Guild Wars 2

It’s a series of questions really:

- What IS “roleplay” in GW2?
- How do you “roleplay” in GW2?
- Is “roleplay” defined by lore or is lore non-mandatory?

An explanation as to why I ask (should you choose to read my long, meandering thought processes!):

Way back when, my first foray into online gaming was via a text only MUD. In the game a I played almost exclusively, moods and many deeds were carried out in the format of “emotes”, either predefined by the game engine (/sit, /stand, /laugh, /noo! etc.), or by customised, on-the-fly, player defined.

For example, typing /em bangs on his chest and roars would return, in text:

Thunderpants Gildedthighs bangs on his chest and roars

This would convey the mood of the moment, what the player is trying to convey to the locale etc.

In GW2, this would also only have a text response as there would be no animation for this. So, in the context of the MUD world, the “visual” would be left to the player’s imagination but, in terms of GW2, you see a static character with just the text.

Is this considered “roleplay” in GW2 terms? And is this how roleplayers actually play? The resons for me asking this is that, since I gave up my MUD and went “graphics” (EQ, EQ2, GW2), “static” characters i.e. not actually doing what you emote (for obvious reasons) detracted from the “feel” – so I’ve dropped roleplaying as such for many years. I’d like to claw my way back into things but I thought I’d like to hear your thoughts first…

In GW2 (and I guess GW before it), there’s a lot of lore gone under the bridge, about which I know 0.001%. During roleplay, is it necessary one know’s at least a certain amount before commencing?

Lastly, but by no means least, I often see in map chat or /say, “Do you want to roleplay?”. To me this is a very strange question; back to my MUD, roleplay was there 99% of the time; players would remain IC, opting out to OOC stuff very rarely. What are your thoughts on this?

Thanks for reading, looking forward to replies!

Flatley.1620:

It’s a series of questions really:

- What IS “roleplay” in GW2?
- How do you “roleplay” in GW2?
- Is “roleplay” defined by lore or is lore non-mandatory?

My general RP experience comes from CoH/CoV where lore was extremely flexible and you could not only tell stories to give some backstory to yourself but create anthologies of story missions to give more depth to your stories or intertwine your stories with others.

~ In GW2, I feel what you describe is genuinely what the basis of roleplay is. You interact with other players using /say and /em (animated and not). I tried to RP a bit in GW2 but it’s just not my cup of tea (or I just didn’t connect well with those I played with…had some fun but ultimately felt like just chatter rather than telling stories).

~ My personal means of roleplaying in GW2 is crafting my characters and their backstories/personalities and, when confronted by people who RP and interact with me, try to channel my character so those RPing don’t have to break character. This is rare though.

~ It depends on who you RP with. Some people understand that requiring lore to RP is a high barrier of entry for many and try to keep their interactions more spur of the moment. I haven’t personally ran into people who are portraying a lore-infused performance.

The issue with seeing text and no animations for your character hasn’t been a big problem for me primarily because I usually have the text window enlarged in games where I RP. I’m usually too busy typing or reading to notice exactly what a character’s avatar is doing. I do try to keep my character in a natural idle stance that conveys my character’s current attitude. GW2 doesn’t have many stances, though.

One thing I always urge posters to do is suggest improvement to the game that would facilitate RP. More idle stances, improved /em interaction, bio space, journals and stuff.

I don’t know if you ever played City of Heroes but I feel it was very RP friendly, from lore to chat and even the ability to tell stories. It’d be great if some of those concepts were incorporated into GW2 (although it’s unlikely a “Mission Creator” can be put into this game).

it depends on who you ask. there are manay ways to do it. I’m a very visual person so I prefer to use as many emotes to go with my texts as I can. if i say my character sits, I use the sit emote, if If I say he laughs I also use that emote. or to go with the mood, like crossing my arms when listening to someone else speak, etc…
others just stand there and do everything with text. at the end of the day look for the way that most fits what you like.

My character, Bekka, is mute (thanks Inquest), so she greatly depends on /e to carry on conversations. For example:

/e signs at Gaile: ~Good morning, how are you?~

Or, sometimes, if the person she is trying to talk to doesn’t know sign language, she’ll use a text-to-speech program on her holopad.

/e writes an audio message.
/s Holospeaker: “Good morning Gaile, how are you?”

Having a mute character who is in character 100% of the time really makes me think about how she interacts with others, and she’s been a smash hit so far.

that’s actually pretty interesting. I wish there were more people trying to think outside the box and be original, sadly many players fall into the same old archetypes. but well, to each their own.

In general, you can find some folks roleplaying around town. It’s polite to ask them via whisper if you wish to join in. Some people are very open and will flow with it, others get very standoffish (and will whisper about how “rude” you are for, y’know, publicly participating in a public roleplaying scene :P).

Also, check the guild recruitment sections here and on reddit for possible RP guilds. They can provide a lot more guidance.

Side note, racial capital cities are the easiest place to stumble on RPers. (Especially the Grove or Rata Sum… the emotes go from end to kitten end.) I remember seeing some folks in Divinity’s Reach while I was setting off firecrackers. They were gushing about this baby griffon they were RPing about, when the quote comes up:
“Touch her, she’s so fluffy!”
What I wanted to say as my Charr passed by was:
“I said that to a female once, and all I got was a claw across the muzzle.”
But I didn’t, because I was behaving that day.

Thanks for the replies all.

It does seem, then, that the RP in GW2 does follow similar lines as to what I’d experienced in my old MUD – I thought I was missing something!

An interesting point was made about running a large chat window – great idea, that would certainly hark back the ancient interface I was used to.

I had a though it would be along the lines of: Player A is talking to Player B about people in Queensdale and what they were getting up to. Player C comes along and mentions that Ine Duran needs grubs and, after some chit-chat, you all go off and help, RP’ing the event all the way.

Flatley.1620:

I had a though it would be along the lines of: Player A is talking to Player B about people in Queensdale and what they were getting up to. Player C comes along and mentions that Ine Duran needs grubs and, after some chit-chat, you all go off and help, RP’ing the event all the way.

That is something you can still do, though I would recommend that as a planned event with a guild over an impromptu public event.

Step 1) Read about the lore of the race you will be using on your character. This will improve your background writing and understand how your race usually interacts with other races. This also teaches you your racial limitations. If you are a norn surely you will win any kind of fist brawl against humans, asura and sylvari, and vice versa, surely you wont start a fight against a charr as a sylvari.

Step 2) Create a name that fits your characters race and origin (krytan,elonian, charr warbands ect). But make sure its canon and not something ridiculous like “Im the great great great grandson of the 3rd king of kryta!”

Step 3) Create a background story for your character. You could also add additional background to what anet provides via character biography

Step 4) Is combat part of your rp? If so carefully chose your profession that fits your characters background. This also applies what kind of weapons you use and what kind of armor you use as well. If you are a simple seraph soldier why do you wield twilight, a great sword tied to a champion rizen from orr that guards the gates of arah? And whats with that Layline energy armor and why do you have a purple modremoth vine on your back?

Step 5) Join a rp guild or a web page community, it helps a lot.

Step 6) Communicate, talking out of character, learning how others wish to RP is important. In a ideal world people would be in character all the time the moment they know they can RP with someone else and everything clicks together.

Step 7) If you are still unsure check this guy out https://www.youtube.com/user/WubdoR

I came across ~ 5ish RP as seraph doing one of the OP bandit events. I got to RP as a civi or something they called me. I don’t RP but that doesn’t mean I cant play along!

There are not rules for RP (like pve and such) so each group doing RP tends to do it differently. For example, your party may walk (no waypointing or running) in-character across tyria on some sort of quest and fight in whatever dynamic events they stumbled on.

Whether doing RP or not I find I like at least a light version of RP. By that I mean having a backstory for my character and things like deciding what music they like.

What do people think about having a character biography window that can be viewed with a right-click (with a max of 5000 characters)?

In CoH, the character bio window was used for various purposes:
-Players could advertise their “guild” or their custom missions in the “Mission Architect” or even posting links to websites to show more info, art, stories or guild websites.
-Players could annotate their build, their window of play for raids and overall stuff about playing (if you were aiming for a certain achievement that required a group, you could advertise that).
-More likely, you can post a brief origin story or explanation about your character and their powers (since you could color and customize your powers, even if you used the “Fire” powerset, your powers might be something else like aethereal, psychokinetic energy, darkness, spirit fire, etc).

Ultimately, such a feature may put your intentions out there that people can observe without needing to directly interact with the player behind the keyboard. If you can more easily see a player’s intentions, this could be a stepping stone to starting an interaction. Like, if you see a character’s backstory and you think it’s interesting, you can start chatting about that and perhaps begin a storyline (you can also get a grasp of their ‘level’ or RP-ness so you know what to expect when you interact). Or if you see the person is aiming for the same achievements that you’re trying for, you can send a /whisper about trying to set up times to pull others together for that.

What do you guys think?

Leo G.4501:

What do people think about having a character biography window that can be viewed with a right-click (with a max of 5000 characters)?

In CoH, the character bio window was used for various purposes:
-Players could advertise their “guild” or their custom missions in the “Mission Architect” or even posting links to websites to show more info, art, stories or guild websites.
-Players could annotate their build, their window of play for raids and overall stuff about playing (if you were aiming for a certain achievement that required a group, you could advertise that).
-More likely, you can post a brief origin story or explanation about your character and their powers (since you could color and customize your powers, even if you used the “Fire” powerset, your powers might be something else like aethereal, psychokinetic energy, darkness, spirit fire, etc).

Ultimately, such a feature may put your intentions out there that people can observe without needing to directly interact with the player behind the keyboard. If you can more easily see a player’s intentions, this could be a stepping stone to starting an interaction. Like, if you see a character’s backstory and you think it’s interesting, you can start chatting about that and perhaps begin a storyline (you can also get a grasp of their ‘level’ or RP-ness so you know what to expect when you interact). Or if you see the person is aiming for the same achievements that you’re trying for, you can send a /whisper about trying to set up times to pull others together for that.

What do you guys think?

This has been suggested before, and I’m all for it!

I love the bio window, I’ve played several games with them and it helps rp a lot, you can know what kind of rp does someone like, more or less the theme of their character, and find people with similar interests.
I doubt it will be added this advanced into the game, but it would be awesome.

You can get may answers and info about things like lore, how to join guilds and RP events at guildwars2roleplayers.com

You can create your own character bio there, read other player’s characters and swap ideas and meet new people to RP with.

There’s even a directory for different types of RP guilds you may wish to join, and everything is divided between Piken Square (EU) and Tarnished Coast (NA) servers, so you can find the right people whether you’re EU or NA

Endless Soul.5178:

This has been suggested before, and I’m all for it!

I realize that but I’m assuming it’s more constructive to make suggestions on the forums vs complaining about the same old subjects. That and I rarely ever see people making suggestions to help RP. I have other ideas but a biography window is the easiest addition to make with only positive overall effects.

If you make your own solo guild hall you can do monument decorations that you can add text to. It’s limited but a permanent option ingame.

A bio section in the UI would be great. It was something my MUD had and EQ/2 also.

To be honest with you, I don’t think roleplay works all that well in modern MMOs because they are not made with that activity in mind and so don’t attract the right crowd.

Some friends and I roleplayed in GW2, in ESO, in Warcraft, in Wildstar and a few other less known multiplayer games but the writing quality usually ranged from “my character is so quirky and loveable, practically the next Amélie Poulain” to “my character is so kitten with a backstory so tragic that friends just call me George R. R. Martin” which then all culminated in such exciting scenarios as standing around in taverns and standing around in towns.

If you want something more modern than a MUD or more visual than a tabletop RPG then try player hosted servers of Neverwinter Nights. People play those for the roleplay first and foremost and there are active game masters monitoring them.

As for the character biography: Warcraft has that as an add-on. Half of the biographies there are steamy descriptions of the character and a list of kinks the player has. The other half of them are long walls of text detailing every single tattoo, scar, dead relative, special weapon and pointless title that the character has. So few people use that add-on properly that it’s kind of a relief GW2 doesn’t have anything like it.

Meanma.5623:

As for the character biography: Warcraft has that as an add-on. Half of the biographies there are steamy descriptions of the character and a list of kinks the player has. The other half of them are long walls of text detailing every single tattoo, scar, dead relative, special weapon and pointless title that the character has..

Never played WoW but I have seen this elsewhere. It made me wonder if there was some huge back story that I’d missed or this particular person was extremely “important” in some way. Very anal. Perhaps there could be a character limit, say, 250? 500?

Anyway, I’m going to see how some RP pans out later – I’ve not really tried very hard up to this point so it could be a new angle to the game for me. However,I’ve just charmed a new pet I didn’t know existed so perhaps I’ll see what it can do first

well it ultimately depends on how good the person is at RP. mary sues and god levels powerful people are boring and I tend to avoid them.

coso.9173:

well it ultimately depends on how good the person is at RP. mary sues and god levels powerful people are boring and I tend to avoid them.

Agreed, which is why I tend to make my characters as Tyria normal as possible. I mean, sure they have magic, but things don’t always go their way.

I play a 3000 year old Vampire that is an unkillable Methusalah. She also slays dragons in her spare time.

:) Just kidding.

I tend to like playing humble but slightly insane characters. Such as a bee loving fanatic who thinks or perhaps she can, communicate with bees. She has trouble making friends though and makes her living pretty much selling high quality honey. In general its odd but still not legendary.

Hilarious when she gets caught up in an adventure. Though I have found it hard to break into the roleplay community here in GW2 they seem nice, but few will interact with you if they don’t know you.

So alot of my roleplay I admit is randomly in lions arch with myself and anyone willing to go along with it.

many times I rp alone, in a tavern, surrounded by other rpers and after a while I see if I can get into their rp, gradually. like someone engaging someone else in a conversation.

Meanma.5623:

As for the character biography: Warcraft has that as an add-on. Half of the biographies there are steamy descriptions of the character and a list of kinks the player has. The other half of them are long walls of text detailing every single tattoo, scar, dead relative, special weapon and pointless title that the character has. So few people use that add-on properly that it’s kind of a relief GW2 doesn’t have anything like it.

That’s a positive of the feature if you put a max character limit on it that enforces brevity but isn’t too short. When you run across stuff you don’t care for (steamy descriptions, kinks, etc.) you can stop reading right off the back. Describing tattoos, scars, dead relatives and special weapons or titles isn’t a bad thing considering it may be important to the motivations and backstory of the character. Which leads to another interesting point: discussing someone’s bio often can lead to critiques if they are willing. Granted, I usually only ever critiqued someone’s bio if they asked (outside of spelling and grammar errors) because you never know how they’ll take the criticism. But talking about and offering criticism of a character is accompanied with learning more about said character. They might tell you something interesting about their character that they couldn’t fit in the bio so you suggest they leave out talking about a specific character detail that isn’t as important (tattoos, scars, dead relatives, etc).

But the point of such a feature is to utilize as you see fit. If you want to advertise your guild, post the times you play, link your build, your aimed achievements, your characters kinks and steamy descriptions or a genuine short story your character is involved in, none of it is wrong or more proper than other uses.

If a clickable character bio ever became a thing, I think instead of using it as a bio, I would use it as a first impression thing:

“The asura female you see before you looks young, but she exudes experience. Her clothes are a bit worn, her weapons well taken care of, she definitely doesn’t stay in cities for long. She’s an adventurer.

You notice that she’s looking at you…"

Something like that.

Endless Soul.5178:

If a clickable character bio ever became a thing, I think instead of using it as a bio, I would use it as a first impression thing:

“The asura female you see before you looks young, but she exudes experience. Her clothes are a bit worn, her weapons well taken care of, she definitely doesn’t stay in cities for long. She’s an adventurer.

You notice that she’s looking at you…"

Something like that.

+1 to that.

In fact, you could take it one stage further and have exactly as you say but have a bio as well. But then, as I said before, that could cause anal-ness

Incidentally, I didn’t get the chance to RP at all tonight. I’ve seen DR around the bank and a pub in Queensdale just outside the city are popular haunts for RP; where else is a good place to get involved?

Nightshade.2570:

I tend to like playing humble but slightly insane characters. Such as a bee loving fanatic who thinks or perhaps she can, communicate with bees. She has trouble making friends though and makes her living pretty much selling high quality honey. In general its odd but still not legendary.

Hilarious when she gets caught up in an adventure. Though I have found it hard to break into the roleplay community here in GW2 they seem nice, but few will interact with you if they don’t know you.

I tend to start off with a contrasting trait than your typical character and then just evolve them over time as I interact with the game. Like:

1. A large and physically strong (Warrior) Asura.
2. A Charr with a modest countenance and a strong reflective personality.
3. A Human who questions existance and the gods.
4. Less intelligence focused and more passionate Asura.
5. A Silvari with a more outward perspective of the dream and a stalwart philosophist.

which developed to:

1~ Origin with Thaumanova reactor from youth and Chaos magic. Cannot tell lies or bend truth or loses all strenth.
2~ Raised from birth by humans with basis in traditional family values. Struggles with human/charr relations and seeks true worth to his people through his craft vs muscle.
3~ A human of extreme religious zeal but not for the human Gods but instead of Norn culture, taking the ideals of the animal spirits to an extreme.
4~ Not any more charismatic than your average Asura, but gains more appeal among mixed races. Exudes leadership qualities despite his feminine demeanor.
5~ Just plain sociopathic and a master manipulator. Could be the next Scarlet, only more ruthless.

Of course, then I get to the end of the available races and just kind of flounder…

Nightshade.2570:

I play a 3000 year old Vampire that is an unkillable Methusalah. She also slays dragons in her spare time.

:) Just kidding.

I tend to like playing humble but slightly insane characters. Such as a bee loving fanatic who thinks or perhaps she can, communicate with bees. She has trouble making friends though and makes her living pretty much selling high quality honey. In general its odd but still not legendary.

Hilarious when she gets caught up in an adventure. Though I have found it hard to break into the roleplay community here in GW2 they seem nice, but few will interact with you if they don’t know you.

So alot of my roleplay I admit is randomly in lions arch with myself and anyone willing to go along with it.

Were you showing off your jars of bees this last Halloween in the Labyrinth? If so, I think you were in my squad a couple times

So where are the most popular haunts for RP?

Flatley.1620:

So where are the most popular haunts for RP?

Usually at the two taverns, or Salma District of Divinity’s Reach. I’ve also witnessed role play at all of the other racial cities and Lion’s Arch. There’s also Ebonhawke. My group has also been known to haunt that small town by Wizard’s Fief. One of my group even saw role play in the human town (I can’t think of the name right now) just north of Lion’s Arch in Gendarren Fields.

You can really just role play anywhere, and you don’t really need to be with anyone. Sometimes I’ll have my Priory character just be a greeter at Durmand Priory, just welcoming others. Will there be positive interaction? Will she be ignored (which is what usually happens), or will the other player become a jerk and start spamming weapon skills and/or be lewd. Who knows? It does make things interesting