Warcraft Roleplaying Guide: Addons - The Roleplay Profile

Previous Section: Part 2

People who have played World of Warcraft for longer than a week know that Addons are simply a must-have addition to the game. True, the vanilla experience without Addons is alright and perfectly playable, but Addons truly help to make the game better overall because they do so much to enhance the game and make you a more self-aware player whether you PvE or PvP.

It’s true. There are addons that help you manage your ability cooldowns, addons that reorganize your UI to make it easier (or prettier) to navigate, addons that help mark enemy targets to focus your attention on, addons that announce Boss abilities so you know what attacks to expect (and even where). There are even addons that take data, compile, and give you information such as damage meters, healing meters, input lag, gold per hour grinding, and more.

As you can imagine with this section's inclusion into the World of Warcraft Roleplaying Guide, there are even Addons that help you become a better roleplayer.

Now, for a lot of players who have never roleplayed before this might seem a little strange. It makes sense that there would be addons that make it easier for you to play the game by keeping track of data, abilities, and cooldowns, but at its core isn’t Roleplay about writing and using your imagination?

Yes; all you need for Roleplay is a willingness to write, and immersive yourself in the setting. There isn’t really any mechanics you need to pay attention to, and you don’t need to actively PLAY the game in the sense that you engage it with the intent of winning. You don’t play for better stats, better items, or even rewards. It’s all grounded in your ability to read, write, and pay attention.

And that’s exactly what Roleplay addons do.

They’re designed to help you enhance your imagination and immersion into the game roleplaying scene and help you focus your attention on what’s happening in front of you. Most of them are unobtrusive and don’t hinder you at all. In fact, a lot of them even help when you’re in a group setting since adding more people to the scene can be hard for beginner roleplayers (more on that in a bit).

Most of the addons that will be suggested are tools that are widely used by the Roleplaying community on both Moon Guard and Wyrmrest Accord and are vouched for by how many typically use them and suggest them to other players. Best of all is that all of the addons seamlessly mesh well with whatever other addons you currently use without conflicting – even UI addons that change your screen settings. Heck, you can even use them alongside other addons that you might use to play the game with PvE or PvP content since a lot of them have settings that automatically turn off the moment you enter combat, dungeons, or battlegrounds.

So, where do you get these addons? You can technically find them on a couple of websites, but a majority of players tend to get them from the Curseforge website because it’s easy to use and navigate, and meshes well with the Twitch Client when it comes to updating your addons later on. You can manually install them yourself (instructions to come later) or use Twitch’s client to install them yourself when it detects you have World of Warcraft installed.

• Curseforge World of Warcraft Addons Here

Quick Note

A quick note before I continue with this guide.

While a lot of addons that are going to be suggested are great for improving your experience with Roleplay, they’re not really ‘needed’ in the sense that you have to have them to roleplay. Most of the addons below – aside from perhaps one that’s important – are just suggestions that perform a single function that you might not need.

With that said, it is recommended that if you want to try all, or some, of the suggested add-ons that you downloaded one or two of them at a time and experiment with them to get a feel for them.

The reason for this is because downloading all of them at once could potentially be overwhelming for the beginner roleplayer. While they don’t do anything to mess with the UI, and all have certain singular functions, it is frustrating to navigate their use and decide whether you like the addon function or not, but not know where that function comes from.

In fact, whenever I start a new character I make sure to disable all of my addons and re-enable them one at a time to keep myself from getting overwhelmed when I need to readjust my UI settings.

With that said, let’s take a look at all of the addons you can use, starting with the most important ones first.

Player Profiles

As I said above, there’s only one addon type that you absolutely do need to Roleplay with, and that’s a Player Profile. While this, and Chat Box Extenders (more on that in a bit) are pretty much essential for immersion reasons, all of the other addons that I’ll be going over are pretty much suggestions.

So, what is a Player Profile addon exactly?

Well, it’s an addon that allows you to customize your character, and how they’re viewed outside of the game world. While it doesn’t affect anything in-game, such as your model or the like, it does allow you to create a sort of “character sheet” for others to read. It allows you to set your Character's name, so it’s able to be seen in the Chat Box by others, allows you to set any nicknames they might have, and write about them as well.

Most of the suggested Addons below even have areas where you can fill in home, height, weight, eye color, body shape, traits, current status, history, physical description, and more.

This all works when another player, if they’re interested in seeing what your character is about, hovers their mouse above your in game character and right clicks to open their profile up to see more. When hovering the mouse over a character, it’ll show quick information about them for you to see immediately before deciding if you want to see more.

Neat huh?

There’s so much that a Player Profile Addon adds that it’s honestly hard to list it all. You’ll simply have to try it out for yourself. Right now there are three main ones that are used by Roleplayers on Warcraft: My Roleplay, XRP, and TotalRoleplay3 (MRP, XRP, and TRP3 respectively).

What exactly is the difference between them? MRP gives you just the basics to get a Profile filled out, and that’s really it. You fill out your name, home, height, weight, title, currently, history, and miscellaneous tab. It’s no-frills, and it does the job. It was one of the first Profile Addons to be developed and it’s still maintained to this day by someone who roleplays extensively in the community.

XRP for the most part is the same as MRP above, but with one major difference that makes it stand out from MRP and TRP3 respectively. It can remotely read a profile. You can right-click someone’s name – no matter if they’re in a different zone or not – and be able to read their profile. Meaning they don’t have to be next to you to access it.

TRP3 though is a lot more extensive than the other two and adds a lot of bells and whistles to your profile. There are too many options to list here, but it allows you to customize your profile to exactly what you want it to look like. The two features that define it though are the ability to cache profiles for later viewing, save profiles that you like, leave notes viewable only by you on other players, and scan for other roleplayers in the area who are flagged as being open to RP.

Whichever one you use though is entirely up to you, as all three can be read by the other. So you’re not excluding any other players if they use another Roleplay Profile addon. MRP profiles can read XRP and TRP3 profiles, and vice versa on all of them. It all comes down to personal taste.

Interested? You can find them here

• My Roleplay
• XRP
• Total Roleplay 3

With all of that said, we’ll be taking a break before we start discussing the other addons in the next section. Roleplay Profile Addons needed to be discussed first in its own section because it’s the foundation for which you build your Roleplay experience off of.

See you soon!

Start of This Guide

Part 1 - Introduction