I've been thinking of playing on the RP server.. Now, I've never roleplayed in any other MMO, and was wondering if it would be fun to take a stab at it... I just have a few questions though...

1) What kind of things/events happen on the RP server?
2) Does one have to stay in character all the time?
3) What is RP like anyways?
4) Any potential "rules" I need to be aware of?

Basically, would like to know anything that would help out a (potential) newbie RP player... Thanks...

1) What kind if things/events happen on the RP server?

For the most part, players will gather for the sake of role-playing. This can range from simply being a beach party or a weekly meeting, such as Monday nights in Chebika's bar which sits on the edge of the oasis, to tournaments, and other miscellaneous things I can't recall because I rarely ever show up.

2) Does one have to stay in character all the time?

Per server rules, if you speak in /say, that's a yes. Whether you'll actually be penalized for it? Can't say. Generally speaking, unless you're blatantly trolling, even speaking within recognized game terms pertaining TERA could be considered role-playing, just that the character might be savvy to what they really are a part of.

Kind of like Deadpool.

3) What is RP like anyways?

Pretending you are your character, living in a world that does not know of Earth (never mind the globes that display Europe in game,) just Arborea. One doesn't need to create a back story for their character, such as a history, likes and dislikes, reasons for what they are and what they're doing, but a lot of people find that part of the fun. Creating a character for many RPers isn't just selecting a few head features and fiddling with sliders a little, it's about creating an alternative persona.

To that end, most RPers are fairly casual about their interactions, not demanding some deep, original concept in terms of character or a grand epic attached to said character, but rather, your character talking and acting like he belongs in the world of Arborea, and isn't just another guy in front of a keyboard speaking through a doll. ...You can speak in thees and thous if you really want to... Most people don't.

Though personally I'm taking a liking to the vernacular of Dragon's Dogma >.> Tis aught to experience while role-playing with others!

You'll find a lot of people mix in custom emotes (a brand new feature just introduced today) in conjunction with what is intended as actual speech. Obviously, the avatar models won't act out those custom emotes, so be prepared to use your imagination.

Finally, the quality of RP you're looking for is up to you. The types of RPers will range from those whom type out several paragraphs to perform a simple gesture, to those that will keep it extremely short and sweet, to those that will put in the silly faces nearly all the time :3 :D :) D: X( 8)

People will have varying reactions to any type of role-player. Don't take their opinions on how you should approach them as gospel though. Judge for yourself which level of role-play you enjoy the most. There's a difference between being open-minded, and having no standards.

4) Any potential "rules" I need to be aware of??

If you don't like the RP, excuse yourself politely. Going all lore/spelling-N*** won't help anyone. Well, sort of it will, unless they're ignorant or don't care, but mostly it will just boil into something ugly.

Another rule: don't god-mode. God-modding is basically deciding other peoples actions and reactions for them. Don't walk into the scene flipping your hair, explaining how fabulous you are, then insinuating in some for everyone is looking at you in awe.

That's something they get to decide.

Don't get into a role-play fight, draw your weapons, then type out how you cut down your opponent, or restrained them forcefully, etc. While and Elin would have a hard time escaping the grasp of a Baraka's SMALL arm, much less their large one, without exercising some form of extreme violence, it's still not okay to proclaim so.

That's something they, that is the Elin, get's to decide.

However, said Baraka can emote they are reaching out to grab the troublesome Elin by her collar/neck/scruff of her neck(?) with the intention to lift her into the air harmlessly, the Elin player gets to decide if the Baraka is successful or not.

Basically, everyone hates crowd-control, especially imagined, text-based crowd-control. No surprise there.

Another unwritten rule, and really, this one will vary from person to person, is to avoid being a Mary-Sue. A Mary-Sue is typically a character that's too good to be true. The kind that can play the piano, sing with the best, unimaginably gorgeous, masterfully trained in just about everything they do, and always have that one tool that will get them out of whatever bind they're in. While not all of those are required to be considered a Mary-Sue, having some won't make on a Mary-Sue either. And those are just a few examples.

Basically, don't make your character essentially perfect in every task but seldom few. Mostly, the point is to play fair with your fellow RPers, and create a character that's actually fun to interact with.

Coincidentally, I've found the more "normal" a character is, the more impressive extraordinary feats become. I expect the Mary-Sue to topple a rampaging Kumas no problem. Several in fact, and the rest of the group the Mary-Sue is traveling with for some odd reason just seems like a cheer-leading squad in comparison. You'll do well to note this isn't how those members imagined their own characters. However, a mere foot soldier being the lone survivor of a battalion somehow toppling the beast, bloodied and bruised, earns much more respect in my book.

None of my characters have super powers precisely because I thinks it's cooler for average Joe to get swept up into an adventure where he'll save the world than to see Super Man save it within the hour again.

Finally, reading up on lore can help if you want your character to have a history. Knowing things about how Arborea works will do wonders for how believable your character is. There is no royalty among High Elves for example, they find direction through a council. They also recently were involved in a civil war. So recent, that middle aged and older Elves would remember it, up to their maximum life expectancy of 100 years anyway. They also don't visibly age very much.

These things are good to know when creating an older Elf, just as an example.

The most important rule is to have fun though. Don't let others bully you into playing their way. Take the advice with some consideration, but you ultimately get to decide what you enjoy doing. Just remember... role-playing alone isn't much fun. You'll want to be at least somewhat enjoyable to role-play with, but the range of types of RPers is so vast, that really shouldn't ever be a problem.

P.S. To fully explain role-play would require writing it's Bible.

Thank you Littleman, I enjoyed your wall-o-text :)

Thanks for the post Littleman! I've played for years on a EQ2 roleplaying server and while I never got very in depth with RPing my character, I highly enjoyed being immersed in the game by the RPing players around me. I am new to TERA and was planning to play on a PvP server but I'm feeling like I want to give the RP server a shot and perhaps get more involved this time with the actual RPing. Your post was helpful!

Thanks Littleman! I enjoyed your text wall... And it seems that others have gotten something out of it too.. So, that's good.

It sounds like you need a real vivid imagination to role play. I have never role played much in my life, so I still don't know if this is for me or not. Back when I was a kid, I never got into Dungeons and Dragons, because (at the time) it was very taboo and considered Satanic. But, later on, I did take a look at DnD and other role play games (Vampires and even a Cyber-Punk game), but I never really got into those either, because I didn't really have anyone to RP with consistently.

So, I guess my last question would be, would TERA be a good game to get one's feet wet in terms of RP? And, if so, are there people on the RP server that would be willing to compensate for such a lack in RP experience? Thanks, and looking forward to your next wall of text.. :P

Thought I'd share my few little ideas about roleplay which might answer your questions. I've been roleplaying for a long long time now across a lot of different games and I can't imagine playing an online game any other way. It can be a lot of fun and it opens up a whole new side to any game, which might be worth visiting at least.

So what really is roleplay?
I guess whenever you approach a game like TERA, you can see it in two different ways. One would be that your character is just a means to an end. It does not really matter what it does, how others see it or how it looks like for that matter. It is there to get you somewhere, probably for you to level up and it is more of an aspect of the game itself, something necessary to play the game, an object within a game.
The second take on this would be that it is not an object, but your character can have a personality. It is a part of the world in front of you, it explores what the game has to offer, immerses itself within the story and in fact, it may have a story of its own to tell.

These two 'views' are obviously not strictly separated. There is more of a continuum between what I just described and it depends on you how alive the character feels. Some people will simply overlook the character completely, some will see it as a part of the main story plot the game offers. Some will appreciate the fact that your character is unique, pushing the idea a little further. This may be as simple as buying your character armour just because it looks good, an may be as complex as writing pages and pages of stories with your character as the star.

I myself love my character very much and enjoy playing the game not just because it is fun from the gameplay point of view (which TERA definitely is), but also because it lets me live out something I could not experience outside of a fictional universe. To me it is a little bit like playing in a movie. Have you ever watched a movie and wished you could change things in it, tell the person on the screen to do this or even wanted to explore what is beyond the screen? Roleplaying for me is just that.

Now this is my take on it and I am sure every person has a slightly different reason, which makes the world an amazing place to be. If we all were the same, that would be no fun!

The game itself promotes the idea of roleplay quite a lot. Actually, every RPG does that. The npc characters you meet talk to your character, trying to pull it into the story. The world moves, animals react to you, the economy is impacted by your character harvesting, selling and buying things. Making the game an immersive experience is something the developers focus on quite a lot. So it might be said that anyone playing the game is to some extent a roleplayer! The question should be, how much of an importance do you want your character to hold.

So now you sort of see why you might want to roleplay or push it further. But how does one start, wouldn't it be strange and difficult at first?

As someone mentioned in your thread, a lot of it is imagination. So does that mean you have to sit down and dream up a whole novel about your character before you start playing? Not at all.

Once you decide you want your character to be meaningful, it will come naturally. It is hard to guess what will happen or how things will progress, but generally all you have to do is act out the role. I started TERA with my friend and we made two sisters, knowing nothing about how they are, their personalities, and not knowing anything about their story. We just played the game for a while. As you play, things happen in the world around you that impact your character. You may put in your own views into your character, making it respond to what's happening.

I was handing in a quest and my sister rushed out to attack some tree, which knocked her down. That made an impact, so I ran over to help her. I do not want to see my sister dragged around by some evil tree, do I. :) So I ran over, killed the thing and helped her. I asked 'You alright sis?'. And we roleplayed a bit around that before moving on. Probably the mildest form of roleplaying, taking the games events and reacting to them.

So events in game influence my character, what's next?

People. There are hundreds, thousands of people experiencing their own stories and they are all connected. What most people call 'roleplay' is responding not to the game's events, but to other people.

Again, this does not have to involve thinking up a whole world. It can be as simple as killing a tough monster and being helped by a person, chatting about the fight afterwards (which is how we made our first friends with my sister). You tell them your name and thank, they tell you theirs. You can just chat about the area, the monsters or about the task you are on at the moment. This could be anything from 'Such a terrible creature. Phew, all this to deliver a letter to some guy.'

How to make it more believable, more authentic?

Just like you would in real life. By adding gestures to help you convey meaning. It is hard to guess what a person really wanted to say by reading a couple of lines. So when we call over the phone, we not only listen to the words, but also to the tone, speed and dynamics of the voice. When we talk, we watch movements, facial expressions or any other tells to make the conversation easier.

In a videogame we do that by what's called an emote. In other words describing all the supplementary things mentioned above. This can be done several ways and it usually depends on the person, different roleplayers are used to doing this differently because they come from different backgrounds. I often try to mimic their way to make it more comfortable for them, but lately I prefer stars. You simply talk and then put the description into stars.
For example:

Oh hello there! *Kyzzi smiles, waving her hand*

putting in 'Kyzzi' is optional and again depends on the person, what you could do is:

Oh hello there! *smiles, waving her hand*

It is obvious that your character does the action. Putting in the name may be useful when writing more complex descriptions to make it understandable.


Some people use -action- instead of *action*. And recently the emote command was introduced into the game, which replaces the need for stars. You use a command to indicate you are describing an action and it makes it into an emote. This would look like:

Oh hello there!
/e smiles, waving her hand.

That way anything after the /e is made into an emote. Note that you need to send what your character is saying and what it is emoting separately. (Two lines instead of one.) This does make things more dynamic and more readable at times. It is easy to get lost in a large block of text, especially if you aren't used to the concept of emotes at first.


What if I want to say something out of character?

Usually the general idea is to put it in double brackets. That indicates it is out of character and most roleplayers will understand that.

For example:

What a terrible creature! *looks exhausted*
((oh, one second, phone.))



How different are roleplaying servers?
There will be different views on what a RP server represents, but my take on it is it is showing a preference. A lot of people (including myself) do not like to roleplay 24/7 and sometimes you just want to chat about the game, make friends that carry over to other games or share a funny thing you heard outside of the game's world.
It of course is perfectly fine to do all that even on a RP server.

What a roleplaying server means to me is that the players there are to some extent interested in roleplaying. It does not mean everyone is roleplaying 100% of the time.

That said, it may be expected that what you say in general chat is coming out of your characters mouth. However, there are no distinct rules that would make a clear line between a PvE and an RP server.

So I can do anything I want?
As in any community both online and offline, there will be certain expectations and unwritten 'ways of acting'. It is not something you can learn by reading a forum post, but more of a thing you pick up as you go along. Different guilds will have different rules, some have their guild chat in character, some have it out of character for example.

There is one general rule that should work across all servers (not only RP), but is particularly expected on an RP server and that is:

Respect other players.

Your character may not be the friendliest person around, you may be a mercenary who does not care for anything but a couple of gold pieces. This could mean you will talk to others in a different way than let's say a knight who holds honor among anything else. In both cases, you should respect the player behind the character you are talking to.

Do not push other people into situations they feel uncomfortable in, do not force other players into doing things the do not wish to do.

Most of the other 'unwritten rules' simply come out of this one, so if you respect the players around you, you are going to be fine.


Where does RP take place?
If you read half of what I've written above, you get the idea that RP may take place anywhere at any time. While that is very true, there are places that promote roleplaying more.

Guilds. Joining a roleplaying guild is probably one of the best ways to immerse yourself in a story. It will let you meet new friends easily and often the guild will have some sort of a theme to it. A backstory you can pick up and interact with, making it very simple for a less-experienced roleplayer to be a part of something big.

When looking for a guild, you might want to consider three things:

Timezone/online members - If you are the only one online when you play, there's not much point in being in such guild.

Theme - As said before, guilds may have a theme to them. Picking a guild that fits your likes will make it much more enjoyable for you. Feel like a noble knight? Join a guild with a similar theme. Or you may be sick of all the noble knights, in that case look for a guild that is sick of them too!

Friendly feel - No matter what else the guild is, you should always feel comfortable in your guild. After all, chances are your future best friends are likely to be your guildies. Make sure the guild you are looking at has a friendly feel to it.


Events. What often happens on an RP server are events of many kinds. This can be a simple party to celebrate that it is Friday, or a great tournament where you can fight warriors. Having a look at your server's forum every once in a while may be a good idea of not missing out on any fun!


RP spots. There usually will be a few places that roleplaying people gravitate towards. This may be a tavern in a local city or a shiny point of interest. When you find a place like this, chances are you will always find a person roleplaying that is happy to share their story or listen to yours.



Good news, finally my monstrous wall of text comes to an end! :)

Remember, RP is what you make it and it should be something you enjoy that makes the game more fun! There isn't a 'right way or roleplaying', but there is a right way for you!

Hope you have a great time living out your dreams!
Kyzzi