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(10-17-2016, 08:33 PM)AlionLucada Wrote:(10-17-2016, 08:10 PM)Kilieit Wrote:(10-17-2016, 07:54 PM)AlionLucada Wrote: When you start applying labels to yourself before you know all of the lore behind the titles and organizations you only set yourself up for a fall.
Welcome to a train of thought that leads to never roleplaying anything interesting, ever, because it's "too risky" or makes you a "special snowflake" (didn't we get over the term "special snowflake" and the concepts behind it in, like, 2013?).
By this logic, I wouldn't be roleplaying an Au Ra.
I'd reiterate what everyone else said to you on the previous page.
There's a difference between that and RPing something that flies in the face of what we've been told by the lore team, whether or not you think they're worth listening to or not.
You can RP an Au Ra because it's been made clear they're refugees fleeing to Eorzea. You shouldn't RP a Dragoon because we now know (and have always known) they're an exclusive and very small order of elite warriors. You can RP as a Garlean or Doman because we see hundreds upon hudnreds of Garlean grunts still operating in and around Eorzea and we saw the quests that told us Doman refugees were fleeing to Eorzea. You shouldn't RP a Galrean Legatus or a Doman Princess because these are both high offices and we know so little about that aspect of the lore you're more likely to get something wrong you're going to have to retcon than not.
Nobody is saying you should only RP boring people doing boring things, but you can basically do what you've already been doing already.. just don't apply these titles to yourself or say your character is part of some special organization.
Okay, but we don't know anything about Au Ra biology. We know comparatively little about what they eat, what their nutritional needs are, what types of food their bodies find easier or harder to digest. We don't know what they look like when they're young. We don't know how they change as they get older. We don't know if xaela tribes tend to raise their young in creches, in parental units, what a "standard" au ra family unit looks like besides those tribes who are noted as being different (different from what?). We only just, this weekend, learned how they hear. We don't know what their limbal rings are. We don't know if they affect their sight. We don't know how prehensile their tails are. We don't know if they're useful. We don't know how handicapped an au ra is if they lose it. We don't know what purpose their scales serve. We know their scales shed, but we don't know how often, and we don't know if they do it naturally on a schedule (how often?) or if they have to be prised off and regrown. We don't know if they're warm- or cold-blooded, although we can make the assumption that they're viviparous, due to their models having belly-buttons... sort of. And so many more things. I could literally go on for 20 minutes about how much we don't know about au ra...
...all of which is totally unavoidable when roleplaying my character, meaning I have to just fill in a value and hope it's correct. All of it is stuff I might have to retcon in future.
By the attitude you've displayed in this thread, this makes me a bad roleplayer who should reconsider roleplaying a race we know so little about before it comes to bite me in the ass.
We knew dragoon jobs were difficult to get into. We didn't know there were thirty of them. It was reasonable to assume that a character who was all of Ishgardian, physically fit, had a strong hatred of dragons, sufficient strength of will to widthstand the hazing, and was old enough to have been at it for a number of years might be in with a chance of becoming a dragoon. There was the reasonable assumption that there was a unit of dragoons per region, or per large town, that could be called upon to defend it at a moment's notice. Or the reasonable assumption that there were enough personnel within the Knights Dragoon that they could "swap out" to prevent them from dying of exhaustion while defending some of the Horde's most persistent attack spots. That'd probably make them around the 300 mark in total that I semi-joked about a couple pages back.
I do not think it is fair to malign people who operated under these assumptions. As I said, I have friends - good friends, who make a strong effort to adhere to the lore, love to devour every piece of information we were given about Ishgard and the dragoons, and made a solid effort to incorporate as much of it as possible into their character's story - who are now having to consider rerolling their character whom they poured so much work into because of an arbitrary number.
Yes, arbitrary. Nobody gains anything from "30". It's not useful for roleplay (the main practical use for lore). It doesn't inform us anything new about the Knights Dragoon that "100" or "300" wouldn't also have (those are still small numbers - just with more wiggle-room for people who aren't named NPCs!) - except maybe that Ishgard sucks at military strategy, because how on Hydaelyn is a high school class' worth of suicide troops supposed to make an ongoing difference in a 1000 year war? As people on like, page 2 and 3 said, they could easily have left it vague. As those people also said, "30" is effectively meaningless without knowing other stats about Ishgard's supposedly expansive military... all of which are absent.
I don't like that the stat exists - I think it's pointless trivia that does more harm to the main users of lore than good to anyone - and I don't like how ready people are to dismiss other people's lovingly, carefully developed and previously totally valid roleplay out-of-hand as a result of its existence.
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