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Roleplay vs. Gameplay
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Post by
HiVolt
This is something that I haven't really thought much about, because I don't roleplay in-game, but I've started wondering. Do you model your character completely after roleplay, or do you allow yourself to go with the flow for gameplay necessities?
I'll give a couple of examples:
You roleplay as a Mage, who is rather skilled in the school of Frost magic. However, you find it more difficult to use spells dealing with Fire as a result of your affinity to the single school. Do you not use Fire-based Spells? Do you use them, but only use the lower ranks to illustrate your weak aptitude with them? Do you forego roleplay in order to accomodate gameplay by using the highest rank of a spell in the Fire school?
Along your roleplaying journeys, you are asked to escort a person of interest to a certain area, while defending them from incoming baddies. However, your "package" unfortunately dies along the way. Do you admit your defeat and never try the quest again, as the person you were escorting is now dead? Do you forego roleplay and just pick the quest back up?
How do you roleplay through situations like this? What are some other situations that you can think of, where gameplay would interfere with roleplay and vice-versa? How do you deal with those situations?
Post by
229054
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
R1TeR
I did that with a mage I RP a while back, he was skilled at frost magic but when he tried to do fire just a puff of smoke came out
Well I dont Rp in game so I would just try the quest agian
and if they died while i was rp-ing then i would be all like
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"
Post by
173035
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
warlock454
I separate gameplay and mechanics completely from roleplaying. Exceptions may be any quests or storylines that I may have wanted my character to have actually participated in in the past. Or maybe there are some quests that fit my character's personality. Then I usually modify the quest somewhat to fit into my character's actual history.
For instance, I occasionally roleplay with my blood elf rogue. Some of the events that took place in Thousand Needles quests with the Grimtotem actually happened to her. In fact, they had alot to do with shaping her as an individual. But, in general, most of the quests are just a means to an end and have absolutely nothing to do with her character history. In those cases, I usually count it as time spent "honing her skills or in reflection".
As Iralima said, many of the quests just "never happened" in terms of the character's history.
In the beginning, I even tried to roleplay my rogue's "kill only if you have to" philosophy. You can do this fairly well with a rogue and complete quests with a minimum of mob killing. The problem, though, is that you will be way behind on experience. When you realize that you can complete a quest without killing a single mob, but everyone else would have had to kill twenty, that's alot of experience you are missing out on.
You can do whatever works for you, though, because roleplaying is a learning experience and it tends to feed on itself.
Post by
HiVolt
So I'm judging by these responses that it's not common if people completely immerse themselves into the aspects of a character or a character's developmental story by doing things like this?
Post by
Patty
Well, I tried it once. It was difficult. Rolling a Paladin and killing Kobolds because they were annoying someone - It sounded wrong.
You can do quests, but like Iralima said you don't have to acknowledge them. After all, who would RP that they just killed Yogg-Saron and Algalon, thus saving the world from destruction after an Ulduar raid? You need to draw a line in it, I feel.
Post by
warlock454
Well, I tried it once. It was difficult. Rolling a Paladin and killing Kobolds because they were annoying someone - It sounded wrong.
You can do quests, but like Iralima said you don't have to acknowledge them. After all, who would RP that they just killed Yogg-Saron and Algalon, thus saving the world from destruction after an Ulduar raid? You need to draw a line in it, I feel.
I agree. In the human starting zone, right out of the gate you are told to go brutally murder a bunch of kobolds.
Kobold Camp Cleanup
is one of the very first quests you get.
You're not told why you have to kill them. You don't even know why the kobolds are there. This might not be a problem for someone roleplaying an amoral rogue who is only in it for the money, or maybe a sadistic mage who will use them to test his experimental magics on (in the name of science). But if you're a devout servant of the Light, there might be problems with this.
Post by
Rankkor
have you ever played Prince of Persia: Sands of Time?
if you did, on that game, it's narrated by the protagonist (the prince) and whenever you get killed, he interupts his narrations and says something like "no no no wait, that wasn't how it happen, let me tell you again" or "wait, no I remember now, it played out a diferent way".
this is done in-game on the "escape from durnhold keep" instance, where if u let thrall die, the whole thing is just reversed out by the bronze dragons.
I just go for the cheap "AN INFINITE DRAGON DID IT, I didn't failed. BRONZE DRAGONS TO ME! revert this modification to the time-line".
works like a charm xD
Post by
HiVolt
Well, it just seems to me that if someone were to take roleplaying to the level of interfering with gameplay, it could make for a more interesting story for the character.
As for the Ulduar quests, I can understand not wanting your character to sound sue-ish by doing that in a roleplay sense, but you have to remember that in the raids, it's not just your character that's being asked to down the bosses. You could say that you took part in the battle, as a member of the soldiery attacking them.
And as for the Kobold Camp Cleanup quest, you could either ignore it for roleplay reasons, or you could acknowledge that your character is merely a soldier, following the order of his superiors.
I may be taking the roleplay idea a bit far, but it just seems like an interesting concept.
Another question:
Would you ever not re-run a dungeon for roleplay reasons? Being that you and your group members have already taken care of the threat.
Post by
Rankkor
not really, because if you think about it this way it works:
you are not doing the instance again, you are remembering that battle once more.
this is like making a Death Knight, and then do tirion's fordring quests on the plagelands that redeem his son taelin.
as a DK, you've already seen tirion on his t6 armor, leading the battle of light's hope chapel, so why are you watching him again as a hermit wearing rags? the answer is simple.
we are not doing these quests again, these are memories, we are remembering when we did these quests as a way to regain our past glory.
also, when applyed to an instance completed being done again, think of it, as you relating your brave tale of adventure on the dangerous region of to a child. or a friend.
this is why I dislike MMORPG's the realism is taken away.
on a single player RPG (let's put Neverwinter Nights as an example) when you kill a bad-guy such as maugrim, or the valsheress, they stay dead, they don't respawn so that other players can kill them, they don't reset after 24 hours/7days.
it's realist because it only happens once, but on an MMO things can't happen just once, other players wanna do these things too, so everything said and done resets.
we kiled Illidan, he's dead, and very well dead, but if we go to black temple, we don't see any ashtounge broken rebuilding their lost home, we see it still ocupied by Illidan, and is up to us to use our imagination to pretend he's dead.
on sunwell we killed everyone, and banished kil'jaeden back to the twisting nether, however we don't get to see blood-elves finnaly using the sunwell to train new paladins and priests, we don't see them feeding of the well instead of fel energy, and so on.
no, instead if we step inside, we see that kil'jaeden is s till being summoned, the legion still controlls the zone, and the place is pretty much a bastion of evil still, so we gotta use our imaginaiton to pretend that the place is clean, and that the sunwell is once more blood-elven property.
as a last example, we know that during varian's mind-controll and subsequent absence, westfall had to form a people's militia and durkswood had to form the nightwatch to protect themselves due to lack of suport from Stormwind, however now that varian has returned, from a lore point of view, both of these zones once more have protection of Stormwind, and we gotta pretend that they are guarded by Soldiers, rather than militias.
after all, the leader of the people's militia on Westfall is found on grizzly hills, he woudn't leave the farmers alone to fight on northrend unless westfall recieved aid.
and westfall recived aid, but again gameplay reasons overlap lore, new players need to do all the pre-WOTLK quests of duskwood and westfall, and so, even when on lore, after varian's return these zones are protected, we gotta see militias, and once again pretend real soldiers are there.
this and a few others are the reasons I wish world of warcraft was a single-player game like Baldur's gate, or Final Fantasy.
if blizz wanted an MMO to make more cash they could had made 2 versions of wow, the single-player that continues the events shown on Warcraft 3, and the MMO wich could be based on either the war of the ancients or the first war.
that way they please the pvp player who only care about war so they can still kill others, and the RPG players like me that want a more realisitc experience.
(phasing fixed to a small degree the realism issue, but it's far from perfect, and it's only present on a few few few places)
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