[A] Travels and Adventures, dungeons and dragons!

As a game, World of Warcraft is about adventure; you take role of an adventurer who travels far and wide across Azeroth fighting evils, seeking treasure and solving problems. In role-play, most characters are inhabitants of cities and are bound by duty or necessity to their faction, or depend on it for livelihood. This is the attempt to bring travel and adventure into role-play.

In a nutshell

You don’t have to be an adventurer and a hero in order to have (heroic) adventures. All you need is a motive to travel; then you need to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. This ‘adventuring group’ is exactly that, an assorted group of characters who have a motive to travel. People are free to join the group for a part of the journey, the whole journey or even just interact with the group as it passes the zone they are in.

The characters have a motive to travel, and a motive to stick together. Everything else is open. One can travel in order to collect exotic spell reagents, another to climb ten tallest mountains in Azeroth, third to locate the mythic tomb of the first king of Stormwind. Adventures themselves will happen due to the different personalities and desires of the traveling companions, locations we encounter and people we meet.

Concept Explained

Reason to travel
It all begins with finding a reason for your character to travel. It does not have to be a reason that binds him to complete the entire journey or travel on months on end, but it must be sufficient to get him started. It doesn’t even have to be a noble reason. For all we know, one of the companions can be a professional thief trying to steal the heirloom dagger of a young noble lad traveling along. If you want to join this project, your character must have a reason to travel and his reason must, at the end of the day, provide role-play.

For instance, having your character just be restless and wanting to travel is a good reason, but provides little role-play. However, if this restlessness also means that your character will get agitated and restless every time the group camps for more than a day, it suddenly begins to provide role-play. This is not really black and white, and there are many ways to give a ‘bad reason’ a good enough twist to turn it into something brilliant.

You don’t have to share your (real) reason with anybody In-character, you don’t have to even share it with me Out-of-character. Sharing it with me OOCly will however give me a chance to may be steer the story a bit to allow your character a chance to come close to accomplishing it, or giving him a chance to shine and enjoy the spotlight.

Quirks and personality
If you are traveling together, you are bound around the same people for days and may be weeks. Having that priest wake up first light and hum a prayer can become a source of annoyance by the end of the week; at the end of the day, traveling together means that we will be role-playing together a lot. Interesting personality with all the oddities and quirks what contribute to it can make all the difference between a dull evening of staring across a campfire and telling something every five minutes, and having engaging RP people will be reluctant to log-off from.

Of course our characters are around each other more often than we as players log on, that means that even the little morning rituals become something public. It is important that we share such details either through role-play or by just informing each other Out of Character. They can be a source of role-play as well. For instance, a traveling mage-apprentice is practicing spells every morning. Another character likes this mage, and asks him “Hey, can you may be teach me a few tricks?” and they can either decide that their characters practice off-screen every morning and role-play out the aftermath when they do log on, or just role-play out the whole process of learning.

At last personality is the cause for risks and troubles. For instance we are passing by an abandoned crypt, and a traveling explorer’s league dwarf in our group just cannot let it go. So he shouts the group into camping by the crypt, and gathers some volunteers to accompany him down. Or a little thug happens to steal something while camping in Stromgarde, and entire group comes under suspicion.

Travelling – how it’s done
Walking for hours can provide for fun role-play, but in the end doing it every day is boring. For the sake of this event we will approach it as following.

If we are traveling by boat, we will find an empty ship in Theramore or Stormwind and spend an evening role-playing being en-route. This gives a perfect opportunity for other characters to decide that they are on the same ship as well and either spend an evening role-playing with us as fellow shipmates, or even use this chance to join the party.

If we are traveling on foot, and we just had two days of doing that already, we will see if there are any interesting sites between current position and point of destination. If there are, we will do it the hardcore way and just walk (probably stopping several times to have that crazy archeologist explore yet another crypt). If there is nothing of interest, we may just consider fast-forwarding to the next stop and role-play the aftermath of travel. Whenever we are traveling through a zone, others are welcome to happen upon us and interact with us. For instance when traveling in the Plaguelands we can easily encounter the Legacy of Dawn or the Scarlet Crusade patrol.

Adventuring – how it’s done
If this was a session of Dungeons and Dragons, we would have a Game Master. To a very small degree I take that role. All I do, however, is write short diary-like entries so that those who travel along but missed a day know what happened and I handle organization – times, places. When it comes to actual role-play, everybody’s a GM. This is how it works:
The group is exploring some ancient titan ruins in Badlands.

Archeologist-player thinks it will be fun if his character spots some mechanism in the wall, so he Role-plays:
/e scans the walls with his eyes until his gaze falls on an inscribed stone slate that stands out against the rest of the wall.
/say Well look a’ tha’, looks like we got us a little treasure after all!
/e walks towards the plate, trying to press it in.

Another player in the group decides that it would be fun if this could’ve been a trap, and the archeologist should’ve read the text first before just pressing buttons. He role-plays:
/e ‘s eyes dart around nervously as the chamber is filled with the sound of rock grinding against rock.
/say You idiot, why do you just go around pressing every fucking mechanism you find, you will get us all killed!

Archeologist-player decides that yes, it –would- be fun if this was indeed a trap, and role-plays:
/e swallows and lifts his eyes upwards. The ceiling of the chamber begins to slowly descend while both doors are being sealed by rapidly-descending stone slabs.
/say Heheh, every archeologist wor’ ‘is salt got trapped in a room with a descendin’ ceiling a’ leas’ once! ‘s my first. Exciting!

The trick is to take initiative, for the moment forget the restrictions and limitations we usually impose on ourselves, and just have fun and role-play. The trick is to take the story somebody else is weaving and take it for a little spin. You can see it as a forum-game of “Continue the story”. It does require different set of skills than we are used to, for instance one needs to be open and easy-going to accept others shaping the environment like that for his character, one needs to respect other people’s fun and role-play not to intrude too much.

If there is real need, I will always step up as an arbiter and resolve a conflict that –will- happen, especially at first as we are all getting used to this. I will also step up and try to do something if the story stops and there is no way to continue it by simple character-interaction.

Just keep this in mind:
• Keep an open mind and relax, we are all here to have fun. Just roll with the flow and don’t get worked up if something doesn’t go the way you would think is the most logical or realistic.
• The one who initiates the scene is in the end responsible for continuing it (archeologist from our example), other players in the scene should try to limit their emotes about the environment to suggestions. (second player emoted hearing grinding sound, but he left it to the archeologist-player to decide that it was indeed the ceiling descending)
• The one running a scene is but one person, and should try to take as many suggestions as possible. After all, we are all trying to tell a story that is interesting for all – usurping it all for yourself is just bad taste!
• Respect other role-plays and their fun, the way this is done has so many ways to go wrong; keeping the other player in mind is the only way of mineralizing the risk!

Visiting the Hubs
Once in a while we will stop at active and semi-active hubs. This will give us a chance to pick up new companions, for others to leave the group but also a chance to advance the story and do something fun. Just treat the hub as another adventure, even if it is Stormwind. The rules are different, there are more outsiders involved, the situation is different, but it doesn’t mean we can’t still have fun together! How about discovering one of your group members reporting the latest adventure to a cloaked figure in some dark alley!
The important thing to remember when in hubs, is to keep in touch out-of-character and always look for ways to create fun for each other. For instance, it can be the player behind our little spy from above who informs the rest of the group OOCly: “Hey guys, my character is ratting the group out. Not going to spoil what is going on, but may be somebody can stumble on him?”

And remember, when traveling we will meet a LOT of new characters. Role-playing this travel is worth it even if meeting new characters is all we do! We are all so used to our hubs and circles, that discovering that so much is out there will be most exciting!

If anything is unclear, don’t hesitate to ask me! I will include the explanation into the original post

PS: check the Looking for RP section for the actual first travel we are intending!

I'll see you there!

I've been wanting to do something like this with some people for a long time O_O

This is how's it done.

Now, to think up an excuse to join with any of my characters...

Thelos wrote:This is how's it done.

Now, to think up an excuse to join with any of my characters...

Well, Thelos can travel to SW for the CoL, and then accompany to Ironforge...and then get HOOKED UP on travelling with some awesome people like Exaythe!

Actually if he gets wind of the fact that Exaythe and Sorayah are planning to travel to Stormwind first, he might as well join them on that phase, since he will be headed to Stormwind for the CoL after all!

Though I have only scanned over this yet, this seems perfect for Xildon to join into, for reasons more than one!

I'm tempted to take part on Tolren