Lydia Lightfoot

I find that the best method for details you want others to remember is to come up with a list of such details, ideally with some alternate phrasings or circumstances where the detail would come up, and then inject them into your RP on a routine basis. Repetition drives memory. Thus, any time I mention Lydia's eyes, I don't merely say "Lydia set her eyes upon Fred", I write "Lydia set her sky blue eyes upon Fred", because as her writer I want the color of her eyes to stand out as a physical feature. That said, most players won't grab ahold of the details you offer up, regardless of whether they remember them or not. To continue the example, experience has told me that it'll be a rare day in which anyone will have their character comment upon Lydia's eyes, or make note of it in any other sort of side conversation (e.g. when discussing Lydia, "The guildmaster of the Reliquarian's Guild? Blonde hyur, with rather light blue eyes, you can't miss her."). It's always a heartwarming moment when somebody does take hold of some detail I've thrown out there, though, but I definitely don't expect it to happen often. It's just a practicality thing, mostly - people look for the hook of your post that they can reply to, and tend to gloss the minor aspects (but that glossing doesn't mean the detail didn't sink in as memorable).

Thank you for understanding, Ardam! On that note, to the OP, is this event still active? I'd only become aware of the response to my original joke because two members of the Reliquarian's Guild stopped by at the scheduled time this week and there wasn't anybody present - though they did say the decor seemed nice!

As the creator of "7th Haven" I can assure you that, no, Haven is not an intentional misspelling of the word "Heaven". It's the correct spelling of the word "Haven". Please don't spread rumors based on uninformed assumptions, thanks. Just now saw this, so I apologize about not responding sooner. The information I'd provided had come from a private chat with Ardam, during August 2016. He had advertised the venue, so I'd messaged to ask him if the name he'd intended had been "7th Heaven" like in FF7, and he responded that was correct. I replied that he seemed to have left off the first "e" (which is a typo that could've happened, and since Haven is also a valid word, a spellchecker wouldn't have caught it to let him know, so I was intending to be helpful), and he responded that it was intentional. So, I apologize if you perceived what I said as some sort of slight toward you or your venue. That wasn't my intention at all - I'd only been commenting from what I'd been told. Further, what I wrote there was meant in fun. Seventh Heaven, Seventh Hell, Seventh Purgatory, etc.

At the very least, I routinely see apartments go vacant, so that's an option that's become more available on Balmung. I wouldn't feel too disheartened, anyway. They'd long claimed that PS3 limitations were a key factor in the finite number of houses, and PS3 is no more as of 4.0, so I'd suspect in the coming patches we may see some more housing open up (even aside from the opening of Shirogane, which will - temporarily - open up some houses in LB, Mist, and Goblet).

Housing's sold out on Mateus, too, as far as I know, so don't let the housing shortage be a deciding factor. I'd say if you already have a character on Balmung, the RP is still going strong there and you may as well check that out. At the same time, if you're able to get a different character started on Mateus (though, I think it's locked for new creation? I don't know), you could always try it out there too and compare/contrast. Just whatever you do, don't transfer that Balmung character off the server, or else by all appearances given all available current data, you may never be able to get back on Balmung again.

Feel free to check out mine, and see what you happen to think. We have both "member" and "staff" options, depending on an individual's interest level and availability, and of course it's totally possible to start as a member and transition to staff if somebody feels it'd be a good fit for their character. https://tiny.cc/relicrpc

Personally, I have one small detail that I have in Lydia's suite which nobody ever notices and it amuses me terribly.

As others mentioned, the OP had specifically mentioned random RP, which implies no planning has taken place. Obviously villainy can be played out quite well with a closed group that's taken time to discuss and scheme OOC to set the framework of the scenario and agree upon the outcome, but that wasn't quite what was brought up.

A bar fight, maybe - but plenty of people do roleplay bar fights, and true to form, nobody goes off to the gallows over it. That's also not exactly villainy, though. However, backstories have to come into play, too, at some point: If a barfight broke out at the Carline Canopy (the inn at Gridania), there's no rational reason why the Wood Wailers wouldn't be swarming the place in a matter of minutes. Players just tend to forget about the existence of NPC policing forces because we can't tangibly summon them present. So, the wailers show up, and this one barfight fellow happened to be a wanted man due to a bunch of background stuff (plenty of characters have this kind of background). So in a circumstance like that, it's entirely reasonable that a character might get long-term jailed or executed by the authorities merely for being involved in a barfight (because said barfight brought them under the eye of the law, and they had existing warrants). You hit the nail on the head when you said "...either of those seem to be very unfun already in RP." That's exactly why players of villain characters often just choose not to accept consequences, but, this leads to players of heroes not wanting to RP with them, because of the whole "it comes across as god-moding to never accept consequences" thing. On the other hand... devil's advocate here... loads and loads of heroic players also wouldn't accept it if their character got a serious injury or killed, or were kidnapped by a villain and imprisoned forever in an oubliette. So, to be clear, I'm not specifically picking on players who play villains. It's a consistent issue across the board. Like I mentioned in the first post, it's the key reason why there just isn't often a lot of character-versus-character conflict (at least beyond the extent of some fisticuffs). Good guy or bad guy, players aren't willing to accept the outcome. Perhaps more importantly, who's to say that the method of arriving at said outcome was fair? Did we do random rolls? Great, but were the characters actually dead-even equals at fighting, or should one of them have somehow had an advantage on the rolling? Did we write it out, and one player was more accepting of taking hits than the other? I've seen players end up with their heads on fire trying to debate this kind of thing...

The issue mainly arises in the lack of tangible consequences which can be forced upon villainous characters. In any realistic circumstance, most people who do wrong onto others get what's coming to them sooner or later (be it by the law, or merely just by somebody who's fed up with them taking it upon themselves). Note I said most - I'm sure we can all think of examples of some pretty terrible people (or petty crooks, perhaps) who flew under the radar and never managed to get caught. So we're presented with one of two possible outcomes for the villainous character: A) They're going to get caught eventually, or B) They're going to manage to never be caught. If it's B, this will probably only happen if the character is very, very intelligently played (rare - and that's no insult to you or anybody else; the top reason most actual intelligent criminals end up getting caught too is that it's just really very difficult to plan out flawless heists every single time), or the character is very, very lucky (in which case, expect other players to call foul on it, because nobody likes to be told over and over, "sorry, my villain slipped your grasp by luck again"), or, the player is pretty much god-moding (e.g., no matter what the good guys post that they're trying to do to capture the villain, the villain slips their grappling attempts, parries their blows, and then posts throwing a smokebomb and disappearing without letting anyone try to react at all, etc.). In other words, B is just a very unlikely situation to keep plausible over time. So let's look at A. Could the character, if caught, manage to get free? Sure, that's possible - but it gets tricky, because if it's said to be happening of NPCs (for example, escaped from a Maelstrom prison, or bribed one of the guards to be set free, or knows someone on the judges' panel and was able to blackmail their way into an innocent verdict, and so on), then doing it more than once or twice basically pushes the character into B territory in a hurry (in particular, the "very very lucky" or "god-moding" camp). So, next branch - caught, and can't escape. What happens then? Well, in most pre-modern societies, even moderate villainy is punished by a short drop with a sudden stop - in other words, execution. But, to be fair, even a prison sentence of a mere year would basically mean the character is rendered unplayable during that timeframe, so what's their player to do, either way? Fantasia and rename? Well, there's $20 spent. So, is the newly repurposed character also a villain? Cool, let's take bets on how long it takes for it to cost another $20. And another. And another. Your mileage may vary, but my own experience is that most villain characters end up falling somewhere into category B, and usually the lucky or godmoding results. The player just flat out refuses to accept any kind of consequences for the character's villainy, and if the issue is pressed, they'll force their side of it by just blacklisting the heroes and moving right along. So, what's to be done for conflict? Well, many roleplayers make use of NPCs, who may be visibly imaginary in the game, and the players simply post on their behalf as if they were there. That way, when the story arc comes to a close and the goods have cornered Iron Toe Joe in his lair, if ol' Joe ends up dead or hauled off to the Wood Wailers to spend his days in a cell thereafter, nobody's out any money over it.

We have our very first genuinely new player to join the group, and he'll have the role of the wonderfully well-written Molgo Meringo, a rarely-found treasure in himself: a serious lalafell. I'm quite pleased he came our way! As an EU timezone player, Molgo knows that he may sometimes miss out on some of the activity here on Balmung, given it's NA status - but there's lots of EU players on Balmung too, and some of us in the Americas play during daytime hours anyway, so things should work out okay. If you happen to be an EU player or daytime NA and you'd like to make a new friend, hit up Molgo! And thank you for the compliment, Athil! You guys are all so nice. :blush:

Welcome Eloria Chantay! Eloria's another whom we'd anticipated coming aboard the staff, and we're very glad to have her! She's nervous (and it's super cute!) about taking the very best screenshot for her character, so for the moment, I have a placeholder image on her Cast entry. We've also finished decorating the Onsen at the Reliquarium (screenshots to come in the future), and that comes with another new NPC staff member, M'seri Tehna. The Onsen is open to guild members and their guests, but no hanky-panky or M'seri will kick the pervs right out.

Bistro Le Beau will be present as a food vendor booth, hosted by kitchen wizard Lydia Lightfoot and any aides she can muster. In addition to serving tempting culinary delights inspired by the great regions of Eorzea, the booth will also have information available about the Reliquarian's Guild for those interested in exploration and treasure hunting. The booth menu will be available soon.

Note to Lydia: Watch your legs while you're cooking, there might be miqo'te making figure-eight patterns around your feet. Lydia: "They're not actually cats, you know." >> I knew that, obviously! Duh!

I mean, this is the answer to your thread right here. Thread over. Almost any question of preference could be shrugged aside in the same manner. It's been a very pleasant forum thread to read through, though, and people have expressed a lot of interesting perspectives, ones which probably wouldn't have been shared if I hadn't presented the topic in the first place.

Stick an old lady to my belt, cuz Irma Gird. How do I do the thing to get the thing?

I've heard mixed things about Mateus, from differing sources. Some say it's going very well over there, and others say it's dead as a can of Spam. The thing is, everyone has to remember they can only expect to get out of an RP community exactly as much as they're personally willing to contribute into it, and that's true exponentially the smaller a community happens to be. This is just opinion on my part but for some a big community like Balmung is ideal because they don't really want to contribute very much, they just mostly want to "take", and there's plenty of contributors out there they can take from. In a smaller community, players like that don't find as many content providers they can take from, and so they'll claim the community is dead or boring. But the truth, often enough, is seen through the lens of perspective. The take-away there is: You'll probably have a fine time on Mateus if you're intending to give as much as you hope to get.

If anyone's looking for a way around the long sea voyage without handwaving, I have an a small plot wrapping up soon in which Lydia will be discovering, wholly by accident, the ruined site of an old Allagan transportation facility. She won't know quite what the place is, but, being a treasure hunter and doomed to die as a cat might (by curiosity), she'll end up activating it somehow, and... BAMF. When she materializes, she'll be in a similar ruin somewhere else, though one in far, far greater disrepair - as in, unlikely to ever conceivably be functional again. She'll be unaware of it, but it's the sister site of the Eorzean chamber, and had been built there at the tail end of the Allagan civilization as a way for them to potentially begin exploring Othard, and then subsequently forgotten when their society collapsed. A day or so of travel later and she'll find her way to Namai, and can use the aetheryte to go back and forth thereafter (albeit taxingly, as some have mentioned it really ought to be, given the distance). Back in Eorzea, she'll discover that the teleportation device can still be used again, though it takes time to recharge itself and is only useful in a very limited capacity. Even were the likes of Cid himself to get to work on it, at best it'd be useful transporting individuals occasionally one-way to Othard, and not so potent as to, say, relocate an entire army. Worse, the Othardian side of it is totally beyond repair. OOC, it'll be a convenient way for Eorzean characters to go get attuned on Othard and put the travel issue behind them. It's also lore-plausible, given that we see on Azys Lla that the Allagans certainly did create teleportation devices, and each had a specific destination point, just like this one does. Anyway, if anybody else wants to get behind it, feel free to say - starting August 1st - that your Eorzean character made their first trip to Othard by way of the Allagan teleporter.

Welcome Osric Rook! We'd been expecting Rook to join the staff as well, so it's wonderful that panned out! The character is the first fighting-focused employee of the guild, which is important since... well, some expeditions unearth trouble along with the treasure.

Yay, my topic got a lot of replies while I slept! I think a lot of the uncertainty element, at least as a player, can be mitigated by communication. Whenever a character I've played over the years has seemed to be potentially making a romance-possible connection with someone's character, I like to chat with the player of the other character and make sure I'm not misreading their OOC intention. Sometimes a player will just want their character to be flirty or something but not actually have it go anywhere, so a discussion like that assures me that it wasn't, like... the player ended up not liking my writing, or something like that. If it is something they player is interested in, then the OOC discussion ends up shifting to pragmatic topics. Are our schedules reasonably compatible as players? If the characters did get romantically involved they needn't be attached at the hip, of course, but if we'd only be likely to even get to RP once a week, that may make it difficult for them to have enough face time to actually form that connection. Do we have similarities in our ideals as players? Some players tend to be collaborative with storytelling while others prefer to be very independent; some play a lot of alts and others mostly focus on a main character only or maybe one lone alt; some have an active schedule of activities their character is involved in and so the potential romance interest might have to chase them around a bit, whereas others may be hoping said romantic interest will lead the way to RP events; some may have a stronger separation between IC and OOC than others (and as others have mentioned they may even be hoping their RP will lead to an OOC interest, which is a good thing to be informed about up front, to avoid hurt feelings on their part later when the other person is like "wait what?"); and of course the "adult stuff talk" - do they prefer FTB or not, and if not, to what extent to they prefer it be a focal point of their romantic RP. I've had plenty of situations where after having the OOC chat, the other player and I realize that our interests as players just don't line up enough that this promising thing our characters have led themselves to is just probably not going to be a happy time for us as players - and that's okay to realize that. It's the same in any hobby. You can run a D&D group and enjoy the company of this person from the game store who's just a real hoot, but, the guy just has a hectic and oddball schedule and it's impossible to get him around a table on a consistent basis, so he's not a good fit for your D&D group even if he's a cool dude. Sometimes, that result means I don't ever really see that player's character around again, and other times I do, but the characters have a fairly organic evolution of their original "hmm, maybe?" thoughts into "mm, friends is good" instead. Or, sometimes other fun results happen, wherein one of the characters ends up harboring a crush or something like that, and as happens in real life, it just doesn't lead anywhere. I've often thought to myself - is this OOC chat technically a form of pre-arrangement? I don't really feel like it is, because we're not deciding the characters will become involved, we're just determining whether or not if they became involved it would actually be a workable situation for us as players.

The recent trend of "looking for romantic RP" messages here at the RPC has me wondering... why do others attempt to pre-arrange romantic RP? I understand that uncertainty is lame (life's full of enough uncertainty as it is, and it can be a bit frightening to try and manage), but, isn't the mystery and the anticipation a crucial element of a situation having a romantic feel to it? I guess it's probably a little different for everyone, of course. Admittedly, in the past, I've had situations come up wherein I've done it, but, my experience has been that it was, most of the time, a very shallow experience that lacked "life", and as such it didn't hold either party's interest for very long. The times when I've had a character become romantically involved with another and it ended up being a fulfilling and interesting element of their overall story, and it lasted long enough to be meaningful and feel even plausibly realistic, it happened organically. My character met another character, as players we enjoyed each other's writing, and so we made a point to roleplay again another time. And then another time, and another time, and the interactions between the characters just naturally diverted into romantic interest. Have others out there had a lot of great experiences with pre-planned romance RP? Is that why it seems there's a lot of people looking for it lately? note: Ideally, I'd like any discussion on the topic to steer completely clear of any diversion into discussing ERP. While it's certainly possible that for some players "I'm looking for romance for my character" equates to "Tell me what kinky things you like and if I'm on board we'll get down", we all are aware of that possibility, and thus we needn't bring it up. Let's focus instead on the assumption that the stated requests by the relevant parties were genuinely a search for a "full romantic scenario" and not "pls snusnu".

Welcome to the first staff character in the guild, Ehzo'ir Tyaka! The character is one of several who were destined for a role in the guild, but though Ehzo isn't genuinely a "new recruit", we're very glad to have him just the same! And, thank you Kazu! You big flatterer! :blush:

I'm going to go ahead and bow out of this one, because the point in a debate in which people become focused on which fallacy terms they can quote is the point at which the debate loses sight of the actual topic and shifts to bantering about fallacies, and that's frankly not productive for anything. Here's what I'll leave with: Having played in a lot - a lot - of various MMOs, and having seen more of them than not become (or already exist as) bastions of RP only among tight-knit clique groups who largely do not interact with each other and almost certainly do not engage in RP in the open world... I feel it's better that we celebrate the existence of open RP and that we try to all remember we're on the same team here. There are boors, for certain. Let's not change our behavior from being a welcoming and participation-encouraged community on account of some bad apples who won't handle that situation gracefully. Personally, I like to roleplay in an environment where my fellow roleplayers and I err on the side of acceptance and camaraderie rather than supporting exclusion and seclusion. If I can read your RP, then it's an invitation for me to join in if I wish. We're all on the same team. If your situation is a proxy or out-of-time sort of thing, that's fine. Just tell me so after I post, and at worst, I'll have wasted my time posting a post and that's not a big deal to me. I'd rather waste time 50% of the time and have the experience of getting RP with some new people the other half, than feel like the only people I'm allowed to RP with without begging them to include me first are my existing friends. That seems terribly insular and that's not how I RP. If it's how you RP, then please do enjoy yourself, and we'll simply have a difference in how we think of the hobby.

Does it? Please explain how a forum post here is at all different from an RP post made on the street in the middle of Ul'dah. How is it acceptable to randomly respond, without personal invitation to do so, to one of these, but not the other?

Allow me to present something for you all to think about. Why did each of you respond to this forum thread? Is it because the OP posted a message in a public space, one which was directed specifically to you, inviting you personally, individually, to respond? Or did the OP post a message in a public space and you chose to respond to it even though it wasn't meant precisely for you? Now consider: If, following your response, she reacted with offense toward you, stating plainly that you weren't meant to reply to it and she didn't want your opinion and you should butt out... would you consider that an amicable and acceptable reaction by her? Or would you be inclined to respond, "Why did you write the message here, where inherently anyone can respond to it, if you only wanted a response from a specific subset of people and would be offended by a reply from anyone else?" Food for thought.