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Zyrusticae · **08-26-2014, 07:49 PM**

(08-24-2014, 05:17 PM)Verad Wrote:

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"Realism" is generally not something with which I concern myself when it comes to choosing how experienced a character is. "Verisimilitude" or "Plausibility," the more-subjective younger-brothers of realism, don't come up as much either, given how widely audience expectations can vary in both counts. Generally, I do one of two things with my characters when I want them to have multiple skillsets:

1. Play them as old enough that Western roleplayers would find their knowledge of multiple skillsets to be plausible. A shame given the emphasis on youthful prodigies in these kinds of games, but the game itself isn't my audience.

2. Play them as incompetent enough that I can have them learn skillsets over the course of roleplay, rather than presume prior abilities.

In both cases, my primary concern is audience expectations. It requires a bit of legwork at first to figure out what the general trends in an RP community are with regards to what is and isn't considered acceptable, but it yields better results for me than hewing to an outside standard of realism that may be challenged the instant I attempt to do something.

(08-24-2014, 08:53 PM)FreelanceWizard Wrote:

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I generally don't have an issue with powerful characters, but then again, I spent a lot of time RPing in CoH where those were the norm ("You're a super-soldier from another dimension with a bow that shoots archers, who have bows that shoot witches? Cool. I rewrite minds with a thought for a living. Wanna get pancakes?"). The trick is to make sure that the power isn't a Solution for Everything and that you have appropriate weaknesses and flaws. After all -- and at the risk of invoking Comic Book Fan Ire -- even Superman is interesting when the stories focus on his flaws, and Marvel's made a business out of showing really powerful people laid low by sidethinking and their own problems.

With that in mind, I personally try to write any character that's powerful in one area as having significant weaknesses in other areas. If they have ways to circumvent those weaknesses, those workarounds have their own problems -- they're fragile, difficult to employ, and most importantly don't bring the character up to the skill of someone who learned it and practices it "the hard way." The more powerful a character is, the more and more severe the weaknesses I apply to them are.

Another approach that works, especially in conjunction with the "balancing weaknesses" approach, is to "turn down" the "RP power" of things your character does but isn't specialized in. Just because you have the class at 50 doesn't mean you have to RP it with that level of power. You could call yourself a "dabbler" who has some training, but not a high level (or even largely competent level) of expertise.

What informs both of these approaches is viewing character skill from a different tabletop RPG standpoint -- your "class" is just points in a skill, and you have a finite number of points. To me, it's not like D&D-style multi-classing, but instead just sticking a couple of points here and there to reflect limited expertise (a "White Wolf" approach, for those familiar with the system). You put a lot of points into your specialty, but you don't have enough points to specialize in a lot of fields.

As a side note, it may just be me, but I largely don't care about the age of characters. Final Fantasy heroes are typically quite young compared to Western fantasy heroes with rare exception. As long as there's a narrative explanation for the skill displayed and the character fits into normal FF age ranges (16+, typically) I accept it as a trope of the setting.

I like these posts. These are nice posts.

Thanks to these, I don't have too much to add. I will say that, in the setting, it is essentially canon that all PCs are Warriors of Light, possess the Echo, and thus correspondingly have Hydaelyn's blessing, which means by their very nature they should be powerful. That's not to say that those who are RPing normal and/or powerless individuals are doing it wrong, but that it's certainly within a player's right to make their player noticeably more powerful than, perhaps, characters from other MMORPGs you may have played.

That being said, the Armory system is really not very well-explained within the game lore, especially within the context of a young 20-something being able to achieve mastery in everything in the game. And that's unfortunate, because it means we, as a community, effectively have to figure this stuff out for ourselves. Personally, I am perfectly okay with a 16-year-old being an utterly amazing, badass Warrior thanks in large part to Hydaelyn's blessing... if that's all they're really good at. There's a sliding scale to this sort of thing, a gauge of verisimilitude and believability that everyone has to read for themselves and figure out where they stand, and measure their expectations accordingly. Some players' place on this scale will clash with others, and that's just the nature of the beast, and the intersection of lore with game mechanics will naturally produce this kind of conflict.

So, you know, go nuts! Within reason. There's no hard and fast rules to be had here, just general guidelines. But even if you only just follow the guidelines laid out within this thread, you should find yourself in a good place, I would think.

Aduu Avagnar · **08-28-2014, 07:29 PM**

I play Nako as what could probably be considered a Red Mage from other games in the series, his skill with Magic are broad, but he cannot master any of them, I play this as a choice, he would much rather be verstatile and be able to turn his hand to many things, than to master one, and have it fail him.
The skills he has picked up in life are the three schools of Magic, archery and swordplay. and even then if he was in a contest or fight with a practitioner of any of those arts, he would most likely lose if he had to rely purely on them. dependant on skill/experience of the oponent, Nako was 35 at the begining of ARR, and as a soldier has been in war/combat situations where he has had to use his skills.

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Multiclassing IC or: How I Avoided Becoming God

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