Thanks, LynMars.

Although I see the aforementioned "raiders don't RP" mentality talked about quite a bit, I've never seen it really put into practice. Perhaps that's because I'm a part of a circle of RP'ers for whom raiding is a normal activity -- while other RP'ers might find it difficult/daunting to get into a raiding group without sacrificing something?

We need to get out of the mindset that RP and raiding are mutually exclusive. I see this most often pushed forward by RP'ers who can't/don't raid (I remember one, specifically, who practically had a mental block against raiding since it would require them to abandon their "RP" character talent sets/gear). Particularly with the ability to transmog gear and the relative streamlining of the talent sets, it's extremely easy to "wear your RP gear" and have RP-style talents while still being competitive in a PvE sense. At this point, any RPer who falls back on the "I can't be a unique snowflake because of big bad raiding elitists" is just self-sabotaging.

And of course, there are the RP'ers who are just afraid/distrustful of raiding because of the "hardc0re" mentality often attributed to people who raid. They are usually either genuinely shy and/or afraid of being ridiculed for mistakes, or, on the other hand, are resentful towards raiders for enjoying a different part of the game than them.

If this is mostly targeted to naysayers on the RP side, it's because I've historically seen more push-back against raiding on the RP side, while raiders are either tolerant or disinterested in RP. I've been in PvE raiding guilds who, while not being RPers, had a policy of "respecting" RP, and I've been in PvE raiding guilds on non-RP servers who were genuinely amused/entertained by me introducing RP into raids (even starting to play along).

I'm a part of the same RP/raiding group as LynMars and while there are always the naysayers, we have a nice group of RP'ers who also raid (and raiders who sometimes RP) and there's always fun IC chatter going on during raids. You sometimes have to look hard to find groups like ours because they don't usually need to recruit -- we have enough interest via word of mouth - so you have to just sort of "fall" into it. So that can sometimes give the impression that groups like ours don't exist, but in reality, they're there, just hard to find unless you're specifically looking.