• Dwarf paladins. Okay, I understand that Uther was The First Paladin, and that in spite of the fact that, say, draenei clearly had paladins (Vindicators) long before they ran into the Alliance, it's generally accepted that dwarves did not.  Fine.  I'm working with that (and it's got some neat twists that will add to my story in the long run) — but it's annoying that canon kind of shoehorns people into either having characters who were "battle clerics"/"battle medics"/"something that looks like a paladin and quacks like a paladin, but is not, in fact, a paladin" — or having them forced into being relatively young characters.
   
• Dwarves and the Light in general. Canon differs on the Light and its relationship to paladins.  The RPG sourcebooks all treat WoW paladins as classic D&D paladins, who lose their powers if they do bad things.  This is more or less backed up by Of Blood and Honor, although it's made clear that the Light can be giveth, and the Light can be taketh away — sort of, unless emergencies arise.  Frankly, dwarves in general are less "follow the Light blindly even though you can't see it, touch it, smell it, or swing a pickaxe at it", and I'm not at all sure how a dwarf paladin is going to react when she recognizes she's done something immoral.  (Well, I know how mine is going to react…)  Dwarves and religion are sort of hard to pin together at all, although I've seen some lovely things from dwarf RPers who touch on the connection to the Makers and Order for Holy powers/connection to Chaos for Shadow powers.  For younger dwarves, of course, this gets easier: a dwarf raised around humans is perfectly well likely to have some influence from her peers…
   
• Magni Bronzebeard and the War of the Three Hammers.  We have an approximate date for the War itself, but how long has Magni been king?  How old is Magni?  Dwarf lore, why are you so difficult to pin down?  (Actually, I suspect it really isn't dwarf lore in particular that's hard to pin down, it's just what I'm looking at right now.)  While I'm at it, I can't tell precisely how long the Explorer's League/Guild has been going, and what the hell happened to the rest of Muradin's expedition after Arthas grabbed Frostmourne?  Did they all end up with Baelgun, and did Arthas kill all of them?
   
• Dwarf ages.  I've seen some suggestions that dwarves reach adulthood at 40 and are more long-lived than humans.  Okay, I can't deal with the idea of an infancy that lasts four years at all (let alone the thousands of years it could conceivably last for elves), so I'm going with the ElfQuest school of thought here: they age to young adulthood rapidly and just stay there for a really, really long time.  I am more or less scuttling the "adulthood at 40" concept.  (Maybe that's when they start being able to vote.)
   
• Dwarves and written language. I took one look at this page on WoWWiki and more or less thought "Oh, screw that."  Look, I can put up with the idea that the humans introduced the dwarves to the Light — maybe (although since it really does seem like different races have different relationships to the Light that lead to similar skills and abilities, I don't see why the dwarves can't just have had those different relationships from the beginning).  I can put up with the idea that, before there were humans and before there was the Alliance, there were no dwarf paladins.
   
  But the idea that the dwarves had no written language before the humans came around can bite me right in my dwarf-shaped rear end.  Excuse me, humans, but you do not get credit for everything in the damn world.  Let me guess: the dwarves didn't have fire before they met the humans, either.  Or wheels.  What's next, we find out humans introduced the dwarves to boomsticks?  And beer.  Humans definitely introduced the dwarves to beer.
   

  Obviously, everyone has their pet class/race/etc., and humans and orcs were certainly the focus of the Warcraft world for many, many years.  It makes sense that their history is richer and deeper than everyone else's.  But why make a race as unflaggingly cool as the dwarves and then say "Oh, hey, everything the dwarves did?  It's really just because humans did it for them."  And written language?  Come on.  How do you have a race as advanced as the various types of dwarves and still say they've got no written language?
   

When it comes to canon-compliancy, I really enjoy the mental exercise of figuring out how my character could have fit into times and places without breaking obvious canon.  On the other hand, Warcraft spans so many things — the first three games, the novels, the comic books, the RPG books.  I'm sure the tabletop game adds things, and I shudder to think how much I'm missing by not playing the collectible card game (to say nothing of rocket chickens.  God, I want a rocket chicken).  But how much is definitive canon and how much is only sort of canon?  Is it like the Star Wars movies, where only what shows up on screen is really canon and the rest, while pretty neat, isn't confining on Lucas's need to make movies in the future?  Is it like Star Trek, where the show and movies are canon, and sometimes what happens in the books can influence and later affect canon — but only sometimes?

I dunno.  I've seen people who go both ways on this.  I've seen people who think if you don't stick to every piece of canon, including in the RPG sourcebooks, you're basically playing a vampire catgirl in Goldshire.  I've also seen people who don't feel constrained by the limitations the game puts on them (not every draenei RP backstory puts the draenei in question on board the Exodar when it crashed).  There's also the fact that canon doesn't always comply with itself — there are plenty of resources that say the Scarlet Crusade is a bunch of racist pricks who wouldn't piss on a non-human if they were on fire and they sure won't let 'em into their secret club (hint: We Like Red), but if that's the case, why do they have statues built to great Scarlet Crusade non-human heroes?  And how old is Anduinn Wrynn now?

I wish there were easier answers for all of this!  I would love a complete, detailed timeline marking down the birth and death of every major and minor character, plus when various things were built, when wars happened, and so on.  We'll probably never get that, because honestly, it's not easy for Blizzard to keep up with their own history.  Which probably says something about how hard it is for the rest of us.  It irks me to think I'm probably going to have to tack a note onto stories that says "By the way, I went with this canon, and not this canon, and also, dwarves are not in diapers for four years."  But I probably will.

Not so clear-cut these days! With new alts being rolled all the time, events that are brand-new to one character are things I did four or five years ago with one of mine. How do you deal with a character who's just found out that the Scarlet Crusade is being run by demons? "Oh, I've known that for years." "…*splutter* You could have told me before I went in there." Or is the news new to you again every time you hear it?

The more interesting question I'm thinking about right now is whether it's feasible to juggle a timeline somewhat — could a character of mine level up to 60, 70, even 80, without ever tackling some of the quests that should come up at 30, 40, 50? In RP/IC, could I get a character out to the Argent Tournament before she finishes the Wrathgate storyline?

Even WoW itself does some bending, folding, spindling, and mutilating to give people the opportunity to do the same quests without necessarily being at the same point in the story. Take Drakuru — if you've done his Grizzly Hills/Drak'Tharon Keep quests, you get one quest when you see him in Zul'Drak. If you haven't, you get a different one. Either way, though, you have the same goals, and people questing together can definitely work together on them.

As NaNo approaches and I hammer down some of the details in Nancie's life, I find myself pondering what order she might have taken things in. There are some quests she probably would have avoided at all costs when she was supposed to do them, but that would make perfect sense for her character now. But it's a pretty twisty timeline, the likes of which might get me a visit from the Office of Temporal Affairs, and I'm hesitant to go for it if it seems too jarring. The fact that my character could have skipped past things, that they'd make sense for her now in a way they wouldn't have then, doesn't necessarily mean it makes good game-and-RP sense to put the timeline in a weird and unexpected order.

(Leaving aside the obvious answer of "at the gryphon master, of course"…)

But seriously, now. Where do you stand on the use of Blizzard-created NPCs in a character's backstory?

This varies for me. It depends on a number of factors, mainly having to do with how important those NPCs are and how much use they get.  How am I expected to behave in-game around people with famous connections?

What I really love are characters who don't have famous connections — characters who are related to the tiny throwaway NPCs we see every day in game and never think twice about.  (Quick!  Name your favorite trainer for your class!  Okay, now name three other trainers for that class.  Can you do it?*)

Part of what makes WoW feel so rich to me are the fact that so many of these characters have first and last names and specific occupations, even if the occupation is "pie vendor".  What does Bimble Longberry do on her days off?  Does Myra Tyrngaarde have a son who loves baking?  How many kids does Vindicator Kaalan have?  Was Harbinger Haronem maybe a little bit of a bully when he was a kid?

Connections to characters like these make me squee; they're like finding extra easter eggs in the game.  I have a friend who RPs his dwarf as a member of the Thunderbrew clan.  Nearly everyone who knows him always barks for the Thunderbrews at Brewfest, and we've been known to say some rather uncharitable things about Barleybrew ales.  (I once had a quest bug in Brewfest, I submitted an in-character ticket, and the GM answered in-character… and my character found out people had been taking bribes from the Barleybrews, hence the quest not working!  Sometimes GMs are awesome.)

Maybe some of this has to do with expectations.  If I have a tie to a specific tiny NPC, I don't expect people to know about that, any more than I would expect people to know that my father is a musician, say.  But it creates a potential bridge to open up connection or conversation — if someone happens to pick up on the reference and wants to run with it.  (Man, now I really want to roll up Myra Tyrngaarde's son, who loves baking.)

How 'bout you?  What do you think of people who use Blizzard-created NPCs in their backstory/history/current events?

* I like to train with Sulaa at the Exodar.  There's also… um… Farseer Nobundo… and that woman down at the lake in front of Stormwind City… and that guy in Ironforge near the Hall of Mysteries…

The Players

• Romney: The media center in our bedroom. Romney dual-boots into Romney-Vista and Romney-Linux.
• Shetland: The audio-recording computer in the craft room.
• Leicester: Val's WoW rig
• Dorset: My WoW rig, largely inherited from Val's castoffs, which also functions as the only computer in the house that will talk to the printer
• Perendale: My laptop

The Scene, Part 1
I walk into the bedroom and turn on Romney-Vista, hoping to watch a little Star Trek and knit on a blanket. Romney-Vista boots up without sound. Media Center won't start. AVRT.dll has failed entirely. Restoring the system to a two-days-earlier backup point does nothing, even though last night, this worked fine. Also, Windows Defender won't load and we've somehow lost SP1, which now refuses to install. CHKDISK fails. o_O

Romney-Linux has been having issues with DVD playback (known, fixable ones which Val will get to later that evening). I give up and read a book.

The Scene, Part 2

• 4pm: I boot up Dorset, print something, and set Dorset back to hibernating. There is no indication from Dorset that there are any problems.

The Scene, Part 3

• 5:45pm: I hit the "power" button to bring Dorset out of hibernate. Nothing happens.
• 5:46pm: I power Dorset down manually and try to restart it. Dorset tells me there's some kind of CMOS error and asks if I want to continue. I blink a few times and tell it "yes". Val loads up WoW on Leicester as usual.
• 5:47pm: Dorset fails to boot.
• 5:48pm: I power Dorset down manually and try to restart it. Dorset boots, but bluescreens as soon as I load it up.
• 5:49pm: I power Dorset down manually and try to restart it. At this point, I'm getting a little worried.
• 5:51pm: As a requirement for boot-up Dorset asks us to choose one of two options using the keyboard. The keyboard is USB, and the boot process has not loaded USB at this point. Val tracks down a PS/2 keyboard in the garage so we can try again.
• 5:53pm: Val starts working on Dorset after Dorset's third blue-screen. I use Leicester to whisper my raid leader that HOLYSHITWTFCOMPUTERERROR. Everyone shares a moment of "OSHIT".
• 5:57pm: It starts becoming clear to me that Dorset isn't going to be booting up tonight. I switch to Perendale, which, mercifully, has WoW and LK installed, but which doesn't have the latest patch. I patch it and panic about my addons, trying to figure out which ones are absolutely necessary to go to raid. I come up with TotemTimers, Grid, GridManaBars, PitBull, Omen, ORA2, Bartender4, and BigWigs. I pray this is sufficient. I start installing addons.
• 5:58pm: I steal the mouse and keyboard off of Shetland and plug them into Perendale. The mouse is three-button instead of five and the keyboard isn't ergonomic, but it's better than trying to play on the trackpad…
• 6:17pm: Val continues working on Dorset while our raid goes and takes down Flame Leviathan. Go TRI!
• 6:20pm: Patched, terrified, on a keyboard where I keep hitting "space" instead of "alt", and having to use "Y" for push-to-talk, staring at a 1280×960 screen (as opposed to my usual 1680×1050), I log into Vent and load up.
• 6:22pm: I land in Ulduar for those last few trash pulls before Deconstructor. I get 6fps. I panic some more and try to beat my UI into some semblance of shape. BigWigs and ORA2 frames are taking up the entire screen, I have no raidframes, and my performance is abysmal. I ask my raidleader if he can find someone to replace me. Turns out I'm the fourth person to have computer failure tonight, and the raid is looking dire.
• 6:26pm: I set every single setting to minimum (except anti-aliasing, without which I get seasick, and projected textures, without which I will die), turn off every addon I can possibly live without (this includes PitBull at this stage), and log back on. This brings me up to 15fps, sometimes as high as 30fps. This is playable. I go back to fussing with my UI.
• 6:34pm: The raid has been filled with bodies, and my UI is playable even if it terrifies me. I have Grid back. We go smash the crap out of Deconstructor.
• 6:42pm: Getting killed now makes me say "Oh, thank God, I can work on my raidframes." During the trash and setup for Kologarn, I successfully set up Grid and get my alert for Stone Grip working. We kick the crap out of Kologarn.
• 6:50pm: I have a UI again. In fact, I'm starting to kind of like the new UI. It involves TotemTimers, Grid, GridManaBars, Bartender4, BigWigs, and ORA2; I have decided that MT frames are actually kind of neat. My screen is still not at native res and therefore looks scary-bad, but things are working pretty well all things considered. I can play this way.

OH MY GOD. No, really. OH MY GOD. This is not something I really wanted to deal with last night. I'm hopeful that the issues with Dorset will be fixable, but I'm grateful to say that I can play like this tonight, at the very least. I'm really grateful that my laptop is powerful enough to run WoW. Today I got Quartz running on the laptop in hopes that it won't eat up too much memory and that it'll help me with some things, and I looked really carefully around at the Blizzard UI, trying to determine what I can actually make use of. I found an option to use a modifier to cast something on my focus target, which, OMG, wow, that sounds amazing — I mucked around with some keybindings to see if I can make use of that.

In the meantime, my raid is awesome for putting up with me last night, and I am glad I did not completely go "splat" when trying to heal. It was a rough night for everyone, but I felt like our camaraderie and morale was at a surprising high for all that. It was one of those nights that reminds me how much I love my raid and makes me glad to be there. *warm fuzzies* I was especially happy with the healing squad, who was down a player (I'd say "key player", but our heal squad is so tightly-interwoven that we're all key players, and we work amazingly well together), and had one of our beloved boomkin step in for us, shaking those branches with the best of 'em. (I was so distracted with the UI issues that it took me forever to notice her, but once I did, Teu squeaked and clung to her branches.)

Oh, and I did get some folks going in on the chicken-sacrifice plan with me, from the healer squad, after Razorscale once more refused to drop our healy hammer. I don't know about anybody else, but for me, I just want to see things DROP. If something drops even once, even if I don't get it, at least I feel like someone's getting some benefit out of it (and with my healy team, I never feel like an item is wasted so long as one of us gets it; I'm just as happy for everyone else as I am for me). If we never see it drop, that's when I get bitter. I'm seriously considering getting started on the sacrificial chickens tonight, but I'm kind of exhausted from wrestling with computers all last night, and I'm not sure I can handle doing a roast before raid. Next Thursday, though, it's going to happen.

3.1 brought about a host of nasty mana regeneration nerfs. Most notably for me, Mana Spring Totem got changed to a replenishment-esque x mana every 2 seconds buff to a Blessing of Wisdom clone — perhaps even the anti-Blessing of Wisdom, since Mana Spring totem now removes Blessing of Wisdom if I drop it. (Eeeuuurgh.)

I hit on a metaphor for why I don't like the mana regeneration nerf the other day, and if this is too pretentious, forgive me, but here's the deal:

Healing is an art, not just a series of spellcasts. Working with a really good healing team is utterly fantastic, because between knowledge of each other's personalities, tendencies, strengths, and instincts, you have a pretty good idea of whose healing is going where when stuff starts happening to the raid. Ulduar has given us a bunch of nasty raid-wide damage to deal with, and yet because of our healsquad leetness, we've adjusted pretty darn fast and have come up with a lot of reasons to use utility talents and abilities that didn't come up very often in Naxx/Maly/Sarth. The healer channel is full of intelligent strategy and ways of keeping people alive, and that? That's fun.

I will grant you that perhaps the complete and utter lack of worry about mana regeneration is not what Blizzard had in mind for healsquads. Given that Mana Tide totem is a 31-point talent — once the crowning glory of the Resto tree — you can understand that they want us to need that sucker. But it's frustrating to have synergistic abilities (Mana Spring totem/Blessing of Wisdom) turn into competing abilities — since Mana Spring removes BoW, if we're going to use BoW at all I can't have Mana Spring up at all, lest it remove the buff from someone who's going to go out of range later. It's frustrating to know that I can help with mana regeneration, but to have one of my key utility abilities (+1% hit) party-only, so my raid has to pick between stacking me with the healers for mana regen or stacking me with melee — and usually the tanks — for hit, tremor totem, and disease/poison cleansing totem.

Worrying about mana regeneration is like having to worry about how much your paint costs. Okay, yeah — paint costs do go up, especially with the economy in the shape it's in now. But at this stage, our healsquad has a team that's been winning blue ribbons at art shows for the last six months, and now we're being told "your art is too nice — we're increasing the cost of your paint so your paintings will look crappier."

Sigh.

I like working out new ways of working with the healsquad to improve our efficiency, help each other out if we've got issues, and stack our buffs in the most synergistic way possible. I'm sure in another month or two, we'll have worked around this. But it's a pain in the tail having to rework my spec over and over again because the artwork the healsquad turned out was too damn good.

School #1: Thinks that camping a single spawn point means they have called dibs on that spawn point, and anyone who manages to click the egg in that spawn point is "ninja-ing" that egg from them. Whispers people with rude tells when someone from School #2 comes along:

School #2: Thinks that all eggs are fair game for everyone (after all, no one has to spend money or time causing spawn points to occur), and that people camping the spawn points are effectively griefing the event (as while one individual person camping a single spawn point doesn't do much to harm someone else's ability to collect eggs, when every spawn point is camped, there's no way for anyone else to collect eggs; more people want to collect eggs than there are spawn points, even if you visit all four home cities for your faction). Is willing to put up with rude whispers from people in school #1.

It reminds me of one of my least favorite quests in the game — Digging for Prayer Beads.

When first implemented, this quest required you to purchase a 2g item as well as some other miscellaneous crap — at which point you had to follow a dog around town, trying to collect an item from spawn points on the ground.

While 50 other people tried to use the spawn point before you did.

Eventually, I'd had so many damn beads stolen out from under me that I was willing to steal someone else's beads. Not the way I like to play the game, but I'd lost a dozen gold or more on this stupid quest, and I was sick of it. In the long run, the quest was altered so you only needed to spend a couple silvers to activate the dog, and once activated, anyone on the quest could loot the spawn point with the actual beads in it.

You would think Blizzard would've learned something about overpopulated servers and spawn points — someone on the forums even suggested an alternative, where an egg might be active for a short period of time, and during that time anyone could collect an egg from the spawn point — but no. Instead we've got a horrible, miserable, awful way of dealing with spawns that requires you to either be willing to stand your character in a single spot for literally hours at a stretch, and then get indignant if you happen to miss the spawn while you're reading/tabbed out/looking at Slashdot on your other computer — that egg is YOURS, damn it! — or run around, desperately trying to grab eggs and looking like a jerk while you do it.

This is a stupid, stupid, stupid stupid stupid way to run an event, and I want no part of it. For full disclosure, yes, I'm in school #2. I have no issues with camping spawn points of, say, quest mobs, and people forming a line — that even worked great during the overpopulated phase when trying to complete Conversing With The Depths; people really did form a single-file line and wait their turn, cross-faction, even! But when you're talking about something where some people are going to want 500 or more freaking eggs, and the spawn points are limited, and the number of people wanting eggs far exceeds the number of available spawn points…

I don't complain about bad decisions on Blizzard's part very often (you didn't hear me talking about how frustrated I am over the change to Mana Spring Totem), but this? It's very, very bad design.

What really gets me about this is that these sorts of events are supposed to be fun. It's great when we all hang out and cooperate, when there's a good reason to stick around someplace because people just aren't finding dwarf females, and so on. But this? There's no cooperation. There's no interaction (at least no pleasant interaction). I got lucky and got a bunny within the first 20 eggs I opened, and yes, the bunny animation is adorable… but screw this noise, seriously. I do not want to play the game as if I'm a big flaming jerk who doesn't care about other people's ability to complete their quests (and no matter which school you're in, you get to be that person during Noblegarden).

Back to the Argent Tournament for me. And also, if it turns out this comment is telling the truth about what happens to the Elwynn Lamb if you've had it out for long enough… words are not going to be sufficient to contain my ire. I don't know what the hell Blizzard might be thinking, putting in a non-combat pet that repeatedly dies, but I wouldn't put it past them, and that's just — for five years I've been wanting a non-combat sheep. I don't particularly want to have to watch my dream pet die over and over again, thanks. (You'd think they might realize that, given that no other non-combat pets die, and that most of the ones which have cute animations have cute ones like falling in love. But no.)

If your "alt" gets to go raiding while your "main" only gets brought in to buff the raid with Spirit (and only then when the disc priest is out sick), you may have a new main.

If you have to change your screen name from your "main" to your "alt" on your raiding board so people will know who the heck you are, you may have a new main.

If the new expansion comes out and your "alt" hits 80 before your "main" hits 71, you may have a new main.

If you're still not sure what the 51-point talents for your "main" are, let alone what they do, you may have a new main.

If your "alt" hits 450 cooking, fishing, and first aid before your "main" even sees a scrap of Frostweave — even though she's a tailor — you may have a new main.

If your "main" is wearing heirloom items she got from your "alt", you may have a new main.

If you roll a second version of your "alt" so she can level up side-by-side with the toon she leveled 1-70 with (in other words, you have a second version of your "alt" purely for RP reasons), you may have a new main.

And, most relevant today,

If you get absurdly, ridiculously excited over registering and setting up a domain and email address which are 100% associated with something your "alt" once said… but you have absolutely no urge to register a domain for your "main", even though you can think of the perfect domain name¹, you may have a new main.

I no longer try to deny that Teuthida (and not Ovistine) is my main, but it was a long time before I could admit it! At first, I called her my "raiding main" (Ovistine was still my "RP main"). But at this point, I've put as much thought into Teu's backstory as Ovi's, and I've rolled a second Teu in order to play her with her companion Valyrie.

It's funny that it wasn't hard to admit this before. My first main was Agnesdea, a human priest who now lives on Sisters of Elune. I was happy to make Ovistine my main; this was back in the days when being a dwarf priest mattered a lot to a raiding team. Not only that, I'd gotten into some lovely RP with the foremost dwarven guild on my server, so Ovi had plenty to do! At first I didn't think I had too many priests (Agness stayed shadow, Ovi was Disc/Holy), but eventually — and especially with the upcoming dual-spec ability — Agness got re-rolled as a warlock. I'm perfectly happy with that.

But I do miss the twirly braids sometimes. In fact, when hairdressers came in, I took Teu to a barbershop and got her as close to braids as I could get (pigtails). I'm pretty sure twirly braids add a significant amount to healing, and pigtails come close.

At any rate, welcome to SandwichRations.com! I'm pretty thrilled to have this domain set up. And if I end up with a new main sometime in the future… well, she'll have to learn to pack picnic baskets, that's all.

^1: "twirlybraids.com"

These days, Anna keeps posting Friday Five posts and I keep wanting to write things, and I never end up doing it. And there are all kinds of things I want to babble excitedly about. So what the heck — I'll give it another go, and if I don't post much, well, you can catch more activity from me on my knitting blog or my review blog. Because I totally believe in the value of compartmentalizing!