I was reading the “State of Roleplay on Antonia Bayle Server” thread yesterday and found myself sighing wistfully for the heady days of hardcore RP chat. It’s a pity, really, online RP is a dying art. Fifteen years ago (give or take) you could browse the open chatrooms and find dozens and dozens of them, each full to bursting and dedicated to role playing any and every fantasy fiction genre imaginable. These worlds and the social interactions within them were all built through imaginative prose as there were no visuals at all, just text chat. This all pretty much went the way of the dodo, however, when Aol and other chat servers stopped offering free chatroom service. I had been heavily involved in that RP world for several years before it all went away. When it was over I stopped RPing for lack of a venue. Fast forward ten years or so when I really got the RP jones again, and lo and behold, there was a whole world of RP online that I had never dipped a toe into, MMORPGs! Its RP, right? Imagine the cold shock when I learned that MMORPGs have nothing to do with actual role playing. Or more precisely, that actual role playing has nothing to do with MMORPGs. It’s funny, but somehow even now, having been playing a few different MMORPGs for about five years now, it still doesn’t square in my head that role playing is virtually unknown and un-practiced in these rich and colorful online environments that are just begging for it! (Especially with Antonnia Bayle being listed as an RP server! What does that even mean, an RP server where nobody roleplays?) Anyway, this post is really just a lamentation. But I’ll close with this; it only takes two to RP. Naraleah, Erudite Monk; Antonia Bayle Quenilie, Wood Elf Ranger; Antonia Bayle Oscephia, Human Swashbuckler; Antonia Bayle (Of course, when you consider it, there probably weren’t even a thousand hardcore RPers in the chatrooms, and if you take those few and spread them throughout the millions of players on what, a hundred or more different games, each with a dozen or more different servers? it’s really no surprise.)
Tritiana, I'll keep a weather eye out for you when I am on AB, splitting my time between there and Oasis, with the occasional excursion to Permafrost as well. Hail any members of the Doomfarer's of Norrath, we'll do our best to make you feel welcome. Aranedhel
Tritiana, there is still lots of Roleplay on Antonia Bayle. The thread that you read is not a true reflection of the state of RP on our server. The main issue is that to many, the RP is about personal gains and vendettas, not about the lore of this amazing game. But there are still lots of smaller, and some more well known guilds who are dedicated to roleplaying amidst the given Lore of EQ2. Please do not let that thread discourage you, and that goes for anyone thinking of trying out RP on Antonia Bayle. You did not say what allignment you were, but I can offer a list of nice guilds/associations for each if you are interested.
