As the month and year come to an end, a number of religions celebrate their respective holidays. Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hannukah, and probably many more I'm unaware of. Many roleplayers may be busily purchasing and wrapping gifts, reconnecting with friends and family, and generally putting the finishing touches on another year lived. For the most part, religion and the precepts of spiritual living are the reasons for this season, so I've heard.
As roleplay and roleplayers often mimic real-life items and events, I pose the question, what (if any) religion or spiritual belief does your character hold true to, and how are you roleplaying that in game during this (or any) time of the year? To those who are thinking religions don't exist in MMORPGs, I have to agree, but only to a point. I currently do not know of a single MMORPG that explicity incorporates any structured likeness to a real-world 'religion' within gameplay. However, the number of direct and obvious correlations to real-world religions and spiritual beliefs that can be found across the entire MMORPG gaming world is nothing anyone would or should miss. Doing so has the potential to harshly limit your imagination's power to create and carry out immersively fun roleplaying.
In the MMORPGs I play, each of them have written within their Codes of Conduct and Terms of Service specific wording about infringing upon and/or discriminating against any real-world religion in game or on game-related websites. Aside from that, roleplaying characters who follow a Life-guiding spiritual belief is not only allowed, it's very often implied. Monks, shamans, priests, druids, clerics, paladins, and more, all exist in current MMORPGs, and are all associated with historical religions and edicts of spirituality. The choice of whether to carry on those historically respective beliefs or not is totally left up to the player, as it should be.
Is it possible to roleplay a direct example of a real-world religious entity within a MMORPG? My answer is that if it cannot be found within the known lore and canon of the realm, don't do it. If you do, extreme caution should be made, and you should be prepared with a supremely valiant RP story, and for perhaps no small amount of ridicule. There are so many plain and abstract uses of religious ideals already in games that it's best to avoid the headaches and loss of fun outright.
Beginning with a look at character classes, take a common class like Priest. Dictionary.com defines it as "a person whose office it is to perform religious rites". Even amongst roleplayers, I can count on one hand the number of characters I've seen roleplayed in accordance with that definition. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, I just mention it as an example of a hugely overlooked RP storyline.
