Role Play: Roleplaying origins and Demon Hunters

I had an interesting question pop up in the Queue last week regarding roleplaying origins and, more specifically, the upcoming Demon Hunter class we’ll be seeing in Legion.

This is actually something I wanted to cover anyway — and with the expansion announcement, now’s as good a time as any. Can you choose a different roleplaying origin for your character, if you’re not so keen on the assigned in-game origin?

Origins

Each race in-game has its own origin story — the storyline you play through in the starting zone for your assigned race. In the case of Death Knights, they don’t have a race-specific storyline, they have a class-specific storyline that takes place just before the events of Wrath of the Lich King. In the case of Demon Hunters, it appears that their origin storyline will mimic the Death Knight starting experience by playing out a particular class origin, rather than a particular racial origin.

With race-specific origin stories, roleplayers have long been ignoring the quests and zones they level up in in favor of creating their own unique stories for who their characters are, and where they came from. Just because you’re roleplaying a troll, it doesn’t have to be a Darkspear. Just because you’re roleplaying a human that leveled through Elwynn Forest, it doesn’t mean that they’re native to that area. Just because you’re leveling a dwarf through Ironforge, it doesn’t mean that they’re a Bronzebeard.

At the moment, we only have one class-specific origin story — the Death Knight. And the Death Knight’s story is a little more specific, timeline-wise, because of the expansion in which they were introduced. The Lich King was the man who created Death Knights, after all, and with his death comes the implication that no other Death Knights are currently being raised. Sylvanas might have her val’kyr to help her out on the raising from the dead front, but the Ebon Hold doesn’t appear to have anything like that in place — and that means there’s a little less wiggle-room to work with.

Plausible story

But that doesn’t mean it’s not impossible — it just means a Death Knight character should feasibly have been raised prior to the Lich King’s demise in Wrath. Just because your character leveled through Acherus, it doesn’t mean that their origin story necessarily needs to take place there. Maybe they were a Death Knight that was raised during the Third War, and broke free of the Lich King’s influence in a fashion similar to the Forsaken at the time. Maybe they were raised somewhere in between the Third War and the events of Wrath, in Northrend, nowhere near Acherus.

In both of these cases, and in many others, the events surrounding your character’s origins are perfectly logical, even if they don’t quite match up to what we’ve been presented with in game. You can create any kind of backstory you want for your character — you can roleplay whatever you want, after all — but the key to changing roleplaying origins is plausibility. Most roleplayers don’t really care about whether or not your backstory is the one that shipped with the actual game, but they do tend to appreciate a backstory that is a believable one.

And really, all it takes is a little bit of research. Sites like Wowpedia can be a tremendous help here, if you’re looking for alternate history for your character. Simply do a search on your character’s race or class, and take a look at the history of that race, or the class, to see what kind of options are available. Make sure you’re placing your character somewhere feasible within the timeline, and you’re good to go. You don’t have to get super-detailed with your character’s history, but reading up on where you’ve decided your character is from can often provide additional insights into how your character behaves, or how they might think or feel about certain situations.

Demon Hunters

Obviously, Legion isn’t even out yet — we don’t even have a playable beta, and just a glimpse of information. But the Demon Hunter class apparently has its own starting experience, just like the Death Knights do. The story is already defined for these heroes, who were originally Illidari that were sent on a mission by Illidan Stormrage. Their starting experience takes place on another world in the Twisting Nether, and presumably somewhere in the middle of it all, the Demon Hunter decides to join the Alliance or the Horde and fight the Burning Legion. We don’t have the exact details of the story, but we do know that according to the starting experience, everyone is starting out as one of Illidan Stormrage’s former disciples.

However, Demon Hunters existed prior to this, according to Warcraft 3. Demon Hunters in the original RTS series were Night Elves who had made a pact to fight against the forces of darkness by using that darkness against it — similar to Warlocks, in that aspect. But due to the dark pact they took, most Demon Hunters were viewed with revulsion by their peers. The few Demon Hunters we’ve seen in game have been fairly isolated for that very reason, and if you’re a Night Elf player, it’s possible your character could have been one of those demon hunters from long, long ago, suddenly drawn back to society by the reappearance of the Legion.

Alternatively, we’ve got cases like Lotharfox mentioned up above. Maybe your character, whatever class they happen to be currently, has decided to undergo drastic measures in the face of what we’ll witness in Legion. Maybe they’ve decided to forgo their original class, take that dark pact that the Demon Hunters assume, and simply become more than they were. That’s perfectly fine too — characters evolve over time, and there’s no reason why they couldn’t make that choice, especially given what glimpses we’ve seen of what awaits us in Legion.

Mechanics vs. story

Here’s what you want to remember: The introductory experience for all races, and for the Death Knight class, was created and written so that all players who experience that content get an idea of just what that race or class is all about. It’s a generalized experience intended to introduce that lore to people who may not necessarily have a good grasp of it to begin with. And in that role, it works just fine — players who have no knowledge of what the Troll race is all about get a very good picture of events when rolling a troll for the first time. Players who have never delved into Human history get a very good idea of where Humans stand in relation to the rest of the world when rolling a Human. The list goes on.

But that experience wasn’t really written to be some sort of bible for roleplayers to follow — it’s just a brief look into that lore. Roleplaying tends to take a much more creative spin, and while we can’t play through our own origins, we can certainly write them out and establish them. Roleplayers always have a choice as to whether or not to include quests from the leveling experience as part of their character’s personal stories, and that applies to the starting experiences just as much as it applies to anything anywhere else.

Having said that, we don’t know what’s in store for Demon Hunters in Legion just yet. There is likely more to the class than meets the eye, and there is likely plenty more to the history and origins of Demon Hunters that we don’t know just yet, either. So it’s a little early to start making plans for your character — you might want to hold off on any major decisions until we’ve got more information to look at. Hopefully, we’ll see that soon.