Smores over Felfire

I’ve got most of my outline done… I just hope I thought enough of it through in order to use a full 50k words without doing the “oh no! we’re stuck in an infinite time loop” trick.

I understand that doing NaNoWriMo means that by the end of the month, you will have a first draft, not a finished copy, but I’m trying to do something more than just create a story, I’m making a world. Most fantasy works stick their protagonists in a medieval-esque setting, ignoring the formative years of a civilization. If mankind were capable of magic, then we would never have come up with the catapult, cannon, bullet, or atomic bomb. We would have simply researched how to propel a rock through the air and, maybe, how to set it on fire. To paraphrase Mr. Vader, the ability to shoot a gun is insignificant compared to the power of magic.

Ignoring the technology problem, what about the religious one? Forgotten Realms/Faerun (the typical D&D world) has a pleathora of gods. Why have so many, which seem capable of giving power to their followers, and no one god(dess) has taken over the world! I mean, you have 1 evil god who promises their minions power and immortality. The god then goes around making allies with other like-minded gods while the minions slowly convert, pillage, and/or burn the world to the ground. Yes, it makes for a somewhat one-sided world, but if the out-of-game creators of said world have to hobble their creation just to make it functional, that makes for a somewhat sub-par world.

WoW has a similar problem. Ask any lore nut and they’ll happily tell you all about the retcons, the hanging questlines, etc. present in this game we all know and love. Where did the Naaru come from? Are they “angels” for the light? Why is the Scourge’s version of undeath so much worse than others? Does it keep the soul of a person from going on while it’s “undead?” How does it do that?

The tentatively titled Junato’s Legacy is my attempt at creating a world that is unique and complete. Yes, it will be borrowing heavily from the real world in that I can’t spontaneously create a bunch of new languages (and even if I could, who would understand it), so it will be in English, but I will be doing my best to make each nuance intentional, instead of taking things like personality, gender, and geographical placement for granted.

And come November 1, we’ll see how far we get along with it.

I’ll be reposting all the stuff I come up with here in the hopes that someone will see something I didn’t. I likely won’t be reading the comments until Dec 1, but in the off-chance that I do, know that your commentry (especially constructive criticism) is much appreciated.

You know what the best part about stuff being in the PTR is?

New content coming in.

You know what the worst part is?

Nothing concrete to blog on without going into old content.

So what is a down-on-his-creative-luck writer to do?

Pad today’s entry with an extra 1,000 words.

Below is the MS Paint-drawn version of the map for my NaNoWriMo project.

I’m always found the line we, as players, draw between our in-game character and the person we play whilst AFK (ie: the real person) very interesting. Where I have no problem being called “Teris” in game and even over vent, if I was called “Teris” by my boss at work, I’d wonder who he was talking to. During down-time in a raid, when fizzlebang comes out for example, we joke about in-game stuff like “I wonder what would happen if I kicked the little bugger into the portal… would we get loot for beating the boss as he doesn’t come out?” We know it’s a game, we are all here to play it, but we still talk about Azeroth as if we were a part of it. So commenting on gnome-based violence is a sort of RP for us, though it’s weak as far as any RP rubric is concerned.

From what I understand of RP (which is to say “not a lot”), that’s the fundamental assumption all “players” make. If I RP in WoW, I assume that Azeroth is the “real world” and even though death is all around us (and I’ve “died” a few times myself), life is to be treasured whilst breathing and mourned once passed. This seems to be in direct conflict with raiding, as wipes are an unavoidable (and unpleasant) part of the game. So is it possible to roleplay AND raid at the same time.

For certain values of “raid” and “RP,” I believe you can.

Rewind about a year ago: I was playing around with various RP addons as I was in an RP guild. Being new to macros, I looked around and found that I could /say a phrase every time I summon a demon, cast a DoT, etc., so I started toying around with phrases that wouldn’t sound silly once said in chat. There were a few times where I would forget to replace the RP macros with the non-RP ones, so every now and again raiders would wonder why my character is screaming something about Curator’s approaching demise when they call for Curse of Doom. After an explanation or two, I noticed something strange.

Some of the other raiders started getting in on it.

Most of these folks found RP “weird.” They were OK with playing a game where fireballs can materialize out of nowhere, but they weren’t OK with “/e looks bashful and withdrawls his hand from the cookie jar” because it made the character too “real.”

So we made a medium, you say a few lines for a few events (entering combat, casting a spell, blocking an attack, etc) and you have the beginnings of an RP event, but without the backstory, in-depth character, and “weirdness” that goes along with it. This baby-step can either inspire raiders to develop their character further or it can just be an interesting thing your raiding group does. Either way, you’re developing your character through new experiences.

Wait… which character?

I’ve done my fair share of rep, item, and mount grinds. After the 2 day break I took from WoW after power-leveling to 80, I started on the slow, maddening path to getting my warlock exalted with all the Northrend factions. I even had a nice pattern I would go through:

1) Dragonblight for the Kalu’ak and Wyrmrest dalies (2)
2) Borean Tundra for the other 2 Wyrmrest dailes (4)
3) The 3 Oracles/Frenzyheart dailies in Sholazar Basin. Yes, I did do both sides (7)
4) The 6 Ebon Blade dailes in Icecrown (13)
5) The 6 gods-could-it-be-more-annoying Sons of Hodir dailies before you could turn in the relics (19)
6) The 1 daily for Brunnhildar Village, ’cause I want the polar bear mount (20)
7) The remaining Kalu’ak daily in Howling Fjord (21)
8) The daily cooking and fishing quests (23)
9) The two dungeon dailies (25)

After about a month, I got all the reps up to exalted. After the last one dinged, I sighed, logged off, and took another 2-dayish break. The closest I ever got to that same mind-numbing routine was the argent tournament dailies, and those were only 9 total instead of the 25 from before. Oh sure, I do the fishing daily occasionally now (usually when it’s the WG or Sewer daily) and I still do the Cooking one as it’s minimal effort, but gone forever are the days of 2-3 hour daily grinds.

I can look back and say “yes, I earned all those reps. It was maddening at times, but it’s all done now.

I have no such luck with the random drop mounts and items.

If you were to hang out with our guild at all, a number of things would become immediately obvious: We hate gnomes, Tobu > Chuck Norris, “rogl” is like “rolf,” and the RNG hates me.

I’ve been trying to grab the green, blue, and time-lost proto drake for months. The polar bear mount STILL eludes me, the 100s of times I ran brewfest gave me 1 of 2 mounts (the other went to a guildie), ZG is yet to hand me either mount, and Hallow’s end leaves me horseless thus far.

As an elitist bastard, I understand the allure to making some things rarer than others. I regularly use my Rivendare Mount as it is the only mount I have that has dropped for me by pure luck. Stuff like the Ironbound Proto-drake, the Amani War Bear, and the Twilight drake are all symbols of a group’s ability to work together (with varying degrees of success). The random-drop mounts are just being in the right place at the right time with the right number to back you up.

I do like how blizzard has changed the “status symbol” from the gear (ie: our guild is one of 2 that has cleared Naxx) to achievements and mounts (guildprogress.com and others look at a guild’s achievements, not their gear). By and large, WoW have made mounts a decent indication of a raid’s ability to cooperate. There are a few notable exceptions (Onyxia and Malygos), but there are more than enough mounts outside of these two dragon-bosses to compensate.

I suppose the question here is: why make random number generators the deciding factor for unique items? Back in vanila-wow days, the mark of a good warlock/paladin was the class-specific 100% speed mount. In BC, Druids with epic flight form were rare (at least on the front end). Why not have epic questlines as a dedication-check to status-items? I can count the number of people on my server with the hand of ragnaros and/or thunderfury with one hand (oddly, a guildie has both on the same toon)? Shadowmourne seems to be shaping up to be an epic questline for an epic weapon, players LOVE this kind of stuff!

And best of all: It keeps us occupied while the next patch is being worked on.

We are fortunate enough to know when our big moments are going to come in WoW. Cataclysm is supposed to be a world-changing event where earthquakes, tidal waves, and general nastiness will occur. If something similar were to happen in the real world, we would have no idea when it would happen.

Conversely, we not only know that it IS going to happen in game, but we’re anxiously waiting for the due-date.

The content patches act, in game, as a way to show that time has progressed in the world. Opening Ulduar, building the Colosseum, and breaking down the walls of Icecrown are all ways of showing that, though this is a static world by and large, time indeed is marching on.

For raiding guilds, it posses a unique conundrum. There is a frenzied rush to clear the new content as soon as it comes out, but as the next group of raids grow closer, the need to progress drops off. Personally, I see this as raiders thinking “well, we’re going to get a bunch of new instances that make the gear we’re looking at now 2nd rate… so why not just wait for the new stuff instead of working on the old?”

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. People who are striving for achievements and hard modes run counter to this concept, but that’s because the emphasis isn’t on clearing the instance or gear, but on set victory parameters that haven’t been completed yet. Anyone, at this point, can drop XT-002, but very few (at least on my server) can do so in 3 minutes (or go for heartbreaker).

Assuming that the goal is to raid as much (and as successfully) as possible, the previously-mentioned points could give raid leaders an interesting advantage. You know that as soon as a content patch drops, there will be a flurry of activity to get inside the instance (at this point, 3.3 is going to be the center of the raid-storm). You can use this to your advantage guild-wise by teaming up with another guild and using them exclusively as your guild’s “pug partner” as it were.

The benefits:

1) An established pool of (assumed) talent for heroics, past raids, etc.
2) More loot opportunities (as there are now 4 lockouts you can attempt instead of just 2)
3) Assuming you are the all-around better guild, there will likely be a few people who will want to guild over.

The trick here, of course, is to make, maintain, and grow a working relationship with the other guild. As simple as that sounds, guild (and raid) leaders have enough trouble getting reasonable communication from you OWN group, so getting feedback from another guild may be problematic (as you are just as much an “outsider” to them as they are to you). The simple solution, though somewhat less effective, is to encourage members to use one specific guild for pugs, though don’t make a big deal about the “pug” guild being a sister-organization of sorts.

Does it get what you want? Probably, but you’ll have to dance around their pre-existing raid schedule instead of revising it to work together.