Every two weeks I spend one evening playing Dungeons & Dragons v3.5, old-fashioned pen and paper role-playing. My character is a mage under the delusion of being the greatest mage of all times, and as he finds himself in a relatively magic-poor environment full of unsophisticated barbarians, that illusion is easy to keep up. So I'm casting spells often just to impress non-player characters, and use my magic in many imaginative ways. And then I come back to World of Warcraft and ask myself how the heck the "RP" part ended up in the MMORPG acronym.
On most servers there is not even the faintest suggestion of role-playing. None of my characters has a background story. People chose their classoften mostly for functional reasons, a mage is made to deal a lot of damage, not not impress anybody with magic. Race is chosen often either for looks, racial traits, or just to start in a newbie area you don't know yet. And close to nobody reads the lore. Actually people don't even read the quest description further than the short summary at the top, you can often hear people asking in General chat for information which is clearly given in the body of the quest text.
I'm not really tempted to play on a role-playing server, because I don't think people will be much different there. Lots of people on a RP server have a background story and try to role-play, but the effort usually fails because everybody is so wound up in their own story that they completely ignore the story of the other players. There aren't many people willing and able to encounter somebody, and play along to that guys story. Roleplaying on a RP server is usually limited to small groups of friends that agreed upon a common story to play along, but the other 3000 players on the same server are completely ignorant of that story. In any case it isn't possible for players to change the world with their stories. The story of you and your friends which culminates in slaying the evil dragon Onyxia only creates a short and limited illusion of you having slain Onyxia. In reality she exists in infinite copies and even for you she will resurrect every 5 days.
"Role-playing" in the context of computer games, single- or massively multi-player, has long since been reduced to the idea that the player plays a single avatar, and that this avatar has stats and skills which develop with time. But that is just the "rules" part of classic pen and paper games. But a role in pen and paper is not just the rules governing what skills a character of that class can use, and how they evolve. Many pen and paper role-player regard such rules as something which should be minimized, lest the game evolves into a rules-lawyering fight. The important thing is the story, and how the players act in relation to the story and to each other. And the story is largely independant of the rules, we once played a Warhammer campaign using rules from a different fantasy RPG system, because we liked the setting, but not the Warhammer rules. And one Call of Cthulhu of ours went horribly wrong, because the players were still in a monster-bashing fantasy mind-set and started hunting the werewolf with a hand grenade in a silver teapot instead of being in any way afraid of him.
Playing World of Warcraft involves knowing how your spells and abilities work, and how the mobs will react to you using them. If you look at most situation in the game from a "role-playing" point of view, they are utterly unrealistic: You can kill a mob in plain sight just a few meters from his friends, and as long as they are outside of some artificial aggro radius they won't join the fight. A slain monster rematerializes a few minutes later out of thin air. You get a reward for delivering a secret information that another thousand players before already delivered. The game world is not so much persistent as static, continually self-regenerating to its initial state.
Maybe we should follow Lum the Mad's suggestion to call our games MMOGs instead of MMORPGs. Because unless you *define* role-playing as being just about character stats, a MMORPG has not much in common with real role-playing.
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