Imo

I'm pretty sure Mikh'a has it right here, yes. It's explicitly stated for many of the trials and dungeons, and implicit for the rest. Beating a Primal 1 on 1 makes you way overpowered. Being a part of a party that beat a Primal? Perfectly acceptable. And Primals are being summoned all the time, so it's not like that even requires hogging a specific plot event and saying "yeah, that was all about me". Well, not acceptable by everyone's standards. But there'll always be power level snobs looking down on you if you play a character who's in any way above a completely mundane blade for hire. In a Final Fantasy game.

Main story: The general consensus is that the MSQ is something that happened in the past. The 2.0 content, ending with the fall of Ultima, happened a bit more than a year ago. Later events are a bit more recent. Your character didn't have to be a part of the war if you don't want it to be. Though for most armed adventurers, this raises the question of "why didn't you fight". GC: Generally, unless your character's RP is not focused on your GC in some fashion, most people tend to ignore the allegiance. If you don't want to ignore it completely, you can probably play it as your character being a freelancer working with the GC and getting rewarded for it - pretty much what it boils down to in gameplay. Or you can be a former member. Primals: The storyline assumes your character is a powerful hero, high above generic soldiers. Some people, myself included, play their characters this way, others roleplay more mundane people. Both approaches are fine as long as you respect the people who pick the other approach. Just don't play your character as more powerful than what's shown in the storyline, that's too much.

The way I see them, Ascians are pretty much the Organization XIII of FF14, only edgier. Playing one is the equivalent of creating an OC member of Organization XIII, and then playing them in a Kingdom Hearts RP. Only edgier. In other words, please don't do that. People will laugh at you, and they will be right.

I think fantasia is both very rare and very expensive, which is why most people never use it even if they wanted - even the rich can have trouble finding it! Successful adventurers often keep contacts with powerful alchemists and other weirdos, and their pockets are full of gil, so it's a bit easier for them. I imagine you're not entirely conscious when fantasia's effects take place - maybe it happens when you're asleep, even.

I'll counter by saying some allied seals gear looks really nice. Also, you just described most level 50 repeatables.

You haven't seen two high powers getting into a screaming match about why one guy's shield piercing magic drill can't piercing the other guy's heavens shield. "My drill will pierce the heavens!" "Nuh uh, my heavens are powered by antispirals." "Your antispirals can't stand up to my spirals!" "Well, I have a special spiral dampening field!" That's the difference between being an arrogant roleplayer, and simply a bad roleplayer. Snobs are the former, e-peen waving powergamers are the latter. Though I've seen a few examples of reverse e-peen waving, where people try to beat each other by claiming their character is the least powerful. That usually happens on forums, though, and not in the game. Sidenote, since you mentioned tabletop RPGs: I've been playing those for roughly 15 years now, and there were games with all kinds of power levels; in some we were ordinary children with no combat training, in others wandering adventurers, in some we were mecha pilots controlling giant robots, in others a team of superheroes who protected Earth from giant monsters. And some of the best roleplaying I had actually happened in those high-power games, while many of the low-power games were just dungeon crawls where people didn't roleplay much because they were too busy trying to stay alive. Another term from tabletop RPGs is Stormwind Fallacy, which I think is very relevant here. It claims that having an optimized character doesn't automatically mean you're bad at roleplaying, and vice versa, being a roleplayer doesn't mean you can't play an optimized character - and anyone who thinks otherwise is committing the fallacy. Optimization is not really a thing that exists in MMO RP, but replace "optimized" with "high power" and there you go. I've seen way too many people commit the Stormwind Fallacy. I don't think it's that hard, if you keep it in mind. It's a bit like parenthood - if you're worried will you be a good parent, that means you probably will, because it means you're thinking about the baby, not about yourself. And, similarily, if you're worried your character might be too powerful, then you're probably fine, because it means you're thinking about the other players, not about yourself. Eventually, like with lots of roleplaying, it boils down to "don't be a spotlight stealing jerk". Also, 99% of the time when personal character power matters, it's combat. And when roleplaying a battle, I go with the assumption that unless a character is explicitly bad at combat, then they're going to be effective - and thus, everyone has a chance to shine. If you play your character as powerful enough to destroy a small enemy army with a single attack, then you're breaking the lore because neither the PC nor any of the NPC allies are ever shown to be able to do that, in game mechanics or cutscenes. That's fighting against NPCs, at least. It's slightly different when it's PC vs PC combat. But like I described a few pages ago, I'm really not a fan of that.

Fun fact: I've never met someone who played a high power character and was a snob about it, going "play high power or UR DOIN IT RONG and are a bad RPer". But low power? Quite often.

Eh, that's a generalization. It depends heavily on the character. Look at real life - there are many people, interesting people, for whom their job is an important facet of who they are. And, to give an in-game example, a paladin whose characterization doesn't include at all what it means to be a paladin to them is a probably poor excuse of one!

Maybe I'm cynical, but to me this reads as: "We totally give you a lot of customization options for your female Au Ra! She doesn't have to be cute and pretty! She can be hot and sexy instead!"

Generally speaking, you both have to be over the legal age of where both parties live to be okay. If you ERPed with a 16 year old but they lived in a state where the legal age is 17, you're still breaking the law. This is why we usually go with 18, since there really aren't places where the legal age will be higher than that. I'm not talking about ERP with a 16-year old player, but with a 16-year old character played by an adult player. The laws get muddier on this one. But it's a moot point anyway, because, like I said: 1. I don't ERP. 2. I'm not talking whether it's legal. I'm talking whether I find it morally wrong. Which I don't. Is it creepy? Sometimes. But a lot of stuff people do is creepy.

Actually, I live in a place where the age of consent is 15, so I'm good. Not that I ERP. A few of my characters had sexual relations, but it always faded to black. It's less about doing that myself and more about thinking if other people doing it are wrong. And I don't think they are. It's their choice. What's even more precious is when teens think that being in your late twenties means you're old.

I think people who look for ERP with their underage characters have a higher chance to be creepy neckbeards rather than teenagers in real life. A teenager looking for ERP will be more likely to play an adult character.

Let's not act like teens are chaste angels. Teenagers have sex, they smoke, they drink alcohol. Some of them even say bad words! Not all of them, obviously, but many. And it's not gross, it's normal. If people want to roleplay sexual situations with their teenage characters, then as long as both players are 18 or older, they're fine to do so.

I figured he was duped into commiting some kind of harsh crime (which, in Ul'dah, might as well be getting into too much debt, because it's Ul'dah) - a newcomer getting taken advantage of is nothing new in Ul'dah. The black mage in the BLM plotline was also sentenced to the bloodsands for his crimes. But actual, legal, slave trade doesn't appear anywhere in the game, so I'd like confirmation that it's canon and not just semi-common edgy headcanon. Sorry for offtopic.

That's a bit of a heavy topic for what's supposed to be a light-hearted RP idea, isn't it? At least as light-hearted as a criminal organization can be. Also, citation please. I know Ul'dah uses sending to the arena as punishment for heavy crimes, but I'm pretty damn sure there's no slave markers or slavers.

From my experience, "not being able to separate IC from OOC" is usually a shorthand for either "thinking that relations between the characters also apply to the relations between the players" or "causing OOC drama after roleplaying didn't go the way you wanted". And both of those are not that uncommon, at least among more immature players.

Ah, the endless problem with power levels in RP. On one hand we have people who demand absolute realism (in a Final Fantasy game), will scoff at you for playing a character who's not completely mundane, and expect every aspect in which it goes above the capabilities of an average sellsword to be explained and justified and balanced with a million flaws. On the other hand, we have DarkMasterX1999, whose half-demon voidlord dragonrider makes Sephiroth looks like a wimp and will poweremote you with every line if you're foolish enough to RP with him. I'm not a fan of either approach. I take the controversial approach of using my character's level as its power baseline. If the character did something in the game proper, then it's probably powerful enough to do the same IC as well. In Imogene's case, that means she doesn't have the Echo and isn't a chosen one or anything like that, but she did do things like fight against the Primals, participate in the assault on the Praetorium, and explore Crystal Tower (because all of those were IC accomplished by a large group of people, not a single hero or just a few of them), and can do all the fancy borderline magic swordplay a high level paladin can do. I sometimes break out of this mold, but when that happens, I always power my characters down, never up - that way DarkMaster's realm lies. I'm perfectly okay if other people roleplay their characters as 100% mundane Average Joes, not heroes. Just please, don't expect the same from everyone else. Some of us like to play heroes. That doesn't make us powergamers. Side note on IC characters fights and power flaunting: first, I'd like to say that I'm personally not a fan, because in my opinion most of the time it's little more than e-peen waving. But there's something I noticed and found very annoying, which didn't happen in FF14 yet (good riddance), but did in other games; sometimes, when my character is just minding her business, it's approached by another character, trying to pick a fight. But I'm very high or even max level, while the other character is level 4 or 5. For me, this is not an even fight; it's an upstart trying to jump up to a much stronger opponent who can beat it effortlessly. Surprising nobody, those people tend to get annoyed when I point it it out them. The way I see it, if you want to play a strong character, you have to earn the right; either level to the point where your character can be considered one, or do something smart or amazing that will make me decide "okay, for you I can make an exception because you're a good RPer". Or better yet, both. Also, don't play characters whose sole reason is to pick fights with others, that's just rude and annoying. This is an excellent approach. Want to show that your character is badass, or cool, or smart, or funny? Prove it through your RP. In the end it's other players who decide if your characters live up to the labels you give them. And if they're worth RPing with, or are just piles of annoyance and ego.

I like how the cactuar is always splashing around in the water.

Having spent several hours just having amusing banter with Monty, I must say that this was a blast. Imo made a friend - and considering she has trouble doing that, it means a lot.

Was my PM ignored? :