Roleplay addons for the beginner: FlagRSP2 and FlagRSP Cataclysm

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW.

Although MyRoleplay, which we covered last week, is a pretty popular addon with the bonus of being fairly simple to use, it can still be a little tricky for a beginner. MyRoleplay offers a lot of options to fill out, and trying to decide what all those options are can be confusing for someone just starting out with roleplay. Another option for beginner roleplayers as far as descriptive addons go is FlagRSP2 -- or its alternate version, FlagRSP Cataclysm.

Both versions have fewer options than MyRoleplay in terms of what you can plug in about your character, but that very bare-bones simplicity can be a blessing for new roleplayers. If you'd like to just give and get the basics of those roleplaying around you, FlagRSP in either version may be right up your alley. But before you turn your nose up at simplicity, you may want to read on; FlagRSP has some interesting features that MyRoleplay doesn't cover.

Just the facts

FlagRSP2 doesn't mesh with the user interface in the same way as MyRoleplay. Instead of typing your information into a window contained on the character screen, you type your information into a window located in your interface menu under FlagRSP2. You can also easily pop the window open by hitting the icon FlagRSP2 will place on your minimap. Once the window's open, you'll see a screen exactly like the one above. It's got just a few small windows to fill out as far as your character is concerned.

• Name Your character's name. You can type in your character's name as it appears in game, or you can make up a first and last name for your character.

• Title If your character has a title, you can put the title here. If not, you can simply leave it blank.

• Physical Description This place is reserved for physical description. Don't bother with your character's backstory; what you want to concentrate on is how your character appears when someone is looking at them.

• Character Status This is to designate if you're in character or out of character.

• Roleplay Experience This dropdown bar lets you choose your level of roleplay experience, from beginner to full time.

And that's it! There's no need to worry about height, race, age, or anything other than these few basics. A word of warning: The name, title and Physical Description sections all have their own save buttons, so make sure you save each one as you're filling it out. But that's really the extent of the input as far as FlagRSP2 goes, so if you're looking for something relatively bare-bones that just covers the basic, this should work fine for you. There are, however, a few really interesting things about FlagRSP2.

Fun with tooltips

While MyRoleplay has its own character window for viewing other people's profiles, FlagRSP2 offers the option of including some of this information in a customizable tooltip. FlagRSP2 will automatically change your tooltips to the design in the screenshot above. If you'd rather use Blizzard's default or another addon's tooltip design, you can shut this option off by unchecking the box in the interface window.

You can, however, customize the FlagRSP2 tooltip to your heart's content. You can choose what to display in the hover for the description. If you'd like names, titles, guilds, and character status in the tooltip, you can check the appropriate boxes, as well as PvP status and title. If you just want a character's default name and roleplay status, you can simply select those. Or if you want the whole shebang, you can check everything that's available.

Simply clicking on a character will bring up their description window. You can resize the window to be as small or as large as you'd like. Descriptions that run over the default size you've chosen for the popup will still be readable; you'll get a scrollbar to continue reading as you wish. Keep in mind when you're writing your Physical Description that most players appreciate a shorter description over a longer one. If you drone on for miles, most won't bother scrolling down their popup window to read the short novel you've written.

Viewing profiles

One other really fun aspect of FlagRSP2 is the Profile Viewer. When you view a profile for someone, FlagRSP2 will automatically store that information. If you right-click your minimap icon for FlagRSP2, you'll pop open the Profile Viewer window, which will let you see a list of all roleplayers you've run across and allow you to browse through their profiles at your leisure. It's a pretty handy way to keep track of how many roleplayers are out there on your server and using the FlagRSP2 addon. And if you run into someone with a novel-length description that you don't feel like immediately reading, you can always look them up and read it later.

The screenshot above shows the Profile Viewer and the basic Description popup window. As you can see on the tooltip, titles are shown below the character's name rather than included with their name. Your interface window allows you to customize the Description window even further. You can choose to save the descriptions to the profile viewer, or you can choose to turn off that function.

You can also choose to show the Description popup window when you mouse over a roleplayer or only when targeting a roleplayer. I recommend showing it only when targeting a roleplayer, as having a big description window pop up as you're in the middle of speaking to someone can be kind of distracting, to say the least. You can also choose to hide descriptions when entering combat, something that is highly advised for any raiding roleplayers -- the last thing you want to do is wipe because there was a giant roleplay description hiding part of your screen!

FlagRSP Cataclysm

FlagRSP Cataclysm works in much the same way as FlagRSP2, but the interface is entirely different. Instead of typing your information in the interface menu, you get a popup modeled after Blizzard's character windows. The main description screen is shown above; each blank spot corresponds to the blank spaces in FlagRSP2's interface. Click Turn Over in the upper right corner of the pane to access the character status and roleplay experience dropdown menus, and you're done. Clicking the wrench tab will option your options for tooltip display.

Tooltip display options are a little different with FlagRSP Cataclysm; you can choose what parts you want to show, but you can also choose whether or not a person's name shows at all. Players who are unknown will not show a name on their tooltip, which makes walking up and introducing yourself almost a requirement -- it's a handy reminder that other characters are strangers until you get to know them.

One of the coolest features of FlagRSP Cataclysm is the Friendlist. You can add players, NPCs, and even entire guilds to this friend's list -- it can hold an unlimited number of players. You can mark these players as friend or foe, and you can add detailed notes about those players in your friends list. This functionality is incredibly handy, especially if you roleplay with large numbers of people. It helps not only keep everyone sorted by whether or not your character knows them, but it also helps keep track of if your character is fond of them or not.

As for the notes section, this makes it pretty easy to simply jot down where you left off when interacting with another character, so that you can keep track of who that person is and what you've learned about them. This saves tremendous amounts of time in the long run, because you're always on top of what your character knows.

FlagRSP 2 and FlagRSP Cataclysm work together. While you can only have one of these addons enabled at a time, you can see the descriptions of players using either one of the two. So if you choose to use FlagRSP2, you'll see both users of that addon and users of FlagRSP Cataclysm as well. Though relatively basic, both version of FlagRSP contain functionality that you don't see with MyRoleplay, and the ease of use makes it a good option for a roleplay beginner.

Next week, we'll be easing into some side addons that are of use to the roleplay beginner, whether it's saving conversations or speaking in accents and languages with ease.

All the World's a Stage is your source for roleplaying ideas, innovations and ironies. Let us help you imagine what it's like to sacrifice spells for the story, totally immerse yourself in your roleplaying or even RP on a non-RP realm!