Kuzhuk

If individual RPers don't want to have the onus for socially conscious RP placed on them, then it will ultimately result in a negative climate. If you don't ask individuals to be responsible for how they depict tricky things like gender and sexuality then the average depiction of those things will often be slapdash and upsetting.

I agree that it's also very important for women playing male characters to attempt to understand the social context of masculine gender roles in writing their character as well.

I would recommend reworking the story away from the "meet her parents" ambition. It just seems like an ambition that's hard for other characters to relate to. I would suggest going with something like that (assuming you also intend for her to be a bit younger given the 20 year ago fall of Ala Mhigo): Madda's parents were part of the Ala Mhigan resistance against Gargemald and died for the cause. A family friend took her and escaped to Little Ala Mhigo when she was still young. He or she trained her in combat with a sword, expecting Madda to someday be driven by the desire to take revenge on Gargemald for the loss of her parents. Eventually she realized that the sword wasn't for her and that she wanted to help people in the same circumstance she found herself in at a young age. To fulfill that wish Madda started an orphanage in Thanalan. When Dalamud collided with Eorzea thanks to the Garleans her refuge was destroyed. Thus the calamity left her with a reason to return to the path set before her long ago.

I don't think Sforze was responding to your post at all Caspar (I'm not even sure if she read it first before replying). Your approach of thinking up traits then considering what's appropriate after is different than a "people are people" approach IMO.

My approach takes RPing as a bit different than telling a story. A lot of times when I RP I just show up to things and see what happens. Storytelling requires a lot of control and thought in advance, this is a bit more like improv for me. What that means is that when I want a story I have to plan aspects out in advance and treat it like a DnD session. I give enough free-form to it that what happens can have a wide-variety of outcomes. That's why I RP. When I feel like writing a story that's more over-arching and better planned out... I do it. I write fiction and I RP, and to me they serve different needs.

Asheron's Call. The first MMORPG I ever played. My character was a virindi experiment gone wrong. Then Candeth Martine's story came about, and, ahhh. So good.

Every MMO community I've RPed in recently has had a gender imbalance skewed in favor of female characters. When I first noticed this in Wildstar I assumed there were more women OOC at first, but after awhile I started to notice a pattern and took some surveys. The end conclusion I came to is somewhat obvious: there are tons of men playing as lesbians (and bisexual women) as a kind of fantasy fulfillment. Is this a problem? That discussion brings up a broad set of issues and there is no one answer to that question. It depends on your priorities. Where I'm coming from however, I have a pretty simple answer: yes. Putting it simply, and in the broadest terms possible, it's a kind of virtual 'blackface' problem but with a set of lesbian-queer identities. Men fundamentally lack the real world experience to know what it's like to be a woman in a culture of restrictive gender norms AND heteronormativity. We live in a society where lesbians in pornography exist almost solely for non-demographic consumers (straight men). It results in a product which incorrectly characterizes those relationships on so many levels (sexual and otherwise). Scissoring, long nails, out-of-the-mouth tongue fondling; most men's exposure to lesbians is deeply inaccurate to the average picture. And of course the problems go far beyond sex. Even when women are straight, the way men RP them is often ham-fisted and insulting. Popular depictions often have subtle sexist roots. For example, I've seen men RPing women have their characters act horrendously socially incompetent only to fall back on the horribly misogynistic "I was on my period" excuse. None of this means female characters played by men HAVE to be badly done. Many aren't. But many are too, and I think that's something people need to hear and think about. I know people will disagree with me. I know many will get defensive. I hope it was food for thought none the less.

Well, if the advice here works then the people who take and apply it shouldn't have any problems. But if it doesn't and there's an external issue... Well, there's always other games and communities. I won't complain anymore either way, I've said my peace.

I've never seen you RPing in public. I mean, maybe it's just that your method of OOC first works better than other methods, because I have seen you shouting for your group. As far as I can tell, you have put in a lot of effort and you've probably earned what you have.

However, IF that is true, then I'm truly at a loss how such thing is possible actually. Following what others wrote here as suggestions, and doing what I do (and described in my post), I find myself currently drowning in roleplay. So perhaps I simply can't see / don't see this struggle, or don't understand how it can be as dire as described. The answer to this thing you cannot fathom is in the post title. You are part of a clique that you benefit from. The people who have tried the same thing as you have aren't, and therefore haven't. You're the leader of an FC, aren't you? I mean, c'mon... You can't possibly mean what you wrote there literally. You're a smart guy, you can figure it out. As for how you were able to get into that clique? I bet the community was once a lot more welcoming before people got established and set in their ways. Aya mentioned earlier how a lot of people have retreated to their FC Housing for RP. That's a microcosm of changing attitudes towards inclusivity, I wager. And it doesn't matter how hard you try to be included if people simply ignore what you write.

Sorry Aya. I did some editing to hopefully make it less objectionable. I know you have good intent, and you're also very welcoming to new people and you frequent the Quicksand a lot. I know if you're offended by that, what I said needs some refinement. You are definitely not part of the problem, you're part of the solution. I wish more people were like you. What I am trying to explain is that this thread is really disheartening to read from the perspective of someone who is trying to fit in and get involved. Knowing why you were ignored when you tried to RP doesn't mean you weren't ignored and having heaps of advice put on you just makes you feel even more responsible for seeing to it that you are included. Let's say the advice given to that person still doesn't work... What then? They will probably quit. And it won't work if any of this phenomenon is caused by the structure of the community (which is something that people don't seem to want to address). An inclusive community takes steps to include people, it does not educate people on how to best be included first. I don't think the veterans here realize how hard it is to get established in FFXIV RP. For example, people suggested joining open RP... Open RP has a waitlist. It will be days before you're even invited. People have mentioned that they see these kinds of threads a lot. That means there is a consistent problem here. I want to be part of its solution. I want to have a discussion about how we can make a more inclusive community. And that includes changing my own bad habits if I need to (and I'm sure there are some things I do that aren't very noob friendly).

You say "we can all take steps to avoid it" but the steps being suggested are put entirely on the excluded person. That's what I'm getting at. Someone shows up and says "I have a problem" and a thousand people offer "well have you tried this?" If the community was as inclusive as it sees itself then it wouldn't be "have you tried this" and would instead be "okay here's how we're going to all help solve this problem." Instead it's been "this is what you should do" followed by pages of people explaining why the person might've been ignored from their perspective. None of this helps the person much, it just puts the onus on them to help themself.

This thread is mostly telling the people who have been neglected what they should do to fix the problem. In suggesting moving to a different hub, I'm just trying to think of suggestions/changes we can make that don't amount to putting all of the onus on the people who feel excluded. That seems like a good way to turn off a lot of potential RPers and shrink the community. ((Made an edit here to put things a bit clearer and hopefully less offensive. I didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings or insinuate that anyone had less than good motives.))

It seems generally agreed that the Quicksand is the main RP hub and that's a problem, so why not do it elsewhere? The Golden Saucer seems like the perfect place to RP given that it's going to be a social/casual mecca anyway. Why don't we all plan to RP more publicly and do it there? It's supposed to be a very large space that's diverse and inclusive. I think that will solve this problem mostly. The whole "I avoid low skill RPers" thing is a problem though. That's an attitude that will steer you away from new RPers and poor RPers alike. It will create an insular community. If too many people adhere to that it creates the very problem that this whole post is about.

I have a few objections, qualms, and suggestions. Please note, even if I disagree with you, I hold everyone here in the highest regard and mean no offense by it. 1) "Events are a good place to meet people." I haven't found this to be generally accurate. As someone who has attended ~20 events in the last few months, the only one that resulted in me making more contacts for RP was the Starlight Ball. This is because most events are so focused on some kind of performative centerpiece that the participants in the event interact with each other very little and/or because of the aforementioned chatspam. 2) The Quicksand is the one place to consistently find RP and the community derides it. Nearly every one of my positive interactions with people outside of my RP partner have started in the Quicksand. I generally can't find people anywhere else with any regularity. And yet the community makes fun of Quicksand RP constantly by mentioning the supposed rampant ERP there (it happens, I've seen the roots of it, but it's not anywhere near as constant as people say it is). Because of this a lot of the more established people avoid the place, leaving RP noobs to interact with a smaller, less connected pool of people. And everyone there kind of feels like a pariah when they see the jokes flying even if they weren't there for anything having to do with ERP. It sucks. 3) The lack of a central RP hub is especially damaging to new people. This site/open RP/every RP LS I've been in has tons of people I have never seen RP. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they do, which just tells you that I don't have access to the areas/events in which they choose to RP. That in and of itself makes you feel like you're excluded from the clique. *** Events largely benefit people who are established. It gives them something novel to react to around friends they've already made. They're a point of diversity for their character. Those who are new are just looking to make those friends to begin with. I think what's really needed is a strong, central RP hub that everyone agrees on. It would need to be a large enough area so that the problem of chat spam can be addressed spatially. Ideally there would be multiple buildings with different themes to include diverse people (bar only wouldn't work). Sadly, I'm not sure if such a place even exists and doubly that people would support it.

That seems to conflict with this ingame dialogue: "What is aether you ask? Why, only the source of all being! Though it cannot be seen, it is everywhere... or should I say, it is everything.Aether flows around us and within us, and without it we would cease to exist. When we die, it is believed that the shock separates our spirits from our corporal forms. Our bodies are then broken down and are absorbed back into the aetherial river, while the soul is left to journey to its final destination in the afterlife. Some call this "returning to the Lifestream." However, our ancestors discovered ways in which, through meditation and focus of spiritual energies, one could reduce her body to aether without losing the grip on her soul, in turn allowing us to travel upon the Lifestream. These methods have been given the names Return and Teleport." Source, the first bit of dialogue here : http://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/Nicia

When you die the aetherial energy that encompasses your lifeforce escapes and returns to Hydaelyn while your soul travels on to the afterlife. It seems likely to me that soul crystals are filled with this aetherial energy (not literally souls) because of the precedence of crystals storing aetherial energy and the 'physical memory' of the final product. Who knows if their creation is a slow bleed off or some kind of ritual upon death. Either way, we know a fair amount about how they're utilized. Soul crystals do not share their knowledge freely. They only reveal their secrets to a suitable host. It's safe to assume that you have to have characteristics in common with the stored energy, and in order to gain more power actions similar to the 'stored story' have to be undertaken. It's like jogging their memory to remember more (which is what you see in every job quest). I feel this is vaguely relevant though. The words from the intro to FFT: "A warrior takes sword in hand, clasping a gem to his heart. Engraving vanishing memories into the sword. He places finely honed skills into the stone. Spoken from the sword, handed down from the stone. Now the story can be told."

I don't like it when every fifth word in the dialogue is l'Cie.

I'm just hoping the story doesn't trot out a million proper nouns, lack moral complexity, rehash familiar tropes, and revolve around a "hope and friendship will save the day" theme. ...I will probably be disappointed.

Assassin's Creed.

I think, and maybe I'm wrong, that FF13's saga seriously deminished the brand. Western RPGs generally attempt to bring SOME choice and customization to the table, I think eastern RPGs need to get more serious about that (and many are, Dragon's Dogma for instance).

Every culture and individual has their own masculine ideal. These ideals may or may not agree with each other and that's okay, they're baseless cultural notions that really don't matter in any objective sense, but they can determine how much someone enjoys an instance of media. Personally I have found it hard to make a character in FFXIV who represents the masculine aesthetic I wish to play. In my mind, Midlander Hyur look too young and Highlander Hyur look like cavemen. I dislike the Gears of War AND FFXV masculine aesthetic simultaneously. I also really liked the redesign of Dante. The solution? Customization options and localization. Give everyone what they want. SE needs to do this if they're going to be commercially viable in the west (and they need to be).

I'm a longtime roleplayer, MMORPGer, and FFXIVer; I'm just 'new' to doing all 3 at once. And I'm really bad at talking about myself. Tried Gilgamesh, didn't like it, transferred to Balmung, loving it. I play and RP a lot. I do endgame stuff, PVP, craft, gather, and RP a ton too. I'd like to find an FC of people who gel well with my style. I like mature, serious RP. Big on lore compliance. Establishing a long-term plot is important to me. Active people are a must. I type fast, I'm responsive, and I try to say interesting things/ask questions. I think I'm pretty good. IDK. Nobody is that great at analyzing themselves objectively.

Personal Profile Character Name: Trenton Cador Gender: Male Race: Hyur Domestic Profile Civil Status: Citizen Place of Residence:Limsa Lominsa Occupation: Businessman Free Company: N/A Social Profile Trenton is a curious, well-rounded man of multifaceted interests, personal traits, and desires. He is easily engaged, hungry for knowledge, and takes pleasure in being good at what he does. Few would guess from his polite demeanor that he is an ex-pirate of Ala Mhigan descent. Meta Profile Publicly he is a businessman, an adventurer, and an artisan. Many people know he is a private investigator. But few know that his investigations almost always end in an execution when he manages to determine the culprit. He has little faith in the city states to see beyond self-interest to police the populace for the sorts of monsters that hide in plain sight. Murders, rapists, and slavers; he hunts the most vile members of society. Used to be a member of the Rogue's Guild. His father was an official in the King of Ruin's court.