As always, thank you for taking the time to share your insight.

/salute

For example, if you stumbled across a group engaging in RP, you’ll find many folks use a dialect. The Dwarves have their Scottish accents. The Trolls have their Jamaican ones. Certain Human characters might even give their characters an accent, particularly if they were born in Northrend (as I’ve seen many, many times on Feathermoon). This is one way to stay IC all the time. Use a dialect and stick with it, even in General or Trade chat.

With regards to your troubles of finding RP up through level 10, RP in the low level zones is either non-existant or so over-the-top bad as to make one’s eyes pop out of their skull and run for cover (I’m looking at you, Goldshire!). Even on an RP server, RPers are a rarer commodity than you might imagine due to the trolls that make their presence known whenever a large gathering occurs. However, if you’re still interested in RPing or at least seeing it, I wholeheartedly invite you to make Horde a toon on Cenarion Circle. Level it high enough to get to the Crossroads in the Barrens on a Tuesday night at 7pm server time (the server’s west coast, so Pacific time) and see Da Doctas clinic. Even if you don’t care to participate directly, at least you can get a feel of how frantic several dozen conversations going on at one time in /say can be when typed out in WoW’s limited space.

And even if you don’t come by the clinic, I thank you once more for getting some use out of my little corner of the web.

I leveled to about ten without meeting another soul in the starting zone. The general chat was filled with the regular “LF Tank, H-UK” that I’m used to seeing on my normal server. It didn’t seem any different. I realize I shouldn’t have expected anything too exciting to happen right away.

Actually, I’m not sure what I was expecting. I supposed, in a way, it was a relief that no one did approach me, because I wouldn’t have had the slightest idea how to respond. I imagine the feeling I experienced is similar to what I would feel had I decided to fly to a foregin country in search of an adventure. You arrive in this place, and suddenly realize you don’t know the culture, the language, or a single soul within a thousand miles. It’s a bit lonely and you feel extremely out of place.

I took the next flight back to my normal server and have contented myself with evesdropping on the RP community via blogs like yours ever since. It’s something I’d like to be part of, but I don’t know how.

You mentioned in this post, that you can check the WoW forums for an RP guild. Now, I’m coming at this from the perspective of a GM of a raiding guild. I know what I look for in an applicant, and I have trouble imagining that anyone wants a level ten forsaken, i.e. me.

Perhaps my understanding of what an RP guild looks for is wrong. Like I said, this whole culture is foreign to me. I just know, if a level 10 applied to my guild and had no family or friend connections, I would politely send them on their way.

You also mentioned in this post that you should be IC all the time and become a known “RP Entity”. I am very shy in real life. I am not the type to approach strangers, especially if I don’t know the unwritten rules. Practically speaking, as a baby RP’er and a newbie character, how do I go about being IC? I mean, expressing myself to those around me without being an obnoxious idiot making a fool of herself.

Perhaps I’m making it all more complicated than it needs to be. It’s just a bit daunting to step out of your comfort zone into a world where you feel lost. I’m the type that likes to have a manual for everything and know all the rules before I make the first step.

I genuintely am fascinated by your style of game play and would love to learn more. Thanks for taking the time to read.

As I may have mentioned in one of my OOC posts, I too used to play solely on a PvE server. But the drama created through raiding and getting more and more loot soon became overwhelming and, in a fit of rage, caused me to delete my now resurrected warlock. I took a 4-month hiatus from the game but was pulled back by the idea of roleplaying. I’m glad I did. I’ve met some fantastic people in the WoW community and the RP community that I consider very dear friends.

Give it a try sometime. Just roll an alt, even if you’ve no intention of leveling it to cap. Try RPing with others. It can be incredibly cathartic as well as providing blog fodder, as you’ll see here from time to time.

The whole idea of RP guilds and people who play entirely in character is fascinating to me. I had never heard of such a thing until fairly recently, and I enjoy hearing from those for whom this is an integral aspect of their WoW experience.

I keep telling myself that someday I will roll up a character on an RP server and give it a try. In the mean time, I enjoy learning about the RP culture from those, like yourself, who are experienced in this genre.

I enjoy your story as well. You have quite a gift for writing and kept me rivited for well over an hour as I followed Arren’s adventures.

Thank you for sharing your story, and your experience as an RP’er.