Eva Wrote:Hopefully tactfully. But usually it's best done through word-of-mouth or storyline post, at least from my own experiences. Granted there were times in FF11 when ballista matches were scheduled to coincide with RP - in the instance I'm thinking of it coincided with something which was already predetermined - I'm lookin' at you Tyriont (Rathium). It worked out okay, but it was never really the norm.
Correct. To give a little background here - my character was involved in a long-going feud with another, Rathium. For reasons I can't really recall, Rathium had a feud with Tyriont that had escalated to levels that pushed Ty over the edge. He'd used a friend of Ty's to betray him (I think some type of amnesia was involved) and had assaulted the woman he was involved with at the time, driving stakes through her hands. Rathium had decided he wanted to quit and this was the plotline that would kill off his character - he wanted to go out with a bang and so wanted to do it in a ballista match - the outcome, as Eva said, was predetermined but nevertheless proved why this doesn't work. At the time I was playing SAM, Rathium was MNK. If I remember right, this was before the Hasso/Seigan JAs were added to the game...and anyone who took part in Ballista knows that one on one, barring MASSIVE gear differences there simply was no way a SAM would come out on top in that match-up. I wound up taking him down a few times, but by the end the score count would have wound up with Ty getting his arse whupped. Had I been playing something like BRD it would have been even worse. The only way we were able to wrap it up with Ty winning and killing Rathium was because we decided the outcome beforehand.
That said, in-game mechanics can be used to add extra drama to a scene quite nicely. It takes a lot of planning though. Here's an example I've seen used outside of FFXI - a key NPC has called a group of characters out to a meeting spot in order to give them some vital information. Unknown to the characters, prior to the meeting the player who had created this NPC as an alt had taken them out and gotten them beaten up by mobs to the point where they only had a few HP left. Halfway through his speech, a villain character who had managed to get close without being noticed by the other players shot the NPC character, killing him. The impact of playing the event out that way was far more dramatic than if it had simply been emoted - seeing the NPC collapse dead in front of them really drove the event home.
But as said, that's very much pre-scripted and can be tricky to pull off.
![[Image: TyFFXIVSig.jpg]](http://i968.photobucket.com/albums/ae167/Tyriont/TyFFXIVSig.jpg)
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