Ildur

I declare this poll null and void. You should make a Lalafell instead!

Well, the background is a bit bareboned, but nothing life-threatening or extremely lore disrupting. You might want to come up for a reason for her current name. Other characters might think it's strange for someone to not follow conventions and ask about it, so it's best for you to prepare to have an IC reason for it. Being raised for Roegadyn would work well if the name followed Roegadyn conventions. But since that is not the case, you'll have to come with something else. These are some questions that sprung to mind when reading the bio. While it's not imperative for you to have answers for all or any of them, I think you should ponder about them. They will help you flesh her history a bit more: -Where did she and her foster family live? Was it in the city, a village? In the wilderness? And if so, was there any civilization close by? -Were they part of a larger community, like a clan or a village? If so, can you describe it briefly? -What do her foster parents do for a living? -Where did she learn martial arts? Is she self-taught? Did she had a teacher? And if she had, who was he? Is he significant? -How and why did she lose her memory? (You don't need to write this in the public biography, but you should know the answer) -Who are her real parents? Is it significant who they were? IE. do you intend, as a player, for it to ever come up?

I wouldn't use Plato as a way to measure common ancient greek thought because, in "The Republic", he writes about how men and women in the Republic would have the same rights, study and train together as equals. And this is something that was said by a man living in a society were women were basically regarded as property. As we all know, that din't really change that much in ancient Greece after Plato. He was way ahead of his time in much of his thought. In any case, the bit you mention talks about 'love between men' which, once you consider the concept ancient greek had about love (as I mentioned, the word for 'lover' and 'friend' are the same because, for the greek, a friend is someone who loves you), is more akin to our modern concept of friendship. I'd have to get the book and read it again to offer a more concise interpretation, but that's what I remember from back then. And I'm also lazy and don't like to read, so I won't hold my horses.

I don't want to get into a historical discussion, but homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome wasn't as wide as many people seem to think. I blame wikipedia for the misinformation, though the fact that the greek word for 'lover' and 'friend' were the same probably complicates the interpretations. I have no idea of how widely accepted it was on Japan, though.

There are quite a few threads requesting feedback on character concepts using this very same sub-forum.

I find the Miqo'te more interesting. The Midlander looks very anime-ish to me, specially because of the hairstyle and haircolor. Granted, Midlanders are designed to be the 'basic anime hero race', so I was already expecting him to look like one.

I agree with Felix. This discussion should be postponed until the system is actually announced/implemented. Until it is, everything we can argue about Squeenix implementing it or not is just senseless bickering and speculation.

There are some threads out there that try to cover what the 'pros & cons' are for each server. But it basically boils down to a mechanical difference in player preference: Balmung will have a fair number of already stablished players at high levels while Gilgamesh will have everyone starting from level 1. In my opinion it's just a useless division of the RP community. That difference will dissapear after a few months, once Gilgamesh playerbase reaches and stablishes its endgame. But there are plenty of people out there with reasons to select Gilgamesh over Balmung that do not boil down to the 'headstart' legacy players will have.

Whomever uses this ICly should plan around it very, very carefully, lest their story come only as an excuse for comedy or a forced cosmical retcon instead of being actually thought-provoking and interesting. I like that interpretation. It's less prone to "'lol, I'm a now".

Yes, it's going to be a fun demo, I agree! :lol:

I'm basing my definitions of what a demo and a beta are on how they differentiate from each other on a practical basis. Wikipedia isn't an authority here. Three days of testing will only show the most obvious of errors while allowing a lot of balance issues and bugs pass by. This will, more than likely, have huge repercutions on the Arcanist class, as people won't have enough time to test it properly. The main purpose for this open beta is evidently to act as a publicity stunt and probably to test stress on the servers. Any actual testing of gameplay is just an added bonus. So it's really a demo.

You only get a small portion of the content when compared to the full game, your progress might or might not carry on, and testing isn't the real focus. In the good old days, we called those 'demos'!

I meant more about magical implications. As in, if someone could make a potion that 'remakes' a person physically, maybe less powerful variants can be made. Maybe someone will invent plastic magical surgery because of this, now. Or short-term shapeshifting powers, or disguise potions like those in Harry Potter. Suddenly, there's a lot of things that can be considered in-lore thanks to this as long as they are many degrees less powerful than the original deal.

The description uses the expression "Legend says". If it's something readily available, it wouldn't be a legend. So it's probably not going to be canonically easily obtainable, even if from a gameplay persepective it is. Also, by the wording, I think it's implied you don't necessarily wake up as the person you want. So you might end up even worse or ugler than you were. I do not think we are going to have to worry about hordes of players using this IC, in any case. It will be interesting to see people pondering about the implications that such a draught is possible, though.

I hope they add this. I will be severely dissapointed if they don't, because a Random Number Generator is the easiest thing to program ever.

Ah, I remember the good old days, when a Beta test primary function, be it open or closed, was to test the game and not being a glorified one-time trial.

Random trolls are always people driven by instant gratification. As such, if they get no quick acknowledgement that they are being bothersome, they will leave. I have yet to run into an instance where a troll decides to stay because we aren't paying attention to him, because that's their only goal: to get their disruption acknowledged. If you acknowledge them, they will continue to be disruptive, creating a terrible never-ending circle of 'I'm disruptive because I'm acknowledged because I'm disrupitve!'. Even trolls with a 'personal grudge', so to call it, will stop their actions when their actions get no feedback. The first method described in the OP to deal with them is a form of 'damage control'. While I cannot say how useful or useless it is in practice, I think its akin to taking a hammer and hitting the walls of your house because some vandals were about to. It might drive them off or it might not. But in both cases now you have a damaged wall. The second method is a tactical retreat. That can work if trolling is particularly obnoxious for some reason, but by retreating you are basically allowing their disruption to affect you. They 'won', in a sense. The third method is the best, but doesn't deal with them on the moment which is, I think, the real issue people have with trolls: how to deal with them on the precise moment the trolling is happening. At the end, I find the first two methods ineffective: they are allowing the troll to succesfully disrupt your roleplay. I think it's best to just ignore them completely. I have yet to personally see random trolls to stay for more than a minute after blocking them.

I want more beards. All kinds of beards. Long beards! Short beards! Goatees! Sideburns! Beards for everyone and for all tastes!

Portraying music via text means is quite difficult. Prove of that is that in the real world we had to develop its own way to write it down. Your best bet is, probably, to describe the music as a mix of character movement (Averis' hand build on speed, moving quickly across the lute) and of music movement: as if the music was an actual creature that is moving. (Averis' song builds on speed, quickly reaching a crescendo of voice and strings). If you don't want to bother with writting actual lyrics/poems, you should use emotes to describe what they talk about. It depends really on how better you can convey the movement of music: if by emoting or by rhyming. Or at least that's how I'd try it!

The only way a fortune teller can be fun for both parties (i.e. the teller and the client) is if you go for cold/warm reading. Not because the alternative is 'meta-gamey' or anything, but because the roleplaying of the reading would become kind of meaningless: you will be repeating what the other told you but in some convoluted way. You could also cheat miserably and read people's bio's if you find them in the wiki and use cold/warm reading techniques to camouflage your cheating. But as I just said, that's cheating.

The only thing I'd like to add is that you should be very, very careful about how you play her. What I often see with this kind of characters is that the player is unsubtle and focuses too much on the tragic angle, making them too angsty and introducing mentions of their tragic past at every opportunity which, most often than not, other players will interpret as attempts at hijacking the scene/conversation/plot. I don't have a formula to avoid those problems (besides "don't do that", I guess), but you might want to keep as a rule of thumb to not make your past come out more than in passing if the current scene/plot is not specifically about character building. FreelanceWizard's idea of using some sort of 'schedule' for the character arcs is a good idea. I've roleplayed with characters that became or were very broken and, let me tell you, it's very frustrating to see them never come out of their dramatic state, or only get out of it to drop into yet another that is worse or similar. Forcing yourself to be under the clock, so to speak, will help with that: you make sure the character is growing at a steady pace, and other players will see there was a development and be encouraged to follow the story.

1. What do you think is a main character? If someone asked me who my main is, I'd point to the character I play the most. In a more technical sense, a main character is defined by the ammount of effort placed in it. With that in mind, you can have a lot of main characters as long as you invest enough effort in all of them. 2. What do you think makes a character an alternate character? Any character you don't play as much as. However, an alt can become a main if the previous main falls into less use than the alt. 3. Do people have a responsibility to make certain "mains pair with mains" if you sense an interesting relationship (friends/rivals/lovers/enemies/long-lost relatives) forming or is it okay that someone's just not going to be around at random or for long periods of time? Pairing 'mains with mains' kills any sense of organic character growth, since you would be choosing social relationships for your character specifically for meta-game reasons. Nobody can stop you from doing so, of course, but your character might (or might not!) end up having a ton of relationships that feel artificial. There's also the very real possibility that a player will get tired of their main for a long period of time and move to an alt. In that case, pairing his main with your main was the same as if you had paired it with an alt. So at the end it kind of doesn't matter. 4. Have you ever discovered that your main was paired off in one of those situations with someone's alt? They just didn't play them at all or played other characters? Did it stall out your story? What did you do? I don't think this has happened to me. I can understand how a plot critical character could stall a story by not being on but, really, if the player is just playing some other character it's just a matter of contacting them and letting them know that you need them to move the story forward. If they are not consistently available (for whatever reason), then plotting must be discussed to make them non-critical. That way, you can follow the story and they won't feel like they must participate when they don't feel like it. 5. What's the biggest stereotype you think of when you think of people who only have one main character? That somehow having one single character inherently makes his story better, more complex or more interesting. 6. What's the biggest stereotype you think of when you think of people who suffer alt-itis and swap characters often? That their character's have an underdeveloped backstory. 7. Which are you? A single or two main characters? 5 main characters? A bunch of alts? In the past few games I have consistently stuck to one or two main characters along with a plethora of alts. Sometimes those alts don't get used ever. 8. How did you usually break up your time between your main characters? Play on demand? Always on one, demand for the other? One with one group and when they all sign off switch to the other? I level up one character for gameplay purposes, who is always the class I like the most. I switch to alts on demand until I reach max level. Once I do, I ussually level up other two to fill the MMO-triad of tank-healer-dd, but I keep playing my previous main for running dungeons or when I feel like using him in RP. So I guess I'm basically a 'on demand' guy.

I still think gameplay tramples all over story in the case of jobs. If the jobs weren't supposed to be commonplace, they wouldn't be available. We can't make Padjal characters, for instance, and that's how the game universe shows that they are rare. However, it could be that Squeenix' lore making is centered on that there's really only one Player Character. In that case, they don't have to justify scarcity for anything the PC does. It's still doesn't mean we roleplayers don't have to handwave the implications of having many 'protagonists' running around. Ultimately, we'll have to wait until we can play through the Jobs quests to know how rare they really are in current times.

References are on the main FFARR website, in the description of jobs. Basically, all jobs are supposed to be an ancient lost art that almost nobody can use. This is the result of the storyline being planned as a singleplayer game: there, you don't have to worry about having thousands of player characters sharing space and all of them being masters of some ancient art that is canonically lost. It's a segregation between gameplay and story caused by poor planning. You can get away from it in a non-roleplaying enviorement because, there, player made backgrounds don't matter at all. Only the game story matters and, as far as the game's story is concerned, the player character is a single one. Not so in roleplay, though: if the game mechanically allows you to be a Dragoon, a White Mage or a male Miqo'te, then every player has a right to use it in their background. Half-breeds, though, aren't supported mechanically. Hence why I think it's best not to make one. There are also other important consideration, that I think Freelance mentioned somewhere before: what does being a half-breed achieve story-wise or character-wise that other, more common trait wouldn't?. We could handwave rarity of jobs and races with Asyria's way: saying that all Player Characters represent rare individuals. That pretty much nullifies all rarity we can find in Player Characters because they are all supposed to be special individuals. I agree with this to some extent, though I think a character's 'special-ness' depends enterely on the player creating him.

Here you go. Non .docx version! EDIT: There! It should be good now. Crazy tables... trait template-table.doc