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All the World's a Stage: The core layer
This week's edition of All the World's a Stage concludes a three-part series on the layers of social interaction in roleplaying. Next week we will continue looking at how to roleplay one's professions. Good friends are stars in the sky of life, and especially as roleplayers, friends are absolutely essential to our hobby – our whole reason for playing WoW involves creative social interactions. Even if you never really know who a roleplaying partner is in real life, just roleplaying with him or her for a few minutes can create a memorable experience. Previously, we discussed how to roleplay when you first meet someone, as well as what to do once you've gotten to know them a bit more. The key in each case is remembering that roleplaying is a social experience first, and a creative one second – your character must conform to the rules of good socialization before he or she can succeed creatively. Even though at first this seems more limiting, in the end it will be more liberating, because through sociable characters, you can collaboratively create stories and experiences in a way that no other form of storytelling can. In fact, the closer you become to your group of friends, the more the possibilities bloom. The core concept characterizations you used to use to entertain strangers are still useful, but here they can take on a deeper meaning. You still listen to your friends and adapt your own character to theirs, but now they will listen to you, and adapt their characters to yours. The closer your friendships are, the more your exploration and creativity are truly mutual and cooperative, and the more you can try out new things that you've never done before.
All the World's a Stage: The inside layer
This installment of All the World's a Stage continues the discussion about the layers of roleplaying, still taking a break from the series of roleplaying guides about how to roleplay your race, class, and professions. Last week, we looked at how to interact with strangers in roleplaying environments, on "the surface layer."So there you are -- you've got a character who is gregarious and gets into roleplaying groups relatively easily. Your character's way of interacting with others makes it easy for other people to recognize you as a roleplayer, and even encourages them to come out and roleplay with you, even if they're not that much into roleplaying themselves. You've followed some good advice about finding roleplayers -- maybe even joined an RP guild -- and you're meeting characters you think are interesting, and you really hope they think your character is interesting too.But then something goes wrong and you feel that special RP feeling start slipping away. The people in your guild stop talking to you as much -- sometimes the whole guild atmosphere seems to go quiet and dull, and no matter what you say, nothing seems to get the actual spirit of roleplaying flowing again. You start to think maybe your interesting character quirks aren't all that good after all. You keep trying to think of new ones, but no matter how funny your accent or entertaining your antics, people just aren't getting into it like they used to. The problem here isn't actually you -- it's an assumption that many roleplayers, even experienced ones, sometimes have when they are in new roleplaying situations. We take the burden of creating a roleplaying atmosphere too heavily upon ourselves, when actually what we need to do is not create the atmosphere, but nurture it. Questions are the key here -- if your character has a genuine interest in other people then he or she will be able to draw out the spirit of roleplaying in them, get them talking about themselves, and start having interesting interactions together.
All the World's a Stage: The surface layer
This installment of All the World's a Stage diverges from the series of roleplaying guides about how to roleplay your race, class, and professions, in order to have a closer look at different layers of social interaction in roleplaying, and see in which ways you can tailor your character for each one.So there you are -- you've got the coolest, funniest, most heartbreaking character idea on your whole RP server. You login, create your new masterpiece, and start leveling up... But as time goes by, you realize you have a problem. No one seems interested in you! You may be having trouble meeting people who actually roleplay on a roleplaying server, or the roleplayers you run into may not realize how truly awesome your character is. Let's say you even join an RP guild and try to impress your guildmates with your witty "/guild" chatter, only to discover that they're seem mildly interested at best. What's a roleplaying genius to do? It would be tempting to think that you are not such a great roleplayer as you think, or that your character idea isn't as fantastic as you had hoped, but the truth might lie in something far less depressing: You may have created a character with true depth, yet lacking established friends to explore that depth with, your character has no way of showing it. Making such friends is never easy if you are too deep for them -- they expect some sort of interesting surface-level interaction first. Likewise, if a character is all silly gimmicks designed to entertain strangers, without anything deeper for potential close friends to enjoy, he or she may seem like an attention grabber, entertaining in the short term, but mostly shallow in the end. Choosing the right kind of surface-layer character traits to suit your personality and social needs is essential if you want to have a good experience in roleplaying.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a Leatherworker
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the thirty-fourth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class (or profession!) well, without embarrassing yourself. At the outset of this series on how to roleplay one's professions, Leatherworking struck me as the most difficult profession to write about, even more than skinning, herbalism, or mining. This was in spite of (and in fact maybe because of) the fact that it was the first profession I ever chose in WoW. My very first character, who was a druid, wanted to choose leatherworking in order in order to make her own armor as well as prevent the dead bodies of all those animals she had to kill during her quests from going to waste. At that time I didn't know a whole lot about roleplaying, or how to play the game, and I knew even less about the background lore behind everything I was seeing. I originally roleplayed with my friends that my night elf had been born in Darnassus, only later to find out that would have made her about 3 years old -- a fact none of us had known, because WoW was our first exposure to the lore of Azeroth. This was actually my inspiration for writing these articles, so that our readers wouldn't have to go read pages and pages of books and websites or play old and (to me anyway) less enjoyable games.As I played the game more and more, the leatherworking armor seemed less and less useful and seemed more and more difficult to make. I also started imagining what skinning all those animals and then stitching together parts of their dead bodies would actually feel like, and suddenly I felt more like a kind of Dr. Frankenstein than a peaceful druid. It turns out, however, that I knew as little about leatherworking back then as I did about the game itself.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a Jewelcrafter
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the thirty-third in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class (or profession!) well, without embarrassing yourself. When I was getting ready for my wedding last month, one of the obvious things we had to do to get ready was to pick out wedding rings. I'm not much of a jewelry wearer myself, but I put a lot of thought into this choice, and in the end, I learned quite a bit more than I knew before about the jewelry profession and how it works. It struck me as a profession for people who really love making beautiful things and who love interacting with people at some of the most significant moments of their lives (such as ... weddings) -- but above all, real life jewelcrafters struck me as people who love details.Of course, a number of professions in Azeroth have to pay attention to details in their various gaming aspects. Deciding which items to make for oneself, which to sell at the auction house, and how to use your chosen profession in itself requires lots of details. But when you think about roleplaying, there's a definite difference between blacksmithing on the one side, with its broad strokes of a hammer on metal, and jewelcrafting on the other, focused on the smallest of cuts and adjustments that the naked eye can't even perceive. Jewelcrafting is the profession on Azeroth that requires the keenest eye, the steadiest hand, and the most attention to detail. In some ways, jewelcrafting in the real world seemed like sub-world of its own, where jewelers knew special secrets no one else knew. They used these secrets to draw forth items that were at once dazzling and magical, artistic and personal for each individual that wore them. Jewelcrafters in the World of Warcraft have no reason to be less devoted to their profession, or any less proud of their ability to craft the most delicate of magical items with the most powerful magical effects, using the secret knowledge only they can understand.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a Blacksmith
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the thirty-second in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class (or profession!) well, without embarrassing yourself. Blacksmiths are known for being brawny folk -- hammering pieces of metal together is not easy work after all. But in World of Warcraft, even the smallest gnome or scrawniest elf can be a great blacksmith. Azeroth is a land where even the smallest people can wield the biggest of axes, so it would follow that they could craft them too, as well as any other sort of armor or weapon that they could imagine.Typically, however, even in Azeroth, blacksmiths are, by and large, members of a class that can use plate mail and heavy weapons, such as a warrior, a death knight, or a paladin, just as tailors are usually spellcasters of some kind. So even if a blacksmith appears scrawny on the outside, he or she is very likely still quite brawny on the inside. Underneath that elf's pretty skin are muscles of steel!Being a blacksmith implies a state of mind as much as it does a state of body, however. Working with metals is not something for the light hearted. The weight, the heat, and all the soot are not for people who like to keep their clothes clean at all times, for instance. It's also not a very socially-oriented profession, requiring long hours spent hammering away at something until it reaches perfection, often using lots of material in the learning process before you finally get one right. Blacksmiths of lore tend to be patient and hardy people, tempered and perfected by their work, like good, hard steel.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be an Enchanter
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the thirty-first in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class (or profession!) well, without embarrassing yourself. Enchanting cries out to be roleplayed. It could be a kind of magician's engineering, or a more refined cousin of alchemy. Although you could certainly play an enchanter as another sort of magical mad-scientist, the profession actually lends itself well to a more gentlemanly (and sane) approach, where experiments are not so much about creating some sort of autonomous monster or mind-controling love potion of serene bliss, but rather altering the nature of things to do what they never would have done previously.Enchantments have a huge role in mythology and literature. Cinderella's fairy godmother turned a pumpkin into a stage-coach with an enchantment, Hogwarts School's "Sorting Hat" famously talks to students who wear it, and the One Ring even contains the soul of Middle Earth's lord of evil personified. All these are enchantments in which ordinary items are magically enhanced so as to reflect some aspect of character development or plot in the story, and a roleplayer at the keys of an enchanter character can work similar magic in telling his own story.
All the World's a Stage: The Art of Roleplaying
This week, David returns (again) to All the World's a Stage as a newly married man, feeling particularly happy and joyful, and overflowing with enthusiasm for just about everything he loves in life.The relationship between rolelplaying and real life is a multifaceted one. If you have read this column before, you've probably seen some mention of roleplaying as a creative art form, but for some readers, it might be a bit difficult to imagine roleplaying as an art. After all, some might say, it's just a bunch of people sitting around, pretending their characters are real people, having real problems and real stories, all in spite of a game environment in which one's character can't actually affect the world in any way that matters. Problems of continuity, such as instanced dungeons in which many people can slay the same monster at the same time over and over again, make some people feel as though there's no story value to the game at all, and that anything roleplayers do is a waste of their time.The trick for roleplayers is to think of roleplaying as something more like freeform play art, in which the main point of the art isn't so much the end product that results from one's efforts (as it would be in painting, novel-writing, or composing music), but rather the thoughts, feelings, and inspiration that come to mind when we actually engage in the process of the art itself. The closest parallel to another art form might be improv acting games, where the whole point is to make things up for you and the other actors to enjoy, rather than to deliver a performance for a separate audience; but if you've enjoyed something so simple as building a sand castle on the beach, then you probably have a good sense of what it feels like to roleplay. Fingerpainting, mandala-making or even just freeform music and dancing can all give a similar feeling like what you get in roleplaying: the sheer joy of creation.Some roleplayers need no more justification for their art than that they enjoyed themselves. But others look at their own roleplaying careers and see certain things that they've taken away from their roleplaying experience over time. These things are usually not as solid as an actual painting or recorded song, but they still have a kind of solidity in the roleplayer's mind, as they positively impact his or her real life in several ways.
All the World's a Stage: Going to the Chapel
I'm back again for another week, guest-writing once again for David Bowers. Today's All the World's a Stage is themed in honor of Mr. Bowers, for whom today is a special day. Everyone at WoW Insider is wishing him the best and it's in the spirit of the festive and celebratory that we take a little bit of time to talk about the roleplay wedding. Last week, we talked about some tips for setting up a roleplay event. These included a small series of steps that would help you formalize and execute an actual plan for such a gathering. Today, we're going to focus in on a specific kind of roleplay event -- the "roleplay wedding." Roleplay weddings come and go in popularity. Just now, it's been a long while since I've heard of one happening on my server. But around this time last year, it seemed that I couldn't take a quiet stroll in Darnassus without tripping across a pair of Night Elves getting handfasted. So, let's talk about that most sacred and beloved of roleplay subjects -- the wedding.
All the World's a Stage: Hosting your own roleplay event
So, you're a roleplayer. You may be a deep immersionist, an escapist, or a light roleplayer. But, for whatever reason, you've decided now is your time to go that extra mile. You're not only enjoying what roleplay has to offer but you now want to gather up a group of roleplayers to interact all at once. And you don't just mean in the same Guild. You want to gather them in a single in-game location, at a single in-game time, and all play together. You want to host your own roleplay event. A lot of the best roleplay events happen spontaneously. The best roleplay event I've recently intended was entirely accidental. Three or four folks were squatting in front of the Eventide bank in Dalaran, chillin' on their riding bears while waiting for the next instance. I thought it was funny, and parked my own white riding bear next to them. And then someone else did. And someone else. Within a few moments, there was a horde of forty or so bears walking through Dalaran. Someone asked "WTF are you guys doing?" Thinking fast, the leader of the procession said "This is an in-character mourning parade, in honor of the fallen Alliance hero." I can't say the name of that hero for fear of spoilers, but I'm sure the readers of ATWAS get the idea. It was awesome, and spontaneous. But that's not usually how events happen. Usually, someone has to invest time, effort, and even money into formulating the idea, building the event and agenda, and then executing the whole shebang. And don't think that a successful roleplay event doesn't take a lot of time. You'll get out of your event what you put into it. So, let's take a moment this week and talk about what you can do to build your own successful roleplay event.
All the World's a Stage: The Roleplaying Spectrum
Today David returns to All the World's a Stage, still taking a break from his series of roleplaying lore guides for World of Warcraft. Instead, he shares a few thoughts especially for people who may roleplay all the time without realizing it. There are lots of people playing World of Warcraft out there, and if you gave a survey to each one of them, asking, "are you a roleplayer?" most of them would probably say "no." But if you actually listened to them, or engaged with them in conversation about it, you might learn a lot of things that surveys usually miss. Many people who say they are not roleplayers actually have an imagination of their character's backstory, personality, or even just individual style. They may not know how to act out the character, and they may not have friends they feel they can act out with, yet at the same time, they do have a sense of their character as their own little creative exploration.The distinction between roleplayers and non-roleplayers is not as clear as people seem to think. In fact, there's a whole spectrum of different kinds of players between those who say they roleplay and those who say they don't -- and most people probably find themselves somewhere in the middle.
All The World's A Stage: Impromptu RP Raiding
Hey everyone. I'm back. David is not tied up and gagged in his own shoe closet. And even if he were, there would be nothing you could do to prevent me from writing this column since, like Adrian Veidt, I'm doing it before I tell you about it. Fiendishly clever, I know.So, it's generally known (by those that care to know) that I play both Alliance and Horde. My horde play nowadays consists of my orc shaman who I am slowly leveling resto because I am an insane masochist and my tauren warrior, who is a raiding arms warrior.... mostly... because again, I am an insane masochist. That, and the abiding love I have for both the warrior class and the tauren race. As I said in yesterday's Breakfast Topic, I love pretty much everything about tauren. (Oh, and Karilyn, I did go stand back to back with a female tauren yesterday, and you're wrong and right at the same time. I'm taller, but she holds her head higher and stands straighter. I'm talled because my massive shoulders are higher than her head. She does look pretty freaking regal, though.)My love for my tauren is so oddly obsessive that I've taken a staff that was going to be sharded to wear around town (It's my walking stick) even though it cost me a shard to do it. It was that run, actually, that introduced me to a fun concept for the insomniacs among us. See, none of my characters are on RP servers, but if it's late enough and you're putting a PuG together of people's alts and unsaved characters (I miss half of the Naxx raids due to schedule conflicts) then it's possible to get 9 or 10 folks together who are willing to throw caution to the winds and actually raid in character.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a Skinner
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the thirtieth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class (or profession!) well, without embarrassing yourself. I should say at the outset of this article that I am a vegetarian, and I generally think of animals as cute and fuzzy friends of the human race. I have no moral objection against hunting animals and using their bodies for food or clothing, however. Logically, it makes sense that people have needed this to survive, but emotionally speaking, I find skinning and eating animals rather distasteful. Things would have been different for me if I had been raised on a farm or in a hunting community instead of a city thoroughly saturated with the culture of Disney movies about cute animals singing songs and having adventures, but... anyways, you are what you are. Hunting enthusiasts should feel free to write their own articles on the topic if they have different points of view.So, anyway, as my vegetarian brain started churning around this idea of how skinning can be roleplayed in World of Warcraft, I couldn't help but admit to myself that I don't have so much real life experience of the topic. In fact, my first google search of "Skinning" turned up none other than WoWwiki's page on skinning in WoW, and I realized most people living in cities probably haven't got the first clue of what skinning animals is really like.So I searched again for "skinning animals," and this time I found various articles about how to skin an animal for people who are interested in surviving in the wilderness, or just into hunting in general. One site even had simple hand-drawn animations of the proper way to kill and skin a rabbit, and I was struck by how very different this was from my experience of skinning in WoW. In the animation, we see the head and feet get cut off, a slice go down the middle of the animal's body, and the skin slowly peeling away to reveal all the flesh underneath... while in WoW we just right-click on a dead animal, loot its hide, and poof -- it disappears before our eyes.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be an Herbalist
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the twenty-ninth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class (or profession!) well, without embarrassing yourself. In this world of constant war, you must choose your weapons wisely: you may be a blood-soaked warrior with a jagged-edge axe of phenomenal power, a maniacal warlock with a lust for forbidden magical knowledge, or a ruthless rogue whose stealth lets him kill his enemies before they even know he's there.You may also pick flowers.Indeed, if you are either an alchemist or an inscriber, picking flowers is probably exactly what you do, no matter how blood-soaked, maniacal, or ruthless you might be. To you, however, the term "picking flowers" may be the sign of ignorance on the part of people who fail to comprehend what powers they mock when they poke fun at the exalted science of herbalism. "Let them have their giggles," you might say to yourself, sheathing your axe in order to bend down and gather some lichbloom, "I'll be the one laughing all the way down the battlefield with my Flask of Endless Rage! Muahahahaha!"
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a Miner
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the twenty-eighth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class (or profession!) well, without embarrassing yourself. Mining is one of the strangest professions in the World of Warcraft. This may seem counterintuitive in the face of such odd professions as alchemy, and more particularly, engineering. But when you think of it, mining is equally strange in its own way.Mining in the World of Earthiness is by and large a capitalist venture, where the people getting rich off of the various precious metals in the world are never ever the same people who actually go out and dig the stuff out of the ground. No, the rich people find other people do to the actual digging for them, and then compel those diggers to hand over the fruits of their hard work for a mere fraction of the work's actual value. Furthermore, precious metals here on Earth are not simply lying about at the surface for anyone with a pickaxe to come along and collect -- otherwise those metals wouldn't be precious anymore. Mining on Azeroth is more like collecting interesting seashells than it is anything similar to what humans do on Earth. Below, we will find a few ideas about why in the world only the very greatest adventurers with the best training can go around picking up shiny ore nodes sticking up out of the ground, as well as what it might mean to your character to do so.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a Tailor
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the twenty-seventh in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class (or profession!) well, without embarrassing yourself. Tailoring is another aspect of Warcraft which people tend to just gloss over without realizing it is an important element of your character's backstory and personality. "I am Zorlastine the wicked Forsaken warlock!" one might say, "I have come to wreak havoc and destruction upon this world! I also sell extremely large bags on the auction house!" Often it's an element that doesn't quite jive with the rest of one's character, but at the same time, nobody really notices. A powerful mage capable of teleportation, massive explosions, and yes, even KNITTING! Makes perfect sense, right?No it doesn't.So today we have gathered a few ideas for how to weave your cloth-wearing character's capability to create cloth wearables into the actual story and roleplay of your character. You think making clothes is a tedious profession? A pastime just for old ladies? No, tailoring is an avant-garde artistic activity of the elite, an excellent way for a starving hero to make cash, and even a mystical philosophy all on its own.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be an Alchemist
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the twenty-sixth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class (or profession!) well, without embarrassing yourself. Too many people roleplay alchemy as a glorified fast food restaurant, with typical phrases such as, "Would you like some healing potions to go with your strength elixir?" or "If you give me just one more herb I could throw in a mana potion too..." Of course, the game mechanics often put us in the salesman position. Limited supply and demand force us to compete with other alchemists for herbs and customers, so to some extent we may have to deal with the capitalist food chain to matter what we do. But there's so much more to an alchemist than just magical boosts and bonuses! An alchemist has the potential to be the other mad scientist! Why should they let engineers have all the fun? Just because engineers can craft their own vehicles and whatnot doesn't mean that alchemists don't have something (or someone) of their own to experiment on. Today we shall take a closer look at the depths of madness which alchemists are capable of reaching, if only they dig a bit into the unlimited supply and demand of the imagination.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a Hunter
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the twenty-fifth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself. The Hunter is probably the oldest class in World of Warcraft. Before anyone in Azeroth took up an axe or sword, or learned anything of how to cast spells -- even before they learned to write -- they had to hunt for food. If they were like early Earth societies, the people of many nomadic groups would have relied on their hunters to bring in the meat they needed, as well as to protect the community from enemies. Back then, there would have been no such thing as fancy armor or complicated magical weapons. The relationship of a fighter to nature was just as important as the weapons he carried, if not more so.Modern hunters in World of Warcraft come from the ancient tradition of those who learned to keep themselves and their families alive by living in harmony with nature. They learned the essential mysteries of survival in the wilderness, killing animals with stealth and primitive weapons, trapping them, and eventually turning predators and prey alike into friends and servants. As time went by, those fighters who took up the path of the druid would learn to become nature itself; shamans would learn to call upon it; warriors and rogues would make battle their art, each in their own way. But hunters remained at that pivotal point between sentient races and the natural world -- they are connected to nature, but not manifestations of it; they work together with nature, but they do not worship it or call upon its spirits; they fight their enemies with the utmost passion, but they do it with the tools that hearken back to the dawn of civilization.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be an Alliance Rogue
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the twenty-fourth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself. Many of the most famous rogues outside of the Warcraft setting have been nuanced and exciting characters. Bilbo Baggins, the Prince of Persia, and James Bond, could all be reimagined as rogues if they had existed in Azeroth instead of their own settings. As an Alliance rogue, you have a certain amount of freedom to borrow from other settings, or from the real world, since the Alliance races tend to be more similar to heroes of other stories we've heard before. To a certain extent, Blizzard has already based its Alliance rogue guilds on stories from other settings, and left some aspects of these institutions rather vague. There is certainly enough room for roleplayers to fill in a bit of the blanks with their own creative inspiration. The only danger is that it could be easy to overdo it and descending into Mary-Sueism: one ought to feel free to reach for a bit of the flavor of James Bond, for instance, without ever believing your character is the single best secret agent Stormwind could ever have.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a Horde Rogue
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the twenty-third in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself. Any class needs its role models. Rogues don't have all that many great heroes from lore, but the ones they do have stand out, especially for the prominence of women in this class. Garona Halforcen is probably the most famous of rogue protagonists, one of the main characters of the original Warcraft I storyline that launched the whole Warcraft series. She's been strangely missing ever since the end of the First War, actually, but it seems that she is finally making her comeback to the story in the World of Warcraft Comic Book. Her full story is best left for others to tell (such as the immensely talented Elizabeth Wachowski, or the mysterious collective mind known as WoWWiki), but for now, suffice it to say that she represents a lot of what makes rogues who and what they are. Here's a few reasons why: She's incredibly cool. She doesn't talk about how incredibly cool she is. She has conflicted loyalties, neither all good nor all bad. There's so much we don't know about her, and so much we want to discover. She's something of a lone wolf, extremely independent and active. Her skill with words was just as important as her skill with weapons. She has a great wealth of complicated emotions and ideas that drive her deeper into the story.
