Ildur

Screw all those. What really seems to define Final Fantasy, based on their own rabid fans (the ones in the official forums, I mean) is arbitrary restrictions. That is what Final Fantasy means!

I use the interpretation that Dragoons refer to a special brand of knights of Ishgard whose combat tactics can be summarized as "I will jump to that dragon's back and stab him to death. No, I don't care it's flying. See ya!"

Dragoon and White Mage are the Jobs with the most trouble for roleplaying if you want to stick to the lore. As Naunet said, I think that if the game mechanics allow you to be a certain class, then you free to be it on your characters. This is a clear case of the developers trying to bake the cake ("White Magic/Dragooning is, like, super speshiul!") and then eat it ("You, our players, are super speshiul!"). But there's been enough of that. For all the other classes, Sounsyy has covered them. I will chime in to talk about Summoners and Schoalrs, though: EDIT: Or FreeLanceWizard will come in, do it before I do and better. SMN: The canonical storyline has a Miqo'te woman actively tell you about summoning and teach you about it. The only stated requeriment for summoning is that you have to be 'dowsed' in a Primal's essence, in this case by defeating them. Mechanicall, your summons are locked until you complete the corresponding Primal fight. This tells us summoning can and is being teached to Arcanists as long as they were present in a fight against a Primal, a thing which, in itself, is also inside the realm of possibility as Primals are constantly summoned by the beast tribes. SCH: You become a Scholar by finding a fairy (and the soul crystal) locked inside a Nymian chest (or something like that). The questline is pretty much all about running around trying to unlock your fairy's memories and being taught about Nymian tactics by an erudite marauder. It is quite safe to assume that one could study the spells and learn to use them even without a fairy. The only thing to keep in mind is that all Jobs require a Soul Crystal. We know they exist canonically as you are not only given one in the storylines, but they feature prominently in some of them (like Warrior's). How you acquire one is up to you.

I ussually forget. When I remember, I drop a line about ear/tail movements, but most of the time I don't have it my conscience. When I do remember, I use this post to keep some degree of consistency. I also don't see any reason to permutate the R's or have any other kind of vocal weirdness. Miqo'te are basically humans with cat ears and tails, so any weirdness in their speech patterns should be a regional thing (like an accent, basically).

Each player has different tastes; what is asinine for some isn't for others. Specially when the 'asinine playstyle' is what differentiates that class. If a player doesn't like it, he has other 7 classes that will hopefully do what he wants to do in a way he actually enjoys. Or...well, other four classes because we are talking about damage dealing. I think TERA did that. It was hilarious, but in that game archers did more damage the closer they were to the target (something I hear happens in ARR's PvP). You could then play safely, staying away from your target, only having to worry about lunges and long range skills, kitting and basically being safe. Or you could get into the enemy's face and deal full damage while also having to worry about dodging the melee attacks and everything else. If I recall correctly, mostly everyone went the safe route.

That is true. Just as Tlamila said, if we used only gameplay, we would all be using Relic weapons, which are in most cases unique. However, there's a big difference between a Relic Weapon and a White Mage: the Relic weapon does not give you new skills. It's just a stat booster. Being a White Mage, on the other hand, grants you a set of unique skills that no other Job can use. What's more, we can induct that Relic weapons of which replicas can be made because they are objects. White Magic, however? There doesn't seem to be any in-lore way to replicate the powers of Succor. Story informs gameplay. I know what potential spells I can make up for a Black Mage because the Job has a bunch of specific spells unique to it and its base class. I don't need lore to come and tell me "Your class can cast ice spells" to accept it as a lore friendly fact. I only need gameplay to tell me, because gameplay is informed by the lore. In the same way, I know what classes my character can be because gameplay allows me to be one.

You could use the website's description as a "proof" that the Padjal are teaching White Magic for whatever reason and use that to justify your White Mage. The Elementals may or may not get pissed of later on, but right now they aren't. Otherwise, there would be no White Mages available in gameplay.

I have asked a friend who has a White Mage and she told me the questline is very insistant about the player being the ONLY one. So, yes, it is canon that the Padjal aren't teaching, at least as far as the quest is concerned. But I insist in that it makes no sense to support that when the developers allows every Dick and Harry to be one. What is frankly silly is restricting player choice for the sake of the lore when the gameplay mechanics specifically contradict it (by having a ton of White Mage players and by giving players White Mage skills). You are asking people to not use skills granted to them by the game. This is not reasonable. Can runs be done without those skills? Probably. But that's not the point: the point is that you are asking people to cull their tool repertoire. Their only option is to either do a gameplay segregation (as in, any action they take in the run itself isn't an actual IC action) or to consider the lore is bollocks and use one of the alternatives (that they are White Mages after all for X reason). I choose that the lore is bollocks because the existence of every in-character White Mage contradicts it. And I prefer to have many potential interactions with those characters than to have none. Because that's what accepting this particular bit of lore does: it asks me to reject all player characters who are White Mages and who "do not have a very good reason", when we should be asking them to just have consistency and coherency. But how can we ask them to have coherency with this bit of lore when the lore isn't coherent nor compatible in any shape with roleplaying on a massive scale? Hell, not even Squee is consistent about it: the website tidbit (which, let's say it, holds less authority than in-game lore) contradicts what is implied by the game. Simply put, if something isn't supposed to be achievable by hundreds of people, then it shouldn't be available as gameplay (in an MMO) unless there's a hardcoded cap on it. But that is a different can of worms.

I don't think Garrus is memetic enough to warrant avoiding his name the same way you would probably want to avoid names from Dragonball, for example. "Garrus" sounds fantasy-ish enough, though you might want to be ready to see some eyebrows raising when you enter a room. That's the worst thing you'll get from reasonable individuals.

People with the Echo are immune to the brainwash, yes. But the Primal has to specifically try to brainwash in the first place. If you ask me, the only reason Ifrit managed to do that in his introduction was because the prisoners were shackled. Otherwise, once summoned, the Primal could just go to one of the major city states and brainwash everyone there and in the way. This tells me a Primal can't do it with their sole pressence, and that it requires for it to concentrate (or something similar) that isn't readily available if he's busy fighting. It could also be a process that consumes a lot of aether and, as such, isn't worth using during combat since it would weaken them considerably. Specially not a good idea if they can't tell if a person has the Echo until after the brainwash spell was cast. I guess I stand corrected. But I still reject that canon. It would be fine if this was a singleplayer RPG where the player character is truly unique in his reality. But he isn't. Squeenix is trying to have their cake ("White Magic is super-duper spechul!") and then eat it ("You, our dear players, are also super-duper spechul!"). So special, we are, that the Elementals have to vouch for us to the Padjal, and they have to teach us despite their reserves. This would be akin to giving us the choice to pick Padjals in race selection. It's all fine and dandy if the player pool is limited to only one person (or maybe half a dozen), but it is not acceptable in a massively roleplaying scene. We have to bend lore, not only to justify all the White Mages, but also because the game itself is giving contradictory messages: that white magic is severely limited by the Padjals and the Elementals, yet every single player character can pick that Job. If Squee wanted White Magic to be super duper special they should have limited the ammount of player characters that can be White Mages with some kind of limit (which would piss people off on a meta-game scale), or not allow any player to become one at all. The same way we can't be Padjal in character creation.

I don't care about 'defeating the lore' when the lore is stupidly restrictive and detrimental to roleplaying. If you keep the "padjals are the only ones teaching White Magic and only to super-duper speshiul individuals" you are inviting people to make Mary Sues to justify their chosen Job. Mary Sues, I say, because they'd need to be selected by the padjals (who are major characters) directly, and chosen for super-duper speshiul circumnstances similar to the ones of the questline (the soul crystal directly chosing you, the Elementals ordering the Padjal to teach you, or similar things). All the Mary Sue alarms will go off around these poor players. This is not good for roleplay. The lore has to be bended and the quest canon trampled over if we want White Mages in our roleplay. An alternative to the Padjals doing the teaching is for that first "very special" White Mage to have started teaching magic to other people, and those people taught others, and those others to others and so on and so forth. That is not true. Padjal are basically the Elementals' "chosen ones". Their purpose isn't to have White Magic but to act as a direct link between nature (the Elementals) and Gridanians. They are given White Magic the same way you could give a carpenter a hammer: his purpose isn't to hold the hammer but to make furniture.

The game's storyline based around the 'hero', states that the Sultansworn stopped picking Free Paladins for some time but decided to restart not very long ago. There are no further details I remember. The biggest thing we have to find out is if in 1.0 Gladiators coudl become Paladins ( I did not play back then, so I have no idea if Jobs were implemented or not). If they weren't, we have to assume that Sultansworn stopped recruiting Free Paladins for somewhere around 10 years or more (or a bit less, I suck at chronology). If 1.0 players could become Paladins, though, that means they stopped recruiting them after the Calamity five years ago. In either case, I think you can safely place your Sultanswornship in your character twenties without anyone raising any eyebrows.

I have no idea why that post says that killing the Primal is not necessary, because it's a plot point for the Summoner questline: people who defeat a Primal are, in a sense, attuned to the Primal's aether. If I had to speculate why, I would say it's because of the massive ammounts of aether a Primal requires to be summoned in the first place: part of it would be irradiated in some sort of magical heat that affects the sorroundings, including people (or maybe only sentient beings). This 'attunement' allows the Summoner to tap on the Primal's essence and extract an egi. This might seem like you can't be a summoner icly, but you can work around it by bending lore a bit: instead of attuning yourself to the Primal's energies directly, you could go to a place where you could find the Primal's essence in great quantities of the enviorement. You could also do exactly what the storyline says: you defeat the Primal IC. The lore allows for them to be summoned as often as the beast-tribes can (or, in other words, as often as the plot demands) so it is quite plausible that your character was on one of the groups sent to dispatch the Primal.

Whomever told you to leave the server deserves to be smacked in the face and be called a twat. Disclosing the detail that worries you would show how the RPC community reacts to it and, therefore, give you an idea of how many people will react badly to it.

I doubt the developers thought much about the evolution of the Eorzean races. They just made a race of humans with cat ears and tails because it was cute/sexy/cool/whatever, and not because they are the natural and logical conclusion of an evolutionary chain.

Everything about the lifespans of races is only speculation except for two things: -Elezen live longer than Hyur, but not by much. -Lalafells 'stop' aging at some point and can live beyond the hundred years. (This is based on an NPC in 1.0, I think, whose dialogue implied he had been alive for 120 years at least). Also, please note that Miqo'te are not cats. They are humans with feline parts. Making them live less or more than Hyurs is arbitrary and speculative. As a rule of thumb, I'd go with "everyone lives between eighty and a hundred years", except for lalafells, who apparently live longer.

There's a difference in saturation. Raptor blue is 'more' blue, and Aldgoat brown is 'more' brown. Though in the case of the last one there envioremental light is different, so the difference might be actually greater than despicted. I didn't know there new dyes. I should go hunt for them!

Going to the bathroom is also a part of life. Yet nobody roleplays that. Why? Because the specifics of going to the bathroom (or sex, for that matter) don't add anything to the story or your character. I have personally never found any reason to have explicit sex scenes because whatever they would tell about the story or characters is always better conveyed by other means. But not everyone shares my findings (or lack of them). As everyone and their grandma has said: if you are going to do something that has high chances of bothering people, you should keep it on a private channel.

I can tell you are extremely protective of your opinions about the Miqo'te race and are averse to discussing potential points of criticism and unable to articulate proper counterarguments to those criticisms. A shame, but leaving the discussion is better for the you, I think. Jokes aside, I keep my posture that Sunseeker culture is based on a "sexy catgirl race" trope. Squee is aware of the fetish and capitalized on it in the game's lore. That's why they made them polygamous and the reason there is an oversexualization of Miqo'te in Ul'dah and Costa del Sol. It's a shame Squee shot itself in the foot and went against its own lore with the U tribe and their nunh, but that might be the exception and not the rule. Sunseeker society might or might not be patriarchal: you might think that a man 'getting all ze women' is a sign of patriarchy, but that doesn't have to be the case. Miqo'te males are fewer in number by biologic bias, so keeping a stable population might need that kind of cultural norm depending on the math. You could even have women telling the nunh with whom to have children instead of the nunh being the one picking people. Then suddenly what you might end up having is the objectification of men. But the lore is sketchy at best, so as Freelance said, you can turn the dial to whatever side you want. Of course, what you can argue is that the devs designed the Miqo'te lore the way they did because they are a bunch of misogynistic blokes, but then that isn't discussing the lore; it's discussing the author.

Three of the playable races are basically humans with some modifications or additions. Elezen and Roegadyn are farther away from humans than Miqo'tes are. Elezen don't just have pointy ears, but also alien proportions. Long necks and extremities. Roegadyn have very square facial traits and heavy torsos (though their females look more normal). Lalafell are basically anime gnomes. But the Miqo'te? They are humans with cat tails and ears strapped to the appropiate body parts. Take that away and they would just be humans with weird eyes or teeth depending on their clan. I made a Miqo'te because some other people were and they needed a family member. The family RP prospect seemed like fun, and that's all the reason one needs to do anything in a game, really: fun!

The best solution are special units or differentiated jurisdictions. An Immortal Flame Captain is on a special unit dedicated to butchering the Amalj'aa and Ifrit, while a Flame Sargeant is on a more mundane protection of refugees arriving to Ul'dahn territory. Tecause they are on different "fronts", so to speak, you can succesfully argue that the Captain has no authority over the Sargeant. It would be akin to one being a police man from one city while the other, while also a policeman, is from another different city. Unless their mutual higher up (who is an off-screen NPC) actually organizes them in a hierarchy, they don't have any business commanding each other around. You can apply this to anything up to Marshal, Admiral, General or whatever. Something that has to be kept in mind when roleplaying officers is that in-character ranks should come with responsability. In-game we rank up as fast as a speeding Ferrari and the game doesn't put any real responsability on you. But in-character those ranks shouldn't be achieved in a matter of days (unless you want to use one of your 'special things' card on that), and they should carry some responsabilities besides the obvious privileges of commanding other people around. Something as simple as the illusion of not having enough time can send the message that your character is actually busy being an officer.

There was some dev post in the official lore forums that said that crossbreeds between the clans are possible (and there was some NPC with a Keeper look but Seeker name or the other way around). Because of that, we can assume that crossbreeds are possible and that they take on the looks of whichever clan...which means that it will be impossible to tell a crossbreed apart from their 'pure' counterparts unless she's named differently (like a Sun Seeker looking Miqo'te with a Keeper name, or vice versa). Unless your character goes out of her way to tell people that she is a crossbreed, nobody will notice. And if they do, well, I don't think anyone is going to do more than raise an eyebrow before continuing interactions normally.

I agree with the use of tags, but we only need these: Clearly.

The problem of "I'm the hero who personally fought Gaius!" (and other derivated anthics) is that at some point you will run into too many people claiming to have done so. There's only so much space (8, if game mechanics inform our story) for people to have participated in it. Now, you might say that the ammount of people isn't a problem in itself. And you are right. The problem isn't the ammount of people; it's the ammount of points of view. So imagine that the elezen Mister Croissant has fought Gaius in-character. You ask him about it. He says Gaius put quite a fight, killing one or two of his comrades. Then you run into the hyur Sir Donut, who says he fought Gaius in-character, too. You ask again! According to him Gaius was a piece of cake that went down easily when everyone in the attack party assaulted him. And then Lord Sandwich enters the scene, claiming that Gaius had incapacitated everyone but him, who bravely put at end to the garlean general by poking him in the eye and throwing a one liner. And then you meet another half a dozen of heroes who defeated Gaius in-character. Yet none of them have the same tale about how Gaius went down. What happens next is that you run into a micro-canon contradiction. Not all of those tales can be true, for Gaius couldn't kill only Mister Croissant's comrade and everyone but Lord Sandwich at the same time. Croissant's and Sandwich's micro-canons are at odds with each other. The other players, upon seeing this, will have to choose which one is the liar. Which means, most likely, avoiding the other character (or both) like the plague. That's what you are doing by being a main piece of an in-game and official storyline: you are forcing people to either accept your micro-canonical truth ("He is one of the heroes") or have to handwave and avoid your roleplay ("He's crazy!"). It's just counterproductive. A much better solution is what others have said already: be part of the story in a generic or tangential way. You can be part of the attack to the Castri, but not part of the group that downed Gaius personally. You can be a Scion, but not the one that rescued Minifilia and the others. By all means pick elements from the storyline to use in your character, but adapt them so that it is compatible with as many micro-canons as possible. Being part of the main storyline in-character is just asking your fellow players to get into trouble. Unless, of course, your roleplay is limited to a specific circle or group. Then I guess you can all agree on how your micro-canon work and be quite happy with it. That's another solution!

My reading of this situation is that Squee is hoping the people with the huge ammount of gil required to buy the FC houses (in Legacy worlds, I mean) will do so. But they won't, because people with a hilariously large pile of money don't dump it on the first expensive thing available. I'm sure some will, but not as many as Squee is hoping. So I'm guessing they will drop the prices in a couple of months.