Technosoldier

Making characters feel alive.

Sorry for the radio silence lately, getting into school is so much fun.

Today’s topic comes from banter I’ve had with friends and observed in the WoW Rp community. The heroes of Azeroth are a hearty bunch, having survived everything from the cataclysmic battle at Mount Hyjal nearly a decade ago until the impending invasion of Icecrown. The thing that people don’t seem to realize is that it’s the little things in a character that make them feel so human (or not human, whatever.) Some turn out as the heroes from fantasy legend, the ones that come back from the battlefield without any mental scars to show for it, because that’s what really happens.

Pictured: Something that never happens.

Which brings me to the point.

People who know me are very aware that I play a single character in Warcraft almost exclusively. It’s really not out of a hatred for the pansy mana users and the like, but because he is so much fun to portray, because he feels alive. In which I mean that he has both strong traits and weak traits, and they serve to balance each other out. Perfect people are boring, and trying to roleplay with a perfect character is no different. The balance comes from a variety of factors, how did your character grow up? How did they handle -or not handle- the events of the third war? Hyjal? Outland? What kind of support network do they have? etc. Tif’s world was torn apart after Hyjal, and the world moved on, leaving him without any direction, and it’s shaped how he’s dealt with problems in his life. He would retreat from his pain by fighting as often as he could, as well as learning to tinker in his spare time, more as a hobby at first. Fast forward to Wrath of the Lich King, and Tiforis is the technosoldier, a man dedicated to using technology to wage a new kind of warfare. Sounds pretty great, huh? Too bad Tif never properly dealt with the mental trauma he suffered at Hyjal, and instead threw himself into his work, at the expense of everything else. Now? He’s an elite soldier, but his personal life has withered from neglect. At thirty years of age, Tif has very few close friends, and his love life has amounted to a series of shallow love affairs, with nothing of substance to show for it.

The strong balances the weak.

Tif is mechanically brilliant, but put him in any social situation, and he’ll look at you and tell you that he doesn’t get it. In many ways, the big bad berserker is still the shy, scared little boy that he was in his childhood. And that’s why he feels so alive to me, because it’s a situation that I can relate to. And you don’t need terribly dramatic flaws in a character to get that effect, expand on the simple things, and you might just see your characters as people you could meet in the real world.

-Donski