Neverwinter Nights: First Impressions

Well.

At the request of one of my friends, I've downloaded Neverwinter Nights and have given it a bit of a test run.  I'm not really sure what I think of it so far.

Recording

The final part is the scariest of all.

Mixing and Recording.

I will admit it here: I have no idea what I'm doing.

Instrumentation

I've had fun documenting my thought process on writing Silence of Silvermoon.  While on one hand, it feels a bit like boasting, it's been an interesting experience forcing myself to stop and think about why I made the decisions I did.  This should be the next-to-last post on the subject, though!

Instrumentation!

Melodic Methodology

Melody is what makes a song.

There are some songs that sound great as poetry.  You can read the lyrics and be moved.

Other songs are incredibly boring if you only read the lyrics. The Lament of the Highborn?  Totally boring to read, but it's one of the best loved pieces of music in Warcraft when you get to hear it.

I hope my melodies can inspire such a transformation.

Lyric Methodology

I'm happy to report that for the first time in months, I've done some significant amount of composing.  I am very happy.

Big surprise: it's Warcraft themed.

On another odd note, it's very much in the same mood and theme as "Lady by the Lake," and both songs were written while I'm being stressed out by inventory prep at work.  Perhaps that says something?

Since I apparently have little else to talk about, I thought I'd spend some time documenting how I usually go about writing a song.

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.

Stress Testing

One of the things I enjoy about role-play are the unexpected things you can learn when trying to enter a character's frame of mind. I have mentioned, I'm sure, that there are things you don't know about a character until you're actively RPing with them and figuring out their reactions.

I quipped to one of my friends that I was "stress testing" a character when she agreed to do some RP with me with a new DK I'm playing for a storyline.  I think that can be an apt term, as I was learning what strengths and weaknesses I had while playing Dearnly.  I was trying to test what did and didn't work with him and discern any quirks the character may have.  About half way through the "test" I was surprised at a reply Dearnly made; how odd it is, to be the author of a character, and yet be taken by surprise at his actions.