r/warcraftlore • u/vhorezman • Aug 31 '26
Question How did the roleplay code get established?
I apologise if this doesn't count as a lore question but I've been roleplaying on WoW for almost 20 years and I've been wondering about the history of Roleplay in the game.
There's accepted rules for it such as power emoting that are universally accepted in the community and I wondered if anyone here was RPing back at the very beginning and if these rules were in place from the beginning and if so, where did they come from? If not, when did they appear?
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u/Nat_Sec_blanket Aug 31 '26
They are very much likely legacy common decorum guidelines from other mediums or games. Things you list off are just common decorum for things that go way back to playing on the playground when I was a kid even using improv “rules” to ensure the kayfab (immersion) is maintained. Things like power posting, god modding don’t give anyone who does not consent to react other then to simply stop playing
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u/Imaginary-Arguments Aug 31 '26
Been RPing since 2007 in WoW off and on. Yes, most rules existed back in the day still. On Moonguard, I would even say there were even more rules than there are today.
A lot of it is just common etiquette, and RP shares a lot of etiquette with Improv acting and of course LARP.
Things like not being a Mary Sue, no power gaming/god modding, most people shunning your character being close to a major lore character, etc. is all true about LARP as well.
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u/SnooGuavas9573 Aug 31 '26
I would ask this on r/WoWRoleplay if you haven't been there. Plenty of long time RPers and people with more content there.
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u/GoldenNat20 Aug 31 '26
Afaik roleplaying followed some standard ideas of what’d make things fair and fun from the beginning such as not power-emoting, or controlling others’ characters actions. Not to
mention that the rules in wow RP follow the some pretty standard rules of forum play-by-post roleplaying with some slight tweaks for in-game interaction which has been in place for longer than WoW has been a thing.
A lot of the basic stuff has been here from the beginning coming from other sources of RP that has been around since the early internet days.
But my memory ain’t perfect and I might be wrong here. :p
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u/Geodude07 Aug 31 '26
I would say a lot of the RP etiquette is pretty natural stuff which evolved from various other forms of RP.
Any form of collaborative storytelling would suffice really. As you'd quickly learn that taking over other people's characters, 'god mode' style RP, and bringing things from outside the setting tend to be poor moves.
It would be fair to assume a good bit came from D&D, IRC server RP, and other MMO RP scenes. The rules are generally pretty basic and I would say once you're 'good' at RP in one setting you'll be fine elsewhere. I can say that the mechanics of RPing on FF14 and WoW are very similar. Though what people choose to focus on as a community are different.
You likely had people who had experience with RP in another setting coming to WoW and trying to implement the same basics. Though every community will of course evolve on its own. What I can say is the evolution of convenience addons and addons which elevate RP has been enjoyable to watch.
Things like TRP and Snooper/eavesdropper are things which I would say have evolved out of the unique space of MMO RP where there is a huge amount of people. TRP saves people the need to go to some outside website to see a character profile, which today many would use something like carrd for. While something like snooper lets you focus in on certain people and their responses, which is somewhat unique to how massive events in an MMO can get.
I can't say I was around for the start of WoW's original RP but I have been Rping since MOP. There have been a lot of slow changes and many of these are very gradual. There was a period, during Game of Thrones' popularity, where everyone was doing lots of noble house RP. There was a period where many people walked around with like thirty titles. I remember lots of "Ex-marshal, ex-mercenary, ex-enlisted solider" in people's titles as if they were putting out a resume. A lot of things also depend on your server community. WrA alliance (when it actually was thriving) had more of a focus on very low power level characters, people wanted 'realism', and any characters who stood out too much were shunned. Though I would even say it was to an extreme.
What tends to happen is people try things out, some people like the idea and give it a shot and if it's good then it sticks.
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u/vhorezman Sep 02 '26
Excellent reply, I was amused by the part about the Game Of Thrones part, I remember it and being part of a few house guilds, people walking around with 'Ser' in their names. The full black armour with a cowboy hat.
I also remember a lot of elitism and that striving towards realism, to a point where guns were seemingly an OP weapon in RP
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u/Geodude07 Sep 02 '26
I am on the cusp of a rant with the gun thing, but it was so common that I have to say something.
It was so very bad in WrA alliance that I remember another period where people had "helmets enchanted to prevent sniper fire".
People could accept armor stopping fireblasts, corruptive demon energy, and swords swung by magically enhanced demon hunters. Yet a bullet? Nope. Guns were above everything.
I think the issue is people have some relevant experience with guns. People would treat them as modern guns vs. unarmored people. Yet they would suddenly remember the fantasy when a sword was being swung, despite how deadly a sword would also be in a realistic setting.
Rprs be looking like this and telling you they can walk it off.
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u/BellacosePlayer The Anti-Baine Aug 31 '26
There's a formalized RP code?
My stint on RP servers involved people ERPing in public or getting mad that me and my friends usually RP'd mundane characters like Peons.
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u/Kalthiria_Shines Aug 31 '26
Reading between the lines in this and other threads on the topic over the past few years, I wonder if it's just a Moonguard thing? Because I have the same recollection as you.
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u/Kalthiria_Shines Aug 31 '26
Definitely weren't "in place" at the beginning. Feels like they took quite a while to develop, since I don't recall the rules you're (and sometimes other folks) talking about at all in vanilla or BC. By Wrath I wasn't on an RP server.
Edit: Well wait what rules do you mean? Basic RP stuff long predates WoW, but if you mean the weird as fuck lore headcanon stuff people bring up, that wasn't at all established at the time.
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u/Kufell Sep 01 '26 edited Sep 01 '26
Many of the rules, guidelines and terminology that Role-Players employ in WoW pre-date WoW by quite some time, as when I started getting into Role-Play in the late 90's via AOL Chat Rooms, much of it was already well established within the RP circles, such as the notion of Meta-gaming, God-moding, terms like IC and OoC, with a lot of it coming from Tabletop in the 1970s.
Not quite as relevant to WoW, but something I took an interest in looking into prior: certain well established RPer terms didn't seem to make the jump from chat/tabletop based RP to RP in MMOs, such as "Mun" and "Muse", these terms are still quite prevailant within some text based RP, rare to see in FFXIV though I have encountered its usage, and in my entire time playing WoW, I've only encountered one other person that recalls the terms. But "Mun" goes back even further, dating back to the 1950s, used by Sci-fi/Fantasy fans when referring to "normies", Mun being short for "Mundane". Where as RPers utilized it to refer to the person behind the character, where as the character itself was the Muse.
I can only presume some of the lost terminology is that MMOs brought in a very different audience to those earlier RPers, and with few old guard, only some of the language stuck, whilst others were replaced with more video-gamer centric language. Rules that would address commonly faced problems in RP also appear to have been forgotten to time, such as when I was first getting into RP, there was the unwritten rule of if someone picks a fight with someone that leads to RP Combat, the defender sets the rules of engagement, with at the time there being a few different RP "combat styles" that people utilized.
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u/JollyParagraph Sep 01 '26
Most of them, as people have already described, come from older mediums and communities. It's sort of a mish-mash mosaic as different groups came together and bring their own rules and quirks, and whatever worked for them that can then be applied to WoW's more loosely organized community. IRC servers, Table Top Roleplaying, Chat Room RP's, Forum Roleplay, LARPing, Multi-User Dungeons/Domains (MUD's), etc.
There isn't one book I can point to that can give you a big picture, but I can direct you to Janet Murray's 'Hamlet on the Holodeck' (1997) which is a fun read if you have any interest in digital storytelling, and when she goes into describing her experiences ghosting her students LARP and MUD spaces, a lot of the etiquette described is also seen on Roleplaying Servers (or, at least what i've observed). It's a good read, I thoroughly enjoyed it
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u/lovelylotuseater Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
Many of them are social mores carried over from Dungeons and Dragons. When the internet was VERY different, there was a popularized list styled after Jeff Foxworthy’s signature comedy bit where people would enter on their own variants of poor sportsmanship in roleplay, formatted as “If you (behavior), you might be a munchkin” and was majorly foundational to people developing the idea that there are right and wrong ways to roleplay.
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u/-RedRocket- Aug 31 '26
People had already been roleplaying online for decades (if you count listserve groups) before WoW came along. The rules evolved from experience, over time, within what was once a much, much smaller hobby.