How worlds can grow, in fanfiction and RPing

And sometimes, a universe can just balloon completely out of control.

Take mine, for example; take both, or all, of mine.

Originally, my friend and I had started roleplaying in the WoW universe. Now of course, this requires some creativity on the part of any RPer, because the timeline is sketchy and there are questions about biology and evolution and, since it's a game, it is by nature incomplete. There must be a full ecosystem in Quel'thalas, for example, with deer and squirrels or equivalent, but all you get in the game is lynxes and dragonhawks, and then giant spiders down in the southern zones. And by the time of the Cataclysm, the Ghostlands must have been at least partly cleaned up.

I could write pages and pages on Quel'thalas alone, in fact, and reams on the cleansed Plaguelands, the fate of Stratholme/Deatholme, bandits and farms and villages and the resettlement of Hearthglen. But I won't.

Big List of Character Questions

• This is a post about roleplaying, but it could also be about any type of storybuilding, or even analyzing real-world situations. It's just a bunch of things to think about; any question can have multiple answers, or none. The answers might go on for pages, or be a single word long. I have tried to make the questions as broad as possible, rather than specific.
• This is, so far, just what I've come up with off the top of my head.
• Feedback welcome, of course; I'm sure I have forgotten lots of things.
• The idea behind this List Of Questions, by the way, is not to force anyone to write a multipage essay about their character. It's to know the character that well, to have a character that well developed, that they can answer (or you can answer for them) any of those questions with no more than a minute's thought. If you can't, then sit down and think some more.
• I'm not at all saying that I've reached this level of development with all of my characters. But it's a goal to aim for, and a better starting point than googling "roleplay 101".
• List, obviously as will be seen, is not limited to human characters.

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"Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here? Where are you going?"

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This was originally part of a response I wrote to someone in WoW, who has been asking me how to roleplay. I have answered before, but apparently not in enough detail.

(Q: "I have been rping with my friend and I noticed it was starting to get abit boring, and was going to ask what elements make a roleplay entertaining. Or what would help to make it more interesting?")

((Long post below the jump.))