(12-16-2013, 02:03 PM)Magellan Wrote: Honestly, I feel like there are (and should be) two brands of our characters. The public, community wide brand has to play a safe, politically correct, and ultimately somewhat bland version of themselves that mostly focuses on socializing.
Lets say your character is a high ranking official of the maelstrom. You go to the bismarck to get a drink, strike up a conversation with a stranger, only to find they are a high ranking official of the maelstrom too.
Only your stories don't match. Nor do your interpretations of what the maelstrom is, and what they do. To accept each others versions requires significant retconning or rewriting of your own tale, which many people are unwilling to do.
Or lets say the other player was a fierce pirate known across all of Limsa. Only, you've worked for the maelstrom for years and have never heard of him...
The point is, what is accepted within your inner rp circle won't necessarily be accepted by the community as a whole, where contradictory stories abound. We exist in multiple universes and multiple versions of Eorzea, so when we engage in the wider community, there are certain defining characteristics that have to be abandoned.
Because everyone has a different interpretation of what is allowed, what is lore friendly, and what puts you in that 'special snowflake' catergory.
This is an interesting couple of points that illustrate the problems associated with RPing your character as if all the in-game events actually happened to them.
An extreme case of the "Oh, you're a high ranking Maelstrom officer? Me, too!" problem exists in Star Trek Online, where your rank is literally your level, so that everyone eventually progresses up to Admiral. Roleplayers in that game quickly realized that they had to divorce their character from their in-game rank to avoid the "bar full of Admirals" problem.
The "fierce pirate" case is interesting, too, but that's mainly because it points out one of what I feel is a bad RPing habit: instant infamy. While it's fun to decide that your character is the Jack Sparrow or Catelyn Stark of Eorzea, it's hard to actually justify it without a history to back you up. My deciding C'kayah is a villain all of a sudden is fine, because I decided he's small potatoes. Deciding he's the biggest crime boss in Ul'dah, on the other hand, is problematic. Now if he'd been working with the Night Blades for months and participating in IC crimes that whole time, I'd have some justification for making a bigger claim about him.
I don't think that this makes our characters blander or more PC, though. It makes them more believable. After all, if we all went with the "in-game events happened to me!" angle, we would all:
- Have defeated Ifrit
- Have defeated Titan
- Be the emissary from Gridania/whatever the other two cities have
- Possess the Echo
- Be the only Hyur/Miqo'te/whatever White Mage/whatever other class
- etc
