C'kayah Polaali

I used to feel awkward if I didn't get a reply, but not anymore. I got in the habit, when I was bored, of sending /tells to anyone who looked like a RPer asking if they were, what sort of RP they liked, and if they'd like to RP with me. I'd say easily 50% of them wouldn't reply for various reasons (afk, shy, thought I was a crazy stalker, etc), so I got used to that pretty quick. As an aside, I heartily recommend doing this, especially if you're the sort of RPer who normally stays quiet and wishes they had more RP going on. It gets you in the habit of talking to people you don't know, it gets you in the habit of asking people about the RP they want (and honestly, you're far more likely to get interest from someone if they think you're interested in what they want), and it gets you a big-ass friends list full of people to RP with.

My suggestion - and this is really simply a good approach to any RP (and I'm as guilty of not doing this as anyone else) - is to think about this in terms of how you can use this RP to help progress other people's stories. That way you're offering something valuable, instead of asking others to provide something to you, and you'll be far more likely to find takers and to have interesting RP. For instance: The Lady Olorin's old bodyguard has betrayed her, and works against her. She is now looking for a new bodyguard to both keep her safe, as well as to proactively work against her old bodyguard. You're providing a skilled combatant foil (complete with RP opportunities) for someone, which is the bread and butter for so many fighters who are motivated by duty. Another example: The Lady Olorin's family has fallen on hard times, and she has gotten into debt from a number of shady folks in Ul'dah (who would be played by PCs). She is looking for a personal assistant who will be in frequent contact with them, staving off their attempts to collect. Ul'dah being the way it is, any shady character worth their salt would want to extract payment in favors (RP hooks!) from the Olorin family, and the Lady Olorin's personal assistant would be a key role in both the negotiations for favors as well as the actual favors themselves.

It's usually pretty easy to tell when a RPer is in OOC mode. Like Val says, sitting and staring at the retainer bell, or wearing ridiculous armor, or having your minion out, or any other number of things are good cues to this. For me, though, I'll typically send someone a /tell before I go up to RP with them. Some people RPing in the quicksand are in the middle of something intense and would rather not have it be interrupted. Some people are afk. Some people are just hanging out while someone in their party uses the bathroom before they go back into Alex. I'll expand on that a little. When I'm bored, I tend to go to places like the Quicksand and examine people. If someone's clearly a RPer and clearly not doing anything, I'll send them a /tell introducing myself and asking what sort of RP they like. I'm a big fan of pick up RP, but without a little OOC chat first it tends to just be "Hey. 'Sup." "Nothin' much. Drinkin' an ale...". Having a little OOC talk with someone allows you to set up a more involved hook for the pick up RP. Here's an example. Setoh's a criminal. He's basically a Leon the Cleaner type, working for whoever pays him. I'm sitting in the QS, and I see someone standing on their own. Their character info says they like mature RP, so I send them a tell: Me: "Hey! I saw your search info! Do you do crime RP at all?" Them: "I don't, but I'd love to get into that. I want my character to be an information broker..." Me: "That sounds cool! Are they doing that now? Would they be well known?" Them: "They're just starting out, but yeah, his name is out there..." Which would lead me into approaching his character to buy or sell some information. It's still pick up RP, but it's got a deeper hook that sets the stage for future RP.

Hey, at least it's not a $70 monacle... One interesting thing about FF 14 that I've noticed is that the outfits carry their own bodies along with them. Look at female Miqo'te in the starter skirt and stockings versus the lightning skirt, for instance. There's a very distinct difference between how muscular their legs look in the two. For most of the outfits, they map to your body sliders pretty well, but I suspect a lot of the limited edition outfits like this are just cranked out without putting the time into making them map properly.

Seriously, I'll keep an eye out for you in game.

I forgot this thread was here! I'm not sure what the recruitment status of Tylwyth Narah is, but I'm definitely not associated with it, anymore. You'll want to talk to Lathu'a about it.

Oh yes, I have. Especially with C'kayah. Man. That guy attracted tears like no one's business. Setoh? Not so much. I imagine it's only a matter of time, though. I *have* gotten upset with a few RP partners OOCly, but that's an entirely different thing.

Elite Dangerous. That's all I'm gonna say.

Good find! Okay! Well, it doesn't make sense to me, but so little does make sense about Au Ra. In any case, direct from the horses mouth, so I recant.

I'm personally not convinced that Au Ra horns are actually ears. Au Ra, despite looking reptilian, are mammals. That's plain as the... er... tits on an Au Ra female. That said, they do have some characteristics of reptiles or birds: some scales being the big one. Neither reptiles nor birds have big external ear structures. Some reptiles have external ears, in the sense that their eardrums are basically right there on the surface, but most reptiles and all birds have recessed ears with no external structures, and they hear very well. I see no reason why Au Ra wouldn't have similar ears. They all have full heads of hair, which would cover a bird-like ear hole. The horns, then, would simply be horns. They might be hollow structures that improve their vocal resonance, or they might be solid horns, or something else entirely. But there's no reason to suspect that, since you see no external ear and you do see external horns, that the horns are actually organs of hearing.

I'm amused by the idea that dancers would by necessity also be prostitutes in any era other than the modern one. I'm more amused by the idea that other professions wouldn't be... Nat came up with the idea of gladiators also being prostitutes a while ago. The idea makes total sense to me. Some muscular, skilled fighter in a light steel subligar in the fighting pits, body sheened with sweat and blood? They'd attract attention. In our own history, actors have frequently been associated with prostitution. Why not in Eorzea, too? Likewise musicians. Likewise witches and sorceresses. Now there's an interesting idea. "There, sir. I've washed your wounds and aetherically healed them. Would you like a happy ending with that?"

Not in Final Fantasy, no. My main character in Eve Online, however, was named for her intended profession: Shintoko, which is a sort of basket, and she was intended to be a smuggler.

Partial-service visual sex workers?

Kinda sorta. My main class is WHM, and I don't RP WHM, but I do RP as a conjurer. Setoh is a combat character, so I mix in conjury with pugilism and archery, ICly. It makes for interesting combat RP.

It did... sort of. People didn't understand the system, and so they would complain because they couldn't get the exact specific land spot that they wanted (certain spots in a ward are always more popular than others due to the view or whatever, I'm sure that's the case in FFXIV too). What they didn't realize was that if they and a friend paid a little gold to buy up the last couple spots for houses of that size, it would trigger the server to generate new wards due to crossing that "availability threshold", which it wasn't currently wasn't due to those couple of "not in the popular spot" houses of the given size being available. Yep, this. What would typically happen was all the small houses in a ward would get snapped up, then the big ones would linger a while and it would be hard to get small houses where you wanted. It wasn't a terribly big deal - my first house in LOTRO, I really wanted one specific spot. I ended up waiting about 4 days until I could get it. My second house there was part of an attempt by my guild to fill up a neighborhood with only guild members, so with that one I ended up getting a leftover deluxe house in a spot I didn't love, but that was sort of an artificial restriction. In general, housing in LOTRO is far more functional than in FF. If you simply want a house, and you have the money, you can get it without a problem, even on the more populated servers (my first character was on Landroval, my second on Laurelin, both of which are highly populated servers), because it spawns new wards on demand. I've argued (both here and on the SE forums) that a hacky variant of that could be implemented by SE fairly easily: The take the existing number of wards and pool them. Each server starts with 1-2 wards, and then they draw new wards from the pool as those wards fill up, LOTRO-style. The hardware costs don't change, as it's still the same number of instances. You simply have those wards allocated unevenly between the servers. Low population servers might be fine with their initial 1-2 wards, while servers like Balmung might have 12-48 wards. It doesn't solve the problem, but it at least mitigates it.

It sure is my reason. And I'm definitely not trying to say that's invalid or anything like that. All I'm saying is that, as an alternative, you could have a regular polygamous Miqo'te who's simply not in the market for another relationship. Instead of responding to propositions with "Sorry, I'm monogamous", you'd respond "Sorry, I'm not interested." For the record, I have nothing against you making monogamous Miqo'te. I'm just throwing out alternatives.

While I'm firmly in the camp of "RP what you want, and it should be fine - especially if your RP is interesting", there's another possibility you might want to consider: What if your Miqo'te weren't monogamous? What if they were bog-standard Miqo'te. I'm assuming they're Seekers, but it would also work well for Keepers with some re-jiggering of roles. The male might have opened up a hunting area (or rationalized the adventurer's life into saying he's basically a mobile hunting territory), and the female joined him there. The male would be the nunh, and the female would be the first in his breeding group. That's fine and dandy right there. There's no reason why your nunh would have to immediately go looking for more females. After all, many people go years as single adults. Why then should anyone look askance at a nunh who has one female in their breeding group and isn't in a particular hurry to find another? You can draw a very rough parallel with mormon polygamists. Watch Big Love (which is fiction, of course, but it's not unrealistic fiction). Four of the main characters are a husband and wives in a polygamist family. They didn't all come along at the same time. For years it was simply the husband and one wife. I think we're used to thinking of Miqo'te as being hypersexed and ever-eager to leap into big polygamous relationships, but that's probably more because of the behavior of players (especially a subset of the ones who play nunhs) than anything else.

I agree with this, but it does actually into play with FATE. Obviously people have to opt into the system, but new players are at a significant disadvantage compared to those with one or more campaigns under their belt. It's a bit of an issue with adding stats to RP, people like and want to feel progression, but it can also leave new people feeling cheated. I'm not sure of what the answer is. This should probably be split off into it's own thread. I'll say something about the OP's question after this. This has always been a problem with progression pen and paper systems. It's typically handled by the DM specifying the power level of the game (i.e.: "This is a campaign for 5th level characters") or simply by the DM working with the same group all the time, so that they progress together. For FATE, it's a little trickier since we've basically got a bunch of DMs with different events, running the same characters through it. I'm personally kind of tempted to say FATE characters shouldn't "progress", in the standard PnP level-up way. They can change, but they won't progress. And this is where it starts heading back into the OP's question. I'll use my old character, C'kayah Polaali, as an example. He started out a scrappy smuggler with ties to a bunch of families in the Shroud, and gradually grew to become something of a capo, with a Syndicate charter to boot. This allowed him to really grow in power, and especially in wealth. This wasn't reflected in RP through me wandering around talking about how wealthy he was (well, it sort of was, in the sense that he was a big spender and would flaunt his wealth). It was reflected in the fact that a bunch of people knew who he was, and knew that he was someone they could go to if they needed something. In other words, it's not how he was presenting himself, it's how other people perceived him. Back into the FATE thing: The standard progression strategy for dealing with this would say that his FATE sheet should add a high resources skill, which would power him up over where he was originally. What I'd suggest (and what I ended up doing on his FATE sheet) is to keep the point allocation the same, and reduce other things to make up for this. You could think of it like this: He used to be a really skilled archer, with a high archery skill. As his resources grew, his archery skill dropped, because he simply didn't have the time to keep it up. I know doing something like that is a bummer to people who like to see their characters progress, but it does allow new people with established characters to join into the FATE RP scene without feeling like they're coming in at a disadvantage.

I'm at work considering ordering tums by the pallet from Costco. The weekend was good, though. Saw The Martian. The amount of money we spend retrieving Matt Damon boggles me every time...

Lovely Miqo'te who's a wonderful addition to the community and a talented dramatic producer to boot!

Kudos for Mholi and Miah Polaali for giving me a place to start fresh post-Tylwyth Narah and post-C'kayah. I might have moved on from Final Fantasy had it not been for you two. Kudos for R'vi Lyrre and the rest of Sepulchre for inviting my then-new character to participate in a beautifully written and very well done dark RP. I'd been meaning to make Setoh into a far darker character than C'kayah, but this was the first chance I'd had to actually show it. Thank you. Kudos to Lathu'a Jhiyati for lending a sympathetic ear when I needed it. Kudos to Aya Foxheart for being such a constant and positive force in the RP community. I think you're insufficiently recognized for this, Aya, but you really do make this a better place. And Kudos to Verad Bellviel for working selflessly to help create better RP for so many people. It's a very hard job, and you do it well.

I'm gonna give some love to the Hand classes. Or at least CUL:

"Seeker, huh? Never had a Seeker before. Well, as long as she does what she's told..."

C'kayah walked into the beachfront cafe, the warm morning breeze ruffling his hair. His espadrilles made a whispering sound across the board while his two foster daughters padded along side him. The cafe had open sides, and they sat at a table where they could hear the shush shush of waves rolling in. "Gahveh", he said with a smile to the waitress, after she helped him settle the girls in their high chairs. "And a paper, please. I heard something interesting yesterday." Breakfast was warm toast and eggs, applesauce and oats for the girls. He opened the paper, smiling at the engagement announcement. "Elise was right", he mused. "What a strange, small world this is." He held up the paper for the girls, grinning foolishly at them. "Look at the fop, girls! Look at the fop! Siiiiiiiilly fop!"

I needed a hug today. Thank you. Now paying it forward. Evil, criminal hugs here!