Valence

I don't mind RPing with alts actually, like most characters if the character is interesting, I'll gladly go for it. Mostly it's always about the form you put into it. I see a lot of connection requests on that forum that I could potentially have answered to, but didn't because it was a bit like "HERE ARE MY 5 CHARACTERS, MAKE YOUR CHOICE". It generally doesn't show the same kind of attachment you will see with a single character. It also means divided time for the player, and that you potentially will never see a character for months before it comes back again to life. Sometimes it's even a way for the player to gauge which character interests people and which one will work... Great when you pick up the wrong one. So yeah I'm very wary of that, but I'm always totally open for alt characters (especially when the player has many) with people I trust. A lot of the connections requests are already most of the time puzzling to me because people will show up here, ask for connection, friend you ingame, and then... never contact you again. I actively have to seek them out most of the time for something to happen (with a few exceptions). It's already tiring because I die a little inside everytime I have to /tell strangers repeatedly for RP, so imagine now, add that with all the potential issues arising with alts... One of the worst banes of RP is player fickleness. When players are fickle enough and go through alts and reprocess them regularly, it's just... urg.

I think public events are one of the potentially worse venues to go for someone green looking for connections. Most people going there are already in their circles and it can be incredibly hard to insert yourself somewhere, without even speaking about the huge amounts of scrolling chat and whatnot. It's overwhelming for a lot of people. This is especially true if you try to portray a shy character or a character that is not especially prone to make the leap and start conversations, or if you are just shy/anxious IRL. Well I know that opinion is probably going against what's generally offered to new people around there, but I stand by it. Anyway, that being said, on entering public RP, I usually play it as fair game. I will always take into account someone intruding in a RP I'm in (unless the people I'm playing with really don't want to...). But that also means since everything IC being fair game, be prepared to get told to fuck off depending on your approach. I mean, my character has already been approached when she had a discussion with friends in the streets by someone that was just being creepy, and being overly clingy even when told "what the heck do you want"... Well, the only logical answer was showing teeth and yell "fuck off".

Totally not interested in any of those items anyway, so I'll probably survive it. The whole thing is ludicrous though.

For the Calamity, you mean the Ascians right?

Generally for the things that never got exposed into RP in any way with anyone else than yourself, it tends to be fair game and you can do whatever you want (unless you have like, people following/reading your story, it might be confusing for them if you change things midway...). General rule of thumbs though is that as soon as you start involving people with something, if you start retconning it it's always better to talk about it with them first, to see what can be worked out or not. It can be rather rude to force/impose change on someone's RP when you want to change something about yours. As soon as you start RPing something with RP partners, it stops being a solo endeavour but more of a collective effort. So in short, it always depends on the people you RP with.

So I was looking for more info on what exactly do those little complex devices measure beside the spikes of aether concentration? They seem, depending on their type, to require a certain amount of preparation work, take a certain amount of time to do proper measurements... What else do we know? What do they measure? I seem to remember that sharlayan aetherometers are super accurate and give a lot of info, but maybe I dreamed that...? http://xivdb.com/lore-finder?loresearch=aetherometer

Lalafells are rare enough that finding some that have good RP and something believable in the frame of the lore is... hard. I lack of lala/elezen/roe RP in a general manner, which isn't surprising. I have unfortunately seem lots of lala players being absolute obnoxious trolls ingame though. We are fortunate that Balmung and FF in general are pretty much empty of people coming to troll RPers around, but the rare occurences that occured was with lala trolls in my experience. You know, they show up out of nowhere and play little imps, intrude in your RP by just sitting on your table and listening to the scene, and emoting ridiculous laughs so that it destroys all immersion pretty instantly when you are in the middle of something interesting. I had one of those lately when we moved somewhere else that got pretty creepy and ask me what the story was all about in a very insisting manner. It weirded me out. That, is probably very detrimental to lala RPers as well.

What makes the dragoons jump? The armour, or the thing in their blood? Or something else?

But... That' actually what's not boring...

Most (if not all) of what I introduce in my background tries to be directly anchored in lore facts, so... Unless they suddenly start retconning...

Feel free to reach me out for any of your characters, if you like!

Oh I'm sure they probably poached here and there, although from what I gather the elementals were kinda not forgiving at all when a single elezen or hyur got to wander and got to hunt them down pretty fast, contrary to the current day where they can roam around freely since well... Gridania. For all we know, they had underground cultures too. I fail to see how you can feed such a large population without any proper agriculture, by just living of hunting/gathering methods in a land that will systematically try to kill you as soon as you step in it...

Well that's the thing then. Elementals didn't care about mortals underground. In that case Ixali got exiled for making a hissy fit when elementals couldn't give a shit about it.

Uh... I'm not assuming anything. I just see absolutely no reason whatsoever for the elementals to be pissy about people underground. Or else they would have sent the Ixali to do their dirty work with the old Gelmorans just when they installed there, the same way that in your scenario they send Gridanian dealing with the duskwights that stayed behind. I don't think that makes sense and the fact that they never sent the Ixali to genocide the whole race of Gelmorans before makes me more inclined to believe that the decision to wipe the Duskwights left behind was taken purely on the Gridanian side. As everyone knows, what Hearers say... Actually, I would tend to say that telling that the Elementals sent the Gridanian do that, or told them to do so, would actually be pretty part of the realm of assumptions there. I don't recall having read anything in the lore to have stated that... But maybe I'm missing something? In any case, that looks a lot more like a political decision rather than a mystical one born out of Greenwrath stuff or anything. I don't see elementals dealing into political decisions. Elementals always seemed to be pretty grey and neutral and only concerned and reacting against what threatens the balance of their wood/biosphere. No righteousness, no evilness whatsoever. While racism goes a long way explaining and leading to all sort of atrocities like genocides, I fear that's rarely enough of a reason to start such a wildfire in itself though. That's why I'm interested to know about it actually. It's probably based on a hefty dose of racism, but something, a spark, must have ignited the whole powderkeg here.

Why would elementals be pissed about what happens underground? They are not harming the Shroud in any case, no interacting with it, except if they get out to poach (but that's the same shit than with wild Keeper clans and other poachers anyway).

People said most of it already pretty well above. 1. Have you killed your character before? I don't think I have yet in any game, but I have had to deal with it from other people (rarely). It was not necessarily always death, but something eventually pretty similar in terms of consequences, like disappearance, or just a character turning on mine and getting the hell out of their life. 2. How did your friends take it? I'm not going to repeat all the good advice said above but instead will give a few examples I had to deal with. I took it like I had to, because eventually I had no choice on the matter. The character I had for 8 years on eve online got at some point (somewhere in the middle) involved in a romance. The other party eventually disappeared due to lack of motivation and left the game... To get back in 6 months later, staying like 2 months, and got out again. We talked about it OOC, which was the thing to do. It turned tricky though since the player wasn't really departing as if he was leaving the game. It implied that he could return (like it's often the case after all). So it was not a death proper, but it eventually entered in a similar case. How to explain it? I feel even if we talked about it a bit OOCly, it wasn't enough eventually. I got stuck in a situation where the idea was mostly "they continue to see each other maybe". So all in all it was kinda the opposite of your situation, but I think it's still interesting, because eventually the player dropped off the radar and I was ultimately left with something, without knowing what that something was. Disappearance? Death? I could have chosen the later but then what if the player comes back? "Oh I thought you were dead!" works fine ICly, but still. On FF I recently had one player with a character involving into something closing on romance (or something) deciding to move on another server (for totally legitimate reasons, but that's not the point). Same here, had to discuss it with the player. Death? Disappearance? It was left up to me. It's fine, but it also implies for the player taking the decision to leave or kill a character, to be 100% sure of the thing. And then, actually live with it, as said in all the posts above. Again it boils down to discussing things to the bone with your partner(s), then deciding precisely what it will be and nothing else. Either if you decide to kill your character, or drop off the game, be sure to leave everything written covering each possibility, because otherwise if one side falls into a case that wasn't discussed properly, that side might get screwed... 3. Would you not want to RP with someone who may unceremoniously kill off their character? Why? As long as it's made mutually agreeable and all.. No problem for me. But that's me, and not everyone else. That's the thing to keep in mind. As people have said above, I would be annoyed if it was to come back to life a month later, or creating new characters to die again and again because the player is just being fickle... Being fickled is the bane here. It's also better if it has a real drama value, otherwise, what's the point? To fill up a whim? Fine then, but that's always nice to jump on the occasion and make it worthwhile for everyone involved!

We have to keep in mind that most average folks on that world are still very weak or not really gifted in magical access. You have mages and stuff, but your average peasant/merchant/whatever is probably unable, but even more, untrained to deal with any kind of magic.

That doesn't make any sense to me. Gelmorans lived totally fine underground for centuries without having to deal with elementals, that only care about what happens on the surface. I'm not necessarily saying that it's not possible that the new Pact they did pushed them to extremes though, but still very curious about the actual reasons.

Well to be fair, for the Au'ra, they introduced them like the refugees of Othard that just came in. They could just be another wave since well. Garlics gonna garlic. Not really my priorities at any point. New races are probably extremely costly to create and insert ingame, and I would rather more budget dedicated to the story, the screenplay, the environments, etc. What saddens me is that players complained that the story dialogs were too lenghty, and SE cut them to bare bones. I really hate those players. If you don't want to read, then skip them ffs.

I wouldn't mind a garlean magitek job. That would be fun. That could be a tank also. http://cdn4.dualshockers.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Viera2.jpg[/img] Did they really show that at some point or are all those images fake or something?

Conjury also borrows from the land (although doesn't seem to go tap directly into the planet itself), added to the fact that even the knowledge of black and white magic is probably limited to a handful of people that actually know about it, makes me think that if people still shun powerful magics is probably more due to common knowledge that powerful magic nearly destroyed the realm, and that's it. Or else they would also shun conjury itself. And possibly the use of chakras too, that borrow from battlefields and intense aetherial areas.

Well, we know that the illegality of most of those highly destructive magicks are a result of the Great Flood of the 6th Umbral Era. Magic got totally prohibited and actively hunted down decades after, until people started to soften up a bit about it... But stigma remains to that day (cf Black and White magic).

Technically the echo has not much to do with Hydaelyn since even Ascians have it. The blessing of Light though... yeah.

Everything is made of Aether as you say, and has various amounts of aether body reserves at their disposal in top of their aetherial essence (making some individuals more attuned and powerful at magic than others). However, cast any spell on someone, it will hurt all the same no matter what as far as I know. I don't remember having seen anything in the lore closely resembling to natural elemental resistances, or even magical resistances. I think there is a misunderstanding how magic works. The less someone is attuned to magic doesn't mean that they are resilient to it in turn... I would even more tempted to say, quite the contrary since they have even less means to defend themselves against it. That would be like saying because you are less able to see and use an arrow, then somehow you will resist it more... Well, to be honest I see where your friend is coming from. The character is supposed to have close to no connection to aether, and so magic ability, but if it's not just a lack of affinity and aether power, but also like a bubble of void preventing them to use magic and be harmed by magic properly, then as you say, it's contradictory and defeats itself. Everyone IS aether. And then, if you say, well, that the character is very much born of aether like everyone's soul, but is somehow cut off from the surrounding aether and the rest of the world, then I would say, it's the best way to go like corrupted crystals go, if you block the flow of aether, but I'm mostly speculating here. Now then, there are plenty of other ways to be resilient or even invulnerable to magic: barriers of all sorts, among other tools, be them material or aetherial.

Well, my character sure as hell isn't going to bring up "Hey by the way here are all my intimate secrets and ongoing plots and do you want to help/be part of it?". "What are you doing for a living?" however, is perfectly expectable. We used it just yesterday with a new contact and from there we went to "Oh, I'm into salvage" then "Where do you go usually for that?" followed by "A lot in Mor Dhona with all the wrecks", which leaded to "Call me if you need a hand". So here you have it, impromptu RP journey planned out of nothing.