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(01-11-2014, 06:48 PM)Sounsyy Wrote: You've got gameplay and you've got story. Very separate things.
Sounsyy, you keep thinking of ARR as a singleplayer game. But it isn't. It's an MMO and as such its lore should, ideally, be designed to allow each and all player characters to coexist. While we surely can't expect Squee or any developer to make special unique quests for each character, we can expect them to not resort to stupid "You are the CHOSEN ONE!" anthics that are actually pretty damn tiresome even in single player games. Tiresome even if they are traditional.
I like my story informing my gameplay, though. There are some mechanical restrictions that you can simply handwave as not part of lore because the game can't do it all and has to keep focused. This is the reason Black Mages don't get a torch spell even though they can bombard enemies with a barrage of fireballs.
If your story is not going to inform your gameplay, your game is doing something wrong. It's going to be counterintuitive, just as the White Mage lore is counterintuitive because they are unique and super speshiul yet everyone can be mechanically one. This is an incoherency and inconsistency on a meta level that has to be salvaged for the lore to not confuse the hell out of a lot of people and work on a massive scale.
Quote:That's really what the game is about, in-game and out of game. It's about a company that needed to bring Final Fantasy back into their MMO or else sink. What's more Final Fantasy than the original jobs from the original games? The games that actually succeeded and we fans think highly on. You'll find near unanimous love for FF IV, VI, VII, VIII, and IX. But you'll find a much more varied response to the later games like X, X-2, XII, XIII. Games that broke away from FF traditions to meet modern standards.Â
This is irrelevant to the roleplaying scene of an MMO.
Quote:Now, I know you don't give a rat's patootie about all the reasons behind it. As I've said time and again it comes down to whether you wish to respect the lore as written by the creators or not. Neither is right or wrong, but the game lore isn't changing, so you've got to make that choice.
I would argue that, yes, one is wrong and the other is right. The one wrong is the one that makes no sense. Respecting lore has no bearing if it is not coherent with its own game. Maybe it's coherent with the Author's designs and his previous work, but that means nothing for our roleplay. The lore is there to provide the setting, to provide a consistent and coherent world for the players to live in. I do agree that breaking it is bad, but only when doing so threatens the world coherency or consistency (like, for example, saying that my character is Bahamut's best pal). In the case of Jobs, we have that the lore itself is threatening its own coherency by implying there can only be only one White Mage even though the gameplay directly contradicts it. Story needs to inform gameplay: if White Mages are so special, they should BE special. You can tell me that White Magic is forbidden and that there's only one White Mage besides the Padjal, but while you tell me I'm going to point to every single character. I'm going to show you how many White Mages there really are. The ancient axiom of "Show, don't tell".
Quote:In my own personal opinion, if you say to hell with the lore because it's just inconvenient, then you aren't role playing or being a role player. You're fanfictioning, which is something quite different. Isn't the point of roleplaying to limit yourself into the role/social norms of a character as part of a predetermined story? So choose a role.
You can roleplay and make fan fiction with it. It is, after all, fiction made by fans. If you are a fan and you roleplay, then you are making fan fiction and you are still roleplaying. What you really meant was: "You are not following lore to the letter and, as the Word of the Author is Holy, your roleplaying has no worth nor validity to me. Therefore, I will use a term I find despective to call you, showing you my dissaproval."
Also, I have another interpretation of what roleplay in an MMO means: it's cooperative storytelling. And I can't form a story if the setting and its game are giving me mixed messages.
Quote:-snip- So in two minutes I just came up with a character that was taken by the Elementals and became a Wildling.
That all smells like fan fiction: you are recycling canon to make up a 'new' character. And you said that fan fiction isn't roleplay. Though I haven't played 1.0, so I dunno. It's just the smell, I guess.
Quote:Maybe this will get me some hate, but I urge roleplayers to not ignore the lore. It's beautiful and it's there for a reason. Restrictive, if you're lazy, but all good stories revolve around extraordinary people who do things many others can't. You don't have to be a special snowflake to make a story-worthy character though. You just have to use your imagination. And the more you try to stick to the lore to the best of your knowledge, the more incredible others will find your story.
It's beautiful when it works and provides a coherent world. When it doesn't, it stinks and we have to work around it. Imagine if the game allowed us to pick Padjal as a race, but then told us that Padjal are very, very rare and that YOU are the ONLY Padjal that has been born outside of the Shorud. Wouldn't it be a bit weird when you run into other three hundred players who want to be Padjal in character, too?
No, lore has to move aside for the sake of coherency and fun. White Mage lore makes no sense in the MMO setting. It does in a singleplayer game, but ARR isn't that. It's first an MMO and secondly a Final Fantasy game. The same way an italian is first a human and -then- a citizen of Italy.