(02-06-2017, 10:45 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: I don't roleplay as an NPC but the conversation has come up a bit here before. It's a divisive topic (as you're already away) and I think I get some of the insight into it. Mix and match from the following as needed:
1) Most people doing it tend to shoehorn in their fan-canon personalities. Since only the official writing team knows how NPCs would react at various instances, the best any player can do is an educated guess at best. Some people do it pretty well, but there's also those who are just in it for the attention. Haurchefant got several people roleplaying him on Balmung, as did the Heaven's Ward.
2) The spoilers you referred to. Tataru and Minf doing some light shopping is impossible according to the lore.
3) Connections. NPCs come with a level of renown: Yours, for example, works with the most powerful adventurer on the planet and is respected by more-or-less every single important country leader that we know of. It's the political equivalent of Superman just throwing all of his problems into the sun. This has an odd extension when it comes to other players, though, since anyone who you would become friends with would technically have you to call upon should they have need.
This is pretty easily remedied by being unavailable or keeping these sorts of excursions limited to your group of friends; I'm speaking for the more broad archetypes where people are roleplaying in bars and pubs and actively LOOKING to make connections. These things are impossible to utilize while staying in the rough boundaries of the canon.
There's nothing wrong with using NPCs in your own stories, but if you're trying to mesh into open-world roleplay it can get tricky. What happens if someone else decides they want to play your character? Any connections you've made don't necessarily exist for that person, so it splinters any sort of coherency you've established.
I get what you're saying, but when it comes to timelines or characters being affected by plotpoints, couldn't we just attribute the entire situation to a case of willing suspension of disbelief? I'm not sure why some people take things to be so literal as that same kind of logic could be used elsewhere and become very restrictive. Saying that though, I come from a rather casual RP background so I might just be a bit more liberal?
EDIT: Wonderful points, by the way. Thank you very much for commenting.
