Andromeda

So tempted to bring my Minister of Parliament. Probably a VERY BAD IDEA given the storyline, though.

Haha, no don't attack me yet. I have to look something up in the index for this one. I actually play it that my Scholar has tabs on pages for commonly-used spells. And just assumed arcanists closing their eyes was more about actually applying the spell to the situation than forming the spell. Like, if you've got a Lustrate ready to burst healing into someone but don't focus it you might wind up healing the enemy or a hunk of rock or something.

I know Equinox has a property they offer for event space, and an amazing main hall as well. They also have a pretty active group so you should be able to get in touch with someone with little trouble. This is their boss' tumblr. Their main space is Goblet 11-35.

I also know the start-up performance FC Fantasia Players has a lot of members new to performing. Their leader is a friend of mine and is doing a great job mentoring them. There's a fantastic tradition of mentorship among the IC performer community I know, actually, especially people like Savo, Nate Telluride (before my time, sadly) and Tuft. There's also some IC mentorship offered by myself and a couple members of mine at Bandee Pakshee. All this is on Balmung, but I know that there's a small group of performers on Lamia that would take people under their wing as well. It would be really great, though, for these various groups kinda doing it for themselves/people they know/talent that finds them worked together more. I love seeing companies and groups work together on projects. Now, just have to figure out HOW to do that and we're really rolling.

One of my alts would be interested. You can reach me in-game more likely on Andromeda Dulaque, but the character in question would be Illua Corcavo, looking to be an investigator. My wiki pages desperately need revisions, so take Illua's with a grain of salt.

Rommie plays lute - a twenty-three string one to be exact. And most of her songs are Eorzea-ified real songs, whose creators are properly credited on Tumblr when I post the edited lyrics. Where most of my effort creatively goes in is the performance. Rommie is a very emotional singer, so she's typically either energetically dancing, or singing particularly rawly, or longingly staring at audience members, et cetera. That's where my focus traditionally goes in writing performances.

From a lore perspective, yes. You absolutely can have the Echo. The Path of the Twelve in 1.0 - the precursor to the modern Scions - was made up of near-exclusively people who used the Echo, and I recently was reminded of someone commenting that there were thousands of Path linkpearls in circulation. That puts the odds of just being in the Path of the Twelve about on par with living in a particular ward of the Goblet. Already not a super small pool, but add to that the Path was only made up of people who were identified as having the Echo - therefore possessing some strength with the ability - and those who elected to join a weird cult. As for how it goes in RP, one of my characters possesses a limited form of the Echo. Generally speaking, it's only used to translate things and as a plot device only when the person GMing a storyline demands. Much like the actual story, I play it as something that's uncontrolled and only invoked to move a plot along by that plot's writer. I also have decided that, though not really grounded in lore, I would add some side-effects of her (quite rare) Echo visions - she goes into convulsions most of the time, sometimes she'll move around like she's sleepwalking, she gets terrible nightmares and often intense physical pain. I basically took the WoL's headaches and thought "Well, they're the freakin' Warrior of Light, what would happen to a poor random researcher if one of these hit her?" Also, for Echo visions, consider the general portrayal of visions in fiction - it's quite common that those snapshots will lead the person viewing them to the wrong conclusion. This isn't played around much with in Echo visions nowadays, but a lot of visions in fiction will be a snapshot from which the person seeing it will draw the wrong conclusion. I've had some RP groups hint to me that regardless of how well it's done, they would never RP with this character, but more than that have told me that the way it's handled and balanced is well enough that they would with her despite general discomfort with the idea. So, like most things you can do as an RPer, the Echo being more broadly acceptable is mostly in how you use it.

My Rommie is a cabaret and concert performer and while she has a number of, shall we say, off-color songs I do a rendition of Still by Alanis Morisette called Hydaelyn's Lament that's well-suited to such a concert and has been called a moving performance in the past.

From the loredump linked above on Corrupted Crystals: So the explaination in the OP of the 'yellow' (corrupted) crystals is accurate, but incomplete. There are other reasons aether can be corrupted as well, including voidsent.

I've noticed that, while not as bad as it sounds for you, we've slowly lost parts of our RP community on Lamia as well. I think right now is just a slow period for the game or RP in general, but that's only based on my own observations.

Savo and I do a lot of musical events together. There's a cabaret coming up on Tuesday and a show at Nanawa Mines the following Wednesday that both would be good places to meet some of Blamung's performers. I'm sure Rommie could be persuaded to work on a group project, since she usually shares the stage at the Night at the Cliffs shows. On instruments, Rommie is almost decent with a harpsichord and is usually seen performing with her obnoxiously over-complicated nine-string lute.

... that one is this one. And while most people I've interacted with actually really like her, a majority of people seem to ignore her altogether. So I'd say finding RP partners isn't always easy with a character so unusual, but if you can really stick the landing on playing them people will absolutely love you once they get to know you.

Ah, thanks for the corroboration. So you could use some Scholar arts without a soulstone, but a Soul of the Scholar is required to manifest a Fairy. That makes Scholar and Black Mage the two jobs that seem to require Soulstones to use them properly.

The only point I would make is that if you decide to go change your outfit and hold up the RP for an hour because it takes a long time to get into a suit of armor by yourself, your group will probably kill you. OOC. Brutally. As for how it works IC, using glamour as an explanation would be a fine hand-wave I think, but I personally excuse myself to change 'off-screen'.

Think of it like this: a large community narrative is built on a whole lot of story arcs, a ton of them being personal or that of a small group. Each of those arcs has its protagonists, challenges and bit players. Sometimes an arc will cast it's spotlight on you and that's fine, and many times you'll just bump into it, and that's fine too. In life we see this a lot but don't think of it in narrative terms. If you're involved in an intense personal struggle - a lawsuit comes to mind - you are a protagonist of that story in your life. But if a friend comes to you with a relationship squabble they need advice on, you're a bit player in that story. And if you don't really know your neighbor but they're being evicted, that's a story you don't feature in at all. A massive collaborative RP environment with countless communities that are loosely interconnected is, in that way, almost a perfect mirror for life. As for the broader, canonical plot about the Warrior of Light, I've found that the closest you can really get to being involved without the community striking you down with its collected fury at your perceived arrogance is to be what I like to call an 'over there' character. Someone connected to the events of the story in a tangential capacity. Maybe a minor Scion who was in exile in Ishgard because the WoL just had to go and ruin everything for their nice little cult company. And even in a role like that I've gotten some serious flak for my presumption. But as far as minor social arcs go? Yeah. There's loads of protagonists. Everyone is the center of their own narrative.

Is it possible for arcanists to generate a Fairy spontaneously? I was under the impression that those were tied to Scholar soulstones, so while you could probably easily learn Scholar healing techniques since they're more scientific than BLM or WHM, I don't think an arcanist can create a successful Fairy familiar. Certainly not one that was 'intelligent' like Lily is.

Well, the Echo translates all spoken language (written is a source of debate still) and there are a lot (in raw numbers, at least, though probably very few as a percent of the population) of people with the Echo. This probably made the transition from beastmen speaking their native language to speaking Eorzean somewhat simpler as they would likely be useful in facilitating the teaching of languages and raising interest among beast tribes for learning Eorzean. How do we suppose the beastmen speak Eorzean and those interacting with them aren't Echo users or are speaking the native languages of the beast tribes? Well, I'm basing that at least in part on the colonialism that Eorzeans have employed toward beast tribes, but also that beast tribes appear able to communicate with one another, per the Vath quests. And some beastmen do business in city-state controlled lands, meaning they'd need to communicate with a vast majority of Eorzeans. So my supposition is that in the five years between 1.0 and ARR there was a major push to teach beastmen Eorzean, likely as an effort to 'civilize' them.

"Better" is a fairly loaded worded. I'd say average characters are much safer/easier characters to play, for a variety of reasons, and that ease of play results in less skilled or experienced writers getting much better results instead of fumbling around with a more complex and extravagant character that would require more finesse to play to appropriate effect. The use of "better" rubs me the wrong way as well. I have characters that are products of unlikely pasts and characters that are just a Brume thief or Lominsian trade ship proprietor. Is the Garlean defector somehow less valuable than the history professor on her first teaching assignment? Or somehow offensive for having an unusual past? I don't believe so. I also don't believe either one is more of a challenge to write than the other. They present different challenges. The more generic characters require a lot of extra work to make them feel like an actual part of the world instead of something that could be cut and pasted into any environment, and the more uncommon characters require a lot of delving into lore and a huge dose of humility to not overplay them into some shounen fever-dream of power and uniqueness. "Better" is way, way too value based a word to use here, I think. And I'm sure it slights a lot of talented writers who've developed interesting characters that happen to have bombastic backstories. I never understood why so many defectors in media take up arms against their countrymen. I recently rewatched an old Star Trek episode about a defector who was deeply offended by the idea that he would betray his people and rationalized his defection in terms of actually helping his culture. Somehow the idea that a defector can still be loyal seems suddenly quite lost in media.

Another thought comes to mind to kind of go with my example of Iris on page 1: the type of character makes a world of difference in terms of how reasonably quickly a character can learn. Most of my characters have a love of learning and study and those that don't typically lack a wide variety of skills. Because a character who is by their nature studious and interested is going to actually try to learn things, where someone who has decided they know all they need to in life will probably only be talented in a small selection of skills. If all you want out of life is to be a hunter, you've got no motivation to learn Allagan poetry. But a historian character would gobble up every tomestone of poetics she could get her hands on. So that's a matter to consider as well. Still, the most important thing isn't a trade-off of skills for flaws, its that all skills and flaws are part of a narrative and describe who a character is and what their beliefs, values, history and attitudes are.

The most important part to me is that it makes sense for the character. Arbitrary flaws as a result of attempts to balance versatility aren't that much better, narratively speaking. Iris is exceptionally studied in magic. While I haven't established her as having abilities outside those of a Scholar with a hint of lesser Summoner abilities, she's also competent in understanding the basic principles of most magic classes. She's also basically spent the last seven years avoiding people she didn't absolutely have to deal with, wasting the resources of her noble house on learning these exotic magics and is a complete disaster in social situations that aren't extremely controlled. She is too obsessed with strategy to adapt to changes in a plan quickly and by in large is a total mess. Actually, instead of her flaws being a result of her skills, the inverse is true. She lost her fiancee in the Calamity (because that player didn't come back for 2.0) and that really seriously damaged her life. She became obsessed with the aetheric sciences as a way to do something other than grieve, and the obsession further damages her life and further fuels her obsession. Basically she doesn't have actual friends that aren't other researchers or Tonberries. A lot of those drawbacks are way less tangible or measurable than the skills, but they do affect her life pretty hard. I don't know if that /balances/ because that depends on how much attention you put on combat potential versus her life actually going well. I think a lot of people have different views on how those two factors balance out. If you're really driven by IC combat prowess, she might be a bit OP despite these flaws. If you aren't all that interested in IC combat, though, I think it more than balances out.

There's also the question of the unreliable narrator. The game has had several character's statements about the function of the world later contradicted (the revelations about the origins of the Dragonsong War are probably the most apparent example to come to mind) and usually new bits of lore come from unreliable sources. While OOC we treat these, rightly, as facts that are true until proven false, it can be said that a character powerfully disagrees with this new fact and disputes its legitimacy based on the same unreliability. And our characters, themselves, are not reliable sources. No one really is on their own life. We misremember, even convince ourselves of lies about our past all the time. For instance: my Miqo'te Noble is a scandalous figure in Ishgard for not being Hyur or Elezen and daring to assume a station of nobility. If a patch suddenly introduced a family of noble Miqo'te everyone was cool with, maybe my character feels insecure and precieves this scandal and hostility when it isn't actually there? My headcanon and revised canon don't have to be in contradiction just because they disagree. Similarly, in the fallout of 3.3 (spoilerish) I'm keeping Andromeda distrusting and largely hostile toward Ishgard because she believes the reforms are being undertaken halfheartedly or dishonestly. We have no reason to believe that Ishgard's reforms are not genuine, but ICly Rommie still has every reason to distrust them and hold them in ill regard. The character probably most at risk for running into a problem with new canon is Illua, who is a defector from the IXth Legion and was, in her youth, the product of a failed experiment to infuse a Garlean with enough aether to make them magically active. A lot of pieces could eventually fall apart there, but in this one I can make Illua an unreliable narrator of her own life. If, say the IXth was involved with the burning of Doma and she said it wasn't, maybe that's shame? Or if there were experiments like the one I have in her backstory that succeeded, maybe she simply is unaware of the results? There's a lot of little ways you can tweak the story to fit new developments if they don't outright blow you out of the water, or even if they do, by playing up the fact that the things people say are very, very open to being lies, half-truths or mistakes.

I've found this to be a self-fulfilling prophecy though. Like, I have alts that people actively avoid RPing with because they're alts, and that makes me less likely to play them. So I drop them for a while and those people who ignored me think 'see, we've proven alts can't be trusted'. While few people will outright say that you shouldn't RP with alts, I've seen that philosophy carried out in practice fairly often, actually.

Each of my characters has one or two minions that are IC and one or two mounts that are IC, except my noble who has a small flock of chocobos, a couerl and a personal airship as well as a number of mammet assistants because of massive amounts of personal wealth. The way I figure it is so long as you don't go way unrealistically out of hand with it a few things here and there make sense. Particularly having a chocobo as it is the primary method of travel in Eorzea.

I recently decided I'd have Iris exist on both Balmung and Lamia, and came up with the way those two versions of the character would coexist. For any situation where Balmung and Lamia's experiences do not directly contradict - i.e. romantic entanglements, free company affiliations, that sort of thing - then both sets of experiences would be 'canon' to the character. Just because people on Balmung cannot interact with her connections on Lamia I didn't feel a need to say those connections didn't exist. For the things where their experiences notably diverge, Lamia's iteration of Iris has precedent as the 'main' version of the character, basically making certain facts of Balmung's Iris an 'AU'. I hadn't really discussed this with many people, so I'm sure the community will tell me I'm doing it wrong and am a disgusting RPer, but that's how I saw fit to navigate this problem.

I'm still a little hazy on who I think of as my main, but Iris Blanchimont was born in Thavnair, despite the fact that she doesn't know it. I've had a strange love of Radz-at-Han since 1.0.