Filed under: All the World's a Stage (Roleplaying)

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.

Roleplaying is the very definition of a social activity -- it pretty much requires more than one participant if you ever expect to have any fun with it. But if it's something you've never done before, trying to get into roleplaying can be a daunting prospect, especially if you've got a bunch of questions and no idea how to get the answers. So this week, I decided to turn the tables around and answer a few questions from the roleplaying community over on Twitter.

While I got some roleplaying questions, I also got some lore questions as well. Honestly, that's only to be expected, because roleplay and lore work hand-in-hand.

@Sin_Aliaga asked:

Blood Elf Druids.... can they co-exist in Warcraft lore? And if so, why haven't they tried yet?

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.

Last week, we talked about roleplaying descriptions for characters and what should be considered a descriptor for your character. Along the way, I also mentioned that a lot of people make the common assumption that a character's history should be a part of their description as well. After all, part of what makes up a person is everything that's happened to them, right? Sure! But not when we're using roleplaying addons that have a clearly defined spot for character history.

And that clarification is important, because there are still roleplay addons out there that don't have a character history tab at all. Does this mean you should type up your character's history as part of your description? Absolutely not. Descriptions are for descriptions, and history is for history. If your roleplay addon doesn't allow for a character history tab but you're really gung-ho about writing up that history for everyone to read, I'd suggest finding a roleplay addon that has a spot for all that backstory you're dying to tell.

Except for one thing -- you don't want to tell everyone everything.

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.

The Darkmoon Faire might have been a little dull once upon a time, but the location switch has certainly improved its image. Darkmoon Island presents a new area for roleplay that is full to the brim with entertaining games, NPCs and events to spark a roleplayer's imagination. More importantly, it's a neutral zone that both Alliance and Horde can enjoy without having to worry about attracting the attention of local guards. We haven't really had a hub like that in Cataclysm, so it's great to see one finally come into play, even if it is just one week out of the month.

For most roleplayers, when one considers a popular roleplay location, two immediately spring to mind -- Stormwind City for the Alliance, and Silvermoon City for the Horde. For the Alliance, Stormwind is essentially the capital city that everyone flocks to. Even before the Cataclysm, it had plenty of out-of-the way locations, taverns and gathering spots. After, it's only gotten larger. For the Horde, Silvermoon offered an actual city comparable to Stormwind, something the Horde was severely lacking in vanilla WoW.

But hey, who wants to roleplay in just one spot? Why not take the action someplace different?

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.

Ah, the last major patch of the expansion. It's a winding-down point for roleplayers, especially if they've been tying their stories into the events of the expansion itself. While some may be roleplaying the struggle to defeat Deathwing, others may be roleplaying those that have nothing to do with the end of Cataclysm -- the shopkeeps, the elderly or those simply too young to participate.

But the same question resounds for roleplayers of any capacity when we're facing the end of an expansion. Whether you're a raider who roleplays or a casual player who's never set foot in a raid, who actually kills the final boss? When the time came to save the world, who was it that struck the killing blow? And when did that death occur?

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.

When you're roleplaying a particular class, you can either choose to ignore the class aspects of what you play, or you can fully incorporate it into your roleplay. A studious magic user or priest can be just as much fun as a sneaky, devious rogue or a dark and brooding warlock -- and death knights are a little bundle of joy, as we discovered last week.

But what about the warrior class? Strong, steadfast and fiercely devoted to bashing heads in, it's a wonder to anyone what exactly goes through a warrior's head. Some incorrectly view them automatically as less intelligent -- after all, if you deliberately go out to get your head bashed in on a regular basis, what does that really say about your level of smarts? But warriors, as simplistic as they may appear to the outside observer, can be multileveled bundles of fun to roleplay, just as much as any other class out there.

This is not to say you can't play your warrior as a character who is dumb as a brick -- heck, sometimes it's fun to do for comedic relief. But there are other aspects to the class and to the character to bring forward, even if the warrior class is lacking in a particular organization dedicated to their cause.

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.

Death knights saw their introduction in Wrath of the Lich King, which was the only appropriate point for them to be introduced. Former servants of the Lich King, the death knight class as we see it in World of Warcraft has now broken free of his hold. The death knights that have broken free rejoined with their former comrades, either Alliance or Horde, but not without a struggle. As a class, the death knights are masters of undeath, using unholy, frost and blood powers against any who would stand against them.

But for roleplayers, the death knight offers a unique challenge. Here is a character who once had a life filled with hopes, dreams, aspirations and goals just like any other. But that character had his life taken from him abruptly and then found himself brutally ripped back to a mockery of his former self. It creates an interesting space in which one can play with the notion of what might have been, had you not been relegated to an unfortunate fate.

The playable death knights of WoW have their own organization, the Knights of the Ebon Blade. It was formed primarily to retaliate against the Lich King, which was taken care of in Wrath. So what are these knights up to today?

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.

A lot of the columns I've been writing lately have been about the ins and outs of character development -- how to create a character that is rooted in the world and has a sense of realism, what that character should be aware of. But those are only the stepping stones to developing a character once you've chosen what to be. How do you go about choosing a character in the first place?

While you could simply flip through the character creation screen and pick whatever looks pleasing to the eye, if you wanted to, you may want to give it a little more thought than that. If you're looking for long-term roleplay, throwing aside a character because it just doesn't feel right once you've gone through all the work to make it viable seems like a gigantic waste of time. So let's break it down to the choices available, and the pros and cons of each, and make it a little simpler to figure out.