07.15.08
Roleplaying in WoW
Overall I’ve enjoyed my vacation on Darkshore. Spent a lot of time on the beach. Didn’t get much of a tan though. My girlfriend turned into a bear a couple of times, so that was a little freaky.
- Uthar the Warrior, heading home to Stormwind from Darkshore.
How do you roleplay in World of Warcraft? With great difficulty. It’s not really a game that fosters immersion - every time you even begin to forget you’re playing a game, the rules are shoved into your face again. Enemies fade in out of thin air, bears cheerily drop battleaxes when you kill them but somehow fail to yield any claws most of time, NPC’s will mourn the death of their beloved although your own death can be rectified in the time it takes your spirit to run from the graveyard to your corpse, and food consumption has level restrictions.
WoW doesn’t want you to forget you’re playing a game, it wants you to learn the rules and then powergame the hell out of them. It wants you to keep chasing those extra 0.5 DPS forever and ever. Now that I’ve tried playing both on an RP and a non-RP server, I can say with reasonable certainty that - barring any RP guilds that have thus far managed to elude me - the only difference is that RP servers have slightly fewer characters named “uberdruid” or “UrDad”.
Nick contributed with an interesting observation the other day though: In many cases, non-RP PvP servers actually have more roleplaying than non-PvP RP servers simply because there’s a lot of legitimate hostility between the game’s two factions: Horde and Alliance. You may still not see any players mourning the death of their friend - that would be a little awkward 10 seconds later, when the dead friend resurrects on the same spot where he died - but thanks to the constant threat of getting ganked by a three level 70 players in a contested area, you’ll see a lot of players express genuine hostility towards players of the opposing faction.
Of course you can ask if that’s really roleplaying. If you actually feel that loathing towards the other team, you’re not really pretending anymore, right? Personally I hope players aren’t genuinely hating each other - I’d hate to ever read in the newspaper that an Alliance player has killed his neighbor because he found out the neighbor’s primary character was Horde - but in any case it creates the desired effect: As an Alliance character, you learn to fear and despise the Horde before you even meet them and vice versa. Could this be the way to foster roleplaying in an MMOG?
Shamus had a good explanation of why you can’t really expect MMOG-players to roleplay on their own accord, even disregarding the constant sabotage any attempt at RP will face from the game’s rules:
Everyone has a different idea of what roleplaying means or how it works. Everyone has their own taste for how much roleplaying they want. Is it okay if we just avoid talking about cars and the internet, or do we need to speak in arty language? What about game mechanics? Do we need to talk around things like what level we are? In a tabletop game you might have a character who is terrified of spiders, or a Dwarf who has a deep hatred of Elvenkind. Those are fine attribures in a game with friends, but in an online game that guy is just going to be a pain in the ass to play with.
Everyone has a different idea of what it means to roleplay, but everybody seems to disagree to hate the different faction. Maybe it would be worth looking into more possible ways to foster roleplaying. Your lore calls for dwarves to be repressed and mistreated by humans? Give the human characters some psychological advantages - the ability to own a home, for example, in a city where dwarves may not. You want druids to really care for nature? Tie some of their abilities into the environment and give them the ability to improve their character by protecting and nuturing plants and animals near their home.
Game mechanics can be a powerful way to wring emotion and drama from a game, but of course it can be a bit of a hazard to the game balance. You’ll want to be careful not to weigh the PvP balance of the game too heavily in the favour of a certain group of characters, otherwise you’ll end up with a race or class that nobody will play. But considering how much players bitch about perceived balance problems in World of Warcraft, it looks like it takes a lot more than unfairness to make a player switch classes. I think it’d be an interesting area to explore. Dangerous, but interesting.
