(03-22-2013, 07:08 PM)Deirdre (Not to derail the thread...but-) Wrote: You are equating player characters more with regular citizens, but the extreme percentage of us are playing characters as 'adventurers' who are regarded as the lowest class and expendable, almost akin to a slave. So that's not a great starting point, even with wealth, family or legacy behind you.
Some people are certainly going to be normal citizens within RP, but I also extensively mentioned where they weren't. And I think it's incredibly weird you'd try to equate adventurers with slave. Like, that's not only bizarrely wrong, that's pretty offensive on top of it.
Slaves are people without power, agency, who don't receive pay, and more importantly, who are horribly oppressed. Equating adventurers -- people who slay monsters, do odd jobs, and otherwise act as mercenaries -- to slaves is just... incomprehensible tbh.
There are tons of implications around that show the company taking care of you as a member. I think trying to imply that they don't is really backwards and odd too. If they're gearing you up, they're feeding you and helping you with lodgings.
My overall issue with using class is it becomes entirely meaningless to use it in this context. It would be better, much better, to describe their situation and leave it at that. Trying to put them into specific, studied socioeconomic categories that they plainly do not fit in -- half the people with lower class characters so far -- in a society that doesn't parallel our own where class doesn't seem to have a real concept in it can only generate confusion.
Also, irony for telling people not to dwell on specifics and then correcting someone as your very first point. ^5
(Though, I really think not paying to specifics of a setting just leads to more confusion later down the line to begin with, so thanks for the correction, I was using a really old term I heard around the alpha of 1.0 and it stuck with me.)
(03-22-2013, 07:53 PM)Dreke Lamorte This. Wrote: Upper-class could be an aristocratic in general, a well-off merchant-trader, a hoarded, scrupulous mercenaries, nobles' employees could be. This is true for all classes, and is quite valuable for player-player interactions, NPC-world to character understanding, and a way to associate a characters upbringing and world-view in line with a player perspective.
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However, I don't liken Eorzea to a pre-industrial Earth, because that means that everyone is playing ancient cultures from our history, and that's not even close to an approriate description of the state of things in a sci-fi/fantasy setting.
Upperclass is very easy to define, and that's probably why you went to that definition for it. The owners of production are almost always going to be upperclass by virtue of, well, everything, but the sheer involvements of guilds would be likened more to a monopolistic union. I think it's a highly important part for learning about everyone's roles in the world. You know. So they can actually play.
I find it weird, and very odd, that you reject the idea of Eorzea being pre-industrial because it doesn't parallel our own culture while in a thread that uses an inherent part of our culture -- you know, class hierarchy.
Anyways, Eorzea, or at least everyone but the Garleanininings, are most definitely pre-industrial. There's very little machinery to think of. There's no factories. It's, by definition, pre-industrial. The Garlean Empire is most definitely industrial. That's sort of a huge point about their military might, what with all their mechanized infantry.
The Garlean Empire even uses a parallel of a nuclear bomb.
