Warren Castille

It's good to see fresh blood on the forums staying active.

Backstory is unimportant for roleplay, but is important for characters (mostly). Random people you meet in walk-up roleplay won't care about your carefully-laid tracks of childhood experiences and meaningful non-events that only happened off-camera and away from the current moment. Does anyone often find themselves rehashing about their history with people in real life? You're not roleplaying your history, you're roleplaying their current existence. Conversely, having an idea of what your character has gone through helps keep them consistent, which is incredibly important in portraying a "living" character. Me personally, I tend to give myself a rough guideline and nothing beyond that: It doesn't matter to me what my character's parents' names were, or what he did during his teenage years. If I need to explain something, I can revisit the framework and come up with a reasonable conclusion that fits the narrative. Note that this is not me saying that I just throw things into my backstory kits as the need arises. That's just metagaming in an unfair or attention-hogging way. More, I think that "My character grew up as the son of a carpenter" is perfectly suitable to begin roleplaying. If you suddenly find yourself needing more depth, you can provide it: "One time I helped my dad put together a house, so I'm familiar with how foundations and the like work." Personally, I've been playing Warren for years and years and his backstory is probably five lines to summarize. It's not necessary for anything but my own framework, and if I play my character correctly I won't ever need to explain why he knows or does what he knows or does.

It's 3:20AM thanks to Daylight Savings time. That didn't stop our champion, Kalizej Dotharl from kicking the asses of 72 other people to become our new champion! Roleplaying for 9 hours in a row is hard. Don't do this thing I'm doing.

Lig was one of the stalwarts in the Welcome Forum a ways back, making sure everybody got a warm hello! It still stands out to me even years later. Good impression!

Are we talking... ? As far as I'm aware.

I'm leaning Sharlayan given the current single existing RDM NPC hails from there.

iirc, milkroot is a drug for sylphs, to spoken it is poisonous. Look at you, with your facts and your knowledge. Still, if it exists in the lore there's no reason to think people can't engineer a way to have it not murderkill people. Where there's a will, there's a way!

Fogweed exists, milkroot can induce hallucinations and there's a nerve-deadener that turns up in the PUG questline to explain how someone's able to ignore wounds. The sky's the limit, really.

I've heard good things about Kingkiller and intend on checking that out, but I just accidentally-on-purpose ordered the entire rest of the Cosmere set (that's printed) so I've got a lot of Sanderson on my plate in the coming weeks and months. I did get a chance to devour Ready Player One and I was really conflicted on how I enjoyed it: Namely, I couldn't tell if I did or not. The premise and world-building were neat, but the fucking writing kept getting in the way of the story. Not to mention the ultra-liberal soapboxes that were stood on at both the beginning and towards the end. In my downtime I read the very end of House of Leaves again, and I can say it's the only book in memory that has hurt me on a deeply emotional level.

Another week, another Grindstone! Week 178 is in the books and we're happy to have crowned a new champion in the rookie Sayori Farcloud! 63 people turned up to fight each other but only one champion emerges!

Go through the effort of recording videos and hiding them inside of spoilers. Don't make them clickable. Maximum Kale.

That is not my argument. My argument is that we cannot possibly know how gender dynamics exist in Eorzea because their level of egalitarianism between the sexes is so far out and alien to our own world. Therefore, making assumptions that rape functions the same way as we know it is fallacious. Your post also doesn't acknowledge that day-to-day sexism is apparently non-existent in Eorzea, whereas in our own, it is still very much a thing. I don't see sexism in my day to day in real life. Is it okay to use this as logic to declare that my city features an alien form of equality compared to yours, therefor it doesn't exist? I mean, I don't know how they treat woman in other countries, so rape definitely isn't the same in other parts of the world. I know this is a Kale-brand-Kale-thread but c'mon, your argument seems to be "How come no one's smashing the miqo'te patriarchy in the lore?"

Yeah, it's totally unrealistic. I mean, we all know once we started letting women into the US military all sexism stopped, as did sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination. Ditto for police, fire stations, education, politics, sports, and every other career that features both men and women in leadership positions. It's so weird to see that sexism isn't solved in a fantasy world, when we managed it in reality!

Well, finished the first Mistborn trilogy and I quite like it. Probably going to reread The Death of WCW again before ordering the second series this weekend.

It sounds intriguing. I know some other groups have talked about wanting to do a pro-wrestling styled event but it always tapered off: I think there's a lot of merit to having both a public performance side of things while also incorporating a more personal work-relationship type thing for the wrestlers themselves.

And now I'm back! From outer space! I just walked in to find that same look upon your face! You know, the Grindstone-just-ended-and-we-want-to-know-what-happened look. Congratulations to the just-debuted new champion Mugen Branwen! He overcame 61 other fighters to get to the top of the heap this week! Congratulations to last week's champion as well, Wanderer Gadieo! I wasn't present and don't have a screenshot THANKS TO THE AMAZING COVERAGE OVER AT The Crystal Chronicle! Props to Deidra for the tip-off. Many, infinite thanks for the dedicated staff of overseers and healers who were able to run the Grindstone without me! It's pleasant to know it's in good hands. And as a summary of out latest fundraiser night: The generous Grindstone community contributed a whopping 21,000,000 gil to carry the Grindstone's prize pot back into July of this year! Holy shit!

You'll be fine. Welcome to Balmung. Brace yourself.

I legit did the same thing looooool The leader called me out on it afterwards. It was the most "disappointed father" I've ever gotten in an MMO.

So there's a FATE up in Azys Lla that specifically mentions a cloned voidsent being the pet of Xande. We know the Void is corrupted/fallen planetworlds that either became too light or too dark. ...so how exactly does that fuck with timespace? Xande was cloning voidsent thousands of years back, but the Warriors of Darkness and Uhlimaskboy talk about their worlds collapsing too. Is there anything in game to clarify just when these things happened, or I suppose more to the point, how many worlds are gone? It seems we have a cap on 13, unless Maskboy's world was just a planet, not a new dimension. FFXIV is weird.

Not gonna lie: My first T5 clear was one I lied to get into, back before the new bonus was a notification. In my defense, I'd wiped repeatedly to the final phase before and had actually seen everything up to a kill, but the fact remains I joined a farm party and dinged my achievement in it.

Reminds me of T5 parties asking people to know past divebombs and having no clue where to stack for them.

Miqo'te are the most likely race to be picked for level 1 trash ERP alts. It's a stigma, but it isn't weird. Don't wear slutglamour and idle in public places with an ERP search comment under level 5 and you'll be fine.

I keep seeing people post this in every thread this is brought up. I find this reaction to be mean spirited and contemptuous. And it doesn't seem to be in the spirit of role play. It's weird where people draw the line between "okay, I'll pretend your character is/has this, but if you say they are/have this I'm going to be derisive and try to make you feel bad. It's a very clear line to draw. "This is my original character that I created for role-play in this world." vs. "This is not my character, it already has a story, but Im going to just pretend that lore doesn't exist." I don't think people are intentionally disregarding canon most of the time barring continuing to play the dead folks. That's the problem with fan interpretations of existing characters, though. One of these is questionably writing fan fiction, and the other is definitely writing fan fiction.

Here's a thought, as well: Eorzea is a land with a distinct caste system in the various nations that comprise it. There's also failingly little evidence of photographs existing, and there's definitely no television. If you AREN'T a part of the high-ranking adventuring class, how does anyone even know what these people look like? Who the hell is Thancred? What's a Ser Grinneaux? We as players know what these names mean, but unconnected player characters can reasonably doubt someone being who they say they are. This leads to... Playing an NPC requires a certain degree of decorum, sort of: If you're playing Raubahn or the Sultana or a Scion, it sort of forces the RP to acknowledge that person exists. As mentioned above, it's difficult to imagine running into Johnny Depp at a coffee shop, but if it DOES happen you can guarantee that the topic of the scene is going to be Johnny Depp At A Coffee Shop. It has the capacity to derail anything else going on when you cash in a character's celebrity. I don't really understand why people like roleplaying canon characters, so I can't explain the appeal. To someone like me it kind of reeks of "Give me attention" and I logically know that isn't the case, but I've seen enough instances of someone sucking the air out of the room trying to swing that unearned clout and it doesn't settle well with me. That makes me feel bad for the people like the OP, who are just doing it to present a scene for their friends. I'm alright with it happening for planned arcs, but I can't really explain away why the Azure Dragoon is hanging out with pirates in Limsa and getting drunk. edit: And truthfully, I'd rather not have to. It's the same as when people do hugely-dramatic actions in public places: Magey explosion fights in the open streets, giant military maneuvering that would have major consequences in the MSQ, and the random "A primal appears in the Canopy and slaughters tons of people" kind of stuff does more to splinter a community than it does to bring one together. Someone Important turning up in public isn't on that scale, but the impact is the same: You either go with it or you don't, and that can splinter coherency in some awful ways. Shared communities don't handle one person or group telling them what the RP canon is, and yes, even in trivial things like "Minfy and Tataru Buy Dresses."

"Anyone who kills their opponent will have their head removed from their shoulders and be dumped in the wash." "They'll WHAT?" I didn't mind the Sultana crashing the Grindstone, mostly because 1) Warren was one of the guards at the original Sultana Ball some years ago and 2) she didn't try to stop us. You'd be surprised at how many times "I've got an army of waiting" has been invoked in roleplay. Yooo, Grindstone plug in a random thread. I'VE STILL GOT IT.