Fantasy Brewmasters

Any fellow WoW heads out there?

I've been playing since November 2004 (yep, that's when the game was first released). I can't believe it'll be the 5 year anniversary this month. It's crazy, and maybe a little sad, but what can I say it's like video game crack.

My main is Thodin, a dwarf warrior meatshield on the Lothar server. I'm also dual specced for DPS and have a dwarf hunter alt when for when I want to just pew pew things.

How great would it be if there were a bunch of us on one server and we started a guild called Fantasy Brewmasters. Only problem with that would be getting us all together on one server, because I know I'm tied to my server (friends and nostalgia and all that). But a guy can dream.

So, let's hear it. Do you WoW?

I had this posted over in the Warcraft Group discussion, but I kinda dig the forums more myself, so I'll repost here.

First things first:
PlayinitCool = Realm: Ursin, NE Druid, now 1.2 way to 76 (edited). I know, I know... WTF... 76? Fantasy Brewmasters sucks up too much of my time to play like I used to. Still love the game though! =D

Now... on to the guild:
I'd love to get a Fantasy Brewmasters guild together some day. Our guild bank would be slap full of beer, and we would have a rep throughout the server where anyone could ask a Fantasy Brewmasters guild member for a beer at any time... if the Brewmasters guildie happened to not have a beer with them, we would get all of Ironforge drunk for the night! I'm thinking an RP server would be the best way to go on this.
What do you guys think? What kind of server? Who would be up to joining the guild? What are your general thoughts?

Also, since we're on the subject of WoW...

Has anyone told their guildies about what we're doing? What's the general feedback from gamers you know?

I finally started playing WoW this spring... thinking I'd be able to progress through the game at my own speed since Azeroth's not going anywhere, right? Needless to say, I have mixed feelings about Cataclysm and wish I had started a few years ago.

After trying my hand at several race/class combinations, I settled finally on Tauren Druid. Her name is Muchao, and she lives on the US-Fenris server. She's been functionally abandoned since I moved to US-Sisters of Elune, and I'm probably going to pay for a server change to move her over to SoE soon. I miss her Moonkin form. Especially in battlegrounds.

When I started on SoE, I also decided to give a gnome a try. Fizzytwizzle is a gnome mage, and is nearly always in-character, though I am relaxed about it when people talk to me out of character. I love the RP, and will mostly respond in an in-character way, but I'm not going to get myself all hung up and demanding that other people do the same. I use the MyRolePlay add-on, and usually only approach other people who use it because I can look at them and be sure they're in-character. I have a certain degree of social anxiety that, after struggling with it all day in the real world, I can leave it behind by doing things in-character in the game.

I totally understand the "too busy with real life to play" thing. Muchao almost reached level 50, Fizzy is coming up on level 40. Other characters I fiddled with range from almost but not quite that point, down to a couple I still couldn't log in and get a mount for, even with mounts being at 20 now. I take the game at a slow, relaxing pace, and only for my "off time" at night and maybe a bit extra on weekends. Mostly, I'm too busy being artist/ wife/ errand-runner/ etc to be flying through levels and content.

On the subject of guild... I think it might be interesting to have more than one guild. I've never played on a PvP server, but I can see how the same guild would be quite different on Normal and RP servers. I can picture the guild being a big hit on SoE, but that could just be due to seeing the server through my gnome's eyes. She's part dwarf, was adopted by dwarves, and lives in Ironforge. Most of her friends are dwarves, except for a Night Elf who moved to Ironforge. I rarely see anybody who isn't on their way to or from a tavern, or who doesn't love to drink. I have to carry a stack of some booze with her at all times because of the drinking. And I incorporate her pets into the RP. I have a Pandaren Monk, so Fizzy will tell you he's name is Brewmaster Sweetbrew, and that he's visiting to work on inventing new brews to take back to Pandaria with him. Brewmaster Sweetbrew has been pretty popular among people who move in Fizzy's social circles.

I also agree with Faisca about some folks being unlikely to head to a new server. I'd hate to play anywhere other than SoE, after having tried quite a few Normal and RP servers before. But having different guilds for different types of servers might fix that?

I don't have Fizzy in a guild, but her dwarven brother is played by my husband, and I've told him about Fantasy Brewmasters. He thinks it's an awesome idea! Everything from the beer concept to the community-driven business model sounds to him like something that can attract passionate people and really boosts the "geeks are cooler than you think" image. Of course, he's a video game and fantasy geek who did his fair share of drinking in the Marine Corps, so what do you expect?

I also mentioned it to a friend who plays the dwarf hunter my gnome mage spends the most time with. I didn't really get an opinion from him on the overall business idea, though. He was kind of focused on the "I'm going to draw a dwarf for this and see how it goes..." part. He got gnome art from me once, so I can't blame him. Mostly, though, I don't get much chance to mention it to people because of the whole in-character thing.

I’ll definitely have to check out the MyRolePlay add on. Did you create your background story before you rolled your gnome, or did you make it up along the way?

As for the guild, I think it would be too cool to have it on an RP server. What I don’t want to get into though, is the old struggle of trying to start up a guild from scratch. An alternative for this might be to create a chat channel for the group. That way people can be a part of what ever guild they want and still feel like part of the group through the chat channel. I don’t think RP servers would use that channel in the same way though. Don’t you consider it out of character to talk in guild chat, or other chat channels, especially if you are out of earshot?

Love it that you’re passing the word on, and I look forward to seeing the Dwarf pic!

I created minimal backstory on the gnome before starting her. I'm glad I had some kind of story for her, though, because she's met several Night Elves who had amnesia at lower levels. That works once as an explanation for not having any backstory, but it got weird after the third of fourth time. One starts to wonder who is wiping the memories of Night Elves.

Mostly, I just let the character evolve as I go through the game. Originally, the trauma of the fall of Gnomeregan had turned her into a technophobe. I ended up really wanting to take engineering, though, so it worked out because one of the dwarves I roleplay with often is an engineer. That allowed me to shape the gnome's character so that his influence on her has made her less technophobic, but she's having to learn engineering from the very beginning because this is a different field than what she specialized in while in Gnomeregan. So her story remains consistent, even as she changes.

The whole chat thing is often weird to me. Some things seem to be very firmly OOC, like Trade or Local Defense. But other things seem to be up to the person or group. Guild chats, whispers, etc. (Although I still don't understand why some people explain the whispers with communicating by whispering into their hearthstones. I must have a different view of hearthstones.) For a chat channel for something like this, I'd say you can simply establish it as IC or OOC. I was in a guild for a while that had an extra chat channel for OOC, and everything in Guild Chat was IC, with the explanation that it was happening in the Guild Hall... a place that existed as part of the world we know, but also outside of that world's existence. The guild leader was a druid, so we worked out an idea about her having designed the Guild Hall by drawing on her own experiences with walking the Emerald Dream. I guess it's really not too difficult to explain how a chat could be in-character when you're playing a game that's fantasy-based to begin with.

As part of my roleplay with the gnome, I've had her write reports on things from time to time. I'll have to dig some of them up and stick them somewhere around here. Writing as a gnome should definitely count as storytelling.