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World of Warcraft offers a variety of server types for everyone who wants to enjoy their game. However, when it comes down to it, WoW is still a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. Therefore, the RP servers are available for those who wish to roleplay their characters. This guide can help beginning roleplayers to understand what it means to roleplay their character.

What is Roleplaying?

Roleplaying is a part of any MMORPG and World of Warcraft is no exception. A roleplayer adopts the persona of their character while playing the game. Anything that is said in /s, /p or /y chat is a reflection of their character's personality.

Character Creation

It is important, when planning to roleplay a character that you have some sort of idea what type of personality your character will have. Heavy roleplayers may make extensive backstories for their character, detaiing everything that has happened to their character, including family history and racial lore. Their characters actions are entirely based on that backstory and it is not deviated from unless there is a valid reason that can be incorporated into the storyline. The light roleplayer simply start with a predetermined personality type and then they let the story evolve as they go along.

Hints and Tips

There are a few hints and tips that can help you on your roleplaying journey. First of all, every character equals a person in the setting of the game. Just as every person is unique from another, try to incorporate something in your charcter to make it stand out from others.

One way you might do this is by giving your character a profession. If you enjoy writing songs or stories, you may want to consider a bard or troubador. If you would rather focus on your crafting, strive to become reknown for your craft. Merchants, assassins, engineers, innkeepers, any profession you can think of can make your character stand out from others.

Another way to make your character unique is to give him or her some sort of quirk. A phobia is a common way to do this. Find something that your character might be afraid of and run with it. Perhaps he is scared of flying and screams the entire time he takes a gryphon. Or she may be afraid of spiders and refuses to take any quest that will cause her to be near one. Negative traits can also work. Give your character a disdain for all short people, so they refuse to group with a gnome or dwarf. Or perhaps your dwarf thinks all elves are snobs and proceeds to either ignore all elves or to tell each of them exactly what he thinks. These are just a few ways to make your character stand out from others.

Using Emotes

Emotes are a handy way to allow your character to express herself. Emotes are short for emotions and they are how you can express emotions using the game interface. World of Warcraft has many standard emotes. The easiest way to find a few of these is to click the chat bubble icon on the left side of your chat window in the game's user interface. There's an option called "Voice Emotes" that lists some of the emotes available. These emotes are the ones that have sound along with them.

A few other emotes are:

• /sit
• /smile
• /grin
• /dance
• /rude
• /spit
• /chuckle
• /wave
• /greet
• /lol

You can also create custom emotes that enable you to provide more description or to do emote an action that is not available in the standard emotes. To do this, type /e, then what you want your emote to say. For example: "/e takes his hat off and bows" will come out as "[yourname] takes his hat off and bows."

Members of the opposite faction cannot understand custom emotes. They will only see "[yourname] makes some strange gestures." However, they can understand the standard emotes.

Things to Avoid

Do not force another person's character to do something. For example do not emote that you "strangle Keith until he dies." Keith may have been able to do something to avoid death.

Try not to "think" in emotes. In real life, people do not know what you're thinking unless you tell them. It's the same in the virtual world. Stay away from emotes that say "[yourname] thinks that Sarah's taste in clothing is bad." If you want them to know what you are thinking, either tell them or provide a more descriptive emote that does not involve what you think. For example, "[yournames] wrinkles his nose in disgust at Sarah's taste in clothing." This is descriptive enough to express your dislike, but it only involves an action (which is the function of emotes).

You do not have to speak in an Old English-sounding style to roleplay. The NPC's in World of Warcraft use normal speech, so it perfectly acceptable for you to do so as well. That is unless, you want to speak that way as a character quirk. But that's entirely up to you.

Everyone has different styles of roleplay. Do not be discouraged if you come across someone who tells you that you are roleplaying wrong. Simply bid that rude person farewell (or tell them to go find the nearest cliff-- whichever is the way your character would tell them goodbye) and find someone a bit friendlier to roleplay with.

Questions? Comments? Email us (Aurael@TenTonHammer.com) or post on our forums!