Ready for some acronyms? I have played UO, EQ, AC 1 and 2, AO, SWG, DAoC and Neocron. Some of them I played for a week and one for 2 years. I say this to underscore this comment: I have yet to have a real engaging RP experience with non RPers. By this I mean I have not had a conversation and/or experience where I was grouped with non RPers, but yet the entire event felt like I was RPing. However this was precisely what happened in my second group in WoW.

Quests in WoW positively enhance the Role Playing experience when in groups. Again and again, when I found myself soloing in an area, I easily found other players who were working on the same quests as I was. When they weren’t it was pretty easy to simply run them over to the right person and get them the quest as well. It took less than five minutes to run to town and get back in the fight. In some ways this rubbed me the wrong way. How was I supposed to feel like my quest was special when everyone was doing it? This is a logical flaw, but I am prepared to accept it. The reason I do, is that I have never had conversations like this with non RPers in other MMORPGs. My favorite took place outside Goldshire near the eastern bridge.

The quest involves a guard who has sent two of his men to investigate the supposed murloc threat in the area. The two men haven't been heard from and he needs your help finding them. We had just killed a stray murloc further up the road so we decided we could handle it.

We ran around the banks of the stream for about ten minutes of fruitless searching. We had traveled pretty far north and fbegan to suspect we had missed something. That’s when someone said "Let’s split up". I loved it because the first thing that popped in to my head was the thought you have in movies....that nothing ever good comes from splitting up. However, it still seemed like a good idea which is probably what the teens in the movie think before the axe gets lodged in their sternum.

So the three of us split up and started back south. Two of us looked on one side of the river and one on the other side. We had two occasions where we had to dash across the river to save each other, but for the most part we seemed to be covering more ground, relatively safely. We had come north on the west bank and totally missed a Murloc camp. Myself and the mage started talking about our suspicions that the guard died inside somewhere. This was when our Rogue told us she had found a corpse on the other side of the river.

We circled wide to avoid the camp and caught up with her. Lying between some rocks that we had passed on our way north, was a slab of meat, bone and entrails. It was like something wolves had picked apart but just weren’t done with. The rogue had inspected it and found a piece of jewelry that tied the chunk of meat to one of the soldiers we were looking for.

“Guess he’s dead huh?” was the glib comment from our warrior. I grabbed my print out of emotes and added a well timed chuckle. Then let the Rogue know that we had found a Murloc village just across the river. “That’s where I bet the other soldier is” said the Rogue. The reason I quote them is that they weren't really RPing, but they were at the same time.

We proceeded to start picking off the stragglers on the outside of the camp and worked our way to the huts in the center. We had a number of close calls and some really intense fights as we made our way to the center. Even though two of us almost died, we had maybe 30 seconds of down time through out our entire advance towards the village’s center.

As we cleared the first set of huts, I spotted another pile of meat at the foot of three of our fishy adversaries. We probably should have advanced slowly but we were too excited at finding what we needed to let the Marshall know the fate of his men. We ran swords drawn and magic blazing. The fight was intense. Runners pulled buddies, I almost died twice before we had beaten back six or seven Murlocs that joined the fight over the course of the battle. When one went down two joined its place due to roving scouts and runners who grabbed their buddies. When the last one fell, I cheered and yelled out “For Lordaeron!” It was a little cheesy, but the moment deserved the shout. Apparently my group thought so too. The Rogue cheered as well and the warrior danced a little jig.

Ok so all of that has happened in other games to some extent, but what I loved, was that there was no OOC chatter to ruin it. No one was saying “Murloc INC”, “oom” or “lost xyz buff”. It all happened so fast that we only had time to say what real characters would in the situation.

As we finished our quest and split up to grab some sleep in real life, I just sat at my computer with a smile. Fine. So I can’t level by exploration only (though you do get about a kills worth of xp just for finding something new) and I can’t level without combat. Maybe its not the MMORPG that puts RP back in RPG. But then again maybe it is. If I can have a totally in character RP experience with two non RPers, I wonder what it will be like if I find some actual RPers in game.

Tomorrow I will talk about Stormwind keep and why it makes EVERY city I have been to in any MMORPG a total joke. I am serious. From a RP perspective, it owns all. Period.

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