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FreelanceWizard · **08-19-2013, 10:08 PM**

Funny enough, I have an idea for a very rich son of Ul'dah who uses the law and mercenaries to indulge his desires: forbidden magical research and power at all costs. "Power is the only game that matters, and in the end, it is a game with no rules," he might say. Such an organization would be problematic for all three organizations: they play dirty and hide behind the law, abuse and steal magical knowledge, and trample upon the poor to their own benefit.

Just a thought. Smile

Gar · **08-19-2013, 10:18 PM**

Hmmm... How would you feel about a bit of a coalition thing on the evil side of things too? I have a character in mind who would work with an organization like that to gain power, but secretly be gaining it to just bring the world to destruction from pure bitterness. An agent of chaos basically.

The good guys team up, so when bad guys can use each other, they team up too right?Â Big Grin

AkhutaiAngura · **08-19-2013, 10:22 PM**

The only problem with the badguys being our alts.. It won't ever be an 'us vs them' thing. It'll only be a portion of them against a portion of us in any encounter, leading to the ever ellusive rabbit.

That, and I'm not a fan of playing alts for any reason. I'd just as soon organize something with an existing 'evil' FC.

Gar · **08-19-2013, 10:27 PM**

(08-19-2013, 10:22 PM)Kaln Wrote: The only problem with the badguys being our alts.. It won't ever be an 'us vs them' thing. It'll only be a portion of them against a portion of us in any encounter, leading to the ever ellusive rabbit.

That, and I'm not a fan of playing alts for any reason. I'd just as soon organize something with an existing 'evil' FC.

That is a good point. Definitely something to consider. But to be fair, we would only need a small handful of us to actually do something like that. At any given time we could just have one person be the Dungeon Master/Their Villain to run an event or whatever.

So maybe we do a big event, and that night its my turn to be the bad guy. So we're only one man out and I make a plausible excuse for my character not to be in the fray.

LeCard · **08-19-2013, 10:29 PM**

(08-19-2013, 10:22 PM)Kaln Wrote: The only problem with the badguys being our alts.. It won't ever be an 'us vs them' thing. It'll only be a portion of them against a portion of us in any encounter, leading to the ever ellusive rabbit.

That, and I'm not a fan of playing alts for any reason. I'd just as soon organize something with an existing 'evil' FC.

They don't even need to be evil, but I do agree I don't care for alts within the same storyline myself. makes too insular a story to me, kind of like playing yourself in chess, in the end you win either way and you could even force a certian side to win.

think about the Triad. they would see themselves as the one that should win, but toss in another mob in another country and that mob would think of themselves as "good" too. making evil simply in the eye of the beholder. Maybe the gridania based FC(s) are simply competition and we/they are moving into the other groups turf, insert turf battle here. the battle could be physical or more along the lines of a price war, or that sort of things.

FreelanceWizard · **08-19-2013, 10:34 PM**

Yep, my recommendation would be to create our own "SMERSH," so to speak, of bad guy NPCs -- or a set of bad guy groups for use in storylines. That'd be a resource for players to create their NPC nemeses and a source for multi-FC storylines. To keep things fair and sensible, they'd all have to be NPCs; the usual problem is that there aren't enough bad guy players to fill a full organization, and not everyone wants to play evil alts.

All that said, Mysterium isn't a hugely story-driven organization RP-wise, so I'd like to keep the villainous plotting to long-term, slow-burning plots combined with occasional events. I'd like to see the villains be "shading" for our heroic PCs -- a background threat that provides longer term motivation -- but that's just me. Smile

I think our PCs have enough going on with the NPC threats that Square's throwing at us: primals, voidsent, Ascians, Garleans... Smile

AkhutaiAngura · **08-19-2013, 10:35 PM**

(08-19-2013, 10:29 PM)LeCard Wrote:
(08-19-2013, 10:22 PM)Kaln Wrote: The only problem with the badguys being our alts.. It won't ever be an 'us vs them' thing. It'll only be a portion of them against a portion of us in any encounter, leading to the ever ellusive rabbit.

That, and I'm not a fan of playing alts for any reason. I'd just as soon organize something with an existing 'evil' FC.

They don't even need to be evil, but I do agree I don't care for alts within the same storyline myself. makes too insular a story to me, kind of like playing yourself in chess, in the end you win either way and you could even force a certian side to win.

think about the Triad. they would see themselves as the one that should win, but toss in another mob in another country and that mob would think of themselves as "good" too. making evil simply in the eye of the beholder. Maybe the gridania based FC(s) are simply competition and we/they are moving into the other groups turf, insert turf battle here. the battle could be physical or more along the lines of a price war, or that sort of things.

Ah, but see.. To my knowledge (Correct me if I'm wrong, Ash), the Blades aren't a.. Competitive sort. WE don't have a turf. We don't care about competition. We just wanna make sure people aren't doing bad (To us) stuff, and make sure the Garleans/Bahamut/INSERTOTHERBBADGUY is stopped. In a nutshell.

Gar · **08-19-2013, 10:43 PM**

(08-19-2013, 10:34 PM)FreelanceWizard Wrote: Yep, my recommendation would be to create our own "SMERSH," so to speak, of bad guy NPCs -- or a set of bad guy groups for use in storylines. That'd be a resource for players to create their NPC nemeses and a source for multi-FC storylines. To keep things fair and sensible, they'd all have to be NPCs; the usual problem is that there aren't enough bad guy players to fill a full organization, and not everyone wants to play evil alts.

All that said, Mysterium isn't a hugely story-driven organization RP-wise, so I'd like to keep the villainous plotting to long-term, slow-burning plots combined with occasional events. I'd like to see the villains be "shading" for our heroic PCs -- a background threat that provides longer term motivation -- but that's just me. I think our PCs have enough going on with the NPC threats that Square's throwing at us: primals, voidsent, Ascians, Garleans...

Yeah I like these ideas. If we do something it should be, like you said, slow burning. That solves a lot of the problems. Firstly that it doesn't have to be true alts that are antagonistic, just NPCs some of us might play out at certain points along the journey.

And I do agree that there are plenty to oppose ICly, and we all will I'm sure. But sometimes you need someone to play out the other side. So I think these ideas are for those occasional events where we want to band together and go against something a bit more tangible.

We're not talking every RP is going to be "We gotta go fight <bad guys>!" To me we're just planning some long-term occasional RP events for our groups. I'd love to run cross-group events where we sort of break up into a couple teams and intermix the FCs so you can have epic RP with people from the other groups.

Myxie Tryxle · **08-19-2013, 10:54 PM**

I've been rolling around the idea of an evil group to serve as antagonists for the community. This sort of discussion keeps cropping up, so there appears to be some demand for such a group.

In my local RP group, we've been breaking away from the typical gaming paradigm of "GM writes plot and runs game." Basically, everyone has a PC, and in any scene where a PC isn't present, their player takes up the role of the NPCs. Generally it plays out where each player has their own character and several notable NPCs (good, bad, and neutral) to play in the game. Occasionally you have to pass off one of your NPCs for someone else to play, but we try to assign NPCs to players who have little conceivable reason for their own character to interact with the NPCs they play.

I think this idea would work if we had an antagonist group that served as a resource for the community. Since Garryson is in this thread, I'll use his organization as an example. Suppose XI: 7 needs an antagonist. Garryson contacts Villains, Inc (just a stand-in title) in advance and requests some dark characters for his storyline. The members of Villains, Inc work out among themselves whose villains would be best for the task, based on Garryson's needs as well as trying to find players who would likely never overlap with the XI: 7 storyline. Considering the size of the community, if we can get a couple players from each of the established groups supporting such an organization, it could be a good resource for the community and give players interested in having a villain alt the organization necessary to make it a worthwhile endeavor.

Gar · **08-19-2013, 11:01 PM**

That is actually a really good idea Myxie. If something like that started to get organized, I'd probably put a villain in the pool.

Dubs · **08-19-2013, 11:22 PM**

Love the brainstorming here.

Maybe the formulation of some type of Villain archetype template form could streamline the process.

Categories might include:

Theme (Political, Religious, Pirate, Garlean, Lallafel zombies, Economic rivalry-crafting competitions)
Scope: Long plot, short plot, inclusion of other FC's. This particular category might sound ambiguous but there should be clear cut defined ranges
Participating PCs required for Villain events. (Lvl & class requirements?) NOTE: If there is going to be large scale battle (If it's even mechanically possible) involved this might take a lot of dedicated RPC members to level a couple of lets say Arcanists to level 20 EX naming convention: Cult Arcanist No. 1 or just use a random name generator because obviously there can't be the same character name for cronies etc. Once character is finished PC can delete character from their character pool (If they have slots available).
Zone dependent?
Head Villain Impresario for the plot who collaborates with FC leaders as well as orchestrates PC villain volunteers, providing OOC villain etiquette to underlings.
Backstories / Lore required

These are just a couple that pour out. I'm sure we can add much more we just have to regulate it to maximize participation, communication, timing while avoiding retconning, metagaming the usual pitfalls of RP. Scheduling is a must because if a Villain volunteer from some other FC has another event with their primary PC a lot of conflicts can occur.

Ashren Dotharl · **08-20-2013, 06:16 AM**

(08-19-2013, 10:35 PM)Kaln Wrote:
(08-19-2013, 10:29 PM)LeCard Wrote:
(08-19-2013, 10:22 PM)Kaln Wrote: The only problem with the badguys being our alts.. It won't ever be an 'us vs them' thing. It'll only be a portion of them against a portion of us in any encounter, leading to the ever ellusive rabbit.

That, and I'm not a fan of playing alts for any reason. I'd just as soon organize something with an existing 'evil' FC.

They don't even need to be evil, but I do agree I don't care for alts within the same storyline myself. makes too insular a story to me, kind of like playing yourself in chess, in the end you win either way and you could even force a certian side to win.

think about the Triad. they would see themselves as the one that should win, but toss in another mob in another country and that mob would think of themselves as "good" too. making evil simply in the eye of the beholder. Maybe the gridania based FC(s) are simply competition and we/they are moving into the other groups turf, insert turf battle here. the battle could be physical or more along the lines of a price war, or that sort of things.

Ah, but see.. To my knowledge (Correct me if I'm wrong, Ash), the Blades aren't a.. Competitive sort. WE don't have a turf. We don't care about competition. We just wanna make sure people aren't doing bad (To us) stuff, and make sure the Garleans/Bahamut/INSERTOTHERBBADGUY is stopped. In a nutshell.

This is correct, as far as the majority of the world knows the Blades don't actually exist, so because of that any turf they owned is claimed through subsidiaries and shell corporation type deals. Even within the Coalition Garryson or L'yhta would have to contact Ashren the usual way (the whole cowry into the fountain thing) to setup a meeting, so there'd always be an air of mystery around the Blades.

To use a kind of amusing analogy, Garryson and L'yhta could be considered sort of like Commissioner GordonÂ² and Ashren is Batman, even though they're allied you don't really know who they are, you just know what they stand for and that they're hear to help, and you know when you need them you just need to shine the Nald'thal Symbol.

As far as the villain idea goes, I like it for the most part but I agree that it would be better if we had other people playing them, and maybe even focus on one organization that could oppose our own efforts so that there could be at some point a fight that would involve all three leaders and their companies fighting together to try and defeat their enemy, or at least thwart one of their schemes.

Kismet · **08-20-2013, 09:19 AM**

(08-19-2013, 06:41 PM)LeCard Wrote: the three grand free companies of balmung.
The blades-XI:7-Mysterium
The shadows-the face-the arcane

I agree with the idea that this is ridiculously epic!

Not to mention that ALL THREE of these guilds are the exact ones that I'm having a really hard time choosing between. I have one friend who already wants to join XI:7, another who wants to join Mysterium (but is considering XI:7), and I'm debating between the Blades and Mysterium... Grrr. T__T

Ashren Dotharl · **08-20-2013, 10:08 AM**

(08-20-2013, 09:19 AM)Kismet Wrote:
(08-19-2013, 06:41 PM)LeCard Wrote: the three grand free companies of balmung.
The blades-XI:7-Mysterium
The shadows-the face-the arcane

I agree with the idea that this is ridiculously epic!

Not to mention that ALL THREE of these guilds are the exact ones that I'm having a really hard time choosing between. I have one friend who already wants to join XI:7, another who wants to join Mysterium (but is considering XI:7), and I'm debating between the Blades and Mysterium... Grrr. T__T

Well at least you know the way things are turning out that regardless of which one you join, you'll get to work with the other two!

Qhora Bajihri · **08-20-2013, 10:17 AM**

I'd actually been waiting to contact the Blades (and the Mysterium) until we got our FC set up, but I would love to make contact any time~ Possibility of villainy or at least conflict on our part certainly exists.

Just got to find me a cowry.

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RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes