Role-playing is lame… At least in my view of World of Warcraft. I just could never see the RP nature of WoW. Sure, it has a thick story, but the game lacks immersion. Anymore it feels like a first person shooter. You log in, play, log out. There just doesn’t feel like there is a connection to your toons anymore. This could be a problem with me and me only. Either way, it’s how I feel about WoW RP.

I purposely stayed away from the Landroval server in Lotro because it was “the unofficial RP server.” My experiences with RP have been limited in the past, I will admit. As much as I try to not look down my nose at RP, I know I am guilty of doing so.

So I rolled on the Meneldor server. Its population is a lot lower than I had thought. This might simply be due to the fact of Lotro being so immense. Though the Auction House was never very busy.

Listening to a few podcasts I kept hearing about player run events taking place. All of them on Landroval. I’ve been to a couple player organized deals in the past, but never in a theme park MMO like Lotro. I imagine it’s like a straight dude going to a gay bar. The guy is freaked out before he even steps foot through the door. The fears of being gang raped by horny dudes who simply can not control themselves scares the hell out of him. Then when he walks in and no one pays two bits of attention to him. The bar patrons do their own thing and have their own fun time, just like at a straight bar.

I decided to walk through the door. I rolled a Champion on Landroval. At first it was way more populated than Meneldor, but that could also be attributed to the Welcome Back Week that Turbine just threw. No matter the case, just seeing other players and on a much more frequent basis was refreshing. That’s when it happened. I walked into the inn in Combe. A kinship (guild) was in there… They were… RPing…

I sat quietly and just watched, much like a deer in headlights I’m sure. I guess I expected to see complete one-star activities go down. To my surprise, the players were just having meaningless small talk, but instead of doing it in kinship chat, they gathered their toons and shot the breeze in person. Oddly enough, I didn’t look down on them for their ways. I thought for sure I’d be a prick and roll my eyes at them, but I didn’t.

I guess I’m hypocritical like that. I demand immersion but not if it means I have to RP. Maybe I couldn’t feel immersed in WoW because I was so turned off to RP (or maybe because most of the RP I’ve ever heard of in WoW is from horny 14 year olds and it isn’t very lore driven…). While I wasn’t excited to see RP, I wasn’t turned off either.  I myself won’t be doing any of it, but to see others do it sort of made the game more immersive than it already is. Instead of mindless NPC banter, these were real people having real conversations, even if they were pretending to be someone or something else.

I’ll be checking out more of these player run RP events. They seem to be a nice change of pace from the normal raid/farm activities I’m used to.