Roleplaying dilemma

I've been roleplaying for a long time, even if I've only recently entered the World of Warcraft. While I entered a few very short-lived SF- or fantasy-based RP groups in high school and college, my longest-lived RP experience was in a "Newsies" writing group, the Newsgirls Union, where we created and roleplayed characters based on the movie and actual New York history, writing fanfiction using our own original characters. I played from 1901 to 1904 (the group progressed in "real-time" starting from the movie's time of 1899 — why yes, I am a huge geek, why do you ask?).

I've found that, for me, Warcraft has been very challenging in that I create my characters in a new way. When I was roleplaying with the Union, I started with a story idea. This usually meant having a backstory ahead of time, but occasionally meant just a character concept. (For Jen, my main character ... and *cough* ginormous Mary Sue ... I knew every detail of her life and history; for 13, perhaps my favorite character, a friend and I decided we wanted "eccentric" characters so I decided she would be obsessed with numbers and she grew from there. God, I really miss playing her. And I really need to e-mail my friends.) Either way, though, I knew who the character was first and created the rest from there.

For Warcraft, I'm finding myself much more hesitant to roleplay specifically because the character creation process is different. For one, as a history geek (and later history major) and huge fan of the movie, I knew the "lore" of "Newsies" and turn of the century New York like the back of my hand. I had no problems navigating the RP waters. I do not know the lore of WoW as well at all, despite poring over WoWWiki in my downtime at work

Also, for my characters in WoW, I started with a class and appearance first. For the most part, Ideale was entirely an accident. In fact, even her name was one I pulled at random from a list of names because it sounded vaguely "elfish" — if I'd expected to keep her, I would have named her something more appropriate (or made her an herbalist/alchemist or a healer class, at least). I wanted to explore the blood elf starting area, I'd never played a hunter before, and I got all the way to level 10 before I hated it. I only went back to her after reading hunter blogs and deciding to give it another shot. I had not developed her backstory — or any of my first characters', actually — at all. Kresha is the same — I made her for Project Infiltration and ended up liking her more than Daj. Ahami was a bit more planned, but still more "on the fly" than any of my Union characters ever were.

The second challenge I'm facing is that there is so much to do in WoW other than RP. With my previous roleplaying experiences (MUDs excluded), the roleplaying was EVERYTHING. If you did not roleplay, then there was literally absolutely nothing to do. With WoW, you can happily go through the entire game without roleplaying for a second. All you have to do is roll on a normal server and ignore all of the quest text.

I don't want that. I started playing WoW because I love roleplaying — the rest is very fun, too, but the roleplaying part was the attraction. But I'm finding, at 70, that I'm nervous to begin because I don't know the world as well, and because it's so easy to fall back on questing, PVPing, and so on.

I'm wondering, had I created my characters in my usual fashion, if I would be having an easier time. As it is, I think I am a "borderline" roleplayer right now. In interaction with other players a good percentage of the time, I am not necessarily roleplaying, but am walking the border where if they begin, I could jump in — but I'm too nervous of messing up to initiate it myself! But I want to push myself over into actual roleplayer territory. I'm just not quite sure how to do that.

Although, on the plus side, this challenge has gotten me writing again, something that I haven't done with any seriousness for several years. While working on writing out character histories and monologues to get a better sense of who they are, I started working on some of my own stuff that has been on hold for too long.