a conversation with a stranger with ‘How did you get those scars?’ doesn’t feel right to me.
My main character has a cursed scar between the ribs that was the result of getting half her soul ritually torn away by a Lich few years ago. The scar aches in the presence of death due to the magic used, and holy places cause physical discomfort.
Zuuka here has a couple of scars, generally cut / burn / gunshot wounds from military service, across her torso and her limbs. Being the sole survivor of a unit that was otherwise eradicated was a big contribution, as was being a goblin, hazards are all over.
My other often used character is a vulpera shaman; she has a part of her right ear missing due to an arcane missile hitting it, a long scar down the dead middle of her chest after an undead ghoul slashed her, and while not technically a scar, she does have one on her right shoulder where the arm itself is missing and replaced by a prosthetic.
On the topic of magic being a fix-all, I figure that people who are very much focused on never having any scars and can reasonably heal it away completely by magical means likely do so, but not everyone has the will or the means. Zuuka uses hers for bragging rights, and my vulpera just doesn’t care.
And that’s not even addressing the fact some scars can’t really be healed away fully that easy anyway; they might be too severe, too deep, treated too late, the magic might be insufficient, the wound could have been caused by magical means itself to prevent healing, et cetera.
What weakness? Despite being blind and wheelchair bound, Drek’thar remains a force to be reckoned with in the orc heritage quests. Scars do not make you weak. Not to mention that orcs generally have respect for the elders of their clan.
I think you greatly overestimate the capacity of healing magic and are conflating gameplay with lore.
One could even argue that an elderly orc who has lived a lifetime of battle might received a lot of respect for having bested anything that has tried to kill him.
I’ve never had too many specific scars for a character outside of my druid, who amassed a number of them across a range of different guild events, but given that most of my characters are worgen those characters all have at least one scar, that being the bite.
As a rule of thumb my more cowardly or carefree characters have the bite on the leg or have most of the bitemark showing up from behind because they were either unaware of the worgen that bit them, or were actively fleeing. Meanwhile my more combative characters have them on the arm or the front part of the shoulder. Some of the scars are lost to time though (as in I didn’t write it down)
My zandalari monk has lost the sight in her left eye and has a lovely long scar down that side of her face. she does not know why it did not regen but she also doesn’t know how she acquired the scar in the first place.
My nightborne warrior has also lost an eye when he was nightfallen.
And my first eye loss can go to my belf paladin who lost his to scourge on the dead scar way back when.
I think that it comes down to people conflating Saurfang’s view on the world with every single orc’s, when it’s clearly him dealing with trauma - even going as far as his first appearance in Battle for Azeroth being a follow-up cinematic to the trailer where he tries to essentially take his own life while reminiscing about his deceased son.
It’s the same conundrum as one line from the Warcraft movie making everyone think that a society led by shamans would have a tradition about honor duels without shamans being able to use their power, without people taking into account that it was just Gul’dan breaking out the magic in an unarmed, unarmored bout.
PS: Magic is not that common throughout the entirety of Azeroth, either. A soldier stuck in some far-flung corner of the Eastern Kingdoms might not have the luxury of being healed in time by a greatly skilled priest.
He’s a bit of a Ship of Theseus. Decades of brutal combat and dangerous destructive magic at close quarters have rendered the counting of scarred tissue a moot point; though, he does keep a few that he’s quite proud of, as a symbolic thing more than anything else - and even fewer manage to last for longer than a few years before they’re stitched up or forgotten.
In a world with a lot of magical healing, it makes sense that there is little scarring. So for most of my characters I use scarring or a bad eye etc. as gimmicks that reflects things in that character’s story.
This is a fair point. This is a setting where warriors jump three meters up in the air while wielding a 500kg weapon, surely your character would be able to overcome the pain induced by a scar…
…On the other hand, if the scar is purely aesthetic then the value of the feature is lost. It isn’t much different from a character wearing an eyepatch but having zero handicaps.
Chekov’s Gun: every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed.
If your character has a peculiar feature and it draws attention, then it should play a role. Consider how it might impact them. Otherwise it is a missed opportunity and instead of making your character feel more unique, it feels more bland instead.
Works. . .alright as a rule in a one-man written novel where the sole author can dictate every element, but we’re not anywhere near that sort of deal in RP or Warcraft. 'Tis a video game setting with a mix of high-scifi, high-fantasy, low-fantasy, steampunk and magicpunk elements all wrapped into one. A scar should definitely have a reasoning for its existence, it wouldn’t exist otherwise but in the world of Azeroth where people can have every bone in their bodies crushed and then take a few weeks to recover in a church/abbey (“Of Blood and Honor”) it seems like that rule is equally going to break under the first point of duress.
The ultimate answer, and the one people rebel against despite it being the case for 20-odd years of this settings existence is that if Blizzard think something is cool they will write or add it, including the nonsense-ish ways scars work in the world of Azeroth (though I’m sure you could argue this is the case due to magical healing removing the debilitating factors of the scar or healing it enough that it only leaves behind the faded image etc., etc).
More on topic, my Half-Elf Caelius has a scar from three claw-marks he suffered from a Troll Primal tearing the skin across his cheek. Merondill has a considerably faded lightning scar across his back from fighting a Shaman in RP-PVP.
The rule perfectly applies to the quoted moment in Of Blood and Honor, seeing how it is said experience which marks the debt that Tirion will have with Eitrigg for the rest of his life.
Also, it’s not like Tirion’s wounds were deep or permanent. As you said yourself, it took him weeks to heal out of his injuries. If anything, the aforementioned example proves you can handwave scars and remove them, should you want to go in that direction.
I am not going to deny they are part of the setting, but we don’t often look at Blizzard and think “what paragon of story-telling that we have here!” and should strive to do better.
I second Meronspell in that this is a very weird argument to make in RP. First, very few of us are actual writers, and secondly it’s also not applicable. The methods of writing are different.
The role is simply a RP hook. ‘How’d you lose the eye?’ [proceed to story]
In a setting where you have a lot of amazing things being done, deciding how much lack of one eye impairs your character is up to your own decision. Maybe your character has managed to adjust everything to work around it - or likewise for any debilitating scars. And that’s the story you tell.
Personally, I disagree with Chekov’s Gun anyway. Sometimes, the gun is just for decoration. A book that is only plot ends up being barren.
Characters that have laserfocused on some niche detail very often also feel ‘bland’ because, y’know…‘their only personality is [feature]’. You gotta have more to it than just that feature. And if you make it a point to emote out how your character struggles with a feature, you sort of start feeling forced to add it into every emote in fear of accidentally not making it play a role.
If you’ve written one emote in a session about how the character struggles (or in a RP glance), how impactful is that really going to be, anyway?
sucks when you blood rage and beat a Furlbolg into a pulp.