FreelanceWizard

We're still about!

We're still around, if perhaps a little lazy on updating our post here. We've made some new friends -- The Cat's Meow Bar and Grill, for instance -- and reconnected with some old ones in the Carbuncle Cafe. If you're interested in fighting a world-spanning conspiracy of evil mages, talking philosophy, linkshell chatter, and more, look us up!

Actually, the easiest way to do this is to move the page. In the upper-right corner of every page, there's a little down arrow next to the Read, Edit, and View History buttons. Click on that to get a menu; you can then click "Move". Enter the new title for the page in the box and click the "Move Page" button. This will both change the name of the page and automatically create the redirect from the old page.

Indeed it would not bode well. From EE 14: "The process, compressing fourteen dimensions back into one, is what that Ascians refer to as the Ardor, and it most certainly spells destruction of life on Hydaelyn as we know it." Based on the Warring Triad line, I don't think Elidibus seeks that. I wouldn't call him a "good guy," but his motivations seem rather more complex than the black-robed Ascians.

We may not exactly be your cup of tea, but just from a characterization perspective, your character might find some friends in the Ivory Tower -- particularly if he has an interest in the practice of magic. (Yes, we're a Free Company with a house -- Mist 5, 24, in fact. We've just been a bit lazy about cloning our post in the FC Hall.) Feel free to give me a poke here or over on yon Tumblr (link in my sig) if you want more information, if you have any questions, or if you're curious about how you might fit in IC or OOC. I'm happy to talk!

The apostrophe is typically ignored (from the Naming Conventions Post, emphasis mine): "Pronunciation-wise, other than the tribe pronunciations listed above, names follow common English phonics. Though followed by an apostrophe, the tribe sound is usually flows into the name." Also, dropping the tribe letter isn't done in common conversation. It's only among those who are close that it's done; the implication is that this is a show of informality and familiarity. From the same source: "In colloquial speech amongst close friends and companions, sometimes the tribe letter will be dropped from the first name." We see this in the MSQ where F'lhammin is called Lhammin by Minfilia, but not by anyone else -- including, IIRC, Thancred. It seems to be common in RP to relax this rule, though personally, I have L'yhta correct people when they drop her tribe letter, particularly if the person doing so isn't a miqo'te themselves. The only thing that's only a little iffy, in my mind, with miqo'te names is when the tribe letter can't flow into the rest of the name, as in "N'nhemo" or a construct like that. I say it's only a little iffy, though, because the post indicates it's possible, just uncommon. My supposition is that most miqo'te prefer to give names that have a natural flow with tribal letter.

You're looking for Encyclopedia Eorzea, page 244. I'm sure someone has a scan of that somewhere. EDIT: Interesting easily missed tidbit on that page: the Deck of Sixty has appeared in every Astral Era. It's what L'yhta would term "deep magic" -- something that has grand significance magickally and represents a principle woven into the fabric of reality.

So, I see a few different places here where I think can offer advice. Free Company story arcs: I'm going to assume for the moment that you enjoy, or think you would enjoy, plot-oriented RP, and that your character has a reason to be in the Free Company ICly. If the former isn't true, and it isn't true for a fair number of RPers, then that's fine; there's no reason to get engaged. If the latter isn't true, then it may be time to find a new Free Company, because this one isn't working for you IC (and possibly OOC). So, working from the assumption that both of those are, indeed, true, your character has a built-in motivation to engage with the plot. Your Free Company associates are your friends, your family, your employers, or someone else (and if they're not -- if you don't really know them IC or OOC -- see above about how to handle that), so you have a reason to want to engage. In terms of engagement, why not have your character just ask someone they think looks knowledgeable or interesting about what's going on? "Expository banter" is an easy, low-impact form of RP where someone brings you up to speed on a plot. Indeed, I'd say about a quarter of my plot-oriented RP falls into that category. If your character doesn't know or can't guess who might be a good choice, talk to an officer of the FC OOCly and ask them. Chances are, they'll be able to set up RP to loop you in. If they don't want to, or push back on this... see above about how to handle that. Walk-ups: Walking up can be hard to do. I, too, typically need an IC pretext, because why would my character just start talking to someone? That said, IC pretexts are easy to work out OOC. RPers who are walk-up friendly are, by definition, putting themselves out there for RP, and a key part of RP is OOC communication. Don't be afraid to send them a tell to the effect of, "Hey, I'd like to RP with you, but I don't know how we'd get them interacting. Any ideas?" You can make this tell more effective if you volunteer some characteristics about your character -- what they like, what would draw them over, what might start a conversation. To use a personal example, L'yhta has an intense interest in various forms of magic. So, if I want to do a walk-up with someone, I'd volunteer that and ask them if they had anything that stood out in that way. About shyness: L'yhta is a very outgoing individual when she feels in control of a situation, when it's with people she knows, or when it's within her areas of expertise. She's somewhat reserved otherwise. To Nebbs's point, a Manic Pixie Dream Friend can help a lot with working around that shyness. Using another personal example, L'yhta generally avoids large crowds of people she doesn't know in purely social situations (she'll get right up in a crowd of adventurers, but a party at a tavern? A pajama party? A concert? Oh, my, no, never). How I get around this is have some other character that she knows drag her there, either as a friend or as arm candy. That way, she feels more comfortable because she has someone she knows and can interact with -- and hey, if that person ditches her, there's some conflict RP that arises out of that. I hope this helps! Just from reading your post, I still have to wonder if you've found the right Free Company for you. If they're great, nice people OOC, then I'm sure they'd be amenable to engaging with you OOC to help loop you into the RP more so that your character has stronger connections and better reasons to engage. If they don't want to do that, or if the IC concept of the group (or the characters in the group!) don't mesh with yours, though, it might be time to move on. As a postscript, I often have times I'm available for random RP, and I can almost always come up with a pretext for two characters to interact. Depending on the situation, L'yhta can even be your Manic Pixie Dream Friend. Feel free to reach out if you want to set something up.

Hi! Thanks for the interest. If you're interested in some help and advice with lore, please feel free to reach out to one of us in game, to me via PM here, or to me on Tumblr. I'd be happy to help! We've recently rejiggered our application form to make it less intimidating, and if you interact with one of us OOC first, we can and will waive the application form -- since we'll just naturally collect the application information while we talk. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Well, I mean, you can always hear voices. The reality of the gods is a question the devs have been fairly mum on. MCKF has said that we'll see more about them over time and that they're imperfect beings whose legends have grown in the telling (I'm lazy and don't have the post reference handy ). Realistically, at this point, they're legends that could be called into this realm through summoning, but they have no continuous existence in the way that, say, a D&D god would. My recommendation would be to leave it vague. Your character believes she's hearing messages from Azeyma and that the goddess speaks to her directly -- but the truth of the matter is not established one way or the other. The nudges and voices do point her in the right direction, but whether that's the Echo, hunches and intuition, sheer luck, or actually the goddess speaking to her is never established. This model gives you the freedom to make the decision later if you must, prevents any conflicts with future lore we may be given, and potentially leads to some interesting RP.

Speaking as someone who's been playing a Seeker of the Sun since beta... no, there's nothing wrong or weird with playing the race of your choice. Play what you want to play. If you're concerned about the lore, there's a lot of great resources around on it. If you're concerned about them being very common in RP, again, remember that player characters are the minority of characters that exist in the world and, hey, you'll at least have lots of other fellow miqo'te to interact with. #seeker pride and all that.

Just thought I'd drop in here and say that the Stars I've had the pleasure to RP with (and I actually have one in my FC!) have been really great people. If your character fits with their concept, they're a really great group of people.

Since I RP every day, and a lot of character growth has happened for the purple-haired idiot over the last 3 years of real life time, I play by the rule of, "game time follows real time, and I'll work out any discontinuities when or if the bubble advances." It's the best balance I can come up with between ignoring obvious progressions of time through holiday events (which, I should note, often mention things that happened at the last celebration, and Heavensturn is an advancement of the year by definition) and sticking to the time progression tied to the MSQ lore. After all, the comic book time bubble exists primarily to aid in the telling of the MSQ given the vagaries of patch and expansion development time.

This is pretty much where I'm at. While the Tower does have a couple of light game systems -- one particularly for "offline investigation," where you compare your listed traits to a forum post and thereby decide what your character knows when they investigate an item or NPC -- I've really ended up on the side of the discussing outcomes OOC and working to achieve some story objective for both sides. That way, everyone gets at least some of what they want for character and story development. And yes, that often means that I end up either losing a fight or achieving a Pyrrhic victory. Sure, L'yhta defeats the bad guy, but she's a shattered mess that needs extensive healing and rest. Then again, I rarely end up in fights with people I don't interact with on at least a somewhat regular basis, and that tends to produce a greater willingness to negotiate. I imagine that, if that were a common thing for me, I might be more amenable to dice rolling -- and I definitely see why that's an important thing in open RP events. For what it's worth, when I have done random rolls for fights, I do take the relative values into consideration. As an example, Clio's Bacchus Shots competition was based on "lowest roll takes hit, 3 hits and you're out." If I were the lowest roll and it happened to be a really low roll, I'd emote a much more visceral reaction than if it were a high one.