C'kayah Polaali

So far so good. You've developed a pretty decent explanation of her abilities. I think the next step would be to start fleshing out the character some more. You've described her personality a bit, but I'm curious about her. How is she dealing with the loss of her family and the loss of her country? What are her goals?

"She's beautiful, intelligent, talented, and witty. She's wasted on Delumiere..."

C'kayah thinks that he can't be killed. It's happened a few times and he's always been raised. He's got this elaborate theory worked out where he's the "Beloved of Thal", thinking that Thal's got plans for him, and that he won't let him die until those plans come to fruition.

Poor Crofte. This is also a fantastic Crofte expression:

"Greyflex Pecfellow leads a rag-tag band of sexy warriors to an ultimate conflict at the end of time... Itself!"

I do like sad (or tragic) RP. I think you can tell some really interesting stories, and having bad things happen to characters people care about can really increase the emotional impact of a story. This doesn't only apply to sad stories: It's important that everyone participating in an RP is able to affect the story. That doesn't mean that they should be able to pop in like a rainbow pony and make everything better, but they shouldn't feel like they're helpless to change the story at all.

Oh, God, yes! :love:

Star Trek historically handles this very well. Watch any episode of TNG where Geordi La Forge and Wesley Crusher have to solve some technical problem. Medicine or goldsmithing or anything else like that don't have to work like they do in the real world, because FF is significantly different. Magic suffuses everything. So you can start in on the handwavium and merely make it look promising and come off as a genius: "It appears to be magnetically sealed. ...I believe I can reverse the polarity by attenuating the aetheric servo..."

C'kayah: "Married? What? Was it arranged? Well, we'll have to make the best of it. I'm living in the Shroud already. Yes. With my cousin, Miah. Yes. That Miah. Wait! Where are you going?"

C'kayah would be a cautious, conservative driver who always obeyed the law. [video=youtube]

What could possibly go wrong? :thumbsup: You don't mind rolling in vast wealth, illegally acquired, do you, Mel?

I like character creation, so I seldom recycle character concepts at all. I started out playing FF on Siren with a few friends who didn't RP, and C'kayah (then C'kayah Tia) was just this storyless avatar. I liked the looks of Miqo'te, so I made him a Seeker. When my friends stopped playing a month or so later, I thought I'd check out the RP community here, so I re-made C'kayah on Balmung. Exact same thing as C'kayah on Siren, so I had a few things already set up: He was a Seeker, he was tribal (hence Tia), and he was no longer with his tribe. I started out an archer because I played a hunter (archer) in LOTRO and liked that mechanic, so he started in Gridania where there normally aren't a lot of Seekers. I liked the idea of playing a criminal, so I figured I'd make him a smuggler. It gives him a reason for moving around, and I thought it would be interesting playing a grey area criminal (as opposed to a "Doctor Evil" type). I'm a huge fan of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, and brought his tendency to drink like a fish from those stories. I happened to be reading Casanova's autobiography at the time (it's long, but it's really entertaining). Casanova had a very interesting approach to social interaction, and he wrote down entire conversations in his autobiography - embellished, of course, but you still see Casanova shining through in them. I thought it would be interesting to bring that into C'kayah. His womanizing tendencies, his attitudes towards life (easy come, easy go) and people (enjoy them while they're here, appreciate them for who they are, don't fuck them over; love is love, business is business, and the rest is bullshit) all come from Casanova, as well as his style of speaking. In a game world filled with straight talking upright good guys and dark villains, this all makes him a very slippery fellow. From this point he started to evolve. I'd been toying with the idea of him having a Keeper ancestor in his past, so when I met Miah Polaali, we decided to codify that: They're cousins. His maternal grandmother was from Miah's clan, and some sort of great aunt to Miah. When name changes came in, I changed his name to C'kayah Polaali (ICly this was because he decided that Tia didn't fit, him not being part of a tribe anymore). Of all the things I've done with him, I've gotten the most mileage out of this one decision. He has family ties now with other players, and that translates into limitless hooks for RP opportunity.

I'm currently FC-less. Give me a poke tonight, I'll sign.

Xenellia is fantastic, I couldn't recommend her enough. She did a quick commission for one of Tylwyth Narah's Lalafell, Salara, that came out fantastic.

The big problem, for me, with trying to squeeze random RP in the middle of an arc is that the arc usually takes far longer to play than it's supposed to take for C'kayah to live. Something that might be 3 days for C'kayah could take weeks to play. This creates a continuity problem that makes it hard to do other stuff during the arc. What I've ended up doing is pinning the end of the RP arc to the day we finish it, and then tracing back, instead of pinning the start of the arc to the day we start. There are still continuity problems (i.e.: it's hard to reference the arc to other people in RP before it's done), but it makes it far easier to work other RP into it. Those 3 days don't actually start until 3 days before the day we finish them, so there's no reason for C'kayah to be unavailable during the weeks we're playing the arc.

Nero makes a really good point about playing the character before you play the trait. I used to set the power level I thought was appropriate for C'kayah, which led to some RP where he was clearly over- or under-powered compared to the rest of the people I was playing with. These days I mainly just make it about the story: I play C'kayah (or my other alts) at whatever power level I think would make the story best. At whatever power level I think would lead to the most enjoyment. That hasn't really steered me wrong.

The sun was setting behind the walls of the city, though the day was still hot and the night's wind had not yet risen. C'kayah Polaali was holding up a jar of sweet new Thanalan wine, watching the way the dimming light played through it when the arrow shattered it. He fell to the ground, clutching at the shaft that protruded from his shoulder. His free hand scrabbled inside his vest for a glowing blue crystal on a leather cord. A portable aetherite crystal. Extortionately expensive, he had started carrying one after the nearly successful attempt on his life by the Roegadyn bandit Dennthota. The crystal flared, and he disappeared. Word spread out that night like ripples from a stone tossed into a pond. Gil was being offered - substantial gil - for information leading to the capture of the assassin.

I briefly played Neverwinter, and ran into this, as well. A friend of mine and I played a pair of traditional Drow. She played a female who had been sent up to the surface as a spy, and I played a male who was sent up to be her minion. We literally ran into 0 traditional Drow RPers. They all played good Drow, to the extent that they would take me aside and try to tell me that I didn't have to live subserviently to my friend's character, that I could throw that all aside and come be free. We enjoyed the hell out of this, because our Drow were evil. Sure my drow was subservient to hers. That's the way it's supposed to be, after all. But he sure as hell wasn't about to treat those turncoat good Drow as anything other than the filth they were.

Honestly, I think it's the attempt to cast all of this into a modern, western "liberal vs conservative" thing that's the problem here. Gridania isn't conservative because of Gridanian racism, nor because of the state-sponsored religion. It's not liberal because it's led by a woman or because of the strong system of socialized care for Gridanians. It simply is the way it is. You can call it one or the other to make it easy to understand the culture, but you're really missing out on the complexity of it if you simply use some sort of conservative-vs-liberal axis as your way of understanding them. And you're certainly setting yourself up for some interesting errors if you attempt to use that conservative-vs-liberal axis to predict the other ways that people from that society might respond.

Welcome Khivva Nhys to our ranks of occifers! Roleplay has tailed off a bit with all the HW content, but it's starting to pick up again. We're currently feuding vigorously with the Morbolvine clan (something about an alliance that collapsed when the Morbolvine mage attacked our spy network), as well as keeping our fingers in a few pies here and there. If you're interested in joining us, our current list of recruiting officers is: Alexander Mason Khivva Nhys L'lani Tyata

My best moment was actually in Eve Online. I mainly flew frigates and interceptors, which are small, fast ships. There was a moment during the tail end of the first big nullsec wars when I was jumped by 5 frigates. I was about 8 jumps away from my home base, and in one of the fastest interceptor in the game (the Claw! :love:!), so I blazed back to home base with the 5 enemies in hot pursuit. I made it back to base and docked, and saw that the 5 were hanging out in system, so I guessed they were camping the exit point of the station, keeping me bottled up. Now I happened to have been playing around with a loadout for an anti-frigate cruiser: Battleship-class armor, frigate-class autocannons, and fast drones. Normally a cruiser doesn't stand a chance against multiple frigates, as they can orbit it so tightly and so fast that it's larger guns can't track them, so I counted on them doing this tactic with me if I undocked in the cruiser. So I did. And they did. I destroyed 4 of them, the last one managing to escape before I could finish it off. A friend in a nearby system said it was amusing watching me zip into my base system with 5 enemies behind me, and then see this stream of their escape pods come back out a few minutes later.

Honestly, though, I don't think it's the setting that makes Ul'dah the RP hub it is. Sure there's an interesting back story, and it's only developed as the expansions have come out. But in the ARR timeframe (2.0, 2.1), you could easily make the argument that Limsa was as interesting as Ul'dah. Rogues hadn't come out, so the backstory presented much more of an uneasy coalition of pirates in the city. Yet Ul'dah was still the RP hub. I'd argue that what made Ul'dah the RP hub was simply that a vast number of RPers chose to do so. Enough people RP in Ul'dah that it's simply the easy choice for other RPers who are looking for a fun place to RP. Which sounds like a pat answer, but it's really not. If you'd like to develop another city to be an RP hub, then do so. It will not be easy. You'll have to organize events and persuade people to engage in open RP there, but if you can get enough people to consistently do this, then there will be another RP hub. I do know that, as a primarily Ul'dah- and Thanalan-based RPer, I'm less likely to want to help do this if my choice of where to RP is being disparaged. Just saying.

We shall be in touch. C'kayah is the head of a growing organized crime group in Ul'dah, and he places a premium on information. He'd certainly pay (and pay well) for your services.

Clearly you can do whatever you choose. We have, among us on RPC, people who play escaped Garlean experiments, artificial primals, bionic men, voidtouched aether vampires, demi-deities, and white mages. If they can do that, then surely you can be from FFXI. You may have (as you've seen) trouble finding people willing to RP with you on that basis, but you can do what you choose. The problems you're running into, however, are one of the big reasons why most of us play characters that are fairly ordinary to - and integrated into - Eorzea. But at the end of the day, you can do what you choose.

ROFL! It's cool..I enjoyed watching you strut the quicksand while I looked down on you...and you didn't notice. MUAHAHA Well, that's what happens when I don't know who the hell you are!