Saiden

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Ah, interesting. I have heard of people using dice generators but have never done it myself. It is too much out of my control.

One of the first things I often get asked by newer roleplayers is where they should start with their character backstories, personalities, or if I know of any good character sheet templates. Ash’s Guide to RPG Personality & Background is by far the most complete character sheet guide I have ever found. The personality aspects it makes you think about are quite extensive. Some folks hate creation systems and prefer things to be more organic and that is lovely if that is how you like to do it! But for some, they enjoy the perspectives that detailed guides make you consider when you go through them. This is the best one I have ever seen.

This is always a fine option. If you are very shy, actually writing a shy character can help provide an out for you to actually have them act shy. Shy hooks are still hooks. And the opposite is also true, namely, trying to create an extremely outgoing character to force you to fulfill their personality and get past your own shyness. But the former option seems to work the best for me.

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I am as new as you, but I will say welcome anyway! Welcome! :bouncy:

Sorry for the second post, but someone else mentioning grey area made me wish I had included it in my previous one. I think that is why so many people can feel iffy about the term "villain." It may bring to mind dastardly scoundrels whose only aim in the world is to eliminate life itself or cause absolute chaos at every turn - those kinds of characters rarely work in MMOs. But if one is willing to redefine the term villain or drop it altogether, then the shades of grey are able to enter in. You are able to have cads, ignoble thieves, noble thieves, arrogant zealots, too far gone anti-heroes, and all sorts of other possibilities. When people hear "villain," they think of the Wicked Witch of the West cackling incessantly and threatening your pets. Grey areas let people step away from the exaggerated stereotypes. All it takes to become a villain in someone else's eyes is for them to hate you.

In my past roleplaying experiences, I have always found this approach to be much more successful. Stereotypical boss-style villains tend to get boring fairly quickly because the arcs can never be resolved if it is someone's main character - nobody is going to allow their character to be killed permanently, so it just turns into trading vigorous monologues. "You are evil!" "Yes, yes I am." "We shall stop you!" "Nay, I shall behead your stepmother!" Having personal villains or antagonists always seem to allow for much more interesting storylines. Maybe a slew of other PC's do not view the person as a villain, but instead consider your character the antagonist. Manipulation, drawing lines in the sand, personal feuds - all of those things seem to have much more long lasting capabilities than traditional mustache twirling villains. The latter tend to work fine for a specific, partially pre-constructed storyline where they are not someone's main character - but tend to fizzle out after that.

I am still new around here, do we know when the expansion is coming? Or is it just Next YearTM?

I did not see a thread like this and every forum needs one! :bouncy: If there is one and I missed it, feel free to whack this one. BS46C2z5lVE

Hai! I am interested in this FC, is there someone I can send a mail to and ask some questions about Unity? Thanks! Saiden

I suppose I never had that feeling in an MMO. I played WoW many years ago for a brief time purely because so many offline friends started playing it, but I had a hard time getting into it. It was not my setting, my style, or writing I enjoyed. There tends to be very specific styles of fantasy that I enjoy, the genre as a whole is very hit or miss with me. For example, I do not watch Game of Thrones but I just read the first book because people would not stop pestering me about it. I found it dreadfully boring - obviously, this is not a reflection of Martin or the work itself, simply a preference of the reader. That has been my perpetual frustration with MMOs in the past - I tend to come along late in the formulation of the community and it brings with it various obstacles. That and I simply do not have time to play for long, long periods of time anymore. So naturally, communities tend to revolve around those that do have the time to spend. That is normal. I am hoping that ARR can be that game I play for a long time to come, sometimes logging in for an hour sometimes longer. See all the content there is to see, try to be more relaxed and less of a "gamer," and just meet some new folks along the way.

Hai! I have no idea what to say in these posts. So. Hai!

While I am new to ARR, in my past roleplaying experience people tend to vastly overestimate the consequences if something goes wrong when they try to put themselves out there. There are a lot of roleplayers. There are a lot of opportunities. If you put yourself out there and try to involve yourself with a certain group of people and they react poorly, guess what - there are many more groups out there. There is no roleplaying community in games this large that have authorities you must get in good with in order to continue roleplaying. Nobody can shut you out, no consequence can deflate all of your future roleplaying. If things go poorly, call them a bunch of ninnies in your head, learn from the experience if there are lessons to be learned, and find another group. And most importantly, love yourself and love your characters. Everything else will follow. ♥

I enjoy current MMOs as long as the setting is one I enjoy, but yes it does feel as if the market is so full now that quick games of the same structure are par for the course. MMO players are a different breed now than they used to be - most players do not stick with a game for several years on end, they hop from one new MMO to the next grinding to the top as fast as they can to see if they like the endgame progression. There was a great article in Wired about it a while back. The old style of game where people spent years (EVE Online just hit its tenth anniversery and is actually growing) in it has kind of disappeared. The majority of players switch MMOs multiple times a year. I do enjoy MMOs, but I need a setting I like, an endgame PvE progression (that was the problem with Elder Scrolls Online - there is literally no endgame progression), and preferably some fun people I have met. Most of the innovation in gaming is in different genres now. MMOs have become a static genre, much like RTS games. Adventure games, games that push the boundaries of game versus film (Heavy Rain), and the like are what push the innovation in the genre now. I put myself on the No Man's Sky mailing list a few days ago, but I have sort of reached the point now that I do not ever look forward to an MMO or have high expectations. That does not mean I will not enjoy them when they are released, but I just do not see the point in having high expectations - being different and innovative rarely pays the bills. The majority of gamers want something they can get the hang of in five minutes, grind to endgame progression in less than a month, and finish the progression within four months. All of that said, I have found that the less time I have to play an MMO the more I enjoy it. As my offline life is busy, I do not have time to play a game for 4+ hours a day like I did when I was younger. It helps stop it from feeling like a grind, keeps the world fresh, etcetera. The only downside is that leveling is so slow that endgame is already chock full of experienced people that have done it all already and it can become difficult to get plugged in to experience the content. And the same goes with roleplaying - the less time you have to play, the later you arrive in a game, the higher chance there is that cliques have already been formed and it becomes more difficult to become involved.

I think that would be lovely. As another new player, I have no idea where to get started - and many Free Companies I have looked at in the advertisements seem dead or invite only. So that makes it even more difficult to figure out how to get plugged in. Maybe doing it on a 1:1 basis is the trick.

Another aspect to do research into that others have mentioned is the fit of headphones. Over-ear headphones can be very uncomfortable if you happen to buy a brand or line that does not fit properly for your head/ears/hair.

I have no idea what Space Mutiny is but I feel as if I should Google it.

You know, the older I get, the less time I want to invest in RPGs. After I played through Journey, I thought, "Why can't we have more awesome games that I can finish in 2 hours?" That said, I do love open worlds. I just don't like to have to do a lot of math and reading while playing the game. I just want to sit back and adventure. I honestly wish there were more open world games with fewer RPG elements. Yeah, for more recent years when I play singleplayer games it is more along the line of casual adventure/story games such as last year's Tomb Raider reboot. As far as open world goes, I have found that many of the lauded open world games tend to not jive with me because the openness leaves me too directionless. They tend to provide content via lack of meaning - you run around this world until you see an icon on the minimap, which will be some kind of event that seems suspiciously familiar to the last five events you did. I tend to get bored rather quickly. If somebody ever developed a combination of Heavy Rain, The Sims, and EVE Online, I would be a happy person. :bouncy: But on top of all that, I just simply do not have anywhere near as much time to devote to games as I used to. When offline life gets busy, everything but MMOs tend to fall by the wayside - with an MMO, I can log in and everything was just as I left it, depending on the game I may have acquaintances I can chat with while I relax for an hour or two that evening and wind down, and I do not have to worry about paying attention to new releases and finding something new to play.

Sounds good. I can certainly come up with something. Though I suppose my character Savage UniKorn will have to be deleted :lol: (I actually saw that name once in an MMO). But it sounds like you are saying that you have not come across a lot of roleplayers here that would blacklist somebody for a slightly iffy name like that? Is that a correct interpretation? And yes, I have run into people like that in other games. :bouncy:

So, I have read the wiki page on Hyur/Midlander naming conventions. While it does state that they have "more recognizable European names," it also states that "Last names are usually based off of professions, or locations of where they or their families lived. They may also represent a person’s outward features (i.e. brown hair leading to the surname 'browne')." My question is, how strict is the ARR roleplaying community in socially enforcing naming conventions? I am new to this community, and every roleplaying community has varying levels of "thou shalt follow lore to the letter" attitudes in them. Would there be a notable amount of roleplayers out there that would frown on a European name that does not coincide with a profession, Anglo-Saxon/Celtic, or physical trait? The name in question is Marmontel. :moogle:

Ah, yes. I have heard similar things about X and XIII. Back when the early ones were being released, I was playing games more akin to the Castlevania series. I found RPGs in video game form rather late in life, sadly. So there are a lot of classics I have not played. I just loved those platformers. :chocobo:

... *eyebrow twitches* W-w-welcome to RP and Balmung. Play I, VI, IX, Tactics, Tactics Advance, and Chocobo Racing. Thank me later. Wai twitchy? I could not play eeeeverything back in the day. Someday, I will go back and play all the ones available with translation.:moogle:

For anything audio related, I always recommend Audio-Technica. Their products are just fabulous. Someone else mentioned Sennheiser, and they are also very reputable and high quality. I personally use Technica's ATH-A900x headphones and have a standalone mic that I bring out when I need to actually talk to others in a game. Since I tend to avoid voice chat when possible, I preferred having pure headphones for music most of the time. They do however have a full line of gaming headsets if you are the kind of person that is on TeamSpeak every day. If you would like a place to read some reviews as well as decent forums to ask questions from audiophiles, Head-Fi is a decent community.