I just read a very interesting post on WoWInsider talking about what roleplayers want that Blizzard’s not giving them.

In summary, the article said that what RPers want

…is customization. They want to create items and spaces which are all their own, not just appreciate the events and stories that Blizzard comes up with. They want things like houses to live in, family surnames, notebooks they can write in, clothes and disguises they can wear at any time or any place, ways to show their personal descriptions and other information without needing a special addon to make it work. For them, the game is not just consumption of whatever Blizzard creates, it is a sandbox playground, in which they can use the tools to make up stories of their own within Blizzard’s world.

This sums up really well why I feel that trying to RP in WoW would be swimming against the tide. Blizzard offers the RPers vanity frills like the Fire Festival dancing girl, but there are no ways to make your mark on the world.

I can’t help but compare this with a few other games of my experience:

• Everquest 2: Almost as poor for RP; you could have your ‘own space’ in the world by acquiring a player apartment, but it was expensive, had little customisation, and was totally instanced so people only knew you were there if they were already looking for you.
• Lord of the Rings Online: Better; you can have surnames, you can create and display family relationships (one character can ‘adopt’ another, and they both have access to titles like “Arwen, daughter of Elrond” and “Elrond, father of Arwen”), you can enter a character bio (which I believe is visible to people inspecting you), and there’s housing. The housing is instanced, but the instances are on a neighbourhood scale of a couple of dozen houses, so there’s a sense of making an impact on the world around you. And there are several dozen titles you can earn by doing things in the world – everything from “Fur-Cutter” (killing wolves in the Shire) to “Warlord of Angmar” (for owning everything in the face, hero-style).
• Star Wars Galaxies: A roleplayer’s delight. SWG allowed you to choose surnames, but it allowed a lot more than that: you could place buildings in the world (as each zone was vast), so homes were accessible for all to see; there were buildings for all kinds of functions (one of our players used to run a bar in a tavern-style building); there were totally viable non-combat classes (dancers and musicians, for instance, served useful and viable roles in the world); you could create hundreds of outfits of non-combat clothing in thousands of colour combinations; et cetera. There were other factors that made SWG great for RPing, but those were the standouts.

Put simply: although I’m a roleplayer as a hobby (why yes, I do play Dungeons & Dragons) I find the idea of roleplaying in WoW actively offputting. I really enjoy some of the RP exploits in WoW I’ve read about – Anna of Too Many Annas writes great character vignettes, and no-one can forget the vastly entertaining adventures of Team Ratshag (especially Galertruby ♥). But personally, I just can’t get past the absolute inability to customise your character and the way they’re presented to the world, nor the dearth of opportunities to make your mark in the world (beyond a quest NPC yelling out zonewide thanks to $your_name_here).

Give me player housing, character customisation, visible marks of achievement (and I don’t mean Phat Epicz), and I’m there. Without them? I find it impossible to forget that WoW is a computer game, with very visible and intrusive game mechanics, and I’ll stick with Dungeons & Dragons (yes, and Shadowrun, and Exalted, and so on) for my roleplaying fix.