Zyrusticae

I'm too socially anxious to do this kind of thing. Every single action, every individual word, is carefully considered to the point of absurdity. It makes for a boring lifestyle, I'll admit. Sorry about that.

I've always disliked this part of SAO's premise. There are so many interesting questions to be asked and answered when players are forced to adapt to a completely different body (especially when that body is of the opposite sex). That being said... I would go on a lifelong quest to find the first Fantasia. And then promptly use it to turn myself into the little girl I've always wanted to be (kekekekeke)! BOOOORIING! I mean, I guess I could just go screw around with some NPCs, but I don't see any particular reason why, in this scenario, PvP would be a no-go, especially if it's a world simulation that's supposed to be on par with the Holodeck from Star Trek. Anything that you can do to an NPC, you should be able to do to a player, IMO.

Nothing special here, just me admiring muh glamours. Now in three different lighting situations!

This is a really good post (and points out some things about the Elementals that I was not aware of), but I just had to pick on this one misconception. The seas are not limitless. Very bountiful, yes, but not limitless. It's difficult to quantify due to the sheer depth and opacity of the water, but it is possible to overfish an area (yes, even an area of the ocean itself) and put a strain on your food supplies if you're reckless. Even only overfishing a single species can have dreadful knock-on effects by killing off predators that were relying on that species as their primary source of food, which in turns gives scavengers less to scavenge on, etc., etc. And before someone else tells me I'm overthinking it, this is what happens to my face when you tell me that: Please stop! You're hurting me.

...so you're saying that the Elementals are going to strike out across Thanalan to hit Ul'dah. Or across the sea to hit Limsa. In their weakened state. The relative distances and proportions don't exactly line up in your comparison... especially if guerrilla warfare is employed. Wouldn't the Elementals go after the individuals setting fire to the forest rather than the abstract entity behind them? Well yeah, the elementals attacking the entities setting fire to the forest is more than enough to discourage the practice. Even siege engines wouldn't be enough, unless they could build them sufficiently large and sturdy enough to withstand the ground itself being pulled from beneath them. The problem with that example is that they were mostly moving through already-settled open areas with plenty of civilization around, not skulking through an incredibly thick, wooded forest with an incredibly hostile defensive force picking at their army from every direction. But those are just two individuals! I think it's a very different thing when we're discussing who would win in a three-way FFA between three enormous city-states.

Well, as far as I'm concerned, any wartime victory condition that precludes the acquisition of resources is completely useless to me. If all you care about is which side stands on top at the end, and disregard whether or not they can survive afterwards, it just feels cheap. Yeah, no, I can't think of it this way. It's just too many levels of stupid for me to accept. All that food, all that natural flora and fauna, all that wood, and you just throw it all away for some mineral resources that you can't even confirm are actually there in the first place? I mean, really. I can see it happen, but it wouldn't be a victory, especially as the desertification would increase dramatically as a result of the clear-cutting. Several generations down the line those people are going to be looking incredibly stupid once they realize what they lost. Sounds like RL, really.

See, the problem with that argument is that it's incredibly counter-productive. The ONLY reason to even attempt to conquer Gridania in the first place is for its natural resources; burning it all down negates any reason for going there at all. You don't even have the argument of Gridania being a massive existential threat to justify such extreme measures, as, as everyone already mentioned, most of their most threatening features only work defensively, not offensively. Of course they COULD be really, really stupid and burn it all down and lose all of that for the sake of "victory", but, uh, yeah, nobody really wins in that scenario. May as well just throw everything to the Empire if you're gonna go that route.

I don't buy this. The nature of the landscape of Eorzea means that Gridania is simply the richest in terms of natural resources. This, coupled with their absolutely insurmountable defensive terrain advantage, in addition to the aid of the Elementals, the Sylphs if they decide to pitch in, and the Padjal (who are all White Mages, which, I should remind you, is the single most powerful form of magick in all of Hydaelyn), means they could easily force any invading force out with minimal losses. Hell, just think about what they're surrounded by - you have to cross either a desert or a massive frozen tundra just to reach them! By the time you get there, you will have to be maintaining massive supply lines while the Gridanians have virtually limitless supplies thanks to the bounty of the forest. Explain to me how they would "lose", somehow, just because they don't need to leave their forest at any one point in time. I'm pretty sure convincing everyone else that they are untouchable after losing hundreds or thousands of troops in a single battle would be enough of a victory that they would win by default, simply by virtue of sustaining the fewest losses. It doesn't matter if someone EVENTUALLY wins a thousand years later if they sustained a thousand times more losses in the process of achieving that so-called "victory".

This is one of the few games where I actually come back to it time and time again. Very few games like that these days. They've done some damn good work. REALLY looking forward to that expansion. It's gonna be a treat.

I like these posts. These are nice posts. Thanks to these, I don't have too much to add. I will say that, in the setting, it is essentially canon that all PCs are Warriors of Light, possess the Echo, and thus correspondingly have Hydaelyn's blessing, which means by their very nature they should be powerful. That's not to say that those who are RPing normal and/or powerless individuals are doing it wrong, but that it's certainly within a player's right to make their player noticeably more powerful than, perhaps, characters from other MMORPGs you may have played. That being said, the Armory system is really not very well-explained within the game lore, especially within the context of a young 20-something being able to achieve mastery in everything in the game. And that's unfortunate, because it means we, as a community, effectively have to figure this stuff out for ourselves. Personally, I am perfectly okay with a 16-year-old being an utterly amazing, badass Warrior thanks in large part to Hydaelyn's blessing... if that's all they're really good at. There's a sliding scale to this sort of thing, a gauge of verisimilitude and believability that everyone has to read for themselves and figure out where they stand, and measure their expectations accordingly. Some players' place on this scale will clash with others, and that's just the nature of the beast, and the intersection of lore with game mechanics will naturally produce this kind of conflict. So, you know, go nuts! Within reason. There's no hard and fast rules to be had here, just general guidelines. But even if you only just follow the guidelines laid out within this thread, you should find yourself in a good place, I would think.

Scholar I can understand, but is there a specific reason you need her to be a White Mage? Keep in mind that you don't necessarily need to pay too much heed to the game mechanics - you don't HAVE to have your character have that class IC just because you happened to level it up. White Mage, in particular, is one of those classes that's really not conducive to having multiple PCs running around and still have it play nice with the lore (especially since just being a white mage is reason enough for others to be skeptical and wary of your character). She can just be a good Conjurer, for example, which alone is enough to be a fairly competent healer. I find that trying to force the "I can be everything!" class system into your character's background is just going to make something of a monster... which your OP is certainly pushing towards. I also have to say that there's a kind of odd dissonance between someone who knows both arcanum AND conjury yet is also proficient in melee combat. Not saying it's impossible, but it takes some doing to explain, especially since the educational background behind any of these is generally quite divergent from one another. Is there a specific reason she pursued martial arts after spending so much time working on arcanum and conjury? Some kind of event or inspiration that sparked her interest? It may be better in the end to put some hard limits on your character instead of having her branch out so much, unless it's essential to her character in some form or fashion. Simply having a lot of interests isn't really an excuse for actually being skilled in many or most of those interests, and it doesn't really make for an interesting character.

Wow, absolutely NO ONE picked prudence OR sloth. LOADS of charity and fortitude in here. And I just have to lol @ the number of people who picked pride (12 on the first page alone!) Well, allow me to be the combo-breaker (and the ultimate hipster) here: T'rahnu has Prudence as a virtue and Sloth as a vice. As a natural pragmatist, she is greatly cautious of any opportunity that seems 'too good to be true', and will not take great risks even when the rewards clearly outweigh the risks. She's very, very careful about picking her jobs and her targets and will bug the heck out of there when things start to even remotely look like they're going south. If you're leading a treasure or bounty hunting team, she's probably NOT someone you want running with you, as she's just a little too unreliable for the really difficult jobs. Of course, this is something you'd have to weigh against her rather considerable skills. The sloth thing is complicated, but the truth is simply that she is almost unnervingly naturally talented and never really had to work very hard to get what she needed in the first place, and the idea of 'hard work' is essentially alien to her. She will not engage in any hard physical labor if she can at all avoid it, and she'll defer to others to solve particularly difficult problems if she has the option (though these problems usually lie outside of her expertise anyway - things like magic or complex mathematics, and so on). While she is skilled in many forms of combat, in hunting, in navigation, and so on, and trains her body very well, she considers these activities relaxing and very different from 'work'.

Well, I mean... you can do that now, sure, but when they add chocobo breeding and all of our company chocobos are revealed to be males and you have to go running into the Chocobo Forest for a female to breed with, you're going to look kind of silly then.

OMG. http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/188524-Letter-from-the-Producer-LIVE-Part-XVII-Q-A-Updates?p=2385009&viewfull=1#post2385009 So now you know. ALL YOUR CHOCOBOS ARE MALES. No exceptions!

I do kind of want to get into this, but the amount of commitment required and the social barrier (which, for someone with as extreme social anxiety disorder as I have, is a fortress wall for all intents and purposes) makes things extraordinarily difficult for me. Hell, most groups even need specific classes, and I can only gear up two jobs with any level of efficiency in the first place, which further complicates things. The end result is that I've not even stepped foot into the first Coil, not once, for the reasons above. I just can't be arsed to go through all that trouble for an experience that, frankly, is only a means to an end. I don't even have any performance anxiety, as I have (justified) confidence that I can adapt to any mechanics the game throws at me, but the other problems are simply too insurmountable for someone like me. If only my old guild rolled on Balmung, I probably wouldn't be in this position...

It means exactly what it sounds like: Nanamo was soon going to hit her sweet sixteen 5 years ago (making her current age 21). Given the nature of the Sultanate position, it's not far-fetched that she was forced into it from a young age, much like we've had young leaders in our own history due to circumstances (though these "rulers" often end up being mere puppets of someone else pulling the strings). Edit: Damn you, coatleque! Well, at least I provide more information...

...Yes. Well, honestly, it'd LOOK super-badass... but you'd still be having far more effect using it on something like Dragonfire Dive instead. So another one, much less broken this time around: Aetheric Release Cast: 0.5s Cooldown: 30s MP Cost: 250 TP Cost: 300 Range: Self Radius: 6y T'rahnu releases pure aether in a sudden burst, dealing damage with a potency of 360 and knocking back all enemies 10y. Yes, this is basically exactly the same thing as one of Nightmare's moves in Soul Calibur: (skip to 3:14 if the embedding continues to be a bitch.) I can't help it. It just seems so fitting for FFXIV, you know?

I can run any disciple of war. Except PLD, because ew, magick! I just need me a good MRD helmet and gloves, and I can play DPS MRD! I want to try that at some point, since I got that i110 axe and everything. Mmmm, tasty DPS...

Hmmmmm. Now I need to figure out how to explain why T'rahnu, who came from a sort of backwater hick-like background, learned how to read. This is going to take some thinking.

I'm already prepared for this. Hm, on second thought, not really that fanservicey when my boobs are so tiny. Heh.

No, not anyway! :lol: I'm going to touch on this. Glamours are really, really popular in Eorzea, something that's made extremely obvious by all the leves and beast tribe quests where you deal with glamour'd monsters. Glamours are powerful enough that they can make something appear like something completely different (i.e. a sylph making itself look like a treasure chest), hence changing the appearance of armor is actually a really mild application in comparison. Hell, someone could make his or herself look like a completely different race through the use of glamours - however, it's worth noting that these types of glamours have various means of being dispelled (with the weakest ones just disappearing upon being attacked). At this point, it's just something accepted within the game world. No matter how contrived it may seem to us IRL, anyone saying their gear is glamour'd is well within reason, and I wouldn't bat an eyelash at someone who claims that they're actually a completely different race from what they appear to be. It's just something that happens in Eorzea. A LOT. Seeing is not believing.

I lol'd. This thread is pretty good so far. Mine's not really humorous, but I think it's a nifty (and utterly broken) idea: Aetheric Mega Burst Cast: 5s Recast: 600s MP Cost: All TP Cost: 1,000 Range: Self Radius: 0.0y T'rahnu pours the entirety of her aetheric reserves into a single devastating attack, draining all of her MP and TP and reducing her HP to 1. Increases the potency of her next action by 1000%, grants it a 12y AoE that blinds and silences enemies within its radius for 20s, and knocks them back 10y. The spectacle that occurs may stun onlookers for a random duration. Combine with Dragoon for maximum fireworks. I should note that T'rahnu has no casting classes and no aptitude for magic whatsoever, so no shenanigans with an empowered Flare or somesuch. Missed opportunities, I know.

Guys. GUYS. Try /handover on your minions. Do it. DO IT NOW!!

Haha, I ran into you guys there and snapped a couple quick shots, too.

What an intriguing topic. I'm only posting here to note that this actually has never occurred to me, not once during my entire RP career. Of course, part of this is that I'm a very light RPer (especially as of late, as most of my attention is on actually playing the game), so I can probably get away with more than most. Part of it, however, is also because I tend to treat my character (singular) like Samurai Jack - she just goes around having random, assorted adventures and doesn't really have anything resembling a character arc of her own. She might have 'episodes' where things happen, but she doesn't really have some kind of overarching story that I'm trying to push her through. So this thread has given me plenty of food for thought. Would I feel compelled to do something like this if I went knee-deep into some serious RP? I do wonder... it's something I'll have to think on. At any rate, I must agree with the others who state that it is your character, and you are the one who has to decide where they go, what they do, and how they end up at the end of it all. While other players should certainly have some weight on your decisions, particularly where they intersect their characters with your own, in the end it is still your decision, and you're the one who has to make it happen.