Melkire Posted August 25, 2014 Share #26 Posted August 25, 2014 Experience born of character history, I feel, should be the deciding factor in how much your characters knows and is capable of. That's been a recurring theme throughout many of the responses in this thread: "Would X character have had time to dedicate to this, and did they? Do they still practice?" I play Osric as a thief-turned-assassin-turned-fighter. He's spent over a decade working with small arms (and by small, I mean cloak-and-dagger small), and approximately half that time training as a pugilist. He is a very recent and very fresh monk. Every now and then I throw a scene out into the public space so that his practicing is visible: maybe he's pummeling a dummy, or sitting around with a whetstone sharpening his blades, etc. He also has a few scant months' worth of experience with an axe, and it shows in how badly he handles one. It's flashy, sure, but it's atrocious in how not-practical and inefficient he is with such a weapon. With everything else, this character falls flat on his face. Can't handle a sword beyond pick-up-and-swing. Absolute garbage with a bow: he's liable to shoot himself in the foot. The intricacies of a lance are so far beyond him that the basics are a good mile out of view. And don't get me started on magic: he doesn't understand it, he doesn't want to, it's some "unknowable" thing to him and beyond the vague similarities in aetheric manipulation between monks and thaumaturges he'll never so much as know what it feels like to handle magic. That's just the War and Magic disciplines. ICly, he's not well-versed in any Hand or Land applications (I will eventually get fishing and culinarian leveled to reflect what meager background he has there). He's a complete mess who wouldn't be able to support himself, let alone others, were it not for the demand for able-bodied fighters that landed him with the Flames. Even if I wanted to get more disciplines worked into his skillset ICly - which I don't - I wouldn't be able to justify them. Practice, practice, practice: you have to practice to stay on-form. There's simply not enough time in a day for a character to maintain that level of skill for that many disciplines. Link to comment
Antain Posted August 25, 2014 Share #27 Posted August 25, 2014 Vaughn has been, and always will be, a bit of a rogue. This is a ten-year-old character, and it's been a lot of fun figuring out the things this character can do from his origin as an elf from Alfheim (the light elves that have glowing auras, bastard children of Baldr), to slave-turned-pirate captain, to his current incarnation of a combination of both pasts reworked to fit in with FFXIV lore. That said, RPing multiclass jobs isn't much of a stretch. He has his talents and his weaknesses. Originally, he was a master thrower. Anything ranged, he is a (near)perfect shot. Wildwoods having superior eyesight was only a bonus. But he can use blades with proficiency, as long as he can hold it in one hand. Bastard swords and larger he doesn't touch as they are longer than his arm, which to him seems unnecessary. And while in game he is level 50 in both WHM and BLM, he technically is a very crappy mage. Because of a story point, which allowed him to be able to manipulate aether to begin with, he has all the power of a developed mage but the inability to control it. Some of the most interesting RP I've had was when his magic goes haywire ("Suddenly wind!"). He got better! Though, not much... He also doesn't see "Jobs" as being a Bard, or White Mage, or anything like that. A job is what you do that makes you money, and class is your status in society. When in an RP and asked about his Job, he replies with "Secretary of a safe house." When he gets funny looks and asked about his class, he's a "former companion," a status that (to him) is below beggar. And, as such these points, he acts like it. While OOCly he's dabbling in every class/job, ICly he's just a jittery, mentally unstable mess of a commoner. Link to comment
Roswyn Posted August 25, 2014 Share #28 Posted August 25, 2014 This is addressed by designing and finalizing the character archetype you want to play before you even begin RPing. Just because the game has been designed to have a literal buffet of things you can hit a button and change into at character select doesn't mean its even remotely within the realm of possibility for your character to have all of them. In fact, some jobs are just not accessible to PC's at all or if they are it's in a limited form. Something I end up seeing a lot of folk doing, and I have been guilty of myself in the past, is stacking the deck as they PvE through whatever game they are playing. Things like this: "Huh. When I knew her she wasn't an master alchemist, cook, OR Monk for that matter.." Firstly, let's address the fact that becoming a Master of anything in this game, in my mind, is a lifetime achievement. I don't believe a character will pick-up a sword, bow, alembic etc at 13 years of age and have mastery of the craft by 20 and move on to master another art. It's difficult and limiting to retain this painfully normal set of limits but I feel it's necessary to have a well-rounded and believable character. This being said, it's been stated lore-wise that certain crafts are just more difficult than others to pick up the basics of. It's feesable to be a layman in Arcanima and recognize symbols and whatnot but be unable to cast all but the simplest poison spell BUT at the same time be able to weave conjury decently. Where I tend to have issues is when people say they are multiple jobs ICly all at the ripe age of 21. Just no. You're not. I really wonder when all these things happened in the characters time frame. They had time to master all these jobs, have a child, master a profession, and still be a Second Lt. in the Order of the Twin Adder. ??? Does time just not pass at the same rate for these folk? What is really going to sting is when new classes come out. I, myself, will need to gut my character for rogue because that is how the character was originally envisioned and archery was taken as substitute. She will be no where near as skilled with a bow as she is now. Link to comment
Chika Ito Posted August 26, 2014 Share #29 Posted August 26, 2014 I'm going to agree with some of the people here that just because you gain an out of character class/job doesn't mean you have to carry it over in character. I've encountered several folks who have done this. When you obtain so many extraordinary skills, and abilities, (and can basically do every single thing that is epic and amazing!) it actually makes people feel very discouraged, and intimidated. In my time playing this game I have spoken to several people who avoid people who have a lot of powers/abilities/skills/etc because they feel like their character isn't good enough. I think it was pointed out earlier in this thread that if someone has so much power compared to someone who has so little the person with the incredible powers and skills will always be picked. In turn pushing the 'less skilled' person aside. I don't think characters should have immense kick ass powers, because sometimes it leads to the attitude of 'You cannot hurt my character! I'll squish yours though ' I've seen it in other games. So I understand peoples hesitance to include over powered characters. Chika has been training as a pugilist for about twenty-three years, and an arch for seventeen years. These classes go hand in hand within the game, and obviously you have to know how to protect yourself if you are disarmed. She's does fairly well in both, but there is always room for improvement. Making your character have only a few, or limited, powers/skills/abilities includes room for character development. Link to comment
Zyrusticae Posted August 26, 2014 Share #30 Posted August 26, 2014 "Realism" is generally not something with which I concern myself when it comes to choosing how experienced a character is. "Verisimilitude" or "Plausibility," the more-subjective younger-brothers of realism, don't come up as much either, given how widely audience expectations can vary in both counts. Generally, I do one of two things with my characters when I want them to have multiple skillsets: 1. Play them as old enough that Western roleplayers would find their knowledge of multiple skillsets to be plausible. A shame given the emphasis on youthful prodigies in these kinds of games, but the game itself isn't my audience. 2. Play them as incompetent enough that I can have them learn skillsets over the course of roleplay, rather than presume prior abilities. In both cases, my primary concern is audience expectations. It requires a bit of legwork at first to figure out what the general trends in an RP community are with regards to what is and isn't considered acceptable, but it yields better results for me than hewing to an outside standard of realism that may be challenged the instant I attempt to do something. I generally don't have an issue with powerful characters, but then again, I spent a lot of time RPing in CoH where those were the norm ("You're a super-soldier from another dimension with a bow that shoots archers, who have bows that shoot witches? Cool. I rewrite minds with a thought for a living. Wanna get pancakes?"). The trick is to make sure that the power isn't a Solution for Everything and that you have appropriate weaknesses and flaws. After all -- and at the risk of invoking Comic Book Fan Ire -- even Superman is interesting when the stories focus on his flaws, and Marvel's made a business out of showing really powerful people laid low by sidethinking and their own problems. With that in mind, I personally try to write any character that's powerful in one area as having significant weaknesses in other areas. If they have ways to circumvent those weaknesses, those workarounds have their own problems -- they're fragile, difficult to employ, and most importantly don't bring the character up to the skill of someone who learned it and practices it "the hard way." The more powerful a character is, the more and more severe the weaknesses I apply to them are. Another approach that works, especially in conjunction with the "balancing weaknesses" approach, is to "turn down" the "RP power" of things your character does but isn't specialized in. Just because you have the class at 50 doesn't mean you have to RP it with that level of power. You could call yourself a "dabbler" who has some training, but not a high level (or even largely competent level) of expertise. What informs both of these approaches is viewing character skill from a different tabletop RPG standpoint -- your "class" is just points in a skill, and you have a finite number of points. To me, it's not like D&D-style multi-classing, but instead just sticking a couple of points here and there to reflect limited expertise (a "White Wolf" approach, for those familiar with the system). You put a lot of points into your specialty, but you don't have enough points to specialize in a lot of fields. As a side note, it may just be me, but I largely don't care about the age of characters. Final Fantasy heroes are typically quite young compared to Western fantasy heroes with rare exception. As long as there's a narrative explanation for the skill displayed and the character fits into normal FF age ranges (16+, typically) I accept it as a trope of the setting. I like these posts. These are nice posts. Thanks to these, I don't have too much to add. I will say that, in the setting, it is essentially canon that all PCs are Warriors of Light, possess the Echo, and thus correspondingly have Hydaelyn's blessing, which means by their very nature they should be powerful. That's not to say that those who are RPing normal and/or powerless individuals are doing it wrong, but that it's certainly within a player's right to make their player noticeably more powerful than, perhaps, characters from other MMORPGs you may have played. That being said, the Armory system is really not very well-explained within the game lore, especially within the context of a young 20-something being able to achieve mastery in everything in the game. And that's unfortunate, because it means we, as a community, effectively have to figure this stuff out for ourselves. Personally, I am perfectly okay with a 16-year-old being an utterly amazing, badass Warrior thanks in large part to Hydaelyn's blessing... if that's all they're really good at. There's a sliding scale to this sort of thing, a gauge of verisimilitude and believability that everyone has to read for themselves and figure out where they stand, and measure their expectations accordingly. Some players' place on this scale will clash with others, and that's just the nature of the beast, and the intersection of lore with game mechanics will naturally produce this kind of conflict. So, you know, go nuts! Within reason. There's no hard and fast rules to be had here, just general guidelines. But even if you only just follow the guidelines laid out within this thread, you should find yourself in a good place, I would think. Link to comment
Aduu Avagnar Posted August 28, 2014 Share #31 Posted August 28, 2014 I play Nako as what could probably be considered a Red Mage from other games in the series, his skill with Magic are broad, but he cannot master any of them, I play this as a choice, he would much rather be verstatile and be able to turn his hand to many things, than to master one, and have it fail him. The skills he has picked up in life are the three schools of Magic, archery and swordplay. and even then if he was in a contest or fight with a practitioner of any of those arts, he would most likely lose if he had to rely purely on them. dependant on skill/experience of the oponent, Nako was 35 at the begining of ARR, and as a soldier has been in war/combat situations where he has had to use his skills. Link to comment
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