Slumming in Season of Discovery

I've poked around on the Season of Discovery WoW Classic Era servers off and on for the better part of a month, but I'm still somewhere around L13 at the moment. Part of that is because I'm just not giving it much priority, as I spend most of my WoW time on "regular" Classic Era servers, but it's also that I'm just kind of slowly leveling while everybody else is swarming all over Elwynn Forest and Westfall. 

I suppose I ought to work on obtaining more runes, but I'm just not prioritizing it very much. 

Part of the reason why I'm not prioritizing runes and whatnot is, well, I'm poor.*

And those items you can buy from vendors that allow you to read a scroll cost silver. When you don't have any silver at all, that can hurt.

I mean, I have to prioritize my training --or rather, the minimal training needed-- and then just build up as much coinage as I can. Once I can get to the point of making or gathering items to sell, then I can actually make some headway, but I'm not there yet.

The other big reason why I've not given a lot of priority to leveling in Season of Discovery is that I've been fascinated by the roleplaying that goes on.

Yes, I know, Lava Lash is a RP server, so I shouldn't be surprised that actual roleplaying goes on there. The thing is, however, when I tried out Bloodsail Buccaneers --both in Era and on Wrath Classic-- I found hardly anybody actually roleplaying.

How do I know this?

This was at noon today on Layer 1.

See those dots? Those are people who use the addons that can communicate via MSP (the Mary Sue Protocol) such as Total RP3 and marked themselves visible to others. There were actually 13 there --a couple were overlapping on the map-- and there were even more people who were obviously role playing without using the addon. The scanning range is the range that I can target a player with, so there are likely more people in other parts of Stormwind that I couldn't see at that point in time.

How did I scan? Well, I've downloaded Total RP3 and when you bring up the regular ol' map (the M key) there's a button in the bottom left that you can click to scan for roleplayers nearby.

I've had the add-on installed for the past several months, so I have a feel for how active the roleplaying community is on servers. If you actually see this many people roleplaying on Bloodsail Buccaneers in either Wrath Classic or Classic Era, let me know, because I've not seen it yet.

But here in Season of Discovery, the RPers have come out of the woodwork.

Yes, I filled in some basic info on Card.
Obviously, this is the "just starting out" version
of her, not the "I've seen some shit out there
in Naxx" version of her, which is some years later.

You can adjust what is visible in the profile, as well as tweak what the player's personality is so that people know what they're getting into when RPing with her:

You can select the standard traits as
well as add your own. And some of those
"add your own" can be... quite adult.

Have I actually engaged in roleplay? Nope. If someone were to approach me, that's one thing, but I'm not one to actively engage in RP with others first. Regardless, I've had a few basic interactions out there with a few people, but nothing worthy of "Goldshire on the Moon Guard server". 

Sorry to disappoint, but even if I had, I'd not mention it.

That's not to say that the RP community isn't active, because it is. It's active enough that a few players have complained about it, which causes me to raise an eyebrow. I mean, you're complaining that there's RP-ing happening on an RP server? Sheesh.

And really, there's not that much RP going on, either.

But there are guilds popping up for people to hang out in and RP with. Some sound rather tame:

And some seem far more, um, adult in nature:

At least they're up front about this.

Some other guild advertisements are that they're RP friendly but not necessarily RP focused. Still, it's far more active than I'd seen on regular Era or Classic RP servers. 

Do I feel kind of, well, icky about this? Not really. I mean, I've played D&D for decades, but naturally I've not played it to this sort of level of inhabiting a character as this sort of RP-ing would demand. This is a lot closer to what you'd find in the Society for Creative Anachronism or your average American Renaissance Festival. And yes, I realize my reticence to actively participate is partially driven by my reaction to the Satanic Panic back in the 80s, so old lies about what RPGs are do die hard.

*Sir Terry Pratchett had a great quote from one of his Discworld books about being poor that really hit the nail on the head. Ah, here it is:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

The thing is, I've been there. I've only been able to afford cheap jeans or shoes that fall apart after a year of steady use, so I end up spending more money in the long run just keeping myself in clothing than if I'd have spent more up front. But you need money to be able to spend a bit more for quality, and if you don't have that, that's the conundrum.