So you have an rp relationship. Said relationship provides endless hours of entertainment thanks to flirts, conflicts, and the mayhem of trying to love someone in an abnormal Warcraft universe. Imagine trying to have a nice picnic with your sweetheart. Imagine instead of ants plaguing your picnic basket, it’s a zombie or a murloc which is, really, a horrifying fish with sharp teeth.

Remember the evil snakehead fish that plagued Maryland some years back? No? Let me remind you!

YEAH, A MOOD KILLER THAT.

Anyway, so you have your Azeroth sweetie and things are going swimmingly until . . . The Bad happens. The characters have a split either because of out of game drama, a player leaving the game, an in-character conflict or IC cheating, etcetera.

How do you handle this?

Having been in this situation twice now, I can tell you it’s tough. People sometimes redefine their character based upon the relationship they’re involved in. My first in-character split was thanks to real life weirdness between me and another player. We had a huge falling out and never spoke again. There was no IC closure, no conversation to figure out how to end things, and I was left holding the bag. Sadly, at that point, there aren’t a lot of choices. Was it godmodding to say the other character just never came home again? Yva sat in an inn for a month waiting for a husband that was simply gone. I never said why he didn’t come home, I didn’t have her mourn him like he was dead. He was just not there. So, godmodding? I don’t think so.

That being said, I had a challenge on my hands. Keeping the details of the split vague was easy. The hard part was having my character react to the split in a way that was at least quasi-believable and would still leave her playable in the end. Yva, in true diva fashion, went positively batshit because it’s how she deals with trauma. True to her character? Absolutely, but – well? It was tough to play. She wasn’t a good friend to have, she was abysmal to rp with because she was nearly incoherent, and so I tried to make lemonade out of lemons. I started a cross server story arc where Yva became a baby-napping super villain, hurting Chelody Smallwing and Shaila Viridiant with her callous disregard.

To this day, it stands as one of the best rp stories I’ve organized. Even though I was OOC’ly miserable about the way Yva was left, I channeled her rage into something workable. When the baby napping portion of badness was done, I put the character down for a while and let her recover, buying me time to really hash her over. It took a couple months, yes, but I was able to pick her up later on with that story behind her. I worked with a friend, Narokor, and set her on a new RP path: Redemption.   Now, four years post game release, she’s still my favorite character to RP.

My other character split was much more pleasant in that I’m STILL friends with the other player. Azka met Thantrus when I rolled alliance for the first time. They had a good thing going. They made a baby, then a second, but then Thantrus’s player was lured away from Warcraft by the dulcet siren’s song of City of Villains. Because Azka and Thantrus were so perfect together, I found it incredibly difficult to rp her without him around. It was hard explaining to their mutual IC friends that Thantrus was always busy or at home. She was too happy and too content to leave him, so I had no reason to want to do that to her (especially with children involved). And so, seeing no other alternatives, Azka was sent on her happily-ever-after with Thantrus. She became an npc, and then, when reskinning became available to us, she was no more. I renamed the character, gave her a new look, and she’s someone else completely.

I will admit that both of these splits had a certain low-level of trauma involved with them. If you’re anything like me, you give heart and soul to some of these stories, so seeing threads unravel around your brainchild? Yeah, it’s tough. You feel like you’re failing a friend.

Here’s a few tips I learned from my experiences that might help others walking the same scary bad path of character relationship wrongness:

  1. Don’t godmod the other character’s reactions to the split, the method of their departure, or any details you really don’t know. Imagine mutual friends hearing you say IC’ly that X character is dead, and then X character shows up at a pub a week later with a smile on his her or face. You put other people in a bad position that way, and that’s not fair.
  2. Try to talk things out with the player you’re splitting from. Sometimes feelings are hurt – often they are – but if you’ve spent a lot of time with the individual, both of you deserve the closure that conversation can grant. Keep it civil, and try to keep an open mind.
  3. Don’t be afraid to RP out your character’s trauma at losing someone. It can result in great storylines later on, even if it’s hard to see that light at the end of the tunnel.
  4. If the feelings involved with the split are too visceral, play an alt for a while. Occupy your time away from your character until you can be more objective about the situation. Deleting a character will result in a restoration more times than not, I’m betting. Save a GM today. 
  5. Talk to friends about the split and see what they have to say. Friends don’t want to lose you or your rp, and they’ll often times have great feedback. When you’re too close to the situation, it’s very hard to see the big picture. People emotionally removed from it may be able to open your eyes.

I’m sure there are other thoughts about this, so feel free to share. In the meanwhile, I wish you and your character merry picnics without scary northern snakefishes.  Ta!