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.
The term "role play" as it applies to electronic games likely stems back from good ol' table top gaming. The electronic games borrowed the familiar classes, abilities, format, and genres from table top games. Some of the earlier games let you chose your characters, your name and abilities, and then gave you very little direction except for what you invented; I'm thinking of the earlier Final Fantasy games and the Four Heroes, or games like Wizardry. They were attempts to bring table top games to the console and the computer.
There was one major difference, however. Because there was no live Dungeon Master, those games were largely "railroaded." You had to play through the storyline present. There was no back and forth, no give and take. Still, your character was your own.
Later generations of Final Fantasy had the storyline grow more specific and detailed. You weren't playing a character of your own creation with its own motivations and choices. You were playing a specific character in pre-defined plot. You were Zidane, an adventurous thief with a mysterious past and a group of mercenary friends; you did not invent your own background or personality. You didn't get to chose if he fell in love. He had his own motivations that you didn't have any influence over. No matter how much you thought that traveling through a swamp was a Bad Idea, you still had to do it to progress through the story. You couldn't tell the GM you had a different idea. The game was a way to progress through a story that someone else wrote, not a way to invent your own.
Yet, the game was still labeled an "RPG": role-playing game. In a sense, the term could still be applied. You took on the role of Zidane and played through his story and controlled his actions. However, you never controlled any of his significant actions. You never made a true decision that affected the course of the storyline. Ultimately, I "played the role" of Zidane with as much power over him as if I'd simply read a book.
I did love playing Final Fantasy IX and other "RPG" games, but I consider them to be immersive story telling devices, not role-playing.
For me, role-playing must have the following features:
- The ability to create your own character
- The ability to determine your character's personality and motivations and make significant decisions and actions based upon them.
And, significant to WoW,
- The ability to consider those decisions and actions as part of your character's cannon.
Questing in WoW is similar to playing Zidane in Final Fantasy. There is a specific story line that Blizzard has written for the player, a role I dubbed the Blizzard Hero. In Pandaria, the storyline of the Blizzard Hero is that he is sent to Pandaria to investigate the aftermath of a Horde-Alliance battle, travels through the Jade Forest, meets the Jade Serpent, and witnesses the disastrous battle that breaks out. He is then called upon to meet the faction's reinforcements as they land in Krasarang and is greeted by his faction leader as a trusted, capable hero and is asked to fight alongside him. He is sent on further missions to investigate the Pandaria story line based upon the fact he's proven himself to be a capable hero.
That is the storyline. There is no changing it. You can skip quests and content, but future quests assume that you've played through it. Quests in the Isle of Thunder assume you've completed daily quests even if you skipped them; you may never have caught that bird creature, but Jaina will still give you credit for doing so later on. Sorry, Zidane, it looks like you're trekking through that swamp, like it or not.
There are very, very few quests in WoW that offer you any sort of choice or change based upon what actions you've taken in the past. The ones that exists are applauded, but they still don't make a significant impact on the plot. We are being fed a specific story, not contributing to creating one. Taking questing at pure face value is no more "role-playing" than Final Fantasy IX was.
And that's fine. It makes a good game. I like the storyline, and players appreciate feeling like they're actually valued and part of the action, and it gives us a reason to be present for significant lore events. As a single-player game, it works wonderfully, it's good storytelling, but it's not role-playing.
WoW lets you create your own character, with her own name, appearance, and abilities. However, the questing experience doesn't let you make any true choices. Quests don't change if you think you have a better idea than "kill ten orcs" to solve a problem, or if you just would rather not do it. To make any significant choice, you have to ignore the quest says and create your own story.
(I truly hate quests texts such as Dirty Birds in Uldum or The Guo-Lai Halls in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. In the first, it gives your character a sudden, murderous hatred of birds that you may totally disagree with. In the second, the quest text doesn't ask, "Perhaps you should investigate?" It simply tells you, "You decide to investigate." That explicitly denies you even an illusion of choice, unless you'd rather ignore the quest and not continue the quest chain and miss out on content. )
Furthermore, once you start playing with other role-players, it becomes problematic trying to claim that [i]you[/i] were the one person who specifically did any single deed, meaning you can't literally add quests to your character's cannon. That separates out the social role-players, who co-exists with other people's characters, from the solo role-players.
If everyone considered the quests that happened to their character to be cannon, it would create a lot of confusion, because [i]everyone[/i] would be rightfully claiming that they're the ones who fought beside Varian on the beach, or helped Anduin answer the Monkey King's riddles. Everyone would claim they snuck into Darnassus.
Going back further, every goblin would say that they were a major up-and-coming goblin in Kezan with a boyfriend named Chip. Every blood elf found Sylvanas's locket. Every human fought Darkblaze alongside Keeshan in Redridge. It simply doesn't make sense.
It also makes a for a very boring world if all characters have gone through the same events. To create engaging stories, role-players need a variety of characters with different backgrounds.
Solo role-player [i]can[/i] take everything they do as being canon for their character, because there is no one else who has the ability to claim credit.
Social roleplayers must compromise. Since everyone has an equally valid claim to being the "hero" of Redridge, we can't declare our character to be the one true hero. Instead of saying, "I rescued Keeshan from the cave and rode in the tank," we'll be more generic and claim, "I was in Redridge during the orc campaign and got to meet Keeshan." That allows a player to take part of that experience while questing and make it part of that's characters background, if they wish, while not directly contradicting anyone else's claim to having been there as well.
Other social role-players will simply ignore that they were part of Redridge at all. My main roleplaying character, Derscha Kettlebomb, is a pudgy gnomish business woman with very limited combat experience as a rear echelon medic. There's not much of a reason for her to have been at Redridge at the time. It would also be a little odd if [i]all[/i] my Alliance characters happened to be there at the same time to meet Keeshan; one begins to wonder just how many people were in Redridge that week. So I may claim that one of my characters was present, but everyone else was busy elsewhere.
Anne's article questioned how to take the Pandaria quests, which have become more and more specific and detailed, and incorporate it into your role-play. The answer myself and a lot of other social role-players give (and DrunkScottishCyclops implied) is simple: we don't. By necessity, we have learned to make questing an "out of character" (OOC) activity that does not directly affect our "in character" (IC) stories because of the need to compromise with other players and because we also play a variety of characters who would not logically have taken part in that quest.
In fact, the more specific quests become and the more personal credit is given to the Blizzard Hero, the less personal they become to social role-players as we are forced to further divorce questing from our characters' actions. All the moral dilemmas faced in those quests? The one we either have no choice to play through or must skip entirely? They're being faced by the Blizzard Hero, a character who is not of my creation nor under my control. While it may be my avatar on the screen, it's not my role play character who is going through the streets of Dalaran hunting the Horde or talking directly to Jaina and Vareesa. I can't take credit for being there; a pudgy pacifist business gnome is that last person you'd send to kick the enemy out of a city. I enjoy the Pandaria quests as a method of telling the story of the Blizzard Hero, but they are not part of my personal role-play and cannot be considered as part of Derscha's cannon activities.
Anne's article was based on the assumption that the role-players she was addressing were those who were sticking as close as possible to the storyline of the Blizzard Hero for their characters, which meant it was addressing a limited audience. There are people out there who do actively play the Blizzard Hero, or close to it. They are largely solo players who like to stop and think about the quests, and maybe invent their own stories about why they're doing what the quest giver asks. They may go as far as picking and choosing which quests they do because "kill ten of those orcs" would be something their character wouldn't do. They're the ones who benefited from Anne's article. I consider them role-players because they are not taking quests at face value; they are making decisions and playing a consistent character, even if they never share that character with anyone else. As long as they are playing solo, they can be the Blizzard Hero without running into the "everyone did that" problem social role-players deal with.
Questing by itself is not roleplaying. Questing is a method of progressing through storyline to learn about events that are happening in the world that you can use to shape your character's experience. Questing is reading a book that you unlock in pieces, and Blizzard is the author and sole person in control of that book. Unless you are a solo player, you can't literally claim to have done every quest you've played through.
I don't believe you are role playing until you step away from the quests, until you stop being the default Blizzard Hero. You start being a role player the moment you begin writing your own story. Who knows, perhaps you character would do everything the Blizzard Hero does, or maybe there's just that one little difference where you decide to kill birds to feed some orphans rather than because you hate them. For most of us, though, it means we play through the quests purely to level and learn about lore and keep it separate from out characters.
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