(06-09-2015, 11:10 AM)FreelanceWizard Wrote: When I, at least, say "lore compliant," I mean "basically jives with what we know about the setting." So that means, to me, no characters from the X-Men showing up, no vampires/werewolves/(insert popular supernatural YA fiction character type here), no claims that the sky is heliotrope and elezen are actually lizardmen in disguise, and nothing the devs have explicitly said doesn't exist -- which is really precious few things.
Beyond that, we're all in grey areas to some degree. As you noted, the lore's not concrete, and there are some well-known disagreements about how to interpret some of it. One that comes to mind just now is "how powerful are the elementals in the Shroud at this part of the story." We can have those disagreements, I think, and still all RP together outside of those disagreements.
(I'm going to preface this with an acknowledgement that my opinion may be unpopular and I accept the difficulties that may provide. However my concern is the happiness and entertainment of my comrades, not an abstract and logically restrictive ideal. So long as it is within reason, and not overly ridiculous, my friends come first.)
When lore is unaccommodating of easily accessible mechanics to the player, it is the lore that it in error, and is open to be bent or flat out disregarded.
The problem about lore-mongering is that it does not take bad writing on behalf of the creators into consideration. The more FFXIV's story staff treats their lore like a single-player game, the more damaging and dividing it becomes to the Roleplayer base. And this happens across several MMOs, particularly noticeable in SWtOR and ARR in particular are pretty big violators of this.
Conversely, well-written lore premises do not ignore their mechanics. Aion in particular went above and beyond making even the revival mechanics part of their lore. Even FFXIV 1.0 in the instance was far and away more inclusive then what's being provided here and now.
Our Free Company keeps 'Adventurer Class' Jobs as canon, with a general story behind each on how the practices are passed on. Issues with individual components such as Fantasias can generally be written in, rather than be retconed.Â
And each situation that these exceptions occur, crate their own sphere of canons that become glossed over, or just not mentioned in larger groupings, in which their own canon may differ.
Head-canon > Personal Canon > Group Canon > Public Canon > Lore - This is generally an accepted structure in preventing lore or personal cannon conflicts. The wider of a group you deal with, the more conflicting details just simply don't come up or be presented.
Here's a breakdown of how it could be done in the spoiler:
I'm actually surprised that more MMO communities are not familiar with these concepts. I've found they work exceedingly well when it comes to accommodating individual quirks in roleplay.
