C'kayah Polaali

It normally doesn't matter to me what the tag is - I like when RP FCs use "RP" in their tag, but I'm starting to recognize all the major RP FCs by name, anyways. The tricky bit is that tags don't have to be unique. I used to be in a FC called "Hand of Fate", with the tag "FATE". There are also at least 2 other FCs with the same tag. It confused me to no end...

Let's chat, Naih'ir. I don't have a Keeper alt, but I'd love for there to be some connection for C'kayah.

Oh, God, yes!

That means there definitely can be multiple nunhs and small sub-tribes within each tribe. This makes me feel a lot better about a lot of the Nunh-players I've seen running around in game, as I've had sort of conflicted feelings about them before. It was hard for me to reconcile how there could be that many when supposedly there should have been only one or two per tribe. I've personally got a different take on those. I see being a Nunh as a role, rather than a title, in the sense that you're a Nunh when you're back with your tribe and your breeding group doing your Nunh thing. If you leave your tribe and your breeding group and you go out and do a bunch of adventuring (especially if you don't handwave the travel times), you've got to figure you're away from your group for months. I don't see any way in hell that a Nunh is going to go back to their group after a long absence and not have been replaced. C'kayah (for his own reasons, partially influenced by the tension between his drives to become a Nunh and his desire to not return to his tribe) tends to think of absent Nunhs as sort of wannabes.

This is a fantastic thread! I'm a big fan of Tobias' style of hooks. I created C'kayah to be sort of a supporting actor in other people's stories, and I find that those sorts of hooks work really well for introducing him into people's RP without taking it over. It's also nice in that I've been able to use those hooks to meet a bunch of new RPers on Balmung who have wanted to RP but didn't know anyone. If I see someone by themselves with a RP tag on, or walking around, I'll typically at least "/em studies blah blah curiously" them (and often send them a /tell) to see if I can draw them into something. The weird thing is that, despite my being a total introvert, C'kayah's turned into kind of a social butterfly with this. The payoff, of course, is more RP than I can eat. The downside, on the other hand, is that I've gone from level 34 1/2 to level 34 2/3 in the last week of heavy game play because of this.

[sex] don't add anything to the story or your character. Okay, now I'm personally a huge fan of the "keep it to /tell and /party" rule, but I've got to take exception to this*. *Sorry for the overabundance of opera. I'm a huge opera buff, so my mind always goes there. I threw in Shakespeare for the rest of you.

You know, you're absolutely right. I've been irked by what I see as people being bothered by erotic content while being fine with other sorts of graphic content, but that's not the issue at all, is it? We're all RPers here in this game that we like to play. Many of us like one another, and we certainly all need to at least get along. I, personally (despite C'kayah being something of a bastard) don't want people to be disturbed by stuff I write, so of course I will tag any graphic threads I write as [graphic]. I feel a little ashamed at missing that essential point this entire time.

I don't think anyone's taking whacks at you, Mizore. I think largely the issue is that Miqo'te obviously have a pretty distinct culture from the rest of Eorzea, but there is very little canon information about what that culture is outside of basic family structure.

I dunno. Culturally they're all pretty distinct, and I think that's where all the really interesting RP possibilities come in - I don't care how alien or not they look, I care how alien or not they act. A good example, to me, is Lord of the Rings Online. I'm a huge Tolkien geek. I've read pretty much everything he wrote, including all the random drafts and essays in the various History of Middle Earth books. I love Tolkien's elves. So, of course, I play an elf in LOTRO. Now it's not terribly easy to tell an Elf apart from a Man in that game, aside from beards, but culturally they're extremely different. Tolkien's Elves are alien. They don't die. They develop differently as children. Their existence is bound by the existence of the world (instead of leaving it and going who-knows-where, like Men do). When they look at something in the world, they see it, as opposed to Men who (in the words of Finrod) seem to be remembering something more dear to them from someplace else. Tolkien's Elves live in the world, while they call Men "Guests" because they seem to pass through it on the way to something else. It makes for a really fascinating perspective to RP. Miqo's and Lalafell and all the rest of them aren't quite that alien from one another, but there's certainly enough differences to be interesting.

IIRC, the Grindstone fights use a random number website (random.org, I think) that lets two people set up a session and see each other's numbers. They do a "first to three hits" rule, and it's up to the contestants to RP the actions. Most of the RP fights I've been involved in have been freeform, but that requires a lot of trust between all of the participants. When I played Star Trek Online, I dabbled with using their PVP system for fights, but that was always pretty unsatisfying. Many people play their characters as being a different power level than in-game mechanics support, which would get completely tossed aside using an in-game PVP system. If you want to get a little more involved than Grindstone, you might use a number site, and then weight the results: "Foo, you're a powerful fighter, so you add ten to all your rolls. Bar, you're very tough, you'll take four hits to defeat." For the most part, though, the Grindstone fights (with their very simple and even mechanic) seem good enough for most things I could imagine.

That's an interesting point, and you're right, there are a lot of people who don't play around with Miqo'te culture in their Miqo'te. In C'kayah's case (I may as well join in on the mature response thing), he did leave his clan and it has had an extremely strong impact upon him: he is a strong opponent of Miqo'te tribes maintaining their (in his view) "cultural isolation" from the rest of the world, especially after the Garleans have shown their colors. At the same time, he makes excuses all the time as to why he hasn't returned to his tribe (building on C'io's excellent C-tribe write up, his tribe sends teenagers out to 'hunt the world' for a year or so before returning to take up their adult position in the tribe. C'kayah sometimes maintains that he's still doing this, despite the fact that his world hunting started fifteen years ago), and alternately describes them as rejecting him and uses them as a rationale for doing what he's doing (ask him sometime to discribe his philosophy of stealing from wealthy Ul'dahn families, he'll do it using a C-tribe hunter's metaphor). That said, the only real thing I had in mind when I created C'kayah was that I would make him to be more of a supporting actor, instead of a lead role. I chose Miqo'te simply because I liked the way they looked, and I figured there was a lot of room to use their culture to generate conflict within C'kayah. Oh, and for the record, Naih? C'kayah and Naih'ir RPed together once, with Naih'ir coming across as extremely elistist and prejudiced about anyone outside tribal culture, while C'kayah was trying (and poorly, since he's not 100% convinced of this) to argue for Miqo'te abandoning tribal culture. It was a brief scene, but it stands out to me as one of my favorite instances of Miqo'te RP. Just wanted to give you public kudos for that, man.

This looks like a lot of fun, Naih'ir! I'll certainly try to make it.

Cirinius'li does have fabulous hair!

Uh... I like cats?

It's funny, in a not-so-funny sort of way, that the issue of tagging threads came up because of the suggestion of erotic purpose in a thread. Meanwhile, we've had threads down in Town Square with detailed depictions of murder, theft, torture, vengeance and slavery, none of which prompted this discussion. There's a quote from George RR Martin that I think is really appropriate here:

M'riss clucked her tongue as Tobias tried to leap off the table. "Get back on the table, boy, you're only making it worse." She slipped a hand under his arm to help him back up. "In any case, I don't know him. I live close to the Gold Court, I'm open at night, and I'm known for not asking questions. So I get a lot of your type in here. Jobs done wrong, guards not properly bribed, that sort of thing. Easy, now, don't try to jump up. Just settle back on the table there, that's right. I don't really want to know what you two were up to, or where it went wrong. I'll just patch you up, you'll pay me, and we'll both just go on with our day."

I'm sure you'll get flak for a time travel backstory, but as far as I'm concerned (and I'm sure many others fall into my camp) just make it entertaining. Interesting RP covers up a lot of sins.

You had another option. Telling the player, "No. Not just no, but fuck no. Get bent." If that seems too harsh for you, please, by all means, contact me and I will be your angry ball of angry and tell them for you. I promise to leave most of their face intact when I'm done. :angel: This. So much this. I don't mean to make light of the subject, but how is it any different than someone scheming to murder your one of your characters without your consent? I mean, if that same person was planning on killing your character, would you be faced with the choice of either retconning months worth of RP or setting the character aside? No. You'd have the (well-established) choices of also saying "Sorry, nope. I don't agree", or acting out the fight and defending your character successfully. A rape scheme is really no different: A: "My dear man, now you're mine, whether you like it or not." *stalks B, club in hand* B: "A! How could you! I trusted you!" *whips out a knife and menaces A while circling around towards the door*

I don't think this is that sort of situation at all. RP always requires consent, either implicit or explicit. Without consent, it's merely trolling masquerading as RP, and that's a different animal entirely. (That's not entirely true. Some MMOs - most famously probably Eve Online - are built entirely around non-consensual PVP. Final Fantasy is most certainly not that sort of game, though)

Well, I suppose the alternative is to not talk about the elephant that keeps walking into the room...

I'm still wondering where you hide Siha.... The best part is that was probably C'kayah's most charitable moment in game to date! She'd been robbed and was stranded in Ul'dah. C'kayah fed her, gave her money, and let her pass out in his spare bedroom when she'd drank too much and gotten vision-sick. Hell, he even made her breakfast the next day! :angel:

Amelia, I know exactly how you feel! It's always scary coming to a new game and trying to jump into RP there, in the midst of people who can speak definitively about the minutiae of lore, especially with something like Final Fantasy that's been around for literally decades. This is a pretty friendly group, though. Except for Karaan, of course. You never know what you're getting with that guy... Seriously, though, we're a friendly bunch. I'm glad you decided to burn the blanket!

It's an oddball assumption, too. I mean, most people who play MMOs to the endgame don't roleplay but do raid, but we don't make the assumption that people who raid don't RP... Granted, I'm stretching the metaphor quite a bit...

I've started a new thread to talk about ERP, so we can leave this one for R'mah's original purpose of finding extras. Come on over and argue! :angel:

I've been reading the "seeking Miqo'te females" thread with some interest as its developed. One thing that really stood out to me - I've been thinking about this a lot lately for other reasons - is the reactions people have been having to it when they assume that it's about ERP. Now, I don't really want to clog up R'mah's thread with a discussion of ERP, but it seems like a good time to split that off into its own thread. Searching the forums, I see this isn't the first time someone's started a conversation about ERP and people's reaction to it, but the last one was long enough ago that I'm going to just start a new one instead of necroing the old. Let me start with a confession, 'cos it's germaine to the topic: I ERP. I haven't ERPed in Final Fantasy, but I have ERPed a few times in games in the past. Does that make me a bad person? A dirty pervert? I don't think so, but you'll have to make your own decisions there. I'm making this confession as an experiment, because of something I think is pretty common in the RP community - despite my having engaged in ERP in the past, I've never come out and publicly admitted that I do so. Why? Probably because of the general stigma that seems to be associated with ERP. So what does this mean in my case? Those of you who know me know that I describe myself as a role-play whore. I've role-played for decades. I'm an AmberMush alumni, for any of you who remember AmberMush. Pretty much my entire RP history in gaming has been at least partially an attempt to recapture the depth and intensity of some of the AmberMush stories, and I typically prefer RP to any other activity in any MMO I play. While I like all kinds of role-play, I prefer heavily character-driver role-play. I love morally ambiguous, villainous, and even evil role-play. I love romantic role-play. Complex stories with a surplus of intensity are my meat and potatoes. So when I say that I ERP and that I've engaged in ERP a few times in games in the past, put that into the context of my role-play as a whole. Why am I doing this? Consider it an experiment. It's pretty widely assumed that a huge portion of the role-play community engages in ERP at some time or other, but just never publicly admits it. Probably for the same reasons that I've never admitted it in the past. So for this game, this time around, I'm going to come at it from the other direction and just flat out say that I include ERP in the types of RP that I do. With that out of the way, let's talk about this terrible stigma associated with ERP, and why a lot of people react the way they do. Look at the "seeking Miqo'te females" thread. It's pretty clear from the get-go that the extras M'rah was asking for were not simply to fulfill an ERP fantasy, but that they were to be used in a story about what was obviously a very twisted Nunh and the status of slavery in Final Fantasy. Despite this, so many of the responses include some sort of ERP disclaimer. I'm not saying this to try and single out anyone, nor to cast any sort of blame on anyone - if blame were to be cast, I'd certainly be guilty of posting my fair share of "blah blah, oh, by the way, I think ERP is fine so long as it's kept private, and I'm not personally interested" replies to OOC comments over the years. Instead, I'm mainly just interested in why ERP is such a hot button topic. Hot enough that the fact that M'rah's arc involves slavery seems less controversial than the impression that it might involve ERP. I think probably the obvious top of the button is probably the squick factor. Some people don't care for sex scenes in their RP or their books or their movies. Nothing wrong with that. I, personally, won't watch the "Saw" movies because I simply don't want to put those images in my head. Other people get squicked out for different reasons. A big one used to be the "man factor" - maybe it still is, I don't know. You know: the old ha-ha-only-serious joke about MMORPG standing for "Many Men Online Role Playing Girls". A lot of men get squicked out at the idea that their character's slender leman is really "le man". Yet many of those same people will happily read novels with fairly explicit sex scenes without feeling uncomfortable at all. This is the "author factor" that people talk about: Is Neuromancer squicky because William Gibson wrote the character of Molly? I think another big part of the hot button is what I like to call the "rocks factor". You know. "I'm fine with good role-players ERPing, but most ERPers are only doing it to get their rocks off." Which is a bit of an odd thing to say because, for me personally, everything I do in RP gets my rocks off. Political RP. Conflict. Romance. Espionage. Theft. In Star Trek Online I played a character that engaged in black market slave trading and sold Orion knock offs of Cardassian copies of obsolete Klingon agonizers in bulk. And that got my rocks off. Writing the tail end of "A Midnight Walk" with Tobias got my rocks off. It's all thrilling. That's why I RP. And you know what? The same goes for everyone. Roleplayers role-play because they like it. It's satisfying. It's pleasurable. It gets their rocks off. Why, then, is ERP considered differently? Why is it good and admirable to get your rocks off doing an intense, involved arc about conflict while it's bad and squicky to get your rocks off doing an intense, involved RP that includes ERP?