See No Evil
Now shout out the snarky blog that give you what you want.
Click to embiggen
Syruna passes the first test for any night elven female – a name that would not sound out of place in the chorus of Freek-a-Leek by Petey Pablo.
Putting the Con in Conjunctivitis
RP pet peeve #1297: People who chose the last names of their characters based on what they are now. Your dark, crazy assassin Darkblade was most likely born Daybreak or something not so…cliché.
Darken Your Clothes or Strike a Violent Pose
We try to avoid clichés and age-based condescension as best we can here at the Roleplayer’s Lament. Keeping that in mind, all I’ll say about the player of this next fellow is that they seem to have some immediate, in-depth experience at playing a teenager.
Click for improved badassery
Either that or it’s Rob Liefeld himself. (I feel like I’ve linked that here before, but it’s so good that I couldn’t take the chance of not doing so.)
Lore, Interrupted
We all like More Dakka, Time Lords, and tieflings, but we don’t bring that stuff to Azeroth for some pretty simple reasons.
Click to embiggen.
This fellow might not have a big flashy canon behind him, but the idea’s the same.
Shut Up, Archimonde! You’re Not My Real Dad!
I’m pretty new to Kaldorei lore. I’m getting into the lore with my new druid, who just hit 85 (Run me through heroics, dammit!) and I’m interested in meeting other Kaldorei roleplayers. (Say hi to me ICly, ya ya?)
Sadly, when I am in Stormwind (Which is much of the time because Darnassus is so confusing in terms of banks and AHs and my guild RPs there), I usually find night elves like this.
Extremely tall night elf half Eredar in red armor that isn’t Mongraa? What has this world come to?!
Subterranean Pitlord Blues
It’s hard to read timelines with a blindfold and no eyes.
Click to embiggen.
Life is what you make it. I made it into tearing into things like this.
La Femme Makinà
How’s everybody been? As far as I’m concerned, you’re lucky to have me posting. Assassin’s Creed has me in its grip pretty badly. It’s painful to not be calling recruits down from the sky on people at the moment.
Almost as painful as this little self-promotion.
A Serious Lapsus in Judgment
Alternate title: Don’t Fear
Happy New Year! It’s funny how we all tend to expect a new year to bring a breath of fresh air, a new start. Well. The more things change…
“Eyes: Purple? Race: Demonic.” Oh, this is gonna be a ride.
Gold Star Character – GMH
We have received many e-mails and requests to do another Gold Star Character, but we haven’t had many Gold Stars to put up who aren’t our friends or guildies. However, the other night, while Varendil and I were RPing, we saw this:
- Full sized because it doesn’t need to be embiggened. It’s perfect.
See the tag after her name? Do you see that, people? It says ‘Beginner.” That means a beginner roleplayer can write an awesome, fabulous RSP without telling us her story line or god moding all over the place. A beginner roleplayer can write an RSP that states the things we can’t see on her character model without getting into how big her tits are and how you want to motorboat them. A beginner roleplayer has done enough research to know that some species of trolls have a soft layer of fur covering their skin. A beginner roleplayer knows that when you’re 6 feet 10 inches tall, you’re going to weigh more than 150 pounds. This beginner roleplayer also knows that female trolls are normally that height and isn’t trying to be overly cutesy by making the character two feet shorter than normal or making the character overly intimidating by tacking on two extra feet.
This beginner roleplayer has done what over one hundred people couldn’t do. The layer of fur, the coarse looking hair, the laugh lines, the silver capped tusks and the split earlobe are all cromulent details that should be put in an RSP.
Even the small section of OOC is perfect. No long winded explanations or excuses for their flim flam, no walls of text about RP fighting and how you could never beat them, just a simple request for advice and critique, since this person is new to roleplaying. The only advice we have is for them to never change.
If a beginner roleplayer can do this, why can’t those with Mature Roleplayer tags do the same thing? What is your excuse?
So, Jentin, troll rogue of Moon Guard, we award you with this Gold Star award. And because it’s midnight and Varendil and I are hungry, you get the Gold Star Chili award. Eat up. You earned it!
- Yum!
Love and Marriage
Not to toot my own horn, but I’ve always thought of Lan and Varen as a pretty good example of an RP couple. They’re responsible enough not to have a baby when they’re out fighting all the time; they aren’t carving each other’s names into one another, opting simply for wedding rings; and they’re otherwise roleplayed well.
Ladies and gentlemen, the “Mirror, Mirror” version of Lan and Varen.
Click to make the lovers swell.
Romance is a beautiful thing, isn’t it? Let’s start with the caring husband.
Meanwhile in FernGully
New, from the Roleplayer’s Lament: what you get when you get all your character concepts from “Newest Deviations.”
I’d say she got the idea from the store-brand costumes at Wal-Mart, but that’s probably a better explanation for the millions of sexy pirates on every RP server.
FFA: She’s Back! [NSFW]
Varen here. Which she? Only our most infamous subject since the guy that pretended to kill himself. “In-house,” so to speak, Lan and I refer to her simply as Bestiality Girl.
'Embiggen' feels dirty in this case. Click for full wall of text.
Don’t read all of it, please. I fear for your health. On the other hand, click through to see me break my rule on ad hominem attacks twice.
Overheard from a Citizen of Silvermoon
Hey, man, did you see this chick?
Oh, she'll embiggen you, if you know what I mean.
Just wow, man! A real knockout!
Are’lia! Wouldn’t Wanna Be Ya!
Varen here. Lan should be here in my secret lair deep beneath the earth’s crust in Wisconsin later tonight, and we’re probably going to have things we want to do more than make fun of bad descriptions.
Oooh hoo hoo!
So I hope that you all will forgive us if we take a couple days off from hardcore mockery. In the meantime, however, we’ve cobbled together a quick little RSP for your reading enjoyment.
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We’ve seen a lot of odd titles before for characters, but this one is new.
The Cliche. *looks directly at the camera for a moment*
Quickie: She’s Not
Oh, she’s exceptional, all right.
For a short RSP, this tells us a ton. Let’s examine it.
Murder Interruptus
Varendil here. One of my favorite kind of roleplayers is the self-contradictory kind. And if you’ve been reading this site, you should know by now that ‘favorite’ means ‘most loathed.’
Here we have a model of rippled and mysterious badassitude. Here’s a tip for every wannabe Cool Guy out there: Mystery and being an assassin and being secretive doesn’t make you into this guy:
It makes you into this guy:
We clear on that? Now let’s move on to the meat of things.
First, this isn’t MySpace. I do not desire a list of facts about you. That makes me want to RP with you less and makes you seem less mysterious, Mysterious Guy.
Second, come on. “Unlawful neutral?” It’s like chaotic neutral, but jazzed up to be more anti-hero. Do you know what the difference between unlawful and illegal is? Ill eagle is a sick bird, and unlawful makes me want to pimphand your character.
Seven lines into the file that you have conveniently provided for your “secretive” blood elf is the fact that his marital status is single. Immediately after this you state that he doesn’t have a wife. Oh, THANK GOD, because the part where he’s single left me with so many unanswered questions. “You’re single? How come there’s no ring on your finger? Ahh, because you don’t have a wife. Thanks for clearing that up.”
At 6′ 6″ and 249 lbs, you have a body mass index of 28.8. 30 is obese. Oh, and you’re a goddamned blood elf. And a rogue. You don’t stack strength, you stack dexterity agility. Somehow I find this a bit much. And then you have the gall to say “Body style: Lean, athletic.” Athletic I’d buy, lean I don’t.
Your hair color is blonde and you have a chin patch. Thank you for providing info for those of us without eyes.
We’re next informed that this fellow has weapons named Ebony and Ivory, as well as hidden spring-loaded blades.
When our powers combine...
It was either Danté or Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney. And just as a non-sequitur, I’m staring at Danté’s abs and thinking he must dye his hair black and become the guy from HIM.
Under Valariun’s career statistics, which I can only assume are provided here because the shipment of Topps cards hasn’t arrived yet, we see that this fellow has 41 Attempted Kills, but only 39 Successful Kills. It’s inconceivable that the other two would be failures for such a Cool Guy, and the numbers reflect this. The missing two are listed as ‘Refused Kills.’ What precisely does this mean? Did he go to kill someone but they politely turned him down? “Yeah, my death’s scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. You didn’t need to send someone across town on my account. No, you have a good day.” I can’t help but feel that if Valariun didn’t want to kill a target, he wouldn’t accept the job in the first place, or would quit before trying to kill someone, so then these wouldn’t be listed under Attempted Kills. Therefore I’m forced to conclude that these are individuals that Valariun began killing, but then changed his mind and pulled out, which is so much less satisfying and just leaves us craving more. And if he’s killing people so slowly that he has the chance to change his mind during the act, I don’t know that he’d be the “Legendary Assassin” that his title claims him to be. Maybe he’s legendary as the assassin that takes his sweet time killing you so he has a chance to wuss out if needed.
Finally, there’s the background paragraph. “Only one solid fact is known about the male; his affiliation and leadership position in the Silvermoon Shadow Guard.” Except for the part where that sentence has two facts in it: he’s in the Shadow Guard, and he’s a he. So we actually know two things about Valariun Nightwalker. And he’s bad at math. Three things we know. Oh, I’ll come in again.
How can we make this better? Well, for starters, I don’t know that we need a complete biography. It’s admirable that you have all these facts determined, but every character’s an iceberg: there’s always more to them than what comes to light. And it’s a sign of amateurism to merely reproduce cool things you’ve seen, like duality weapons and spring-loaded stuff. Work on breaking it down into its component parts, seeing what makes these things cool, and then creating something new within that vein. It’s the hard part, but it’s necessary to make your character feel unique, rather than a simple mishmash of other cool stuff.
Oh, and no theme songs. Nobody cares what bands you, or anyone else, listen to. Harsh truth. Well, maybe some people do, but they’re reading your LiveJournal, not your RSP.
Final thoughts: I’ll close with a remark that Lanuria made when we first discussed this RSP: You call yourself an assassin, yet come straight out and call off any PvP before it happens. “If you’re going to say you’re a bad enough dude to hit yourself in the dick with a hammer,” she said, “you need to be able to hit yourself in the dick with a hammer to prove it.”
And that’s why I love her.
Final final thought: Wait, doesn’t ‘Nightwalker’ mean ‘prostitute?’ Does this make the fact that he pulls out mid-assassination more Freudian?
Lanuria Dawnblade, a.k.a. Courtney Adler, aspires. She's an aspiring DM, aspiring photographer, and aspiring wife. She lives in Monroe, Wisconsin and complains about the weather far too much. She enjoys The Big Bang Theory and singing the songs from Glee.
Varendil Dawnblade, a.k.a. Taylor Vincent, is a 22-year old writer, student, World of Warcraft player, and 4th Edition DM. He lives in Monroe, Wisconsin with his fiancé and their jade plant, Esmeralda. He likes Douglas Adams and The Venture Bros. He hates Toni Morrison. Don't even ask. 
