A Spot of Good Advice: From Imitation to Inspiration

Ahoy, Varendil here.

Does this look familiar?

That sounds like someone I know, I just can’t figure out who.  Someone with a name like that, dragged to Northrend… no one I know. Definitely not a major lore character from the latest expansion pack.

A good number of the RSPs on this site are those in which ideas are lifted from media whole cloth – Naruto this, Bleach that. Anime’s popular, but it’s certainly not the only source. Star Wars, Arthurian legend, Firefly, the sources are endless. These are all valid places to find ideas for roleplay and character concepts. Even characters within Warcraft itself can serve as inspirations for our own characters, but it’s important we know how to take these ideas, break them down, and build something new with them instead of simply ripping them off.

It’s said straight away in the Bible that ‘there is nothing new under the sun,’ which is funny, because it says that in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and yet someone still came along and made a far inferior sequel with too much character biography and not enough flooding the earth and killing families of random pious men. But this line is correct – the basic stories of human history are all incredibly similar. A hero goes into a land, quests about, defeats some evil, returns to his home and brings benefits back. Sound familiar? Sure, there are twists – hero is corrupted, hero becomes villain, hero brings curse instead of blessing. The pieces, though, are usually the same (I wrote a college-length paper on it, so I’m clearly an expert in the field). How many stories have some young man chasing after his dad? That covers everything from Oedipus Rex to Fallout 3. How many temptresses, how many wisecracking sidekicks? Han Solo is Mallory’s Gawain. It doesn’t mean George Lucas ripped off a 15th century writer, it means he recognized a common trait to a good story and made a good example. We as roleplayers aren’t inventing a new genre with our little Alliance or Horde redshirt’s story (and our redshirt nature will be my next spot of good advice, I promise you that), we’re retelling a tale told before, just bringing our own little spin to it to try and make it memorable and unique.

If we see an RSP like the one above, or one of the countless preceding on this site that has lifted ideas from some movie/book/TV show, it’s not that it’s simply bad. It’s that they’re only at the first step of what has to be done. The key in making good roleplay is to move past that first step. Instead of copy and pasting an idea, figure out why you like it, because that opens up whole new realms of opportunity.

Making it Work

1. What You Like. So. You see something you like. It could be a named weapon or a character concept or backstory or anything. I’ll use a personal example. I’m a big fan of Fullmetal Alchemist (the English version of the show(s), don’t even start with the SUBTITLES IZ BETTER flimflam) and noted how the Elric boys destroyed their home when they left to get their bodies back. So cool, right? I was in high school, gimme a break. I liked this idea, and it came to mind when I made my human warlock back on Feathermoon and Emerald Dream.

2. Why You Like It. I didn’t want to simply rip off FMA, though, by having my character burn down his house and write the date in his pocket watch. It was important that I figure out why I liked this idea so that I could figure out how to best make it work. It wasn’t the idea of wrecking the house that I liked, it was the idea that he always had to keep moving forward, that the past was full of sins and he had to keep on keeping on. This isn’t anything remotely new – in fact, it’s a trope – but I’d picked out the essence of what attracted me to the concept.

Oh, and careful with that link, that website will siphon your time away in a manner that makes a Wikipedia bender look brief.

3. Make it Yours. So. Cool thing identified. I have to apply it to my warlock. He doesn’t have to destroyed his house, but he can’t have somewhere to go back to. He can’t be from Outland with the Dark Portal shut, I don’t feel like bending lore that much. Gilneas is locked off, there’s an idea, but I don’t want to have to speculate at what’s there, or why he’s here. Hearthglen or another Scarlet stronghold? There’s an idea, but then I’d feel obligated to go murder Scarlets all day for RP’s sake. Lordaeron or Stratholme? Done to death. I’ve got it! Alterac. Not only is it gone, people don’t care about getting it back within the Alliance, so it’s out of mind as well. I’d settled on Crianas’s background.

Aside from basic rules of roleplay such as “Obey lore” and “Don’t godmode,” I think that knowing how to avoid ripping things off and what to do instead is one of the best things for a new player to learn. Regular readers here might think themselves above simply ripping off established media, but that step two, figuring out why you like something, is an important tool in determining RP ideas, and it might be a good thing to keep in mind when you see that <Beginner Roleplayer, Looking for Contact> tag on a guildmate or friend and you want to help out. What is it about Han Solo you like: is it the wanderlust, the casual attitude, the love of money? Answering that question is the first step in turning your character from Jan Zolo into a personal and unique creation.