What are some things that are common in Eorzea, but rare in the roleplay community?

[Griffith!]

Combatant characters who aren't good at combat? It seems like every other lancer, gladiator, marauder and dragoon is super elite or teh bestest evah. You almost never see a struggling soldier or a fresh recruit Red Badge-ing it up out there. Just lots and lots of hyper-competency.

 

I know it's a power trip thing - who wants to be weak, after all? - but it does stretch suspension of disbelief when the sixteen year old paladin is just totally undefeatable with a long string of victories against unrealistically large and rare adversaries. Like dragons.

[Virella]

More racism. No really, I want to see people spit at my hyur/elezen couple. So far everyone has been surprisingly okay with the two.

[Gegenji]

I know it's a power trip thing - who wants to be weak, after all? - but it does stretch suspension of disbelief when the sixteen year old paladin is just totally undefeatable with a long string of victories against unrealistically large and rare adversaries. Like dragons.

 

You would've loved to have seen Chachan repeatedly failing at the Grindstone, then. :lol:

[Asmodean]

Combatant characters who aren't good at combat? It seems like every other lancer, gladiator, marauder and dragoon is super elite or teh bestest evah. You almost never see a struggling soldier or a fresh recruit Red Badge-ing it up out there. Just lots and lots of hyper-competency.

 

I know it's a power trip thing - who wants to be weak, after all? - but it does stretch suspension of disbelief when the sixteen year old paladin is just totally undefeatable with a long string of victories against unrealistically large and rare adversaries. Like dragons.

 

This is one of the things I have to agree with. I always see it as with age come the experience to handle combat. So I don't care how good someone thinks there character is, if the opponent training is more then twice then long as yours, at least make it a hard up hill battle.  Asmodean has 4 or so year with his ax, if I was to fight a hellsguard with more then ten years under his belt, you better believe it would be luck not skill that makes Asmo win.

[111]

I wish there were more struggles about money and food and such.

 

It's one trope I've liked about a lot of adventure anime. The heroes are often, hungry and poor. Sometimes that's why they're adventuring, trying to get some food in their bellies.

 

Good examples are things like Cowboy Bebop, Gintama, or Slayers. Most RPers I know (including mine, to be fair) have no issues finding food, money, or safe housing. However in a world like Eorzea, and especially in RP hotspot Ul'dah, that sort of security would be rare.

[Mae]

I have been thinking lately of how rare it is that I see people playing illiterate characters, even though literacy is considered rare in Eorzea.

 

You know, I've seen this stated in the forums here a few times while looking around and I'm a little confused about it. Is there anything in-game that supports the idea of a large number of illiterate people? Because... so far... all I've seen are examples of people being pretty literate in general. Books, logs, journals, letters, etc... all being passed around in quests.... Signs and posters on the walls... Wearable "reading glasses".... Books decorating buildings... etc...

 

There's also a statement in the Hyur character creation about how Midlanders are taught to read very young or "trained in letters from infancy" if you will.

 

The only thing I've seen to support illiteracy in game was a one-off statement from a game dev without much elaboration (or racial/regional/cultural specifics). Curious if anyone here could point to more examples from in-game text/lore to support this at all?

 

I'd LOVE to know though, because I'm thinking of having my character be pretty literate... or perhaps a "book nerd" if you will. It would be nice to know how odd/rare that kind of thing actually is amongst people (or Lalafell specifically) so I can RP appropriately.

This is something I don't get, either. We have that statement from the Dev saying that literacy is rare... yet we have so many quests where we're passing notes around for people. Or putting up notices/posters. And then there's the actual Moogle Delivery Quests. And the 'newspaper' NPC's that pop up for some events. There's only one NPC (quest out in the Gold Bazaar) that I've ever encountered that, when trying to give them a flyer for work, actually said "I can't read". Everyone else, you give them a piece of paper and they read it.

[Arik]

I wish there were more struggles about money and food and such.

 

It's one trope I've liked about a lot of adventure anime. The heroes are often, hungry and poor. Sometimes that's why they're adventuring, trying to get some food in their bellies.

 

Good examples are things like Cowboy Bebop, Gintama, or Slayers. Most RPers I know (including mine, to be fair) have no issues finding food, money, or safe housing. However in a world like Eorzea, and especially in RP hotspot Ul'dah, that sort of security would be rare.

 

This is one of my favorite things to throw into RP, honestly. I agree that I'd like to see it more, but I'd also especially like to not have my character's money-woes be immediately remedied at the turn of a dime by another character who seems capable of manifesting money from thin air. I don't have any problem with people who choose to play rich characters, but it seems the financially well-to-do tend to outnumber the average joe (much less the actively impoverished) in a lot of RP communities. 

 

I love my struggling mercenary types who go from town to town trying to scrounge up enough money to even eat... Only to then make a spectacle of himself chowing down at some local restaurant. (Or, alternatively, blowing what little he has on booze only to go pass out in some dingy, back-alley gutter somewhere because he can't afford an inn. 'Dat class.)

[Ryanti]

This is something I don't get, either. We have that statement from the Dev saying that literacy is rare... yet we have so many quests where we're passing notes around for people. Or putting up notices/posters. And then there's the actual Moogle Delivery Quests. And the 'newspaper' NPC's that pop up for some events. There's only one NPC (quest out in the Gold Bazaar) that I've ever encountered that, when trying to give them a flyer for work, actually said "I can't read". Everyone else, you give them a piece of paper and they read it.

 

To me, I think most of the questing you do in that realm (and the roleplaying community in general) involves the educated community, or literate community. It may seem like a crap ton of people, but I mean... in the general scale of things, you're talking about an entire continent. Even two percent of those people = hundreds of thousands.

 

So if you take that and add to it in the sense of... roleplayers like to feel like their universe is 'lived-in', then what you end up getting is people that RP that they can read, and perhaps write.

 

Now, I've RP'd with a healthy number of people that can read, but not write. As well as not being able to do both or being crappy at reading/writing or both. I think it is more of what you choose to RP as.

 

This is just my conjecture and how I see it:

 

For example, if you RP as a simple farmer on the La Noscean coast, you probably won't be able to read or write. If you RP as a pirate, or a thief, or a mercenary or a drifter or refugee or whatnot, you probably will be able to read or write but not as well as someone who is proficient. (Sign papers with X's and whatever). These people might be poor, and they very well might be the majority of people in Eorzea.

 

If you RP as a Merchant, you certainly will need to know both (writing ledgers, reading ledgers, doing math when it comes to peddling and keeping inventory, etc.)

 

If you RP as a Magi, a Scholar, a wealthy person, or an Officer or higher in the military, you probably will need to be able to read and write as well.

 

Adding to that, anyone that owns a business, works in politics or is middle class and above I'm sure would have to learn how to read and write.

 

What we might be looking at here is not a situation of them getting things confused, but a situation where the lower class contains the majority, but the majority of society's 'happenings' occur above the lower class. Which would include those quests. Because all those other people are trying to do is basically not starve that day.

 

Or I could be completely wrong and people got confused about what came in one ear and out the other, lol.

[Klynzahr]

Combatant characters who aren't good at combat? It seems like every other lancer, gladiator, marauder and dragoon is super elite or teh bestest evah. You almost never see a struggling soldier or a fresh recruit Red Badge-ing it up out there. Just lots and lots of hyper-competency.

 

 

Meet Klynzahr!.... no seriously.

 

She is a career gladiator, adventurer, and odd jobs girl, who can barely scratch the level of mediocre in combat. The fact that she has lived to be almost thirty can be explained by her strong sense of self preservation, which has seen her beating many an ignominious retreat. It is debatable if she is a complete coward, or simply knows when she is in over her head.

 

 

It definitely leads to some interesting RP moments, because no one expects their 'tank' to turn tail and run in the middle of a RP scene, or a 'veteran gladiator' to be out maneuvered by an amateur. Better yet it leaves her with miles of room for character growth and development, unlike most sixteen year old geniuses*.

 

 

As for what I would like to see more of... I will echo what others have already mentioned. I would love to see more frequent portrayals of how harsh Eorzea can be. This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with character death. It has more to do with the acknowledgement of danger, hardship and their effects on a character's mental state.

 

I would like to see more characters who have experienced hunger and constantly harbor the fear of starvation in the back of their minds.

 

I would like to see more characters, who have been forced from their homes and remain deeply affected by the loss.

 

I would like to see more characters who have lost someone close to them in battle and find themselves wondering if a friend will return each time they step outside the city walls.

 

I guess what I am saying is that danger and struggle can be portrayed very realistically, without ever removing your character from their cozy city home. The key lies in allowing hardships from their past and the struggles around them to influence their actions and world views.

*Disclaimer: As with anything, there are ways to play the sixteen year old genius type very well and very badly. It can be more difficult finding room to grow but it is certainly not impossible.

[111]

Combatant characters who aren't good at combat? It seems like every other lancer, gladiator, marauder and dragoon is super elite or teh bestest evah. You almost never see a struggling soldier or a fresh recruit Red Badge-ing it up out there. Just lots and lots of hyper-competency.

 

 

Meet Klynzahr!.... no seriously.

 

She is a career gladiator, adventurer, and odd jobs girl, who can barely scratch the level of mediocre in combat. The fact that she has lived to be almost thirty can be explained by her strong sense of self preservation, which has seen her beating many an ignominious retreat. It is debatable if she is a complete coward, or simply knows when she is in over her head.

 

 

It definitely leads to some interesting RP moments, because no one expects their 'tank' to turn tail and run in the middle of a RP scene, or a 'veteran gladiator' to be out maneuvered by an amateur. Better yet it leaves her with miles of room for character growth and development, unlike most sixteen year old geniuses*.

 

 

As for what I would like to see more of... I will echo what others have already mentioned. I would love to see more frequent portrayals of how harsh Eorzea can be. This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with character death. It has more to do with the acknowledgement of danger, hardship and their effects on a character's mental state.

 

I would like to see more characters who have experienced hunger and constantly harbor the fear of starvation in the back of their minds.

 

I would like to see more characters, who have been forced from their homes and remain deeply affected by the loss.

 

I would like to see more characters who have lost someone close to them in battle and find themselves wondering if a friend will return each time they step outside the city walls.

 

I guess what I am saying is that danger and struggle can be portrayed very realistically, without ever removing your character from their cozy city home. The key lies in allowing hardships from their past and the struggles around them to influence their actions and world views.

*Disclaimer: As with anything, there are ways to play the sixteen year old genius type very well and very badly. It can be more difficult finding room to grow but it is certainly not impossible.

 

Klyn is better than Evangeline with a sword. I guess that makes Evangeline less than mediocre.

 

Sounds right T_T.

[Klynzahr]

 

Klyn is better than Evangeline with a sword. I guess that makes Evangeline less than mediocre.

 

Sounds right T_T.

 

I'm not sure that Klynzahr actually is a better sword fighter than Evangeline. The one time that they did spar Klynzahr only won because she could take multiple direct blows without toppling over.

 

:dazed:

 

Considering that Eva landed the first blow, out feinted Klyn three times, and socked her in the jaw before being decked by a single hit....

[Jana]

Jana keeps worrying about making Klyn freak out in combat. ;w;

 

To be more on topic, I guess I'll second the "trying to get by" posts. Until very recently, Jana was succeeding as an adventurer but getting by on flatbread and water while actually out on the field. Doesn't make sense to spend money on fancy food when an adventurer needs supplies!

[Zanther]

Combatant characters who aren't good at combat? It seems like every other lancer, gladiator, marauder and dragoon is super elite or teh bestest evah. You almost never see a struggling soldier or a fresh recruit Red Badge-ing it up out there. Just lots and lots of hyper-competency.

 

 

Well, my own char is a bit over 30 and in reality does not like combat unless he needs to. As a Sch, he has gotten decent at healing and such and can fight as a Rogue/Ninja but that is more rare and from an ic role, hes not the best but I will try and get a rp going where he will be trained better in combat, thus letting him grow and maybe participate in Rune/Grindstone matches someday.

 

 

Also taking about hardship, my char has nearly died a few times, according to his backstory at least, and he accidently caused the death of a few people (to include his own mother) once in his mid-teens cause he was not thinking about his actions, so I at least keep alive that the world is not safe, same goes for the Rp group I recently joined up with.

[Addison]

I have been thinking lately of how rare it is that I see people playing illiterate characters, even though literacy is considered rare in Eorzea.

 

You know, I've seen this stated in the forums here a few times while looking around and I'm a little confused about it. Is there anything in-game that supports the idea of a large number of illiterate people? Because... so far... all I've seen are examples of people being pretty literate in general. Books, logs, journals, letters, etc... all being passed around in quests.... Signs and posters on the walls... Wearable "reading glasses".... Books decorating buildings... etc...

 

There's also a statement in the Hyur character creation about how Midlanders are taught to read very young or "trained in letters from infancy" if you will.

 

The only thing I've seen to support illiteracy in game was a one-off statement from a game dev without much elaboration (or racial/regional/cultural specifics). Curious if anyone here could point to more examples from in-game text/lore to support this at all?

 

I'd LOVE to know though, because I'm thinking of having my character be pretty literate... or perhaps a "book nerd" if you will. It would be nice to know how odd/rare that kind of thing actually is amongst people (or Lalafell specifically) so I can RP appropriately.

This is something I don't get, either. We have that statement from the Dev saying that literacy is rare... yet we have so many quests where we're passing notes around for people. Or putting up notices/posters. And then there's the actual Moogle Delivery Quests. And the 'newspaper' NPC's that pop up for some events. There's only one NPC (quest out in the Gold Bazaar) that I've ever encountered that, when trying to give them a flyer for work, actually said "I can't read". Everyone else, you give them a piece of paper and they read it.

 

On the topic of literacy...

 

For me, personally, MMO spaces are by-and-large a small taste of what's actually going on. What we see on our screens is but a small example of what the world might actually be if it were going to transfer into reality.

 

A city-state like Ul'Dah might only have a couple hundred of NPCs we as PCs can interact with when we load up FFXIV, but I'm willing to bet if Ul'Dah translated into the real world, it could hold several thousand people that we will never see in game.

 

To fully populate a game to make it feel like a real place (yay immersion!), it would require a lot of resources both from the development team and on our hardware. SE has done a pretty good job with populating areas with NPCs, whether they serve a mechanical function for our PvE experience or not, so that areas don't look so empty.

 

Remember, there's a ton of doors that we can't open. There's places we physically can't put our characters. There's mountains we can't climb and oceans we can't swim in.

 

So just because the NPCs we primarily interact with are literate doesn't mean the whole population, or even the implied population we don't see, is wholly literate. Or even the majority literate. Educated and literate people are easier to write into a story because the creators making those characters are educated and literate.

 

Besides, would you really trust a guy who tells you the fate of the world rests in your hands and you have to slay the primal -whoever- for -whatever reason- when the guy couldn't be bothered to learn how to write his own name? I certainly wouldn't.

[Aya]

Remember, there's a ton of doors that we can't open. There's places we physically can't put our characters. There's mountains we can't climb and oceans we can't swim in.

This post so much! Most of the "real" world of our MMO-world exists within our imagination.  If one were to take the game space's layout literally, then the majority of Ul'dah's land area is the six and a half or so wards of the Goblet, but we know that can't be true.  Taking the actual game world as a literal limitation on the setting is to miss out on the breadth and beauty of an MMO's world. 

 

I tend to spend a lot of time making up areas and places in Ul'dah, and that's a big part of why, I just imagine it as a mighty canvas upon which we can color with our imaginations, and provided our designs are in sync with the overall feel and sense of the place, we can contribute to the collective world of Eorzea.

[Blue]

There is a good lack of people that spend their time working/thriving to make a living. Most of people I see around are going to a party of having a drink at the local pub. WHEN DO YOU MAKE ALL THAT MONEY YOU'RE SPENDING!?

 

For once, I'd like to hear someone ICly complaining about the upcoming bills/taxes and not knowing how to make up for it. The Sheriff of Eorzeangham will come at your door too one day.

 

Honestly, the only thing I'd like to see is people being more welcoming towards each other. Even with the moderate racial tensions, Eorzeans seem to get along with each other better than the RPC user base does.

 

I feel the whole opposite of that. Most of RP characters I interact with are overly friendly and tend to share TMI/open up/trust a stranger waaaay too easily. I think this is mostly due to the OOC knowledge that nothing bad can possibly happen to their character without their consent, and also OOC wish to hook up/make connections easily and asap. I'm obsessed with realism and try to keep my interactions with a RL-related mind, so I tend to distrust strangers/people who walk up to me until given reason not to, but I understand why not many would go with this method in RP.

[Addison]

There is a good lack of people that spend their time working/thriving to make a living. Most of people I see around are going to a party of having a drink at the local pub. WHEN DO YOU MAKE ALL THAT MONEY YOU'RE SPENDING!?

 

For once, I'd like to hear someone ICly complaining about the upcoming bills/taxes and not knowing how to make up for it. The Sheriff of Eorzeangham will come at your door too one day.

 

Somewhat unrelated, but this post made me think of it...

 

My RP experiences here have been limited, but something that always boggled my mind about other RP communities I've been a part of is that some PCs do nothing but sit around and drink at the local tavern. They drink, they go home, they sleep it off, they come back the next night.

 

But they still look like Photoshopped super models.

 

Seriously, how do you drink all those excess calories and still have a 6 pack? Or bulging arms? Or a waist so tiny that makes Barbie jealous?

[Lilia Lia]

I'd like to see more religious RP.  We have a whole pantheon of Gods and the most I ever see anyone saying is "by the Twelve!"

[Virella]

I'd like to see more religious RP.  We have a whole pantheon of Gods and the most I ever see anyone saying is "by the Twelve!"

Feel free to walk into Virella one day, you will be lectured on Halone within 5 seconds. Everything is By the Fury this, Her x, Halone's blessing, Fury permits ect. Granted I haven't met many other religious nutcakes yet. Wtb more!

[Caspar]

I'm glad that a lot of people mentioned the existence of NPCs and areas that we don't meet or experience. I think that a lot of people on here confuse the exceptional with the mundane due to the fact that frankly, most people seem to not want to play those sorts of mundane "normal peasant craftsman" roles, and I don't blame them. For many the heroic aesthetic of FFXIV is appealing; players want to be larger than life, even if they don't RP the WoL. To play something that you could play in almost any medieval fantasy or even historical medieval setting is not something the average player is looking for. If you are, that's good, and I'm glad you can have fun doing it, and standing out from the crowd a little, but I really do understand the desire to play combative, heroic, or otherwise distinguished characters. Players want to be exceptional, or at the very least very good at something. This should not be a surprise given the typical content of both video game and pen and paper RPGs. Why count on PCs to populate your world with layfolk when NPCs you create or the game provides do that for you?

 

It's not necessarily fun to suck. Sometimes being noncom narrows your RP opportunities, or being incompetent at your profession makes it difficult for you to interact with others outside of a mentoring role. Naturally you can turn these into opportunities, if you're creative enough, but if you're not able to come up with ideas or have a limited pool of players to interact with, even being illiterate constrains your character's option. That's why while I sometimes wish the player demographics reflected the setting, I'm not too bothered by the fact that they don't.

 

When something that is supposed to be rare, such as male miqote, is common in game because of players' tastes, I accept that and roll with it. I just assume that my character is seeing a disproportionately large number of them because of the social circles she is in. I've only made one male Miqote NPC for an event once, and he was not used because none of the PCs looked for him. Almost all the others conformed to demographics of the locale. When the PCs are exceptional, I introduce placeholder NPCs with backgrounds based as much in the lore as I can to balance them out.

 

The other thing that probably provokes this disconnect from the setting is the nature of the story players want to tell. If they wish to play a gritty story, they might make their character heavily flawed and fallible in combat; if they do not, they might make them extremely potent in their abilities or have superhuman, uncanny abilities. In old Dream Pod 9 games, campaigns could be adjusted based on the type of campaign your group is excited to play. "Gritty" for lasting injuries, sudden death, and severe challenges to a meager skillpool. "Adventurous" for being able to achieve some things that are improbable in real life, or survive injuries that would normally be a death sentence through some contrivance or luck. "Cinematic" for featuring larger than life heroes who accomplish great things and overcome insurmountable odds with grit and unbelievable skill. In an ideal world we would all be able to fit at the same comfortable level as one another, but in reality, the only real way to reconcile the difference between the players who want to know exactly how much water you have on that trip into the Sagoli and the players who are more interested in the antlion fight at the end of the adventure is just through judicious choice of who you play with. I'd like to think most of you are flexible enough to play with anyone, but maybe sometimes you just can't tell the kind of story you want to without having actual flesh and blood people behind every merchant and lowly peasant with speaking dialogue. For me, it's enough to keep the camera lens focused narrowly on the players, and assume things that happen offscreen take care of the nitty gritty of real life, until I want to actually play those events myself. 

 

Anyway, sorry for rambling. I'm perfectly fine not paying my character's taxes. (She's a vagrant and probably doesn't pay them anyway...)

 

I think a thing I'd like to see more of in the game that is common but rare among players is internal discrimination. What I mean by this is PCs who do apply to the norm of their race pressuring those who do not to conform. If a lot of players are out of the ordinary, and those who play ones who are ordinary OOC are raising an eyebrow at this, it'd be cool to see them step up to the plate and exert pressure on the exceptions more heavily. There's a lot of talk about the racism in Eorzea and that would be interesting to see more of. But I also think that cultural norms in the setting work when the average person enforces them. Aggressively suspecting a loner of being a heretic in ishgard, or Ul'dahns who don't give two shites about money being laughed at. 

 

Another thing I'd like to see is more crime RP, such as theft and swindling. Not just theft for a good cause, but legitimate greedy crime done for one's own sake. Of course, be polite and ask if it's fine with the other player to pickpocket them; I think a lot of RPers would relish the opportunity to chase or try to negotiate with a criminal, and RPers of law enforcement such as Blades or Yellowjackets would have more to do. A murderer PC can kill NPCs they've created if there is nobody available who is looking to retire a PC, which brings me ramblingly to another point; there seem to be a lot of players who want to retire characters for one reason or another, and I figure character death can be a convenient solution to that urge to stop playing someone in favor of that shiny new Au Ra. Maybe players could get together and arrange a dramatic, or for the grittier stories, sudden, death. I've always felt that a person is killed randomly, or suddenly; a character only dies when that becomes their purpose.

[Darien Cadell]

I'd like to see more RPers take into account how ruthless the world is. Life spans are short and death is around every corner.

 

I'm curious to know in what form you'd like this representation to take, because I'm going to assume you're not necessarily advocating for arbitrary player character deaths.

 

For me, I just like to see it in backgrounds affected by loss. In some other games/worlds, the orphan/lost family trope is so overdone it hurts. Here, I'd expect the "I still have all my family members living" ideal to be painfully rare.

 

As far as I'm concerned, though, I don't really need to see loss roleplayed more. It seems to be very well balanced. The player characters who still have their families seem to know they're lucky and play up their luckiness. The player characters who've lost people close to them are numerous, and that's exactly as it should be.

 

For most things that have been stated by Lore Devs to be common yet aren't, such as illiteracy and not-Miqos, I figure the reason we don't see it in the adventuring community is because of situational appeal. Adventurers find it appealing to be literate. Miqo'te find it appealing to be adventurers. I don't really see any need to change those things in the general RP community. For the RPers who aren't going the adventure-ish route, the more power to them! But I don't see any need to change the way things are done currently.

 

I say we could use more of anything that people find inspiring for their RP, whether that's coming up with where they get the money for their drunken shenanigans, the state of their character's religious beliefs and how to portray traditions, or whether or not they can get away with slitting the purse of that big guy at the bar. That's all we need more of.

[Flickering Ember]

I have been thinking lately of how rare it is that I see people playing illiterate characters, even though literacy is considered rare in Eorzea.

 

You know, I've seen this stated in the forums here a few times while looking around and I'm a little confused about it. Is there anything in-game that supports the idea of a large number of illiterate people? Because... so far... all I've seen are examples of people being pretty literate in general. Books, logs, journals, letters, etc... all being passed around in quests.... Signs and posters on the walls... Wearable "reading glasses".... Books decorating buildings... etc...

 

There's also a statement in the Hyur character creation about how Midlanders are taught to read very young or "trained in letters from infancy" if you will.

 

The only thing I've seen to support illiteracy in game was a one-off statement from a game dev without much elaboration (or racial/regional/cultural specifics). Curious if anyone here could point to more examples from in-game text/lore to support this at all?

 

I'd LOVE to know though, because I'm thinking of having my character be pretty literate... or perhaps a "book nerd" if you will. It would be nice to know how odd/rare that kind of thing actually is amongst people (or Lalafell specifically) so I can RP appropriately.

This is something I don't get, either. We have that statement from the Dev saying that literacy is rare... yet we have so many quests where we're passing notes around for people. Or putting up notices/posters. And then there's the actual Moogle Delivery Quests. And the 'newspaper' NPC's that pop up for some events. There's only one NPC (quest out in the Gold Bazaar) that I've ever encountered that, when trying to give them a flyer for work, actually said "I can't read". Everyone else, you give them a piece of paper and they read it.

 

I have to say for things like this, I don't go by what the dev tells me. I go by one very important phrase in fiction:

 

"Show, don't tell."

 

Now I know fernhalwes is a pretty swell and cool dude. He's given us tons of infos and lore. 

If the author is totally insistent about their character or an element being a certain way, say for example, someone like George Lucas, and this conflicts from what we see in the story. What am I going to believe in as the audience?

 

What is being shown to me of course!

 

(Not a perfect example, I know, but it's 4 am T_T)

[Michikyou]

• How things are actually dangerous in the world. Did you know Diremite venom can dissolve people in minutes?
  
• More tribal roleplay - I know, this is a sensitive topic with Miqo'te, but Tribes are there for a reason, right? How is it that over 70% of miqo'te I have met were raised in a city...
  
• As others have said - some illiterate roleplayers would be nice.
  
• Acknowledgement of city state laws and the like while in those territories.
  
• More.. 'everymans'?
  

[Kellach Woods]

I'm kinda not into the whole "why aren't people playing everymans" because the very definition of everymans requires the player to ignore 90% of what's happening and just say "Sigh life is hard" without the power to do anything about it.

 

Now imagine if ALL your RP was essentially going to the Quicksand and lament that life is hard because taxes etc. what-have-you.

 

You'd get bored of it but more importantly many others would get bored of it and just not accost you anymore. And since you're an everyman you can't exactly pop up elsewhere! It's not like an everyman would travel to Limsa on a whim, or Gridania.

 

Anything that happens to that person immediately makes them a not-exactly-everyman, doubly so if they decide to do something about it.

[Caspar]

I have been thinking lately of how rare it is that I see people playing illiterate characters, even though literacy is considered rare in Eorzea.

 

You know, I've seen this stated in the forums here a few times while looking around and I'm a little confused about it. Is there anything in-game that supports the idea of a large number of illiterate people? Because... so far... all I've seen are examples of people being pretty literate in general. Books, logs, journals, letters, etc... all being passed around in quests.... Signs and posters on the walls... Wearable "reading glasses".... Books decorating buildings... etc...

 

There's also a statement in the Hyur character creation about how Midlanders are taught to read very young or "trained in letters from infancy" if you will.

 

The only thing I've seen to support illiteracy in game was a one-off statement from a game dev without much elaboration (or racial/regional/cultural specifics). Curious if anyone here could point to more examples from in-game text/lore to support this at all?

 

I'd LOVE to know though, because I'm thinking of having my character be pretty literate... or perhaps a "book nerd" if you will. It would be nice to know how odd/rare that kind of thing actually is amongst people (or Lalafell specifically) so I can RP appropriately.

This is something I don't get, either. We have that statement from the Dev saying that literacy is rare... yet we have so many quests where we're passing notes around for people. Or putting up notices/posters. And then there's the actual Moogle Delivery Quests. And the 'newspaper' NPC's that pop up for some events. There's only one NPC (quest out in the Gold Bazaar) that I've ever encountered that, when trying to give them a flyer for work, actually said "I can't read". Everyone else, you give them a piece of paper and they read it.

 

I have to say for things like this, I don't go by what the dev tells me. I go by one very important phrase in fiction:

 

"Show, don't tell."

 

Now I know fernhalwes is a pretty swell and cool dude. He's given us tons of infos and lore. 

If the author is totally insistent about their character or an element being a certain way, say for example, someone like George Lucas, and this conflicts from what we see in the story. What am I going to believe in as the audience?

 

What is being shown to me of course!

 

(Not a perfect example, I know, but it's 4 am T_T)

That's a good point. Despite his word, nobody bought Greedo shooting first, so Word of God only goes so far if it makes no waves in the game itself.