Filed under: All the World's a Stage (Roleplaying)

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW.

A new expansion means several things to roleplayers. There's the thrill of new content and new areas to roleplay in. There's the change in storyline to something fresh and new. And of course, there's the introduction of new races or classes depending on the expansion, something that offers a new outlet for creativity as far as roleplay is concerned. With Cataclysm, we not only got two new races, but we got several new race and class combinations that weren't possible before, which opens the door even wider on making character changes.

For most roleplayers, the choice of what to do comes down to rolling yet another alt to roleplay with. For others, attachment to their main character and that character's story might suggest a different option altogether. Race change services have been around for a while in World of Warcraft, and although most players change their character's race and don't really give it much though, it becomes an odd situation for roleplayers.

So how do you work around a race change when you're a roleplayer?

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW.

Last week, we talked about acceptable times to drop character while roleplaying. In with all the comments was a pretty good question:

Joining a roleplaying guild is a pretty good idea, especially for new roleplayers. It guarantees that at any given time, you'll be able to find some roleplay without having to hunt around for it. Finding the guild that's right for you is another question altogether -- and reconciling your character's story with the story of a guild can be even more complicated.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW.

Imagine walking through a park or tranquil forest and coming across the scene in the video above. What would your reaction be? What would you think about it? Live action roleplaying, or LARPing as it's commonly called, looks just a little strange to anyone who isn't familiar with the concept. But the truth is, it's just a bunch of people playing a game. Sure, the game's got different rules than most, and the uniforms are definitely not your standard fare, but in the end it boils down to this: It's a game people like to play.

World of Warcraft isn't like your standard video game. There isn't one set goal. There isn't a big "the end" when you finish everything, because you can't really finish everything in it. There are different focuses within the game -- fighting in scripted encounters for loot, fighting other players, doing quests, and for some players, roleplaying. To everyone else, roleplaying looks just as strange as that video above, and a lot of people tend to make a lot of false assumptions not just about roleplaying itself but about roleplayers, too.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW.

We've had new races in two expansions so far -- the alien draenei and the native blood elves, the scheming goblins and the beaten-down worgen. Each of these races had their own quirks and reasons for allying with the Alliance and Horde, and they were good ones. The draenei chose the Alliance because the night elves made first contact with their people, and the ideals of the Alliance matched what the draenei were all about. The sin'dorei allied with the Horde partially because of the help offered by Sylvanas Windrunner and partially because the Alliance had already turned their back on the blood elves in their most dire of hours.

As for the goblins and the worgen, well, the worgen were a natural match to the Alliance as they were an Alliance race already -- human, save for the curse. The goblins allied with the Horde out of sheer necessity more than anything. The Bilgewater Cartel was in ruins, and the Horde helped them out. Each race chose Alliance or Horde, and each had its own reasons for doing so.

But the pandaren pose a different kind of problem for roleplayers, because they can choose either side to ally with. So how do you roleplay a pandaren character who's allied with one side or the other?

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW.

One of the hardest, most difficult things to do when you're creating a roleplay character is coming up with a name for your character. This isn't necessarily because it's difficult to come up with a name; it has far more to do with coming up with a name that isn't taken already. Let's face it, World of Warcraft has been around for so many years now that almost every iteration of every name out there has been used in one form or another.

Mists of Pandaria is introducing the pandaren as the new player race. Unlike every other new race that came before, the pandaren are available to both factions, which means that finding the perfect pandaren name is going to be even trickier than usual. Pandaren names are filled with just as much tradition and history as pandaren culture, which makes names a little easier to muddle out.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW.

It's that time again -- that end-of-expansion lull when players start losing interest in the game and taking breaks until the new expansion launches. Raiding guilds sometimes find themselves struggling for raiders by this point, opening mass recruitment or simply letting everyone take a break from raiding. And with Diablo III out in a big way, a lot of players have picked it up as a respite from WoW until we see Mists come out.

But for roleplayers, this lull poses a much larger problem. Characters in the middle of fun storylines suddenly find the other characters in the storyline have gone missing. Roleplayers lose roleplay partners, and it leaves their story at a virtual standstill. And of course it leads to the question of what to do until everyone comes back. Do you put your own roleplay on hold until other roleplayers make their return? Do you write them off? Do you pretend that however many months of roleplay you happened to share simply never existed?

What do you do when you're faced with the sudden departure of roleplay buddies?

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW.

Last week, I saw an interesting thread on one of the RP forums I visit. A roleplayer was asking for advice regarding a situation with one of her RP characters. The general gist of the situation was this: She had been roleplaying a relationship with someone, and they had a child together. The child was another character she'd made on her account. The two roleplayers had a falling out and stopped speaking to each other. The roleplayer in question asked if it was all right to tell the ex-friend that he could not roleplay their child, because the child was a character on her account.

Needless to say, since the questioning roleplayer had the character on her account, it was her character. She had every right to tell the ex-friend not to roleplay the child, because the character didn't belong to him. But it's situations like this, tangles in the threads of RP relationships and arguments between players, that create sticky situations both for roleplayers and the storylines they roleplay together. How do you know when things are getting out of hand before it gets to the point of a virtual child custody battle?

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW.

Are you ready for Pandaria? I don't think I can really repeat it enough: Pandaria is beautiful. The locations are gorgeous, and the amount of detail that went into simple things like leaves and trees is just phenomenal. Even if I don't have any quests to complete, simply running around and soaking in all of the scenery while snapping as many screenshots as possible is a lot of fun, particularly since there are hidden shrines with bits of lore all over the place now!

Since last week's jaunt into the wilds of Pandaria seemed to go over well, I decided to point out a few more places that are suitable for roleplay. Only this time, we're going to take a look at some really large areas where guilds or groups could hang out or large events could take place. Group events can be a lot of fun, even if they're a little harder to coordinate. Having the perfect backdrop for an event makes it even more fun -- and Pandaria is full of perfect backdrops.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW.

Maybe you're in the beta, or maybe you aren't -- either way, it's hard to avoid information coming from the beta servers. If you're a roleplayer, spoiler information is one of those double-edged swords. Sure, it's nice to know what's coming ... but at the same time, you don't want advance information leaching into your roleplay, especially if your friends and fellow roleplayers are avoiding spoilers themselves.

Thankfully, today is spoiler-free -- well, unless you count some truly gorgeous screenshots of Pandaria's scenery as spoilers, that is. While Pandaria doesn't really appear to have a neutral capital hub at this point in the beta, most of Pandaria's towns and villages are decidedly neutral. This makes them ideal roleplay hubs for both Alliance and Horde and offers something we haven't seen since the days of Dalaran: locations where both factions can roleplay out in the open and interact. Given the rising tensions between Alliance and Horde, it's an excellent chance to grab some compelling roleplay.

Plus, did I mention Pandaria is gorgeous? Seriously, you guys, once you visit, you'll never want to leave. Let's look at just a few of the locations Pandaria has to offer that are ripe for roleplay.

Sure, the expansion's not quite out yet, but that doesn't mean you can't start planning for it as a roleplayer if you want to. The pandaren race features some really amazing, beautifully animated characters with an intriguing story ripe for roleplay purposes. While some roleplayers may already be happily roaming around the beta servers, others have only bits of information to work with. The process of coming up with a roleplaying character can take a little time, so if you're wanting to create a pandaren when the expansion is released, why not start pondering possibilities now?

Though pandaren can be played by both Alliance and Horde, they cannot speak to each other once they've made that decision -- a decision steeped in the storyline of the Wandering Isle. However, this does mean that you can play a pandaren character no matter which side of the faction fence you happen to be on. And with the kind of history and story the pandaren have behind them, it'd be well worth looking into if you're looking for a different kind of character to roleplay with.

This is a primer of pandaren lore, and as such, it'll contain a little spoiler content. However, because of the unique nature of playable pandaren characters, we won't be divulging any major story events that take place in Pandaria. This information will mainly be starting zone info. If you're looking to avoid all Mists spoilers, however, you may want to pass on what's after the break.