Faust

I haven't read the entire thread yet so pardon me if I reiterate something. I think it's worth noting that realism is not only contextual, but it isn't the first and only rule of RP. For example, while it might not be "realistic" for a person in our world to group up with a self-professed villain, or just generally dickish character, we have to remember that the characters we're playing aren't people in our world. And if you simply watch the CSs in FFXI, or any of the FF's, you'll find several if not numerous instances where the protagonists and various neutral characters DON'T act in ways that are realistic to us. That doesn't make them less entertaining though! Even grossly absurd characters can still be compelling if done tastefully. So I would encourage RPer's of non-villainous characters to not be afraid to make their character unafraid of something that might by all rights be worth fear. There are as many motivations for teaming up with a villain as there are for being a villain. Point being, if you want the spice that comes with having villains in your RP, be flexible enough to actually encourage that kind of RP. Same goes with the "lone wolves" and jerk types-- whether because your objective requires their help, or your character is curious to understand them, or you simply want to keep an eye on them, there are plenty of reasons to keep villains close at hand and active in the RP.

Getting a scroll bar on the guild name "The Freckled Pixies" Not sure if there's supposed to be any stylized font, but there's not one for me (on that page).

As usual I'm going to be critical for the sake of constructivism. I think, even categorizing by RP style, you're going to potentially be looking at some very long lists. What might be entirely too technical but really cool would be to have linkpearls that form a circle, which spins to select. Not only would this look really cool, but all linkshells would be "equals" from the selection menu. Just a thought. A probably much simpler solution would be to make columns and rows rather than a single column. Personally I don't think it's necessary to make a distinction between light and casual, nevermind moderate-heavy and such. They're subtle nuances, and I think most guilds will be fine if they have to choose between casual, intermediate, and serious business.

The biggest effect, I think, was shops, particularly guild shops, that are only open during certain hours. I think they wanted to have shops that opened and closed, and for whole days to go by within the course of a single session (so you could easily see the environments at different times of day, like sunrise and set, without playing absurd hours). They probably figured that people wouldn't like it if you had to wait really long periods of time just to buy something or see a certain environmental effect.

Yeah, I prefer game time just because it expedites otherwise boring things. I wouldn't want game time to follow real time, because then you don't get to play at certain hours game time, but it would be best I think if a real life day was 2 or 3 game days (at least for the purposes of RP). My impression is that the game clock is partly there for the purpose of making those things make sense. Traveling across an entire region in 10 minutes on foot doesn't make much sense, unless that ten minutes is actually a few hours. When I log off for the night, my character isn't sleeping for the night, they're taking days off to rest. But I really don't think it matters so long as everyone in your RP circle is on a similar page.

I'm not actually aware of a lot of references to age in XI though (Prishe?). Obviously most of our characters are well over a hundred years old in XI, but I wouldn't assume that they age the same as humans either, so in the end it doesn't really matter. Course my memory could be deficient here.

If I were going to RP a pregnancy (as a male I never would), I would have just done it by the Vanadiel/Eorzea calendar. Nine months is, what... eleven days real time?

I'd still like to find out if the JP RP the way we do, and if they plan to have unofficial RP servers as well. Even though we can't really RP with them, it'd be nice to be one community in that way.

Well, some potentially good news today. Word is that retainers will be able to do equipment repairs somehow, so if you want to RP a retainer as some kind of crafter alt rather than just a shopkeep or servant, looks like that might be an option for you. I'm wondering if this means you'll actually be able to raise crafts on retainers somehow or if they'll somehow use your main's skills.

I have no intention of using alts, but if I do end up making one, I'll just make them a retainer-- no different than any other mule.

My opinion as a freelancer: Don't worry about it overmuch. A server is a server-- pick one and be done with it. I see no real need to vote or deliberate on the matter, and don't care to be involved in the process one way or the other. If left to me, I would just pick whichever server name I liked the best.

Personally I don't really even care about RP in the beta. The people that I want to play with aren't in the beta. I really don't even want to spoil the game for myself by investing a bunch of playtime into the beta either. I may be the only person who is primarily there just to offer feedback.

I agree with Soren. If for some reason we can't get everyone on one server, have a backup server declared, but make it clear that it's the spill-over server, not necessarily an RP server.

My thoughts: Last minute split: Say there is a conflict/misunderstanding/confusion/etc and one or more guilds end up on different servers. What should be done? The RPC should QUICKLY decide what the server should be, and those on other servers should reroll/server transfer. RP-resistant server: For some reason we end up on a server which has a particularly negative bias against RPers. Grief is a regular ordeal. Stay or go? I think leaving is the last recourse we should pursue. First, we report griefers and make a concerted attempt to educate them while presenting ourselves in a favorable light. If in reasonable time, the problem persists heavily and SE fails to enforce its own anti-harassment policies, then we grief back. Most likely, griefers will be scattered and unliked, and neither able or willing to stand up to a united front against them. If all else fails, we can search for a server that will welcome us and begin a migration campaign. Unknown Names: Names of servers unknown until launch. How do we pick one? I'd say we need to have placeholder threads in all of the populated communities, just to let people know that there WILL be an unofficial server selected, and they should check back when they sign up to find out what it is. Of course, the RPC will need to decide very quickly on what that server will be. Mobilization agitation: lol I'm having fun with this now. Anyway, what if we fail to mobilize RP'ers to our server? Ads placed on other forums haven't been entirely effective, or at least weren't as welcome as we'd hoped. What if general Role-Players or people who are at least willing to try it end up all over the place? The best we can do is be vocal about it. As I've said a couple of times now, shortly before release (probably as soon as a server is decided), make a thread in major forums: Unofficial RP server is "Server". This way everyone knows with merely a cursory glance which server it is. We keep these threads bumped and visible (preferably with contributing content rather than just *bumps*). If we can get community sites to support us by making announcements or hosting articles, that would be great. Friend Trap: What if a significant amount of Role-Players decide on a server with their friends first, and move there to play with them. Should we all try to pick one server for everyone? Is that even possible? How can we get as many people on our server, along with their friends. Personally I've flat out told my friends that I'm going to the RP server, so they should come there too. There's really no good reason to pick a different server in advance... one is pretty much as good as another. They shouldn't have a problem going to the RP server.

Scroll bar issue is resolved. I do like the new tabs better, though I agree that darker/more drab would be even better still. As for the font, in lieu of something flowery, maybe a good ghetto fix would be to use something with serifs and italicize it. Particularly something where the lower case "f" dips below the letter line. Could also just screencap it as an image for shorter text blocks?

Some are fixed; I still see it in Etiquette and Links (title captions only). Could be a screen resolution thing?

I'm using Firefox. For example, when I go to the main page, it shows the Welcome! and right next to the Welcome there's a little scroll bar which lets me scroll up and down on only the Welcome. I don't actually need to be able to scroll to see it all, but the scroll bar is still there.

I don't know html so I'm not sure what's involved with changing the font, but I'm sure there are plenty of decent fonts in Wordpad/Office if that's workable. The "Visit our forums" banner on the Welcome page has a decent enough font, but I'm guessing that's an image. I would feel free to go with something even more pensman like with the titles. As for the scroll bars, I'm not sure if we're understanding eachother; they're fine where there's enough text that you actually need to scroll down, but there are little bars just sitting there where there isn't even any text to scroll down to. If those are easy enough to remove, it would clean up the look.

Looks great, but I have a few suggestions: 1. Change the font to something a bit more appropriate. Preferably not something so frilly that it's hard to read, but something with more appropriate character. The Times New Romanesque font isn't much to look at. 2. Can you tone down the colors on the tabs? The bold colors don't really mesh well with the antiquated leather-bound book look. 3. Get rid of the scroll bars where they're not needed. 4. Not going to make too many comments about the content at this point, but good general advice is to keep it brief. For example, opening up the charter gets an automatic tl;dr from me. I don't think most people will be interested enough in the charter to bother reading it, but a summary of the main points that are going to be relevant to the average reader would be good. A link to the charter for those who would like more detail would probably suffice. Make the page for the average person who is looking to join a guild, but also keep the information for those who'd like to start their own guild easy to find. Overall a job very well done, but I think these few polishing touches will go a long way.

I'm not sure what you're wanting as far as a "clever" backronym for RPC, but here are a few that I took in different directions. I generally figured it would be ideal to end it with "company" although there are a lot of options, everywhere from "children" to "conspirators". I'm sticking with Company since it will probably fit perfectly into the lore. Probably the most "clever" one that I came up with was: Recreate the Plot Company (or variants; Recreation of the Plot Company, Recreating the Plot Company, Recreators of the Plot Company, etc.) Recreate is used three ways here: 1. Recreation refers to rebuilding something. In this case, it refers OOC to rebuilding roleplaying and the RP community. 2. Recreation is, of course, something you do for enjoyment, such as role-playing. 3. Recreation can refer IC to something that we plan to recreate in Eorzea. In this case, referred to as "the plot." Plot, of course, can refer to a story's plot, which is something we will all create both individually and as a group. So Recreating the Plot, or RPing, refers to bringing the story back to the RPG. IC, the Plot would refer to an overarching plan by members of the Company, which could be a specific plan at some point, but could also be indefinitely vague, like, "the way." (Or maybe like "the force" for you Star Wars fans). "Farewell, and remember the plot." "The plot before all." etc. The plot could also refer to a physical plot, like a monument or piece of land, such as the Garlean-invaded Eorzea, or a specific spot picked by the RPC. So there's a lot of value added to that one. But while the more clever, admittedly it doesn't roll off the tongue too well, and I'm not sure which variation is the best. So feel free to bastardize it into something slightly less clever but more aesthetically pleasing. Alternatively, you could go with something purely for the aesthetic of it. For that you need merely throw together two words that sound good. Here are some that I've picked out: Ring of Rise of Righteous Rebels of Rebellion Radicals of Reverent Return of Recreation of Protection/Protectors Pretending/Pretenders the Path the Plan Pride the Plot Nearly any combination of those will net you something decent. I would like to hear other's opinions, and eventually have a short list to vote on.

I don't even know if Japanese players RP, at least the way that westerners do. Maybe none of them do, or maybe they all do a little? For all I know it could be anywhere in between. Anyway, I think that the JP community is going to have a more important say on whether there is an RP server than we will. It's naive to think that they'd create an RP server because many western games do when the development team is of an entirely different culture. I would really be curious to know what the RP scene is like for JP. My current impression is that there probably won't be a RP server, so the discussion is moot. Even if SE recognizes an RP population as having unique needs, their design philosophy trends to making servers more cosmopolitan. e.g., if they won't segregate servers by LANGUAGE, I doubt they'll segregate them by player types. They probably like the idea of having roleplayers on every server. If by some wild chance we do have an option, I say we just go with the SE designated server. The reason being simply that over time, that server will attract a lot of roleplayers that won't learn about us, and the RP community will become disjointed and weakened as a whole. Any other advantages/disadvantages are trivial by comparison. Since we probably won't have that option anyway, of course we should have an unofficial server. The more, the merrier. The easier it will be to find a good fit with an RP group, the more robust the RP community will be-- more events, just more RP in general.

Most likely a male Elezen Dusker from Gridania.