C'kayah Polaali

I like my swords in many shapes and sizes, but 'okay' just won't cut it! I'm a fan of bastard swords. But then again, I'm a bastard, so that only fits...

Because Otto backed the wrong horse, old boy? There's plenty of room on the dark side of things...

The chef was right. C'kayah had to give him that, he was right about Kaurwa, with it's intense flavors. Many so-called chefs sought intense flavors by simply maximizing what is already there: salt; spice; garlic; heat. Their Kaurwa was noticeable, yes, but forgettable. Uninspired. He smiled at the dancers as they swayed to another table, then turned his attention to Snarl again. He used rigatoni. An interesting choice for the intensely flavorful Kaurwa. The pasta would trap more of the sauce, but not more of the larger ingredients: the cheese, the olives. He grinned as Snarl spoke of the parsley - an herb many considered to be inconsequential. An ornament. Both Miqo'te knew what it could add to a dish. Finally the plate arrived, borne by first one then the other of the dancers. He looked down at it. The sauce shining wetly in the afternoon light, filling only the ends of the rigatoni's tubes. Parsley flecks greeted his eye, the chef hadn't overcooked them, and they promised a green tang to the dish. The olives were small, and halved, each with it's own little cargo of sauce. He took the fork and bit. It was spicy, yes, as it should be but no more than that. The olives retained their unique flavor, as did the parsley. He could taste the salt of it, but it didn't overwhelm him, while the cheese added both a snap as well as helping to mingle the flavors. And last of all was the aftertaste of the oil: sweet and bright as a new day. He smiled. "This", he said, gesturing with his fork, "is nicely done. You have an appreciation for food, and that's not something that can be overstated."

Tylwyth Narah is also willing to ... ahem... help a Miqo'te in need! If you're interested in heading further down the criminal's path while having friends at your back, look us up!

The chef knew how to play a crowd, that was certain. He had a natural charisma, and a showmanship that promised entertainment, at least. But the question, C'kayah thought to himself, was 'can he cook'? Ul'dah was filled with would-be chefs, some fronting large restaraunts, others master of only a corner of cobblestone. All dreamt of enduring fame, but most of them approached it without a real sense for what made food. Anyone could combine random ingredients and call it unique, it took a true master to do something memorable that worked. He grinned at the half-naked chef. Snarl wanted his request, and he was of a mind to challenge the man with the least of dishes, the most humble of pastas. The whores of Ul'dah were fond of a tangy, salty, spicy dish made with olives and peppers. A cheap meal that could almost be comfort food if it were only a little more bland, considered beneath them by many of the shining chefs of Ul'dah. C'kayah loved it, just the same. It reminded him of his own early days in the city. Over the years he'd eaten many plates of it, some greater and some lesser. What could this Snarl do with such a dish? "My name is C'kayah", he purred, sucking thoughtfully on a fang. "Your dancers make me think of Pasta Kaurwa, with olives and hard cheese."

C'kayah is fantastic with kids, and adores them. He'd have a great time babysitting. He'd probably organize them into a big, chaotic lunch production line, and then they'd all go trooping out into Thanalan for a picnic and an adventure.

C'kayah Polaali wandered out of the quicksand, leafing through the stack of letters in his hand. It was time to pay rent on the old NHSC office. Should he renew it? It was useful enough, and inexpensive. His gemcutter was nearly finished on the necklace that would replace the one Ezhara took up in Coerthas. One of the alchemists he was trying out had sent him something reminding him that the potions he ordered could be made in bulk at a discount. He stopped short at the sound of a male yell, looking up at the spectacle in front of him. Snarl? He hadn't seen that particular chef before, but he had to admit the man had showmanship. A grin slowly spread over his face as he stepped forward, his eyes taking in the ingredients. The dancers behind the chef were attractice and coordinated, and they played their own part in the show, but their costumes were worn thin. Poor. That's alright, he thought, a hungry chef might be more eager to please. And a successful one might buy a pair of pants. "I'll bite", he said, moving to stand near the table.

Speaking as someone who playes a little 31 year old male Miqo crime boss that sips wine in the Quicksand all night listening to all the people talking about how deadly they are, I'd like to know who this person is and why she's not in my employ.

Easy. [video=youtube]

I got open headcount to hire a senior developer today, so my days of making due with a team of only consultants is coming to an end! And I had a really good bowl of brisket and tendon pho. Yum!

Bryn, you are my hero!

I'm with Coat on this. The Quicksand is one of those places where you see a lot of trolling going on (whether intentional or not), and a lot of it's in the form of spamming random emotes like this. It's already hard enough to follow things in the QS when it's crowded because of how quickly chat scrolls by. Adding a bunch of random emotes only amplifies this and makes it harder for other people to RP. I, and a lot of people I know, manage this by the diligent use of our blacklists. At best, doing this sort of thing can get you the sort of reputation you don't want. At worst, you're cutting yourself off from future RP.

That is really beautiful!

I can't think of anything better than this: [video=youtube]

On the villain side, at least, there are a lot of RP FCs that are participating in public RP and cross-FC RP. My old FC, Tylwyth Narah, is very strong in this area. Sepulchre is another, though I believe their recruitment is by invitation only, as is Jackal and Hyde on the EU time zone front. There are also a number of solid RP FCs on the neutral or good guy side that do the same. I'd like to especially call out The Dauntless and Shroud Wolves here.

Eleni is extremely cheerful and goes out of her way to make RP happen! Many kudos!

As things grow so do they change, and there's been a lot of that going on in Tylwyth Narah. The current contact list is: C'kayah Polaali Alexander Mason L'lani Tyata

Actor. Clearly.

(stuff) I get that, I just get guilty over others feeling like they have to you know. I'm like that in real life so it bleeds through. I hate asking for help. You're not asking for help. They want to help. You're letting them help.

Erik, I want to take exception to this. I think taking the position that you (as FC leader) are the only one responsible for raising funds for a house is both harmful to yourself as well as to the sense of community within your FC. A house costs a tremendous amount of money. A small is perhaps kind of sort of reasonable for one very dedicated player, but a medium or large approaches an order of magnitude difference. If you take the attitude that you're responsible for raising that money, you'll both never get it done as well as burning yourself out. At the same time, you're depriving your FC of something really valuable: the opportunity to feel invested in the FC. There are a lot of FCs out there where the individual members feel like replaceable parts in the leadership's thang. Now, I don't normally make a lot of value judgements, but I'll make one here: These sorts of FCs are bad. You don't want that. What you want instead is a FC where the people who join it feel like it's their FC. Where they feel like they're a part of something cool, and that they matter to it, and that it's success is partially because of their efforts. Fundraising for a house is a significant way to let everyone in the FC be a part of this. If the whole FC comes together over time and works up the money for a bigger house, then when you get that house they'll all feel proud of it. They helped make it a reality.

Haven't <> and a few other FCs done this? I don't think so. The DOVE auction that Rock Shattermountain ran went to help fund their new house. If there are other FCs that have done date auctions that didn't use actual gil, I'd be really curious to know about them.

I think ultimately the biggest problem with fundraising events is that they're fundraising events. As others have pointed out, things can get ugly when gil is involved. The canonical case of the date auction where one person makes millions and another makes nothing is a perfect example. We're all roleplayers because we love the creative, chaotic, artistic craft of making stories together. This is a fundamentally fuzzy thing, and wholly different than anything else in the game because it is unscored. Think about it. If you go run Ramuh, you can time your run parse your DPS or whatever you want to do and use that as a score with which to compare your performance to someone else. If you run Coil, you can compare which turn you run with other people. They're scores, and we love scores. Scores tap into our competitive impulses and our egos. And what is gil but another score? Erik has been running Royal Balls in Ul'dah for a couple of years. He works very hard, plans a nice event, and people enjoy them. He doesn't see a single gil from any of that, aside from any gil people donate to him to show their appreciation. In comparison, are there any date auctions that don't actually take real gil? Would people go to a date auction if the money were all pretend? I mean, ICly C'kayah is about as wealthy as Otto Vann. We've both established this in our backstories and our RP and it's pretty well accepted by the people we RP with. If they were both at the same date auction, they could afford to pony up huge bids. OOCly, on the other hand, Otto is one rich m**********r, while I hover around half a million because I don't care about making gil. So going to a real date auction, there's no way C'kayah could afford to make the same sort of bids. Using real gil puts the date auction firmly into the category of "fourth wall, it is broken". I'm not calling out balls and date auctions specifically, by the way. I'm only using them as examples. Adding complexity to things is the fact that roleplaying takes time, and time (in MMOs as well as real life) is money. Every hour I spend roleplaying is an hour I'm not crafting, or running CT, any other of a number of things that bring tangible in-game benefits worth gil. We roleplayers are poorer than we would be if we played the same number of hours and didn't roleplay. At the same time, one of the biggest things that sets a roleplaying FC apart as "serious" is a house, and houses are huge ticket items in this game. Moreso on Balmung, where housing is in such short supply that any potential buyer has to factor in an additional cost to pay the previous holder of the house so that they can even have an opportunity to buy the house. And so the date auctions. So the host events. So all the plethora of gil-making things that play to our strengths as roleplayers. They can get an up-and-coming new FC the gil for that small house. They can get serious roleplayers enough for a personal house. They can finance that upgrade by a bigger FC into a medium or large house. I can assure you, it is a real draw. Tylwyth Narah, for instance, has been around for almost a year. For that whole time we've focused on medium-to-heavy RP as villains in other people's arcs, in bottoms-up (scriptless, extemporaneous) RP with other people, and just in general trying to improve things for everyone by providing part of the living atmosphere of the game. This, of course, brings us nothing in gil. We've been fortunate and managed to buy a small house, and we make use of it all the time. At the same time, we've got over 50 people in the group (with about 30 in the FC), so we're starting to think about moving into a medium. Grinding the gil for the small was tough, and it took us quite a while to get our RP legs back after taking all that time away from stories. The jump from a small to a medium would require at least the same effort. It makes the idea of holding a date auction really, really tempting. Despite all the potential pitfalls. Despite the inevitable bad feelings and squicky interaction and the overall poke-it-with-a-stick response that it produces in some people. And I think that's why you're seeing so many of them now. Not because people don't have the creativity to do other things as fundraisers (hell, if you want an RP event with us, just say something. We're sort of a low-level continuously running event), but because they're a proven way to RP your way to enough gil to make up for the gil deficit you've already accepted.

One of the things I've noticed about Eorzean lore is the episodic nature of it. The ages don't really flow seamlessly from one to the other. They end with catastrophe, and new ages rise from them like foxfire from the ashes. I'd imagine there are a lot of civilizations, lost and vanished in the shadows of time, throughout the ages.

It frankly doesn't bother me one whit. Not for historical reasons, nor for "It seems as if" reasons, but for game design reasons. Mages in MMOs are powerful. They have very strong ranged damage dealing (hello Black Mage!) or healing powers that allows them to play with devastating effect. Tanks, on the other hand, largely focus on being able to soak damage, and their use of heavy armor with it's powerful damage mitigation compliments this. For the same reason that White Mages have crap damage dealing abilities (to avoid the "I can do it all, hahahaha!" syndrome), mages in this game (and most MMOs) are limited in the armor they can use. High damage/heals at range? That's powerful. Counter it by making them fragile? That balances them against the other classes. If your Black Mage could wear Dragoon's armor and do Dragoon-levels of damage from anywhere on the map without worrying about positioning or being hit by the AOEs around a monster, why would anyone play a Dragoon? If a White Mage could clank around in Paladin's armor and simply keep aggro with their massive self-heal while letting the damage mitigation of the armor keep the incoming damage low enough to let them live, why would anyone play a Paladin or Warrior? That's why RPGs and MMOs handwave odd restrictions like this. Not because they think that's the way it actually would be, but because they have to balance the game so that it's fun for everyone. The current setup, while not perfect, provides a solid mechanic that relies on well-balanced parties with well-balanced roles in order to succeed at the tougher content.