Verad

You discover that SE declares Dragoon fighting styles to be highly proscribed, and they have nothing to do with the Circle of Blades. It would be considered a terrible thing, in-setting, for such a character to have such a style, by lore, and no Temple Knight would ever use it. How do you retcon it?

This series of games was where I learned to really, truly role-play, and they taught me one very important rule: OOC and IC should be kept apart as much as possible so that we, the players, can maintain a proper grip on reality. It's exceedingly unhealthy to forget where the game ends and reality begins. Every time you mix OOC and IC, that line gets a little blurrier. So it's important to keep each world as separate as possible. Some mixing is bound to happen, but it should be avoided if at all possible. White Wolf's claims at the start of each of its game lines are more about avoiding legal liability than advocating good game advice, after a number of incidents in which they were tarred with the same brush as D&D with regards to inciting people to violence and suicide. That's pretty off-topic, though.

This would require that roleplayers stop viewing roleplay in dogmatic terms (seriously, arguing over differing "interpretations" of lore as if they were a religious scripture as often as our people do implies a kind of dogmatism). I don't think that can happen.

Cast aside your Flame allegiance. Hnghh, you speak truth, but I'm going to go with a petulant, arm-crossing "No!" Let me know if you manage it. Then we can start asking some difficult questions about why we're playing in Eorzea at all.

Please tell me how I, someone who believes 100% that PCs cannot be White Mages, and you, someone who 100% believes it doesn't matter can come together and come to an agreement beyond going to our respective corners and leaving each other to rp in peace. I'm not going to force you to see my view on it - which is, in lore says only Padjal can be WHMs, are you going to force me to see yours - which is game mechanics means we should be able to play whatever we like? You play a WHM and see what all the fuss is about. Somebody else downgrades to Conjurer to see if it's similar in style. Hopefully perspective is gained. Probably one or both participants just feel dirty.

Verad is funny and generally not a giant prick so people are willing to do things for him.

Cast aside your Flame allegiance.

I believe you two should date. In all seriousness, the contrast here interests me - someone who will not be bent, and someone who will try to irresistibly bend, in their beliefs. On an IC level this is all well and good, of course, but it does lead to questions regarding what happens when a character's belief systems are irrevocably undermined from their original state. This leads to another question, for both those who have already posted and for those who have yet to post: Is it possible for your character's beliefs to be undermined or goals to be achieved in such a way that the character is no longer satisfying to play? What do you do if that happens?

I'm more interested in the following: It's one thing for people to make claims about certain characters, and to write them off as insane or delusional or whatever. I'm not one-hundred percent on-board with that particular choice but I recognize it's a valid one. What do you, however, when the player proves it through some metaphysical means? Some dimensional traveller, to use Klin's example, leaps into another Final Fantasy setting in front of you and comes back with Shantotto. Somebody claiming to be a primal manifests as such in front of you. For the more hardline lore-hounds, a WHM casts Succor or Holy. In short, something that would have a tangible effect on the world and can't be denied by a simple claim of insanity. It's possible to retcon the matter and say that the person only said they did these things, and it didn't actually happen, but that's very much not letting the character lead; it's making an OOC judgment call in the moment and declaring that a fact stated by another player isn't actually a fact. On the other hand, taking the claim on faith and reacting to it means having to grapple with denying it IC at a later date. How do you address this problem?

I don't get over it. I put it to use.

A terrible secret revealed:

It's not. What could also happening is this: He's taking advice from people on the RPC, and trying to find RP with people not on the RPC. The advice may be failing for a number of different reasons - social interaction not being math, among them - but one of those is that he's interacting with people who don't know he's been struggling, don't know him from Adam, and have no reason to be more sympathetic to him than they would any other stranger. If you would like to blame the people on the RPC, that is certainly your prerogative. But it will go about as well as everybody else who blames the RPC for things that aren't actually under anybody's control.

Your character has beliefs, whether in terms of guiding philosophies or in terms of concrete goals they seek to achieve. How do you like to see those beliefs treated when you roleplay them? A few possibilities, derived from the Burning Wheel RPG forums: Validation: The character's belief/goal is essentially just or correct and your roleplay confirms that. If their mission is to kill someone, for example, the someone is a real puppy-kicking baby-eater who totally deserves it. Undermine: The character's belief/goal is at odds with other facts in the setting or your roleplay, and part of playing it is to examine whether the character will change the belief or continue to pursue it, and what that says about the character. Challenge: The belief/goal is difficult or nearly impossible to achieve, and the value is in the tension of whether the character will succeed or fail. Catch-22: Achieving the character's goal requires the character to sacrifice another, mutually contradictory belief. Play often involves the struggle of the character in choosing which of these two goals to sacrifice. Harmony: You like playing your goals in such a way that they mesh with other player's goals in order to bring them together. Friction: You like playing your character's beliefs in a way that puts them at odds with those of the characters around them, creating conflict. Based on the above: -What are your character's beliefs and goals, and how do you like to see them addressed in roleplay, either by yourself or by the characters around you? -Are they some in-character beliefs/goals that you consider to be essentially correct or just and refuse to see undermined in RP? On the other hand, are there beliefs that you want to see undermined or challenged but haven't done so yet? -Do you leave your character's goals open to completion by other people, or do you prefer to resolve them yourself? For Example: Verad has a number of beliefs that I, as a player, consider to be incorrect and am simply biding my time for somebody to undermine. The obvious one is his fascination with things that are "dubious," and the non-logic of his salesmanship and what that implies. People generally challenge him on the matter, but only in passing; nobody has made a serious attempt to disabuse him of the notion. For a very long time he was stuck in a goal that was a Catch-22 as described above: He had a very hefty debt to pay to the Silver Bazaar, but doing so quickly and effectively would require him to give up his belief in the value of the dubious and start selling goods dishonestly or sell goods that are actually worth the time to purchase. When the problem was resolved by an unexpected windfall, the value of the goal was undermined when paying the debt gave him no closure, and left him worse-off than before. He also has a tendency to idealize people that seem to embody the philosophy behind his salesmanship: people who are broken in some way but have, to his eyes, a real and clear value that other people can't see. This has been useful in creating Harmony in a number of cases because he's willing to see the best in the worst around him, but it's also created Friction when people fail to live up to the ideal and he finds himself turning on them, as he did when he betrayed Roen Deneith's trust.

Aw now, you know I like the superficial RP as much as I like the deeper stuff. I wouldn't be aggressively badgering people in the Quicksand if that were the case - although it has significantly fallen off since I've been managing Scales I admit. But I know a lot of players see walk-up RP as a gateway first and foremost, a means to get into the end of deeper storylines with heavier character development. There are easier ways, I think, to get started on that beyond shotgunning people in the Quicksand, and if a player wants that, but feels too nervous to walk up, it may be in their best interests to seek alternative venues.

These are important questions. I had them myself when I first started roleplaying on Balmung. It was especially a problem for me because I came into this game pretty much blind, not knowing any RPers from other services and having to start from scratch. Before I started getting heavily involved in walk-up, I developed my character, sought out out-of-game roleplaying communities (This one, basically) and made a skeleton of a wiki with a basic personality sketch. Then I posted on the introduction page with the concept. I had a few people express interest. I made note of their names and contacted them over time to arrange roleplay when I could find them in-game. I did have one person contact me to set up a play-by-post thread on the forums, and that worked well for a little bit, but it fizzled (No strike against you, Zhavi, that was all me). I'm not that great at responding to forum RP. Other connections made through the forums proved more long-term and substantial. In-game, I started joining linkshells being randomly advertised. Again, no quality control, and several of the ones I was in at the time I have long since left. But it put me in contact with people and gave me a means of getting used to interaction while sussing out the in-game culture. I also started engaging in walk-up RP. There is one piece of advice that hasn't been given: my walk-up RP is highly scripted. Verad has a goal, a set list of products, and a ton of stock phrases. Anybody who watches me engage in walk-up RP will no doubt see there's a lot of repetition. This is intentional. Having a big list of stock topics and statements makes it easier to engage in walk-up RP. There's not as much pressure to be inventive every single time, because I always have one old stand-by or another on which I can rely. However, I ran into Reason 2, above; with a very few exceptions, it was all transient. If I wanted something more substantial, I'd have to do other things. I set up an advertisement here for a FC company and joined Harbingers of Dawn for several months. That helped with the ability to get long-term roleplay while also letting me continue with walk-ups. You'll notice that I did quite a bit willy-nilly here. I don't really see a problem with willy-nillyness. I started broad with my roleplay and narrowed my approach as I figured out what I wanted. It was very much a work done in-process. One last point: I made my character visually distinctive. He was, in the mists of time, a Hyur Midlander at one point. He was therefore easily overlooked. Elderly duskwight with bright white hair? Not so much.

Here's why you shouldn't walk up: 1. There's no quality control. A simple "Walk-Up RP is loved!" comment in the search info will tell you nothing about how much you'll actually enjoy interacting with a player. They could be boring. They could be predatory. You are taking a chance every single time. 2. The RP is superficial. As somebody who engages in walk-up RP constantly (why is he writing this post if he does it so often, you wonder; I'll get to that), most of the interactions I have don't go further than the initial encounter. I sell people things, they have a laugh at Verad's behavior, I move on. The encounters that developed into more meaningful, long-term RP are vastly outweighed by transient one-shot transactions. If you're looking for walk-up as a gateway to more substantial RP, it is frankly difficult and you are probably better off planning something with somebody in PMs or on the RPC. 3. Reasons 1 and 2 both collaborate to create this one - in order to overcome them, you have to take a shotgun approach, constantly walking-up to as many people as possible for the walk-up RP to have any meaningful effect. If you are already grappling with introversion and social anxiety for the act of one walk-up, stretch this out across weeks of effort. 4. There will be days when, by relying on walk-up RP, you come up short through no fault of your own. The Quicksand will be empty because of IRL events. There may be an IC event drawing everybody's attention. Everybody might be engaged in other conversations or go afk just seconds before you approach. You have to learn to deal with rejection that has nothing to do with you or anybody at all, really. But it will still happen. So there's plenty of good reasons why any given player shouldn't walk up. I nevertheless do it frequently. I have my reasons. For those of you who are struggling to get past shyness or social anxiety to do this: Why do you want to do this awful thing so bad?

"It is a common observation, that objects which in the reality would shock, are in tragical, and such like representations, the source of a very high species of pleasure. This taken as a fact, has been the cause of much reasoning. The satisfaction has been commonly attributed, first, to the comfort we receive in considering that so melancholy a story is no more than a fiction; and next, to the contemplation of our own freedom from the evils which we see represented." -Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime and the Beautiful, "Sympathy"

It doesn't need to be illegal. . . But generally, have a goal. Something short term. Decide somebody nearby will help with that goal. Engage.

Gimme Schneider.

"Permit me to sell you this, er . . . " Verad grabs a coaster from a table and a punches a hole in it. "Decorative horn ring!" Then Aya yells at him for breaking a coaster.

Ppppsssstttt....you mean the 28th? Sure, why not!

Let's shoot for Tuesday, April 27, at 8 EST. Will adjust as necessary!

He's very sad that all his friends are demonspawn.

Here, have a long, dry military history with a huge ensemble cast, lots of character development, and rumination on the distinction between autocracy and democracy: Legend of the Galactic Heroes It's also really old, and the animation doesn't benefit from the OVA animation bubble in terms of quality. A must-watch! Or you can watch a political thriller set in post-unification Germany, also with an ensemble cast (I am a sucker for ensembles): Monster This is especially interesting if you think "Good man does the right thing, and many people die" is a good story.