Player Event Tips: Scripted / Theatrical Events

These sorts of events are where you will find your preparation for the event to be more important. People generally are not going to actively participate in your event so it’s all on you to make the event entertaining and worth their time.

Examples of Scripted Events

• Weddings
• Funerals
• Guild Ceremonies
• Plays
• Fashion Shows

I would say that timing would be the most important thing here. You should constantly keep the event progressing on. Think of it like a radio program. Dead air is bad. Role-players are a patient bunch but you have to keep things moving. I’m not recommending you speed type through your event but keeping a good pace so people realize what is going on is important. You know it’s going a tad too slow if you hear people asking things like “Is that it?” or “Are we done?”

This is going to sound rude but you should think of your audience as being about six years old. A six year old child can sit for a certain amount of time and listen well until their attention span snaps. When that happens you will find your event disrupted by attention wanting crazy people. I’m not sure if people just see a crowd and can’t keep their crazy in or if they really have a short attention span but you will want to avoid the six year old outburst if at all possible.

Do not misunderstand me, not everyone who attends events is this way. In fact, most are not. But there always is that one six year old in the audience and you will want to plan your event around their attention span for the sake of everyone else’s enjoyment.

A good rule of thumb for a scripted event is twenty minutes to an hour. If you have it shorter than twenty minutes, people will gripe about spending 10 minutes on a griffin for something that ended so quickly. If you have it more than an hour you’ll get the crazy attention starved six year olds.

Not everything fits into this time frame and that is perfectly alright. I do recommend that if you plan the event to last longer than an hour that you mention it when you announce your event. It doesn’t have to be formal, a simple “I suspect this event to last 2 hours” is fine.

As with many things, communication is the key. If you are running late or hit an unexpected snag, simply communicate it to your audience. It may feel a little embarrassing to have to do so but you’ll find that the audience is more patient when they know what’s going on.

Your goal is to have everyone walk away saying “That was a great time, I’ll make sure to attend at the next event”. Hopefully I’ve helped you a little in achieving that goal.

General Tips

• Type out what you plan to say and keep a print out near you during the event. There could be a lot of things going on and having the script in front of you could help you find your place when distracted.
• If possible, macro the text so you don’t have to spend your entire event frantically typing. You can also have the script in a file open in the background and copy/paste in the script although I don’t recommend this, it may work better for those who use windowed mode.
• If you have actors other than yourself involved, make sure they have their parts scripted and given to them before hand. If long and complex, consider a rehearsal. Make sure they are all in a group with you so you can quickly communicate to them during the event.
• If there is a lot of movement or a large space you are performing the event, make sure your audience is close enough to hear you. /say does have a rather short range.

Caught an Opera Tonight

Tonight good Sir Geearthur invited me along to Karazhan again. I was more than happy to attend. Keste was able to join after the Moroes fight due to our rogue having to leave. We were both so elated to be able to be in Karazhan at the same time.

Team Banana seems to have grown together and are working together much more effectively since I last joined them. We were able to handle the Maiden without any problems this time around. I was so excited to see what was next.

I know Karazhan is old news to many of my friends but I can't help but be in awe of this dungeon. The Opera event is the most amazing thing I have seen thus far. We had Romulo and Julianne for our show and were able to bring down the house so to speak. Ok, so that's a bad pun but I cannot describe how excited I was to experience this. The entire event was a real production! The added bonus of doing it with such wonderful friends, not to mention my loving husband, made it an evening to remember. Luckily I had done my homework and advanced reading of this particular event so I was able to jump in after snapping out of my original gawking mode.

It was a very fruitful evening for me as well. I walked out of the dungeon with Grasp of the Dead as well as the Boots of Foretelling. I am so pleased with how well everything has been going for me. Gee says they are continuing Karazhan on Saturday. I hope they are still in need of a mage and her furry hubby companion.

Arenas ... I'm Doing It Wrong

Let me preface this with the fact that I like PvP. There are several things that I like about it.

• You get to smash people in the face.
• No need to find 4 other people.
• Relatively quick and easy to get in and out and keep yourself occupied.
• You can take care of other little day to day tasks while in queue and not feel like you're holding anyone up.
• Smashing people in the face!

With most of my characters, I feel comfortable and completely at ease in battlegrounds. I have to say my shadow priest would be top ranking as my favorite; running in Warsong Gulch melting faces and capping flags. In fact, I love it. To the point that my friends thought I was a tad off and wouldn’t even try it with me. I simply talked about it too often. (I find out now that they’ve since discovered the wonders of PvP and are happily playing without me. /sigh)

My problem with Desdarii is I didn't PvP with her from the beginning and I'm out of practice. I flip out and don't remember all the skills and talents I have available to me. I can get away with this sort of behavior in the battlegrounds. Eh, so I die again. It's a quick reminder that I have ice block and should use it. I dust myself off and go back out and the overall goal of the BG is marginally effected if at all. Plus I'm familiar with the battlegrounds. I've played many different class types through them. I understand what's going on and feel I do what I can to make myself useful.

Enter the Arenas

First a little history as to why the Arenas are so new for us. Keste and I quit playing WoW last year right before the Burning Crusades came out and returned in December of 2007, leveling up horde characters on Khaz Modan. This whole concept of Arena was new and wondrous to us. We never tried it with our horde 70s and decided we wanted to try it for sure with our Mage and Druid. We expected to get killed but we really wanted to see it. Plus, we came up with a really cute name: We Will Rawr Pew! Ahhh… it still makes me giggle.

So Keste goes through the process of setting up our 2v2 team and one evening we set some time aside to give it a try. Like I said, we expected to get killed. We were doing it for fun. The experience of something new. That is why it came as such a shock to us that we logged out angry and upset.

We weren’t killed. That is really not a good description of what happened. We were decimated. My mage honestly could not stand up for more than 2 seconds in any match. Keste didn't fair much better but at least he got to live long enough to watch me die. It was several matches before I even could claim I at least caused someone some damage before dying quickly. That was it! I was proud I could damage something before dying.

How Do We Compete?

I’m sure Arena pros out there can give me a million different reasons as to why we experienced this but we're really stuck as to what to do now. Here are some of the thoughts Keste and I were throwing around.

1. We are totally new and unfamiliar with the setting. In one match Keste and I were facing the wrong way and didn’t see the doors opening behind us. /blush
2. We are severely under geared compared to these teams. We have gear that has us about Karazhan entry ready while our opponents are in PvP purples.
3. Mage/Druid combo may not be the best. Not really an option to change it. We Will Rawr Pew!
4. It is very close to the start of Season 4. As I understand it, everyone’s ratings are reset making even the heroes of season 3 at the same rating as us. Probably not the best time to try to break into the Arenas.

There may be other reasons but these are the ones we could think of. That night we left the Arenas claiming that it just wasn't fun and we'd go back to doing things we liked. I think I even exclaimed hatred for the Arenas, but I'm prone to extremes at times. We've since cooled down from the defeat and are willing to give it a go again. What we are left wondering is, how do we compete?

We talked about trying again in a month when hopefully the better teams will rank up and we’ll have others just breaking into Arenas similar to us to match against. Perhaps giving us at least a chance to kill someone. (Baby steps here. We don’t have to win; we just want to kill someone.) In the meantime, how do we go about preparing for this task? Should we be running the battlegrounds to get the PvP gear available with honor? Will that be enough to give us a shot? Or is it simply too hard to get into the Arenas now that we’ve waited until season four to jump in?

I leave that open to anyone willing to give advice. We certainly need it.

Can't Get Us! We're Safe!

Last night my guild mates Stropothrina, Keste, and Cyllinth along with our dear friend Dumadin wandered into Shattered Halls to see what we could see. Most of us had never ventured into the halls and were experiencing everything for the first time.

As it happened we had a fairly easy time making our way through the dungeon. We started slipping out of the "always on edge" reactionary fighting attitude to one of an outing with friends. Seems a little silly to think of raiding a dungeon this way but it helps me feel more at ease.

During one of the fights Dumadin was experiencing some sort of troubles. His reaction times were slowed to a crawl and he claimed to be effected with some sort of ailment called "Lag". I don't know what that is, but I hope it's not contagious! I was standing right next to him!

Because of Dumadin's difficulties I yelled to all the orcs, "TIME OUT!" Rina thought this was very funny and we started discussing how it would be great to play a game like tag with the orcs. How we could call "Time Out" if we needed it and how we could run to an object to be "Safe" so they couldn't tag us. We decided barrels inside the dungeon were considered "Safe". It proved to be a good choice as they were placed throughout the dungeon.

Before we faced the Warchief Kargath Bladefist, Cyllinth sort of faded away. We waited to see if she returned but she did not. I hope that is not an extreme case of "Lag". Again, I was standing next to her! While we waited for Cyllinth, Rina and I hopped up on the final barrel for a photo opportunity. When Cyllinth couldn't return to us, we called in Aloenus to come and assist us with fighting the Warchief.

Overall I'd say I had a very productive and fun evening!

Learn 2 RP: Emotes

One thing you will quickly learn is a lot of role-players love to emote. Using emotes instead of words are a great way to describe your character, their actions or the situation better so that those around you understand you better.

Example:

Keste: Hello Desdarii!
Desdarii: Desdarii squints trying to focus on the familiar face.
Desdarii: Oh hello there, Keste! I almost didn't recognize you.

There are many emotes built into the game already that you can use with slash commands. Some of them have actions, some of them have vocals, some of them just display emote text on your screen. Most of them will say different things based on if you have someone targeted or not so make sure you try both versions out. Don’t worry about memorizing or knowing all of them. You will quickly develop your own favorite set of emotes that you’ll be using over and over.

As a word of warning, some of the built in emotes do not necessarily do what you think they should. For example you might think that /shake would offer your hand to someone in greeting; instead it says you shake your rear at someone. Not a very friendly greeting! Just look over the list or try an emote out first before using it in a RP situation.

You can create your own emote in game by typing: /em or /me

Example:

/em takes a sip out of her flask and slips it back into her pack.

Will appear in game as:
Desdarii takes a sip out of her flask and slips it back into her pack.

Creating your own emotes will not cause any actions or vocals to happen with your character but the text will be there describing what you are doing. These emotes have the same range as /say and will only be visible to those around you.

You can also bring your pets to live by adding a ‘s at the start of your emote.

Example:

/em 's kitten curls into a ball on her lap.

Will appear in game as:
Desdarii 's kitten curls into a ball on her lap.

The opposite faction will not understand emotes you make yourself but do comprehend emotes that are built into the game. Emotes made with the /em command show up as strange gestures to the opposite faction.

If you want to indicate an action in a specific chat channel, like guild chat, most people put asterisks or sometimes brackets or greater than/less than signs around their action to indicate an emote.

Example:

Desdarii: *Walks into the guild hall and greets her friends*

Using emotes will really help bring your character to life! Make sure you use start using them to give your character a little action.