Hello TORWarriors! We here at TORWars orbital command are constantly looking for new and unique content to keep you, our loyal followers, entertained. Meet Ace who is a Star Wars: The Old Republic role-player (RP’r). We have found a need among our content and that is in the RP arena. Ace has agreed to help us out by writing for you a primer of sorts. Some of you are avid RP’rs and really don’t need this basic primer, but many players are interested in the idea of RP and are afraid to try something out. If you need a place to start, then listen to Ace.
I would love to make Ace a regular here at TORWars. So, give him a nice big welcome. – Signed, The Editor
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Hello TORWarriors, my normal internet/gaming handle is Ace but within the TORWars guild you may find me as Xal’Griz, the evil Chiss Powertech, usually playing with my constant companion Keladrie, the true blue Imperial SIS Sniper. This is my first piece for TORWars and I just plan on keeping this first article simple, starting with a few common-sense guidelines I have found during my time as a Role Player in SWTOR, along with an overview of the different kinds of RP. I would also like to introduce myself as well in this first article, and that sounds like as good a transition as any.
My Chiss Powertech Xal’Griz. As evil as evil can be.
I have been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic since pre-launch, and have enjoyed it immensely, though I have never been able to put the hours I would like into it. But, that in turn has helped me from getting bored with it and suffer from many of the problems people had with the game early on, allowing me to still be as excited and exuberant as I was at launch about most things. As well as being a RP player, I take great pleasure in Operations, though I never get to do it anymore due to my scheduling, something that I hope can be fixed when I get to fifty with my Powertech with the new guild. And most importantly about me, I am a literal Star Wars super fan, collecting and owning roughly 80 percent of the written books and starting in on the comics, but that’s just a primer on me, now on to the purpose of this article.
Two Ways To RP
There are two ways to RP, both satisfying and for the most part, still fall under the same general rule set and etiquette.
The first way, and the most predominate by far, is what I call Cantina RP, because as the name implies, this type is most prominently found in the various cantina’s within the SWTOR universe. It is almost always fun, relaxed, and has no meaning other than spur of the moment enjoyment. Most RP guilds I have seen tend to subscribe to this form of role-play since it is easier to manage, doesn’t require as much time and effort and is also the way that most people meet up for RP. So, if you’re looking for a guild or if a guild is looking for recruits this would be the best place. Nar Shadda, Hoth, and Tatooine being the most predominate cantina’s I can think of besides the Fleet to sell your guild to potential RP recruits.
The second way is actually my personal favorite, so I apologize if it seems like I go into more detail with it since it is my preferred style. This is also very intricate and requires more in depth explanation for you to really understand. If I had to try and put a name on this style I would call it Arc Role-Playing, but if there is another name for it please feel free to comment below so we can all learn. Basically, Arc Role-Playing is where you, the player, write a back story for your character within BioWare’s story (known as canon) within the game.
Role-playing is not difficult if you follow just a few simple guidelines and rules.
People often wonder where a good place to start their own story is and I would say that before your character’s class story actually starts is a great place. This is so you differentiate yourself from BioWare’s original story canon. So, using your character as a portrait for your imagination, write your own story out, this is also known as head canon. Now that is just a simple way of putting it, the finer details are a lot more challenging and for me personally gratifying. The best example I can give of this style in practice is what my old guild (not founded by me for the record, though until its implosion I was a high ranking member) did which is, the guild founder RP’d as the Emperor of the Sith, and he elected a Dark Council which were RP’d by the high ranking guild members with administrative authorities. The rest of the guild RP’d their characters within the story that was being created by the guild leaders.
Obviously in each characters story they become some person of importance within the game’s story and galaxy, and given the number of players it isn’t exactly feasible for every Sith Warrior to be the Emperor’s Wrath (for example) so that is why the guild created its own story arc that started with the overall situations that the galaxy is in at the end of the main story, eliminating any of the plot specific elements that each class has. This allowed us to not be hampered with down time in the RP while BioWare created more content, and we incorporated the Operations and Flashpoints that came out into our Arc as one-off events for actual RP. Of course we still ran them weekly and daily, but they could and did only happen once in the canon of our story.
Behind every great RP’r is an equally good crew.
When my guild first started on this style of RP, there was a surprising (to me at least) amount of backlash from the server community against us, mostly stemming from our guild leader proclaiming himself as the Emperor. I would like to think that most of this was from the community not understanding what we were trying to accomplish, but due to the events that ended the guild it was more we had too polarizing of a guild leader (but that is totally off-topic and a tale best left in the dirt). I would also like to point out this is an example of how a guild would operate this style of RP, but it still has the same values when you are using it for personal pleasure as well, by removing your character from SWTOR’s storyline and creating your own.
Those are the two most common types of RP that I have found in SWTOR so far, but even those very different styles tend to follow and have the same set of guidelines for the actual role play.
Guidelines
I do not have a particular order in which these should be followed because I believe they are all important and of equal value, so I will just dive right in.
When in character (also known as IC), it is proper to use the /say channel, so that you are not spamming world chat, and hopefully when we have chat bubbles it will be how you activate those as well. It also adds realism for me because it shows up as “Xal’Griz says….” so it looks nice in the chat box. I also recommend configuring at least two if not three channels in your chat box. I have one for normal use, one for RP, and one for Operations, in order to make sure I can see what I need to see when I need to see it in any of those situations.
You can create a new tab (panel 1 and 2). Alternatively you can even create a new channel if there are others your RP with (panel 3 and 4). Decide what you want to see in your chat window (panel 5 and 6).
Also, for the sake of consistency, even if you don’t plan to be in a guild, it is nice to have a back story typed or written out that you can refer too when RP’ing. It also helps you to predetermine your characters attitude and demeanor, and keep track of your successes and failures.
When role playing I would recommend dismissing companions and mini pets. With only four classes to choose from (each subtype has the same companions for each class), you could potentially end up with the same companions out and I personally find that to ruin immersion for me. I would also venture to say that a good RP doesn’t feature the games companions at all, since, like I’ve said, they are interchangeable with someone who has the same class. The mini-pet thing is probably not so much an issue other than it wouldn’t be practical to have TaunTaun in the desert on Tatooine, and so on and so forth.
Pro Tip
Probably the most important tip I could give is this, never make a choice for someone or corner them IC into a choice that would hurt or harm their character without at first talking to the other player about it and making sure they are okay with it. Also, in order to make dueling as fair as possible I always recommend having an empty modded suit that looks the way you like. Of course, this only works if the other person has the same thing, so this would be more of a guild rule than random RP. Still, looking the part you are trying to RP is always a good idea, so I find having multiple sets of armor to be both practical and helpful.
This concludes all I have for this article; I hope that you all liked it and please leave comments and questions down below. Also, if there is an aspect that you would like me to cover or go into more detail about let me know and I will be more than happy to do that. Until we meet again, stay frosty.
TORWars Podcast #152: The Terrors of Nuturing the SWTOR Community
The reason your guild/guild leader had such a major backlash from the community is because he committed one of the most heinous fous pas in community RP. He declaired himself to be the leader of a major faction within the game, and as such an extremely important character within the game and canon.
It is considered a form of Godmoding. As a bit of an example, it would be like someone in WoW claiming to be Thrall, or the Lich King. It’s absurd and everyone knows it’s not true. You can be a secret and powerful organization, even a rival empire why not, but not the actual Emperor or the Sith.
Emperor OF the Sith… I wish commends could be editted…
But why can we not just rp as the existing empire? There is not a rule or stipulation that says the rp had to respect the existing canon. In that situation we are merely using the game as our sandbox. Now, admittedly he did take far overboard, hence why he has no guild now basically, but the idea itself its Not bad nor should it be treated as such. We all have to share the game no one way or person is more right than another. And your right that particular way is not conductive to community rp, but it was never supposed to be. You can still take that style and do as you said and make it a secret group or rival faction, but at the end of the day it matters not as long as the guild members are fine with it. The only reason that guild died was because the leader took a power trip against a favored leader, and I am sure any body who has been in a guild knows what happened next.
It sounds like it was his execution rather than his idea that was the problem. If you go around proclaiming to be the emperor, then yeah other players are going to go “dude stop that you can’t be” and I think that’s part what Kal said above, and part breaking immersion.
In SWTOR, the emperor has been in seclusion for ages. It’s irrefutable canon. I don’t RP, but as a storyteller, I’d find it more acceptable that the Guild Leader proclaims to be the emperor, but does so through less direct roleplaying. Setting up schemes and stories via once off suggestions to his Dark Council, maybe using some alts as message runners/emperor’s children. The emperor himself never directly interacting with the main RPers, but instead being a subtle hand in everyone’s story. It would be a Really Huge Deal for someone to interact with him in character, and then other people may not believe them, creating subterfuge and mystery within the guild’s stories and their interactions with other players.
I actually have no idea if this would work inside in game RP, but it’s just a thought? I’ve never tried RP, it has always seemed very intimidating.
That is actually a pretty good idea, foxesforsale. I would love to have that type of rp in a guild. You should give RPing a shot it’s a lot of fun. Even if you’re a beginner most people will be patient with you and give you tips if you need them. Ace and I love to RP. I’m actually better at making the characters backstories than rp’ing it myself, but it is a lot of fun for me regardless.
On the assumption that the RPer does not want to completely disregard the bioware storyline in their character, since these shared events may themselves form a good setup for RP, then writing a complete backstory for a character, while something many serious RPers will want to do eventually, can also be somewhat daunting, since it is a fair bit of work up front and requires knowledge of at least a decent chunk of how the class quest plays out, so what you write doesn’t have to be rewritten each time the game does something you didn’t expect.
A way to avoid these issues, is to make the character more emergent through the quests, especially the Class quest. Start by picking a few words or short phrases that describe your characters basic personality: Honorable, Selfish, Greedy, Friendly to allies, Dispassionate etc. As you make choices, especially the LS/DS choices, make note of why you picked a choice and refine these words into a more complete personality.
As an example: Your Sith Warrior may start simply as Honorable (and thus probably leaning LS from the get go), but as you play you may decide that he only acts that way towards those with what he considers real power, and thus will engage in an honorable duel with other Sith, but have no qualms about stabbing an enemy (such as a Jedi) in the back or torturing citizen #35472 of the empire.
This approach to character building can be fitted into both cantina RP and a more organized common story setup within a guild.