I'm of the opinion that someone roleplaying a character who has certain skills that more or less borrow from the aesthetic of a class/job and its mechanics has an obligation to at least be familiar and knowledgeable about what said class/job is capable of.
Take the difference between pugilists and monks, for instance. There are certain things a pugilist can and cannot do, and the distinction between them and monks is an important one.
A pugilist is more or less a martial fighter trained to understand and utilize their body to inflict harm upon other bodies. They're not known for particularly superhuman feats (save Hamon Holyfist, but come on now, it's Hamon Holyfist), which is to say you wouldn't expect them to break rock with their fists, or cross long distances in the blink of an eye, or any other such dazzling displays.
You would, however, expect them of monks, and that's largely due to the lore behind them. Furthermore, I'd expect someone playing MNK at level 60 to have a better understanding of what such a character ought to be capable of than, say, a level 25 pugilist who can't even access Greased Lightning III to see how stupendously quick/fast/swift a monk can be. That's tied up in "OoC achievement" : if you've played pugilist up through the level 30 quests, if you've unlocked monk, and if you've played monk up until 50 (or 60 now), then you know what you're talking about when you write for such a character.
This won't always matter (generic swordsman characters can more or less ignore GLA/PLD lore and mechanics without detriment) but OoC knowledge, familiarity, and skill do contribute, in my eyes, to how seriously I take someone's character and that character's actions, and to how my character reacts to those. In a way, it comes back to the question of how lore-compliant folks want to be, and how lore compliant they expect their RP partners to be. I, for instance, am not someone to sit there and accept a pugilist throwing a punch through the air that someone translates into a gust of wind that stikes my monk from several malms away. In the first place, Air Render is from an entirely different Final Fantasy title altogether, and just because the lore there supported it doesn't mean that the lore in XIV does. Secondly, according to XIV lore, monks aren't even capable of that... so why should I accept that a pugilist is?
Take the difference between pugilists and monks, for instance. There are certain things a pugilist can and cannot do, and the distinction between them and monks is an important one.
A pugilist is more or less a martial fighter trained to understand and utilize their body to inflict harm upon other bodies. They're not known for particularly superhuman feats (save Hamon Holyfist, but come on now, it's Hamon Holyfist), which is to say you wouldn't expect them to break rock with their fists, or cross long distances in the blink of an eye, or any other such dazzling displays.
You would, however, expect them of monks, and that's largely due to the lore behind them. Furthermore, I'd expect someone playing MNK at level 60 to have a better understanding of what such a character ought to be capable of than, say, a level 25 pugilist who can't even access Greased Lightning III to see how stupendously quick/fast/swift a monk can be. That's tied up in "OoC achievement" : if you've played pugilist up through the level 30 quests, if you've unlocked monk, and if you've played monk up until 50 (or 60 now), then you know what you're talking about when you write for such a character.
This won't always matter (generic swordsman characters can more or less ignore GLA/PLD lore and mechanics without detriment) but OoC knowledge, familiarity, and skill do contribute, in my eyes, to how seriously I take someone's character and that character's actions, and to how my character reacts to those. In a way, it comes back to the question of how lore-compliant folks want to be, and how lore compliant they expect their RP partners to be. I, for instance, am not someone to sit there and accept a pugilist throwing a punch through the air that someone translates into a gust of wind that stikes my monk from several malms away. In the first place, Air Render is from an entirely different Final Fantasy title altogether, and just because the lore there supported it doesn't mean that the lore in XIV does. Secondly, according to XIV lore, monks aren't even capable of that... so why should I accept that a pugilist is?
![[Image: 1qVSsTp.png]](http://i.imgur.com/1qVSsTp.png)
