Why I Ignore Questing

To show you how slow I am sometimes at writing, several months ago Anne Stickney wrote an article for WoW Insider called "When lore and roleplay collide".  Her article was about how questing in Pandaria had become more "personal" and how players could interpret those quests for their characters and decide on what motivated them, or how they would react to the quests.

I was one of several commentators who, frankly, didn't feel the article to be very useful for role-players.       Anne wrote a lovely article about why someone would be doing all the quests in Pandaria and how it would affect your role-play.  It didn't feel useful to us, on the basis that questing was a separate thing from our role-play and that she was assuming we were playing characters who were on the front lines in Pandaria.

DrunkScottishCyclops wrote (a little rudely):

Is it just me, or is this inability to differentiate between in character (IC) and out of character (OOC) gameplay a running theme in this site's roleplay articles?

I wrote a few comments attempting to explain my dissatisfaction with the article, which, to my surprise, actually prompted Anne to write a couple of follow up articles, one for Horde and one for Alliance.  (That's one of the things that's truly great about the WoW community, how people listen to each other.) However, I think the main confusion, for my part at least, stems from different people's definition of role-play and how we treat questing.

In short, I do not consider questing by itself to constitute role-play, nor are quests automatically part of my character's story.