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Naunet · **01-11-2014, 03:52 PM**

(01-11-2014, 03:14 PM)Ami Wrote: there are more than one Dragoons. Â Doing the quests in Coerthas proves this. Â There is, however, only one Azure Dragoon (special snowflake for the PC).

This is how I've interpreted the dragoon story, as well. Alongside Ildur's excellent description!

LiadansWhisper · **01-11-2014, 04:03 PM**

Tiergan is exactly right - it's just a sore spot for me shaking my fist at a dev team that I honestly don't think actually thought about the kind of scenario they were setting up. Â It totally works in a regular FF game. Â In an MMO? Â It's balls. Â Horrible balls.

The other information in this thread is really awesome, too.

And, Ildur, best description of Dragoons ever. Â I've always thought those dudes were crazy!

Sounsyy · **01-11-2014, 04:17 PM**

(01-11-2014, 02:20 PM)Naunet Wrote: Honestly, fuck the lore wherever it disallows a player from roleplayingÂ a class you can choose to be in-game. Restricting the lore behind jobs such that only ONE SPESHUL SNOWFLAKE UBER GUY/LADY can become them is quite seriously the dumbest "lore" move I've ever seen an MMO make and it doesn't deserve being given the time of day.

(01-11-2014, 03:10 PM)Naunet Wrote: It gets absurd whenÂ only one person ever is allowed to actually be that class/job, even though the game allows as many people who want to level it to do so.

We have very different opinions on this. I'll spoiler my last post on this topic below if you want to see another viewpoint.Â

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(01-11-2014, 03:14 PM)Ami Wrote: As for dragoons, the way a buddy and I rp'd it (and I still do, since he's left the game seemingly permanently), is that there are more than one Dragoons. Â Doing the quests in Coerthas proves this. Â There is, however, onlyÂ oneÂ Azure Dragoon (special snowflake for the PC). Â Neither of us were such. Â We were chosen to be dragoons, but aren't uber-uber dragoons.

Actually really glad you brought this up! I had almost forgotten. There is a distinction between dragoon and Azure Dragoon that I forgot to mention in my post. I should edit that to make that more clear and not confuse people.Â

There are lots of "Dragoons" in Ishgard. It's the title given to any Knight of Ishgard that slays a dragon and can prove it. So yeah, anyone who slays a dragon and brings forth proof to the Holy See will be awarded the honorable title of Dragoon. Now Azure Dragoons are the special snowflakes that are only chosen once a generation by Nidhogg's Eye.Â

(01-11-2014, 02:31 PM)Jomoru Wrote: Dragoon of course.. has a much more interesting potential Lore sidestreet. Ishgard could only field one or two Azure Dragoons... but Dravinia could easily field those who call upon the dragon's power without it being stolen.

I think this is an interesting avenue. However, the XIV definition of a Dragoon is Dragon Slayer, not a person who has a dragon's power. So technically having their power still wouldn't make them a dragoon.Â

The difference between the Azure Dragoon is that Nidhogg's Eye chooses them and exposes them to the full extent of a dragon's power and influence. The reason Dragoon's must wear the Drachen Mail is so that they do not succumb to this influence. So an Azure Dragoon has the power of the dragons, yes, but it is a weight to bear, not a gift. It strengthen and empowers them, but it also corrupts. As seen in the DRG storyline. But they are first and foremost Dragon Slayers. And Azure Dragoons are destined to defeat Nidhogg. So seeing a Dravanian dragon slayer empowered by Nidhogg's good eye would be a little weird. But it's an interesting route to explore since we get to see very little of the war between Ishgard and Dravania.

Naunet · **01-11-2014, 04:57 PM**

(01-11-2014, 04:17 PM)Sounsyy Wrote:

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Job Opinion PostI hear a lot people complain about how the story and lore support a lone Hero viewpoint in a Massively Multiplayer game world. But when you think about Final Fantasy, which games come first to mind? FFVII maybe. VI. FFIX. X. XIII. Final Fantasy has aÂ richÂ tradition of single player games that are small ensemble or singular hero based. All FFXIV is doing is staying true to that tradition. They're keeping to the wonderful hero-based storylines that captivated us and made us raging FF lunatic fans in the first place. I honestly believe, if they had not done the lore in this way, (which I personally believe FFXIV has some of the most wonderful lore) the game would really feel just like any other MMO and not a Final Fantasy MMO. But maybe that's just me?

It might just be you, or just be me, but tbh, I don't give a rat's patootie how "Final Fantasy" this MMO is. It's an MMO, not a single player RPG. I never played any Final Fantasy games before this, but even if I had, I don't think this would change my opinion. It makes zero sense to tell roleplayers they cannot rp as a particular class (job, whatever you want to call it) when they damn well can level up a white mage, alongside the fifty bazillion other people who choose to level up a white mage.

I think this is a silly thing to hang one's "This is what it means to be Final Fantasy" hat on, as certainly the job system, or the themes of the jobs, or the aesthetic and music, or the common monsters, or any number of other things are far more fundamental to the game and are arguably more "Final Fantasy" than a very single player-only friendly story (which is shared by all single player RPGs ever in the history of single player RPGs).

Asgarn · **01-11-2014, 05:01 PM**

Personally, I'm a very open-minded RPer. The only class I perhaps take exception to is White Mage, for reasons explained before (White Magic is forbidden, your character is the exception outside the Padjal). Most classes, I find, have ways of roleplaying them which aren't the conventional way the storyline tells you. Smile

Â As long as the roleplayer can provide an adequate story for reason, no problems what they play.
(As long as they don't play the bastard Son of Bahamut, brought forth from a virgin's loins to wreak havoc upon Eorzea, or some crap like that...)

Ildur · **01-11-2014, 06:01 PM**

(01-11-2014, 04:57 PM)Naunet Wrote: I think this is a silly thing to hang one's "This is what it means to be Final Fantasy" hat on (...)

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!

Sounsyy · **01-11-2014, 06:48 PM**

(01-11-2014, 04:57 PM)Naunet Wrote: It might just be you, or just be me, but tbh, I don't give a rat's patootie how "Final Fantasy" this MMO is. It's an MMO, not a single player RPG. I never played any Final Fantasy games before this, but even if I had, I don't think this would change my opinion. It makes zero sense to tell roleplayers they cannot rp as a particular class (job, whatever you want to call it) when they damn well can level up a white mage, alongside the fifty bazillion other people who choose to level up a white mage.

I think this is a silly thing to hang one's "This is what it means to be Final Fantasy" hat on, as certainly the job system, or the themes of the jobs, or the aesthetic and music, or the common monsters, or any number of other things are far more fundamental to the game and are arguably more "Final Fantasy" than a very single player-only friendly story (which is shared by all single player RPGs ever in the history of single player RPGs).

You've got gameplay and you've got story. Very separate things. You need a healing class. You need a tank class. You need damage dealers. It's the holy trinity. In a story, you don't necessarily need these things. You have people RPing lancers who face 1v1 against beasts they could never in game. You can gear your ARC/BRD to never miss an enemy, but if you never missed in story you'd be godmoding. And you don't see any NPCs mastering multiple Jobs, yet that is a key selling point of this MMO.

But there's a reason the jobs are created so exclusive. Because they weren't always in the game. When this game started and the original lore was written there was only the classes. In order to make this game an actual Final Fantasy game, the classic FF jobs were written in. Now, how do you explain their absence in the game before without retconning the whole thing? You make them ancient, you make them legendary, you make them secret, you make them forbidden, you make them exclusive. There's only so many options. Otherwise they wouldn't be special and the whole point was that Eorzea needed special. They needed something more powerful than what they had to stand against the threat of annihilation.Â

That's really what the game is about, in-game and out of game. It's about a company that needed to bring Final Fantasy back into their MMO or else sink. What's more Final Fantasy than the original jobs from the original games? The games that actually succeeded and we fans think highly on. You'll find near unanimous love for FF IV, VI, VII, VIII, and IX. But you'll find a much more varied response to the later games like X, X-2, XII, XIII. Games that broke away from FF traditions to meet modern standards.Â

Now, I know you don't give a rat's patootie about all the reasons behind it. As I've said time and again it comes down to whether you wish to respect the lore as written by the creators or not. Neither is right or wrong, but the game lore isn't changing, so you've got to make that choice.

In my own personal opinion, if you say to hell with the lore because it's just inconvenient, then you aren't role playing or being a role player. You're fanfictioning, which is something quite different. Isn't the point of roleplaying to limit yourself into the role/social norms of a character as part of a predetermined story? So choose a role.

You want to be a healer? You can drop yourself into the role of the conjurer. A mage that manipulates the aether around them and upon meditation crafts a spell from that aether. Drop into the role of a Chirurgeon. Healers of modern medicine. But I wanna be a White Mage! A user of Succor. Actually not that hard to come up with ways to become one that don't break lore.Â

Anyone remember Brother Morys from 1.0 CNJ quest? An Ishgardian boy lost in the Wood, accrued Greenwrath and became a servant of the Elementals. He lost his memories and became a powerful conjurer. The Elementals gave him a gift. Combine that with the 1.0 WHM quest. Oha-Sok bestows upon you the power of Succor, even gives up his own body to become your very robes. So in two minutes I just came up with a character that was taken by the Elementals and became a Wildling. He now heals the Wood as he wanders it, a lost soul. There's several directions I can go to from here. What other ways? There's the obvious roleplay a Padjal. A-Towa-Cant wandered Eorzea healing the land and exploring everywhere he could. What's to say your Padjal can't either. A-Towa-Cant also had an apprentice. That apprentice could have had one too. So long as it's kept secret, and un-abused, the Elementals won't destroy the world. You can be an Elemental in human physical form. It's never happened in game, but Elementals take all forms in 1.0 storyline. One becomes your robes. And just because you are one, doesn't mean you go around telling people.Â

Maybe this will get me some hate, but I urge roleplayers to not ignore the lore. It's beautiful and it's there for a reason. Restrictive, if you're lazy, but all good stories revolve around extraordinary people who do things many others can't. You don't have to be a special snowflake to make a story-worthy character though. You just have to use your imagination. And the more you try to stick to the lore to the best of your knowledge, the more incredible others will find your story.

Seriphyn · **01-11-2014, 06:49 PM**

Right! I apologize, I misread.

I agree, I actually thought all job stories would have been akin to the Paladin questline, where adventurers can become Free Paladins. I had no idea you become the Azure Dragoon of Ishgard...certainly, perhaps the Holy See is training a "foreign legion" of its lancers for help against the dragon threat.Â

My guess is that they had different writers for each questline, and that having all the job lines as "Long-established title is being trained openly to adventurers" would be too repetitive (this is from Squeenix's angle that is)

EDIT: Gosh, i still don't know how to quote in this forum. This post was a direct reply to Naunet's #13 post.

EDIT2: Derp, this went onto a second page. I second Sounsyy once again. Personally, I consider myself quite proudly an Ul'dahn RPer (waa, Ottoman/Arabic city as the largest city in-game right now, and not some generic European city? yes please!). Paladins are, historically, Ul'dahn...while my character will always antagonize free paladins (not Sultansworn of course), if anything, this is more to explore the lore and history of Ul'dah, and not criticize the player's RP choices. "Captain Jenlyns says anyone of pure spirit can be a paladin! Meanings change over time!" vs "Captain Jenlyns' effete words means nothing to six centuries worth of history! The only true paladins are Sultansworn!" etc

raindrops · **01-11-2014, 06:56 PM**

I really, really like Sounsy's take on the WHM problem. They're all creative solutions that keep the actual job as unique as the lore intended because to use them you're building your character around being a white mage, but just saying 'oh and she'he happens to be a white mage nbd.

Love or hate the lore, it's there and to just plain ignore it is really, really inconsiderate to fellow RPers. It's not impossible to work around it, and the restrictions can create some really interesting and unique characters who might have otherwise been 'just a white mage'.

Ildur · **01-11-2014, 07:36 PM**

(01-11-2014, 06:48 PM)Sounsyy Wrote: You've got gameplay and you've got story. Very separate things.

Sounsyy, you keep thinking of ARR as a singleplayer game. But it isn't. It's an MMO and as such its lore should, ideally, be designed to allow each and all player characters to coexist. While we surely can't expect Squee or any developer to make special unique quests for each character, we can expect them to not resort to stupid "You are the CHOSEN ONE!" anthics that are actually pretty damn tiresome even in single player games. Tiresome even if they are traditional.

I like my story informing my gameplay, though. There are some mechanical restrictions that you can simply handwave as not part of lore because the game can't do it all and has to keep focused. This is the reason Black Mages don't get a torch spell even though they can bombard enemies with a barrage of fireballs.
If your story is not going to inform your gameplay, your game is doing something wrong. It's going to be counterintuitive, just as the White Mage lore is counterintuitive because they are unique and super speshiul yet everyone can be mechanically one. This is an incoherency and inconsistency on a meta level that has to be salvaged for the lore to not confuse the hell out of a lot of people and work on a massive scale.

Quote:That's really what the game is about, in-game and out of game. It's about a company that needed to bring Final Fantasy back into their MMO or else sink. What's more Final Fantasy than the original jobs from the original games? The games that actually succeeded and we fans think highly on. You'll find near unanimous love for FF IV, VI, VII, VIII, and IX. But you'll find a much more varied response to the later games like X, X-2, XII, XIII. Games that broke away from FF traditions to meet modern standards.Â

This is irrelevant to the roleplaying scene of an MMO.

Quote:Now, I know you don't give a rat's patootie about all the reasons behind it. As I've said time and again it comes down to whether you wish to respect the lore as written by the creators or not. Neither is right or wrong, but the game lore isn't changing, so you've got to make that choice.

I would argue that, yes, one is wrong and the other is right. The one wrong is the one that makes no sense. Respecting lore has no bearing if it is not coherent with its own game. Maybe it's coherent with the Author's designs and his previous work, but that means nothing for our roleplay. The lore is there to provide the setting, to provide a consistent and coherent world for the players to live in. I do agree that breaking it is bad, but only when doing so threatens the world coherency or consistency (like, for example, saying that my character is Bahamut's best pal). In the case of Jobs, we have that the lore itself is threatening its own coherency by implying there can only be only one White Mage even though the gameplay directly contradicts it. Story needs to inform gameplay: if White Mages are so special, they should BE special. You can tell me that White Magic is forbidden and that there's only one White Mage besides the Padjal, but while you tell me I'm going to point to every single character. I'm going to show you how many White Mages there really are. The ancient axiom of "Show, don't tell".

Quote:In my own personal opinion, if you say to hell with the lore because it's just inconvenient, then you aren't role playing or being a role player. You're fanfictioning, which is something quite different. Isn't the point of roleplaying to limit yourself into the role/social norms of a character as part of a predetermined story? So choose a role.

You can roleplay and make fan fiction with it. It is, after all, fiction made by fans. If you are a fan and you roleplay, then you are making fan fiction and you are still roleplaying. What you really meant was: "You are not following lore to the letter and, as the Word of the Author is Holy, your roleplaying has no worth nor validity to me. Therefore, I will use a term I find despective to call you, showing you my dissaproval."

Also, I have another interpretation of what roleplay in an MMO means: it's cooperative storytelling. And I can't form a story if the setting and its game are giving me mixed messages.

Quote:-snip- So in two minutes I just came up with a character that was taken by the Elementals and became a Wildling.

That all smells like fan fiction: you are recycling canon to make up a 'new' character. And you said that fan fiction isn't roleplay. Though I haven't played 1.0, so I dunno. It's just the smell, I guess.

Quote:Maybe this will get me some hate, but I urge roleplayers to not ignore the lore. It's beautiful and it's there for a reason. Restrictive, if you're lazy, but all good stories revolve around extraordinary people who do things many others can't. You don't have to be a special snowflake to make a story-worthy character though. You just have to use your imagination. And the more you try to stick to the lore to the best of your knowledge, the more incredible others will find your story.

It's beautiful when it works and provides a coherent world. When it doesn't, it stinks and we have to work around it. Imagine if the game allowed us to pick Padjal as a race, but then told us that Padjal are very, very rare and that YOU are the ONLY Padjal that has been born outside of the Shorud. Wouldn't it be a bit weird when you run into other three hundred players who want to be Padjal in character, too?
No, lore has to move aside for the sake of coherency and fun. White Mage lore makes no sense in the MMO setting. It does in a singleplayer game, but ARR isn't that. It's first an MMO and secondly a Final Fantasy game. The same way an italian is first a human and -then- a citizen of Italy.

Seriphyn · **01-11-2014, 07:36 PM**

Hm, if the lore (rather aggravatingly so) says that you can't be a White Mage, what's wrong with just playing a Conjurer? I don't think I've actually MET anyone who roleplays a white mage, mind, so it's asking a question into nothing...but if I was a healer character and ran into this problem, it'd just be easier for myself and everyone involved if I just went for Conjurer.

Edgar · **01-11-2014, 07:44 PM**

Quote:It makes zero sense to tell roleplayers they cannot rp as a particular class (job, whatever you want to call it) when they damn well can level up a white mage, alongside the fifty bazillion other people who choose to level up a white mage.

It makes perfect sense when you consider this game was not designed with roleplay in mind.

Naunet · **01-11-2014, 07:50 PM**

(01-11-2014, 06:48 PM)Sounsyy Wrote: There's several directions I can go to from here. What other ways? There's the obvious roleplay a Padjal. A-Towa-Cant wandered Eorzea healing the land and exploring everywhere he could. What's to say your Padjal can't either. A-Towa-Cant also had an apprentice. That apprentice could have had one too. So long as it's kept secret, and un-abused, the Elementals won't destroy the world. You can be an Elemental in human physical form. It's never happened in game, but Elementals take all forms in 1.0 storyline. One becomes your robes. And just because you are one, doesn't mean you go around telling people.Â

I'm sorry, but I am so entertained at the thought of you telling roleplayers to stick to the idiotically restrictive for MMOs lore and then tell them to... roleplay a Padjal. Just lol. Do you even realize what the lore for the Padjal is? Roleplaying one, when they are not a playable race and serve as theÂ governmental and spiritual leadership in Gridania, would be taking an awful lot of liberties with the lore, moreso even than attempting to roleplay a white mage.

(01-11-2014, 07:36 PM)Ildur Wrote: No, lore has to move aside for the sake of coherency and fun. White Mage lore makes no sense in the MMO setting. It does in a singleplayer game, but ARR isn't that. It's first an MMO and secondly a Final Fantasy game. The same way an italian is first a human and -then- a citizen of Italy.

Yes, this. A thousand times this. The single, tiny bit of lore that the PC is the first and only non-Padjal White Mage in Eorzea is at complete odds with the undeniable fact that this is an MMO and not a single-player RPG.

Ildur · **01-11-2014, 08:02 PM**

(01-11-2014, 07:36 PM)Seriphyn Wrote: Hm, if the lore (rather aggravatingly so) says that you can't be a White Mage, what's wrong with just playing a Conjurer? I don't think I've actually MET anyone who roleplays a white mage, mind, so it's asking a question into nothing...but if I was a healer character and ran into this problem, it'd just be easier for myself and everyone involved if I just went for Conjurer.

There's nothing wrong with being just a conjurer. What I'm arguing is that if the game allows everyone to be something, then the lore should support that. There's also a big implied difference between Conjurers and White Mages, since ones do not have access to Succor while the others do. It would be akin to asking "Why do you want to play a surgeon? Be a nurse instead!"

Naunet · **01-11-2014, 08:07 PM**

(01-11-2014, 07:44 PM)Edgar Wrote: It makes perfect sense when you consider this game was not designed with roleplay in mind.

I can't think of a single MMO (except maybeÂ LotRO) that was designed with specifically roleplay in mind. That is not an excuse.

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RPing the Jobs

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