The Bare Bones Basics of Role Play

If you have ever wondered just how to role play on World of Warcraft, this is the post for you.

Let's begin with a basic definition of "Role Play". To Role Play means to act as your character. This means you type as your character and act as your character, not as yourself sitting behind a computer screen playing a game. To type as your self is called being "OOC" or "Out of Character". Everyone must have OOC moments, such as running a dungeon or asking about a quest, but a lot of Role Players try to stay in character as much as possible.

This means you must have a fairly good grasp on your character. Their back ground, their likes and dislikes, even their speech patterns. It's a lot to consider, but the more you put into a character, the more you'll get out of it when it comes time to play.

But before we go into that, let's cover the basic game mechanics of role playing in World of Warcraft.

WoW has two ways to express yourself in character. The first is an emote. Most non-role players know about the pre-made emotes Blizzard has already incorporated into the game.

As you can see this is a very small and limited list, though they do have their uses. The bread and butter of role play on WoW are emotes that you write yourself.

You start this by typing /e and hitting the space bar.

 This will start an emote beginning with your character's name.

 

You're then free to write what ever your character is doing.

 

The content of the emote is completely up to you. Emotes are there to express what your character is doing in that moment, thus they should be written in present tense. This frees you from the pre made and limited interactions of simply waving or crying to open up a whole new level of personal description unique to your character alone.

The other way to communicate is to "Say" things. The default setting for chat in WoW is in say, but to "say" something you need only type /say and hit the space bar.

 

Some role players will also speak in the emote itself like so:

 

 It really comes down to personal preference and style. I personally prefer to "say" what my character speaks, it just feels more... authentic somehow.

Now that we have the technicalities out of the way, let's move on to the more interesting topics...