…what were they like? How have they changed?
I’ve been dwelling on my main’s initial characterisation and all of the little mistakes, changes and growth I have made along the way whilst writing her. Sometimes, I read my old roleplay and feel quite embarrassed- I suppose that is a good thing, in a way. It is a sign of improvement, even if I do have a long way to go, as someone relatively new to roleplaying.
I wonder if anyone feels similar? Do you still play your initial character to this day?
I’ve been guilty of making a few really awful Mary Sue characters in the past as a teenager.
While I have fond memories of some early roleplay and alot of my early WoW characters, I do not think I would say any of them were actually written or alot of cases, roleplayed well.
When I was just new into RP several of my characters and RP tended to be quite dramatic on a soap opera level.
Twas this character but she was much different and badrp/badlore. I just changed her over time to fit the lore and become a better character in general.
I think we all go through a bad phase when we first start haha.
This was my first rp character… well unless you count my Death Knight who accidently engaged with an Alliance light guild. But this was my first ‘made spefically for rp’ character.
I play her as a pve character, but as an rp character, she’s deceased. And yes I do look back at some of her earlier interactions and wonder what, exactly, was going on both in my head and others.
Asking Tauren if they’d like some grass to eat, spending an evening slapping each other with a fish… they were very much characters played by young adults, staying up -very- late and possibly drinking.
Yes - Acrona here. Started off as a druid which I renamed to Winterflow when the mage class became available (wanted to play a night elf mage since Vanilla, but alas had to wait). It’s coming up to 20 years now since she was made on Argent Dawn.
While there were some relatively minor things that were retconned, or backtracked when I realized they’re not as cool to stick with as the younger me initially thought, I’m glad I never did something so drastic that would’ve made me leave the character for good. I think it helped that my characters in general are slow to change, and in my head Acrona still retains many of the qualities I envisioned when I first made her, even if she has grown much like I have OOC. Had I chased new concepts through her every other year, I think over time I would’ve lost the essential bits that draws me to the character time and time again. Keeping a steady course long term helps sometimes!
Edit: And it probably also helped that I had started roleplaying at a pretty young age. First in Finnish chatrooms and on forums, then in Ultima Online before transitioning to WoW. I had already made plenty mistakes and regrets, some of which I knew to avoid when coming over. Despite that, would I cringe if I read some of Acrona’s old stories? Absolutely!
Arathyrion Sunwrath.
He was created as a love letter to the Blood Elves, particularly the Warcraft 3 and TBC depiction of their race. I had a lot of fun portraying him, made quite a few friends along the way - some of whom I am still in contact with to this day.
I made the decision to kill him off a few expansions later as he was more loyal to his people and homeland than either the Horde or Alliance and wasn’t particularly thrilled with either, not in the least due to the abysmal handling of the Purge of Dalaran story line.
I don’t regret it, since the setting has changed quite a lot since then and there are other niches that have caught my interest. It remains to be seen if Midnight can rekindle my enthusiasm for the race.
I remember Arathyrion! T’was around 2010, right?
Correct!
I mostly play on the Alliance side of the fence these days, though I only came back to the game ‘properly’ relatively recently.
My first actual ‘main’ roleplay character was a Night Elf Druid way back in 2008/2009. I rpd her until at least 2013, and… yeah, as I look at her lore I can definitely see that I was new to rp a lot. Her AA still exists, and it’s a lovely little nostalgia trip, but I don’t think I could bring her back. Mind you, the character OOC still exists, but is a completely different character now.
Before that… well, I used to pretend to be Onyxia way back on a PvP server with my friends in Westfall.
Oh, absolutely. Iszy here, whilst not my first ever character I made, is a solid example of this. He has existed since 2014, and I absolutely struggle to read some of the old RP logs that I’m sent about the character, just because both he and I have changed as people.
It’s kinda funny to think about, but 11 years ago is a long time ago, it makes sense that my RP/character writing has gotten better as I’ve matured more. Just glad I got the opportunity with Dragonflight to bring him back.
This has been my first RP character. since i started role play in 2015.
He went from A sunwalker who had anger issues. to a Sunwalker who helps people with their anger issues. He joined a Guild in november in 2015, and now leads the same guild for the passed 4 years.
My Main issue I had with my RP is having trouble with finding new ways to move his story. Being the GM of my guild, allows me have a more supportive/ side character roll in other people’s stories. which in turn can lead my character into new paths.
but for almost a decade of RP i do not see this old Bull ever entering the Bench. Yorah will be here till the end.
Not my main but my first ever character (and Rp character).
Named after another walking corpse who used hell magic in my RP escapades before WoW.
(Also often gets remade in other games because i like the vibe)
He’s toned down a lot since his initial release.
No i am not changing my outfit, I don’t care if i look like somebody else, this warlock tier set is a vibe.
Oh, to be an edgy teen on AD again. I think my first genuine attempt at a long term RP character, was the quintessential example of the deservedly-mocked HMP stereotype.
He isn’t around these days. Darwinism applies to creative pursuits as well, as it turns out.
My first actively played RP character was my vulpera shaman, Viira, who I played as a constantly drifting ex-pirate Horde mercenary at the time. Early BfA, this was - I haven’t roleplayed in WoW before that, my RP time was spent in other MMOs, though.
She’s still around, to a much lesser capacity; she’s now an aunt figure, a mentor to multiple shaman trainees, and very likely a heir to her family caravan.
Oh how times change.
My first RP character was a draenei, made in TBC. It was my second character ever (not counting private servers), made on Argent Dawn because I wanted to see what RP was. At level 2, I ran to Valaar’s Berth (the Azuremyst Isle pier) and found two draenei RPing there. Those were times when you could just randomly find RP somewhere in the world.
I made a lot of stupid mistakes early in RP. I did the Wetlands death run to reach Stormwind, and upon reaching Cathedral Square, I claimed that what happened in-game happened IC — like that I was killed by a crocolisk and ran to my corpse as a ghost to revive. Thankfully I immediately stopped doing that and learned about IC/OOC separation.
I also hung around Goldshire for a while, seeing it as a source of legitimate RP, until I learned.
This character no longer exists. I faction changed her to a blood elf.
My first ever RP character?
Dead, probably being a bonebag in the scourges hold or something like that.
Used to be a lovely guy, but unfortunately silly old me got too invested into the character to the point of blind obsession.
The breaking point for me was when someone else had the same name as my character and I immediately assumed they were trying to “assume my characters identity”.
Yeah, my mind wasnt all that well during that time.
Obviously said “copycat” was a new player who had the same name by coincidence, but that whole thing where I raged against someone innocent like that because my mind was scrambled eggs left me with very, very sour taste in mouth. For roleplay as well as my character.
I tried to have the character run through a big issue to change him, getting rid of the more “out there”-things like his tamed sporebat, the rylak and his weapons etc. Didnt work out as he was, once that drama occured, basically a goner for me. And subsequently I have had him “gone lost in the plaguelands”.
I really liked Nathan Morrow and his wolf Kane.
Hunter rp also was quite a daring challenge that I took well. Roleplaying effectively two characters at once might have been a silly idea from me as newbie back then, but eventually I grew fond of that which I do to this day if any of my characters have a pet.
Though crap happened and I feel still sorry for that poor guy who I was bullying that fateful night. I hope he wasnt immediately thrown off by that unpleasant experience.
Nowadays I’m alot better, got the issues I had back then in order etc.
Everything has a price, or so they say
My very first character was a dwarf hunter back in 2007. I had watched Make Love, Not Warcraft and immediately wanted to start playing WoW and make a dwarf which I kept -all- the way to 2010 until the release of the worgen.
Stallnorth has been my main since 2010… man I feel old.
My first-ever WoW RP character was my first-ever WoW character. I paid to transfer my gnome warlock off of some PvP server, Frostmane I think? Over to The Sha’tar. My two friends who had got me hooked on the game had gone off their separate ways and I was alone, starting University, and needed something to pass the time when I should have been studying. Dunxie came from a parallel dimension (keep in mind, this was during TBC, so we hadn’t quite been inundated with time/dimensional travel shenanigans) where the Legion had won. I don’t remember how, but they had invaded, and they had won. Maybe when Kazzak re-opened the Dark Portal to Outland? Anyway, he made a device that backfired and sent him on a one-way trip to a parallel Azeroth, which I used as my IC cover for my realm transfer. I remember being inspired by a Buffy episode called The Wish where Cordelia makes a wish to live in a Sunnydale where Buffy never moved there, and it was pretty much doomed. There’s a bit at the end where Giles goes to smash the demon Anya’s pendant and reverses Cordelia’s wish because everyone’s pretty much either a vampire or being literally farmed in machines for blood to sustain vampires, and she asks Giles how he could possibly know if the alternative would be better? And he replies “Because it has to be.”
Dunxie was your archetypal bitter scientist who studied the fel and souls as sources of energy. He was very much the antithesis of the, at the time, established gnome stereotype of being loud, silly, and happy. He spent some time being tormented in his mind by an old god minion, before trying to take a trip through the Dark Portal in Outland and… Got stuck in-transit for months. That’s how I wrote him out of the story when I couldn’t afford a subscription! Eventually Wrath dropped, I wanted to play and RP a Death Knight, and decided that Dunxie’s time stuck in the nether between portals had afflicted him with the fel equivalent of cancer and retired him.
I like to think I’ve come a long way from writing such slop, but who can honestly say? (Probably Watrus could) Maybe as I’ve gotten older I’ve just become more enamoured with low-key, lower-stakes stories and conflicts, and embraced Warcraft’s lighter tone. We were all young and edgy once, right? I don’t have the character anymore, I deleted it when warbands where announced. I haven’t really played Alliance since Ulduar so there wasn’t much point.
This story doesn’t really have an ending 
Oh! Wait!
I think it’s important to accept and be okay with this being a road that doesn’t have an end, in terms of improvement. You’ll keep getting better at what you’re doing, and then you’ll step a little outside of your comfort zone, be bad at it, learn from it and improve, and it just repeats. And that’s okay, as long as you’re having fun with it. Enjoy the trip. 
Didn’t know anything about Warcraft lore, made a night elf hunter with silver hair and spent all of my time in Goldshire (not cringe at the time I swear) roleplaying with anyone that isn’t an elf.
It was bottom tier RP at its finest and he was quickly replaced once I realised I was bad at hunter and the game in general and made his brother who was a blue haired night elf rogue edge lord.
I was not firing on all cylinders with those characters and didn’t fully hit my stride until character three.
Specifically WoW RP, my first character was Caledhel Bloodseeker around the launch of WoD. I made him after seeing the Sun Hawks thread on the forums and was inspired to create a blood elf of my own.
A farstrider reeling from the loss of his family to the scourge joining up a stupidly dangerous wing of the military looking to get killed.
Instead through years of RP he was fixed, found love in his life, settled down. It was a very fulfilling character arc. Met a lot of great roleplayers in the blood elf community at the time.
Shining Elf?