Thorbought

I'm going to second what Erah said. It may seem like you're giving them interesting RP but check with them oocly first before you go into a house and start burglarizing it. I run a restaurant and we had a customer come in who started RPing they were starting a fire. Now from their end they probably thought they were making an interesting scenario but from my end she's just causing me unneeded work and disrupting my customers.

I would say I give my characters a lot of endurance but make them them vulnerable. For example, they can get shot several times and be severely wounded but can still manage to fight/walk for a bit.

This seems fun! Ci She's got a pretty bizarre fighting style that's mostly developed from certain handicaps and her past. She used to be a performance magician but now works as a mercenary so her style incorporates a lot of tricks, illusions, sleight of hand, and many classic stage magician techniques just fitted for battle now. Her most used would probably be playing cards she's loaded with aether and summoning doves (whether they are real or just illusions is something she'll never tell!). The cards can do many things from being charged with different elements, hardening, growing in size, or even acting as flash bangs! She can be quite deceptive as well. She intentionally makes sure most of her cards correspond to what they do. For example, she'll make sure any cards with the heart suite are loaded with fire aether and are your usual exploding cards. However, she recognizes that most fighters will look for a pattern in their opponent's style. So for this reason, a few cards in her deck are mismatched with their usual suite and element combination. An 8 of hearts might explode with ice rather than fire for example. This helps her take opponents she fights for the first time off guard as their brain will first recognize the pattern between suite and element. Her other favored weapon is her gun. Due to some things in the past, her aether pool is quite small so she can only cast so much before she is out of fuel. She'll carry a gun around with her for cases where magic is ineffective or she needs to conserve her aether. Some call her a gun mage because she likes to use trick shots like ricocheting bullets or specially crafted bullets loaded with aether. Another technique she uses is swapping clothing with a snap of her finger. It was mostly for performance purposes but it can come handy at times in a fight.

I dm a large event for my FC every week with usually around 20 people. First of all, you won't make everyone happy so try to do what you think is best instead of attempting to cater to everyone. It's been said before but make sure you divide people into groups with other dms. The smaller the group, the better as people will get more opportunities to talk and bond. For combat and such, I will do turn orders and wait for everyone to go. I know some will be slow to respond so I will sometimes tell them to prepare their rp in advance. (For example, I will be typing up a response to the previous person and I'll tell the slow rper in this case to have their type up ready). I'll also usually try and get a response out of everyone or make sure everyone will get some attention. Some rpers are a bit slow or shy and may not talk much in these big group events. In this case, I'll try to focus some action their way such as having npcs go up and speak to them.

This is an important point as well. Anything above 5 people I HIGHLY suggest a separate party. Having 8 people in one party is actually a really bad idea. Your turns will TAKE forever and some people may begin to lose interest. It's also a lot easier to get some good rp going between a smaller amount of people without some people just sitting there and doing nothing. If you have a round 10 people on average, I suggest you run two groups and maybe even three if you have the dms for it.

I have a few pointers for you. Work on time management. This is something you learn through experience but most people DMing for the first time will create this elaborate events with multiple parts but they find that they are only able to get through maybe half of what they planned and they either have to run the event for a LONG time or they have to cut if off. You don't want to have to do either of those. I'd say plan your event for 3 hours max as that's where people may start to burn out. A simple idea can usually last you a long time. I remember when I first started dming, I had an elaborate idea and it took 3 hours to get out of the starting point and get through the first battle because people were talking so much. So try to have a simple idea first. Try to focus on keeping things simple and maximize RP interactions. What I mean is that a lot of the time I see people do is they plan out very elaborate story sequences with a lot of text and a lot of npcs but what ends up happening is people get lost in the all the dialogue, lose track of the npcs, or just lose interest because it's not fun being in a cutscene and doing nothing while the DM just posts walls of texts. Your events should ideally allow your players to make the choices and lead where it goes and it should be about them. People will lose interest if they are kind of just spectators to your story rather than participants. Focus more on the RP rather than the combat/rolls system. This is a mistake I see a LOT of people make. They will create this elaborate system with rolls and stats and such but everyone is here to just RP and interact with the world you make and other characters. If I wanted to play D&D I would do just that. Say you have a boss with x amount of hp. Your rpers might get terrible rolls and the boss might end up taking an eternity. It might get to the point where it feels like a drag where they are just rolling turn after turn to take him down. Don't do this. Just have the boss die when you feel it is appropriate rather than just looking at his hp bar. Also allow people to be creative with their attacks and characters. It's not fun to create a restrictive system where people can't be flexible. For the story, I would suggest you start with something simple as well. This is because not all your members can be there all the time so you don't want them to be completely lost when they miss an event. Also, it lets your players be able to influence the story and be the main drivers in it.

The one's I'm thinking of in particular are usually fronts for criminal business. Like their description usually is 'Definitely not a front for shady business'. I've seen that one used ALOT. And it's not really a complaint or anything on my part. It's more of an observation.

This is just some observation but I want to know if others feel this way. Every FC I see these days now seem to ALL just be a restaurant being a front for criminal activity or some kind of trading business that is actually dealing in black market trading. I've had three people recently leave my FC and ALL three of them started a business that's actually a front for something else. Its gotten to the point where I roll my eyes when I run into them because I feel like there's more 'Front for something else FCs' then there are FCs that are just a real restaurant or business.

I have been doing some Garlean RP and have been using a bio-engineered aether block. I figured that if they can mess with their DNA to allow purebloods to use aether, than the reverse is also true or at least plausible.

The only two you will have a hard time justifying would be Black Mage and White Mage but even with those two you can just be a Thamaturge or Conjurer which for spell casting purposes pretty much do the same thing. Everything else you could feasibly find a way to justify your character being one.

I am not sure if this is the place for this kind of thread but as the title suggests...what do you guys do when something you have been rping, something that is not explored in the in game lore, suddenly is introduced in the story? Do you re write it? Abandon it completely if it is radically different? It's kind of discouraging because I don't want people to just think I took it right from the msq >.<

Hmm as mentioned above, you can take up arms against them but keep in mind we aren't WoLs and will struggle against them. Personally for my company we treat them as VERY big threats that we try not to engage. We had a mission to guard some merchant ships but we were besieged by Leviathan and our whole goal was just to slow it down with cannon fire and escape.

I personally don't see too much of that crazy sex-capades that are rumored to happen in Ul'dah. I see the hookers and stuff with their tags but no public ERP yet. I do notice that people seem to be a lot more forward and honest about what they want. It's not even the ERP that really bothers me but a lot of people seem to only play this game looking for relationships. I've seen a lot of people RP with me and lose interest once I tell then I am taken/not looking for a relationship. And it seems like with a lot of people that there is no such thing as good friends, you just HAVE to love each other at some point.

Yeah I like the idea of thinking of OOC reasons to meet (being accused of crime, bumping into someone, etc). The problem is that I get on almost everyday to RP with my FC and I feel like I can't keep coming up with reasons like that. Though I agree that, that would be the best way to approach RP with walk-ups in Ul'dah. She does have a higher position in her company so perhaps I can have her be forced to try and be 'friendly' or 'sociable' to help recruit or put on a good face for her company's sake.

Yeah, I agree that using the elements around me and using actions would be the best to open up more RP with people. For the record I do enjoy the 'jerk' character I have. She's not quiet so much as she's a very irritated person. She comes across as very blunt and doesn't have a filter at all. I have fun RPing her when things get going or if its for some plot thing but there's always this awkward part in casual/social RP where I find it hard to approach people while still maintaining her personality.