So You Wanna Start Roleplaying In FFXIV

(Specifically, On Crystal Data Center)

But It Sounds Really Scary And You're New And How Does This Even Work Anyway?:

A FAQ

By Nevivi Nevi/Lenneth Andrew of Balmung
Discord: Nevi#1505
Feel free to contact me regarding questions, typos, additions, etc.!

• Chevron Down

Introduction

So, you've heard about this roleplay business that happens in FFXIV, and you're interested, but you've never done it. Or you've done it, but only in other games. Or you've done it, but only outside of an MMORPG. Fear not, we all started somewhere, and that's fine! This FAQ, now updated to a carrd since that's what all the cool kids are using, will aim to get you off on the right foot, with a good grasp of how RP works, what most RPers generally expect of each other, and even some of the finer points on things like making the user interface work for you, inter-player conflict resolution, and handling RP anxiety (spoilers: almost everybody has it, I promise it's not just you).

Not sure which server you should even be creating a character on? There's a FAQ for that too. Click right here and check out So You Want To RP In FFXIV But Balmung/Mateus Are Locked: A FAQ. (Yes, it still works even if they're not locked. And yes, I'll be updating it to a carrd version at some point as well.)

Don't let the FAQ's length trick you into fearing that RP is complicated or hard! It's actually surprisingly simple to get into, and new people start RPing successfully all the time. This writeup is meant to be comprehensive, but if you don't need or care about every last detail, you can skim or skip around as you see fit.

Prefer the published Google document version? That still exists and it can always be found at https://tinyurl.com/FFXIVRPFAQ.

At any time, you can use the down arrow button at the bottom of a page to move to the next chapter in sequence, or in the header and footer, the home button will return you to the top of the carrd, and the location pin button will take you directly to the Table of Contents.

• Chevron Down

Table of Contents

For ease of not having a thousand fiddly links for me to format and you to accidentally fat-finger if you're on a phone, only the chapter titles are actual links.

• Chevron Down

Changelog

To-Do List

• Chevron Down

Chapter 1: How Does Roleplaying In FFXIV Work?

Rule Zero: There are always exceptions. There are always cases where the right thing to do is what the FAQ explicitly says to not do. And I'm not the boss of you, or the lore, or any part of the community, and I don't even want to be. And for that matter, nobody else is, either. If something doesn't work for you, that's fine! Throw it out and do it your way! The goal is to have fun, and if something's not fun for you or someone you're RPing with, figure out how to make it fun and do that instead!There is no such thing as bad RP, only RP you don't want to do.

Alright. Now that that's out of the way...

Let's start from the start, for conversation's sake. Roleplaying (often abbreviated to RPing) is, basically, acting as a character, with others also acting as their characters, to write stories together. It's social, it's fun, and there are countless venues to do it in: playing with toys as kids, play-by-post in forums, via social media, in person at LARPs and historical reenactments, and inside online games. MMORPGs have had a rich history of in-game roleplaying since the days of text-based MUDs (multi-user dungeons), and they're still going strong, 40+ years later.

Of course, every different venue ends up with its own community and general expectations, and FFXIV's Crystal Data Center is no different. (While I'd love to address the RP situation on every Data Center, I've only played on Crystal, so I can't really speak to the other Data Centers.) Even if you're an old pro RPing on WoW, Second Life, Wildstar, or any other online scene, you'll likely have a little adapting to do.

1.a. A little vocabulary before we get started...

Like any hobby, of course, there's some jargon that RP in FFXIV uses. Most of it is common to other forms of RP, as well, but for clarity's sake, I'll go over all of it together. Many of these terms are also used in search information.

1.b. No, really, how does RP work, in practice?

Most simply? You type your character's words and actions, and the people around you respond in kind with their character's words and actions. FFXIV offers two general ways of doing this: you can directly type (if you're in another chat mode, such as /party or /alliance, first enter /say or /s to change back to local chat), which will place your text exactly as you enter it directly after your character name…

Lenneth Andrew: "And how have you been?" Lenneth asks, having a seat next to Nevivi on the couch. He has a book in one hand, something about arcanima if the cover is any indication, and a drink in the other.

Or you can emote, using /emote or /em, which will display it as a custom emote. By default emotes use a different color, and they start with your character's name, but they don't use a colon, so you can make a singular sentence out of them to describe actions.

Nevivi Nevi laughs, raising her own glass of red wine in greeting before taking a drink. "Ain't too bad. Just been busy, mostly. Doctorin' never stops, people're always findin' new an' improved ways t' get themselves messed up."

You can also use ingame emotes, reposition your character, equip or remove pieces of gear, change your pose, and other little visual things for emphasis and immersion.

...And that's basically it, in a nutshell. The actual execution is pretty simple.

1.c. How do you meet people for RP?

That's the million-dollar question no matter where you go, isn't it? Generally speaking, there's a few easy ways to get into some in-character action as soon as possible. The simplest is to look for the gold RP tag in front of people's names — that's the easiest way to advertise that you're in-character. You can set your own tag two ways: the fast way is to type /roleplaying on, and boom, you're set! To turn it off, you can simply type /roleplaying off. Alternatively, you can set your status the longer way by pressing O (or whatever your Social window hotkey is), or navigating to the Social tab via the Options button on controller, and right-clicking/using the subcommand button on your own name. Choose to edit your search info, and then just use the dropdown menu to set your status to Looking for Roleplay.

While I can't at this point really recommend it as such, the most instant way to find people to RP with is to just head to the Quicksand, which is the bar at the Adventurer's Guild in Ul'dah, on either Balmung (more crowded, more sleazy) or Mateus (more sedate, less sleazy). In either case, there's sometimes some ongoing RP, though the Quicksand is also infamous for being a hub for ERP, short for erotic roleplay — which is exactly what it sounds like. I will come around to that subject much later (briefly and worksafe-ly, fear not), but the important thing to know is that sometimes non-explicit RP happens here as well, and you can strike up conversations with people here easily. The downside is that it's crowded, a lot of people simply lurk and wallflower hoping to be approached so you do need to be proactive, and the overall quality of what you can find is a very mixed bag. There's also a fair amount of open RP out the back door of the Quicksand, on Pearl Lane, which tends to focus on sketchy and/or criminal activities.

The Balmung Quicksand used to be somewhat better for walk-up RP, but when your reputation is 'the Goldshire of FFXIV,' a certain kind of person shows up in droves, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unless this is what you're looking for, at this point in time it's probably best to just give it a miss. (If it is what you're looking for, hey, no shade, you do you, and now you know where to go.)

Almost all other servers tend to congregate in Limsa Lominsa, due to its more convenient layout. If you're looking for open tavern RP outside of Balmung and Mateus, or you just want a quieter venue on those servers, try the Drowning Wench instead. The Carline Canopy in Gridania doesn't tend to see as much RP, but it does occasionally happen.

The longer way is to search out some event RP. FFXIV has an amazing number of player-run events, running the entire gamut from fairly standard bar and tavern nights, to live performances with synced music and emote-based dances, fight clubs, in-world educational lectures, organized sports, date auctions, street fairs, mercantile associations...if you can imagine it, someone is probably RPing it, and if they aren't, hey, new niche to fill if you ever get the event organizer bug yourself. The best place to start finding events is probably the FFXIV Event Calendar, which serves all Data Centers; there's also an associated Discord bot, which you can invite to your own Discord servers and set up to announce the day's events in whatever timezone works for you.

Another way you can pick up some RP friends and experience is to find a Free Company that's involved in RP and join in. There are countless active RP FCs with every flavor of writer out there, and a lot of the long plot arcs in FFXIV are FC-based. Granted, this does take some searching around, but meeting people casually via the other two ways is a good way to get a feel for what's out there and find opportunities to join FCs. The official Community Finder is a good resource for finding Free Companies of all sorts that are looking for recruits.

1.d. What's up with all the nightclubs? Is this what RP is really like?

In recent years, a lot of nightclub-style venues have popped up in FFXIV, often advertising live DJs and various Twitch stream activities. They tend to advertise rather aggressively in /shout in major cities, and you're likely to see several such advertisements just by sitting in any larger hub in the game, on any server. What are these, and are they good places to find RP partners?

In short: generally, no, they aren't likely places to meet new people to RP with. The nightclub scene is surprisingly separate from the long-term, plot-based, immersive RP scene; a lot of what goes on in nightclub venues is more akin to a party on Second Life, where people are dressed in fancy online avatars and may be behaving differently than they would at an in-person party, but they are still, essentially, themselves. They aren't so much writing a separate character as they are acting out an idealized version of themselves at an idealized version of a party.

This isn't a bad thing! It can be fun, and if you find that it's enjoyable for you, go for it. They certainly wouldn't be such popular places if there weren't good reasons to attend them. There are even likely more serious RPers there now and then, and you might even meet them. However, do keep in mind that there is a major difference between the two 'kinds' of RP, and that the nightclub/venue RP community isn't representative of the immersive RP community, as well as vice-versa. That being said, there are plenty of nightclubs and venues out there that do cater to immersive RPers, so an event being advertised as a club, party, or similar doesn't automatically mean that it isn't a viable immersive RP event. You can generally (though not always) tell the difference between the two by their advertising materials; an event with a carrd listing a bunch of online DJs with little further detail is less likely to be an immersive RP event than one listing all the various staff's complex backstories.

As you've probably surmised by now, this FAQ is about the immersive sort of RP, not the venue sort of RP-lite that goes on. From the outside, a lot of other FFXIV players don't realize there's a distinction, so you may unfortunately find yourself having to explain your hobby to confused friends that have assumed that you spend your free time ERPing at nightclubs for gil. Try tossing them this FAQ; they might read it, they might just end up with their eyes crossed, but either way hopefully they'll understand that not all RP is the same.

1.e. How do I format my search information to attract attention?

Search information is the second thing people generally notice about you, after your appearance. Yes, people really do read it! The top things you should most consider while writing a search comment are how you want to be contacted, what kind of RP you're looking for, and anything that should be noted about your character that isn't immediately visible on your in-game character model.

For example, if you really want to be sent a /t first, you aren't at all into any ERP and want to deter people fishing for it, and have a lot of off-model scars and an accent that would be immediately obvious to people in-world, you could write a search comment like this:

/t first, no ERP!
Ala Mhigan accent
Heavily scarred arms+chest

It's limited to 60 characters total over 4 possible lines, so you really have to make it work for you in the space you're given. (The above example uses all 60 characters, which is why "arms+chest" is formatted like that.) That being said, here are some PROTIPS for getting more than 60 characters out of it…

1.f. Adventurer plates

Adventurer plates are a newer addition to the game that allow you to spice up your presentation a little bit. You can take a portrait of your character, choose the frame, background, and other details, and state what kinds of gameplay you're looking for, as well as your active hours ingame. As far as text, it's quite limited, only displaying your search information comment, but for showing off your character's personality through posing, lighting, outfit, and layout, you can do a lot of really fun things.

1.g. How much of the game lore do I have to know before starting to RP?

Realistically, you will want to do your homework on this. FFXIV has some very deep worldbuilding, and the majority of the community on Crystal expects people to at least follow the lore within reason. Now, this doesn't mean that you 'aren't allowed' to RP until you've completed the entire game or anything like that. Far from it! But I do strongly recommend that you at least play A Realm Reborn (or watch the cutscenes at an inn room or on YouTube, or at least read a good synopsis, if you bought a plot skip) and get some feel for how everything works in-world before you simply jump in. Familiarity with other MMORPG settings won't get you terribly far with FFXIV's setting, as the laws of magic, how races are depicted, and other such fantasy tropes aren't the same.

This is a fairly large topic, so there's a whole section on it later on.

1.h. What if I'm on a Trial Account?

Free Trial players face a few extra restrictions that can impact RP. They aren't at all insurmountable, however, and other players are generally very understanding about Free Trial limitations, so don't worry that being unable to afford a subscription will lock you out of being able to RP. The following are the things that a Free Trial player cannot do, and a little bit about how that will affect your RP life.

For full details on how to start a Free Trial and how to download and install the client, read the official FAQ by Square Enix, which can be found by clicking right here.

• Chevron Down

Chapter 2: The Etiquette Of Playing Online Dollhouse

Of course, when you get a bunch of strangers together on the internet, there's got to be some kind of broad social contract to keep things working smoothly enough, and there is. It's largely unwritten, and mostly common sense, but it never hurts to go into it anyway, especially if you're new to it. A little preparation will save you on a lot of confusion later.

2.a. Ask, don't assume

You see two characters in a back alley, and one pulls a sword on the other and makes a demand: their gil or their blood. Now's your chance to leap into action and heroically fight off that attacker! Right? Well...no, not necessarily.

Just because you can see what someone else is typing doesn't mean that it's there for you. Granted, some people do live by that rule and if they're RPing in a public space and in public chat, they will let you jump right into their scene and roll with it. Others don't, however, and will be very put off that you interrupted their RP.

The simple solution here is to simply ask before you join. Just like we all learned in school, if you want to play with someone else's toys, you check with them before you grab at what they're playing with. They'll appreciate that you asked even if they say no, you won't have the awkwardness of having accidentally irritated people, you all win. (And if they get snippy with you for some reason, now you know that's not someone you probably wanted to interact with, and you've dodged a bullet.)

2.b. Communicate!

I'm going to be banging on the C word like a drum, so prepare yourself for that. Communication is absolutely everything. There are certainly online RP cultures where it's considered bad form to negotiate things OOC, and perhaps you've encountered those or have even RPed in them, but let me be very clear upfront: FFXIV is not one of those cultures. If you need to step away for a moment, let people know you're going AFK. If you're uncomfortable with something that comes up in RP, you can ask to steer the scene away from that topic. If there's something you really want to do in a scene, speak up and share your ideas. If you need clarification on what a character says or does, or even looks like, simply say so. Want to RP with someone again later? Say something, and maybe even offer some times that you're free!

For almost every problem that you encounter in RP, clear communication between RP partners can minimize or even completely resolve it. So go ahead, be upfront with your cool plot ideas, what your boundaries are, what your schedule is like, and how you feel about the latest happenings with your character. The better your lines of communication with your co-writers, the better a time you stand to have.

But what if someone refuses to communicate with you, or communicates poorly and wires get crossed? Don't worry, we'll touch on that later.

2.c. Mind the spotlight

When you have multiple people all writing without any central role to direct things, the balance of power regarding who's in the spotlight is tough to manage. Everyone wants a piece of it, of course, and everyone is entitled to have some time in it. However, keep in mind that it's a cooperative exercise, not a competition; if you find yourself fighting to be the center of every scene, take a step back and think over whether this is really fair to the other RPers around you. And, if it turns out that you feel you have to fight because everyone is fighting over being the center of attention...well, now, that's something to communicate with them about and see if you can't work something out. There's enough fun to go around! RP is not a limited resource.

On the other hand, if you find yourself in a group that seems centered around one character or one RPer, and you can't get any RP in edgewise unless it's about them, that's a red flag, and you might well want to consider getting out of that group.

2.d. Treat other RPers with respect

The majority of the FFXIV RP community is made up of adults. We've got busy lives and other responsibilities outside of RP. And that's good! That means that we're in a position that we should be able to deal with each other in a mature and respectful way. Yes, it's the internet, and that doesn't always go as planned, but if you make it a point to treat people well, you earn a reputation as someone who's enjoyable to be around. And that directly translates into your RP life, as well. For every character you see who seems to be RP-famous, what you don't see is that there's a person behind that character who's built and maintained all of those friendships. Fancy glamours, cool housing, big events, and powerful characters don't get you friends and RP; being a person that other people genuinely like to spend time with does.

2.e. The 'M Word'

Let's get it out in the open: yes, some people use mods for FFXIV, for measuring their performance in game content, making screenshots prettier, altering gear appearances, and using custom poses. No, this guide will not tell you how to do any of that. But if you do, do so considerately of others: taking unasked-for screenshots of others' characters using racy mods is the digital equivalent of taking upskirt phone shots on a bus. If others are fine with it, and you're fine with it, do whatever you like as long as it's private! But if not, keep that kind of business restricted to your own character only, otherwise you will rapidly build a deserved reputation as a creeper and can even be reported to the GM team. All kinds of modding are against the Terms of Service, and while there's a firm don't ask, don't tell culture about using parsers for content, using any mods to harass anyone, anytime, is a bannable offense. Just don't do it.

Also, keep in mind that certain modded screenshots can and will provoke GM action even outside of the game; people have been banned for producing adult images of underage characters in the game. This should go without saying, but use common sense, and don't do anything truly disgusting or illegal.

2.f. The twin sins of beginner RP: metagaming and godmodding

Metagaming is when you take out of character knowledge and apply it to in character situations. Plenty of RPers like to divulge more information about their character than yours could reasonably know, via artwork and creative writing and even just talking about them with you. Try to keep a hard division between your knowledge as a roleplayer and your character's knowledge in-world. Sometimes it can be hard to track what your character knows vs. what you know, so keeping a document of important in-character knowledge can help you with this (and also alleviate having to remember every single thing that they should know, but that you might easily forget).

Godmodding, on the other hand, is when you take control of others' characters in your writing. Don't do this, ever. Even in a fight scene, you can write in such a way that doesn't assume that any of your hits necessarily land, or that your opponent will react in any given way. This is also sometimes called godmoding instead; there isn't a functional difference between the terms. One term is from describing forum moderators using their influence as a moderator to get their way, the other is from godmode as commonly found in single-player games, but both describe the same thing.

For example, the following description turns the other character involved into nothing more than a puppet; it claims that he dodges incorrectly, and that the hit lands. Neither of these things are guaranteed to happen; a /random roll could go poorly for Lenneth, or if it's a freeform RP without random rolls, the other RPer just might decide to not get hit.

Lenneth Andrew throws a quick one-two feint, making his opponent dodge the wrong direction, before swinging a heavy right hook that connects hard with the other man's jaw.

This way, however, Lenneth takes exactly the same actions, but instead of declaring the result, the description merely declares his intent, and it's up to the other RPer to react however they see fit. Maybe he takes the hit, maybe he sees through the feint and dodges, or maybe he moves in some unexpected way and takes the hit in some other location.

Lenneth Andrew throws a quick one-two feint, hoping to distract his opponent, before swinging a heavy right hook straight for the other man's jaw.

Always leave room for other characters to actually react. That's all there is to it. You don't need any special verb tense tricks or anything; just remember that your control ends at the tip of your character's nose, and write accordingly.

Godmodding can and also frequently does involve making your own character practically invincible. Don't do this either. For as good as it feels to 'win' a fight, there's no actual 'win' or 'lose' in RP. If you get to RP something and it's entertaining to you, you win. You can lose tremendously in-character at any number of things and still have a fantastic roleplay scene even so.

2.g. *Teleports behind you* "Psssh...nothin personell...kid..."

Eventually it's going to happen: someone is going to do something to your character that you aren't cool with. They might give your character a grievous injury, claim to have secret knowledge about them, grab their assets in a way that you aren't comfortable with, or even straight-up say that they've killed your character. What do you even do?

Well, it's very simple: you tell them, "No, that doesn't happen."

At any point in RP, you can say no to something. Whatever the context, you still have full editorial control over your own character. You don't have to be injured, or kidnapped, or knocked out, or molested, or teleported against your will, or poisoned, or blackmailed, or spied on, or killed, or anything that you aren't good with happening. You can always, no matter what, reject someone else's actions on your character's person, and if that's not working, you can just pick up your toys and leave. In the heat of the scene moment, it's easy to forget this, but it never stops being true.

Even in the event that you're participating in a /random-based fight that you've consented to and you lose a roll, the other participants don't get to decide how injured you are, no matter what they write for description. While you shouldn't constantly no-sell attacks made against your character, it's your right to state just how hard they land and what happens as a result of them.

Of course, like any interaction, starting off politely is a great idea here. Something like, "Hey, that's not really something I want to have happen to my character," is a good line to keep in your back pocket just in case. If you have a reason why and feel like you want to explain, that's fine, but you don't really even need to do that much. The point is that RP entirely happens by consent, and you can revoke your consent on any detail at any time. Nobody can force you to roleplay or write anything at all that you don't consent to. Someone may be surprised, and might initially have some questions or objections, but if they resort to whining, guilting, browbeating, or otherwise being hostile about it, that's a red flag for controlling behavior.

If someone does want to do something drastic to your character, or if you want to do something drastic to their character, have an OOC chat first about what it is, how it'll happen, consequences, and anything else that might potentially need to be covered beforehand. If you're RPing with a group, let the group know that you've reached a consensus as well, so that they don't misinterpret the proceedings. This isn't even a matter of being overly attached to characters and wanting to coddle them, either: the vast majority of RPers have multiple other people they RP with and multiple plots they're part of, and getting sidelined can dramatically alter if not end other stories they're in, which can cause a disruptive ripple effect that goes surprisingly far.

2.h. The past is done (but also editable): Retcons

In the event that much later, you realize that something that was okay in RP at the time is no longer okay at all, you can still even say no to it after the fact. This is called a retcon, which is short for retroactive continuity. Opinions wildly vary about them — some people will retcon quite readily, and some people are proud that they've never once retconned in their lives and can't stand the concept alone. Ultimately, though, like any other RP tool in your toolbox, it's just a tool, and how you use it makes it 'good' or 'bad.'

It's fairly common to retcon characters out of each others' lives, for instance, if the characters and their RPers were both in a romantic relationship with each other, and ended up having a breakup. Other common reasons are new lore coming out that changes previous lore assumptions, a scene or arc becoming uncomfortable in hindsight, discovering that a participant in RP had ill intent and they're no longer welcome OOC, adjusting past events so that a new future direction can be taken with a story, or even just because it ended up unfun or somehow stifling.

Whatever the reason, if you're still in communication with the other(s) involved, it's only right to let them know that you want to make some changes, since this will affect their character(s) as well as yours. If they're not too happy and it's something that you're willing to compromise about in some way, you can negotiate with them to figure out a new timeline that works well enough for everyone. Sometimes you can't please everyone; that's just life. Do the best you can with the situation you have.

As far as how exactly to perform a retcon, there are a few ways, and you can always get creative with regards to the exact situation to come up with more.

• Chevron Down

Chapter 3: Crossing T's, Dotting I's, And Formatting Your Writing

Alright, so you write some text, you hit enter. Sounds simple enough, but there are some community conventions and game restrictions in play that are helpful to know before you really get going.

The majority of FFXIV RPers heavily favor something between sentence and single paragraph posts, with some going on to multi-paragraph. Due to chat box limitations, in-game RP is not a great venue for multi-paragraph RP. It can be made to work, of course, but most use it sparingly because of this, and also in order to keep the scene flowing for other RPers.

Script format is not generally used, and some RPers actually avoid script RPers. If you are used to script RP, this can take a little getting used to, but dust off your complete sentences and grammar, and you'll be fine. Actions should be fully written out; don't use asterisks, colons, or similar to denote what your character does. Write it like you would if your RP were sentences in a novel.

Third person (i.e. "He greets her.") is standard. First person RP (i.e. "I greet you.") is not only considered kind of strange and potentially creepy, as it often signifies that the writer has a poor grasp of the distinction between themselves and their character, but it also causes the /em command to read very awkwardly. For instance, in first person, an /em becomes something like, "Lenneth Andrew greets you. I put down my book and stand as you enter the room." In description and prose, refer to other characters as their names or pronouns, and do not use 'you.' Default emotes when targeted at other characters will appear in second person on the targeted character's end, such as "Lenneth Andrew pokes you." but this is acceptable because it's a system limitation, and everybody else sees it as "Lenneth Andrew pokes Nevivi Nevi."

3.a. How long should my posts be?

The hard limit to the number of characters that can be entered into the chat box at one time is 500. Entering commands to choose which channel you're speaking into will cause your posts to be slightly shorter, so for example, if you were to send a tell to someone using the text command, for example, /t C'atboy Tia@Balmung, this would take 23 characters including the space after the end, and leave you with 477 characters remaining. Say, party, linkshells, FC, tells, and yell can all be set to post directly into that chat mode, so you'll have the maximum of 500. Shout chat cannot be toggled on and off, only posted into one block of text at a time with /sh or /shout. This effectively limits your shouts to a maximum of 496 characters.

Macros are a special case; they only allow 180 characters per line, including text commands.

3.b. Say, yell, shout, party, and tell

RP almost entirely takes place within local /say chat, or sometimes in /party chat. /party chat is especially useful if you're in a large crowd and having difficulty picking your friends' messages out from the chat scroll, or if you're RPing a private scene in a public area and don't want eavesdroppers. Another common use of /party chat is to isolate OOC chatter from the IC action.

/yell and /shout chat are special cases. It's extremely rude to continually RP in either of them, as they are audible over much larger areas, and people not involved in your RP don't want to have it elbowing into their chat box. /say is roughly the distance to which you can zoom out your camera. /yell is roughly three times the radius of /say, and /shout will speak to the entire map that you're on. If you're inside housing, their areas still apply, but they only work inside that one house, room, or apartment. Events often will reserve the /yell channel for announcements, performances, and other official event host business, so using /yell (or /shout) during an event that's already using it is disruptive and should be generally avoided.

/tell is more private than party chat, even, and can be used in many of the same ways; it's only ever a two-person conversation, but it can also be very useful for reaching out to people privately in an OOC way in larger groups.

3.c. Verb tense

FFXIV RP uses either present tense (i.e. "He greets her.") or past tense (i.e. "He greeted her.") fairly interchangeably, and most RPers have a preferred one, though nobody will be upset if you prefer to use the other tense. Plenty of scenes proceed just fine with some RPers using one and some using the other. Some RPers have no real preference and will just match their RP partners in the moment.

Some RPers use a kind of hypothetical 'would' tense (i.e. "He would greet her."), but this is a point of some contention in the community and sounds stilted or weird to many, and if at all possible you should try to not do that.

3.d. Quotation marks

Quotation marks are, as they are anywhere else, used to mark speech. FFXIV has no pop-up speech bubble option for player characters, unlike WoW, so for the sake of others reading, don't skimp on them even if you write a line that's entirely dialogue. It's visually much easier on everyone involved to be consistent, especially since there are many non-native English speakers active in the community.

3.e. Heavy accents

Characters in the world of Hydaelyn often have strong, recognizable accents, and RP characters are no different. That being said, however, be aware that the more you phonetically type out an accent, the more difficult it becomes to read for others who aren't used to it or speak English as a second language, and you can always use description to emphasize that they have a drawl, twang, brogue, stutter, or lisp without overusing written accents. A little is great! By all means, have your character speak in a way that's uniquely them. But think of it as a very potent spice: more isn't always better, and too much of a good thing is still just too much.

3.f. Speaking other languages IC

A well-traveled RP character might reasonably speak more than one language, even if you as a writer might not know the same languages. And that's fine! There are a couple of ways to easily indicate that your character is speaking a language other than the common Eorzean tongue.

The first is simplest — just write out what they say as you would normally, and enclose the words in the other language in some kind of brackets. Square or angled are both used for just that all the time. Whether this goes inside or outside of quotation marks is a matter of taste.

The second is to describe that they are speaking another language, without actually saying what the actual words themselves are, and then send the actual message to everyone present who understands it via a /tell or /party chat. This takes a little more work, but if you want to keep it secret for plot reasons or the like, it's very useful for that.

Please, please, do not go throw words into Google Translate and then simply post that. Actual speakers of the target language can instantly tell that it's been machine-translated, and this makes you look silly, as well as possibly being offensive. That being said, if you actually do speak the language in question, such as Japanese standing in for Hingan, of course you can just deliver your lines in that language and translate however you see fit.

• Chevron Down

Chapter 4: Lore. Huh! What Is It Good For? (Absolutely Everything)

FFXIV is known and loved for its expansive, deep worldbuilding, which gives RPers countless interesting hooks to work with and build from. Accordingly, RP for the most part has its roots in the game's lore, and without a grasp of it, finding your niche will prove very difficult at best.

But, as mentioned earlier, that also doesn't mean that you have to play the entire game before you start RPing. You'll need to decide for yourself where your comfort level is between RPing blind and making mistakes, learning the lore, playing through the game, and having parts of the plot spoiled. As a general rule of thumb, you'll want to know generally what the game teaches you about the world throughout A Realm Reborn, plus anything that applies to your own character in particular. If you wanted to play a Xaela character from the Steppe, for example, you'd of course need to brush up on Steppe lore.

A beginner's guide to FFXIV lore would be cool...but would also make this FAQ ten times longer than it's already going to be, so unfortunately, that is not something that's going to be included here. But there are some general guidelines that should be given consideration, which we'll go over in this section.

The thing to keep in your mind is that there is no rule that you can't break; there are no hard DOs and DO NOTs here. You can do whatever you want in RP. However, the more community norms you disregard, the fewer people will likely want to write with you. And if you find a niche that you really get along with, and make a few good friends there, and that's all you want to do, hey! You're set! Do literally anything that tickles your fancy, it's fine! But most people will find that sticking generally to the expectations of the broader group of RPers will get them the most enjoyable experience.

4.a. Classes, jobs, roles, and why 95% of it goes out the window for RP

FFXIV is, of course, first and foremost a game. It's got game mechanics, such as visible AoE markers, an inventory, jobs and classes, quick-changing gear, HP, MP, and all the rest. You play as the Warrior of Light, a singularly important character who, one way or the other, is the strongest person in all of Hydaelyn.

And then, you start RPing, and none of that applies suddenly.

It's a bit of whiplash when you first start, but think about it: from the viewpoint of someone living in FFXIV's setting, it's a normal world, just like the one you live in. Sure, physics behaves a bit differently, and everything is made of aether instead of atoms and subatomic particles, but it's seamless, like the real world, and 'game mechanics' aren't something that anybody inside of the setting would see or even be aware of.

Beginning RPers often feel that they have to play as a character job or class, but this is not the case at all. Marauders come from the Limsa Lominsan Marauders' Guild, but anybody can swing an axe without being a marauder. You can fight with a sword and shield without having to be a gladiator or a paladin. You can learn magic from all kinds of places that aren't one of the presented in-game groups that you as the game player can access. You don't even need to be a combatant! You can play as a business owner, a healer, a tradesperson, a servant, or anything else that you can imagine.

Even if you do want to play a character from a known combat job or class, you aren't restricted to the exact set of moves that your in-game character is. The jobs and classes that we as players have access to are single examples of disciplines that in many cases exist in other forms across the world. Enemy combatants are shown using a variety of abilities, some from other classes, many not even accessible to players, and allied combatants much later in Shadowbringers are shown having classes that you do not have, and a spread of abilities from several other classes, plus some of their own unique abilities. As long as whatever you come up with feels cohesive with the setting, it's fine to play around with different combinations of abilities.

Moreover, all of the jobs and classes that we have been shown (and, ergo, ones we haven't) are generally of equal power to each other. A white mage is a much more specialized kind of magic user than a conjurer, for example, but both of them are capable, at least in the lore, of great feats of miraculous healing, as well as wielding the forces of nature for destruction. A thaumaturge is not less potent than a black mage; a skilled lancer isn't specialized to take down dragons in flight with a single mighty leap as a dragoon is, but they're still a powerful combatant and not to be taken lightly. If you want to write a character who is powerful in their own right, you don't have to immediately jump to being a specific, specialized class to do so, and in fact, it can save you a lot of explaining if you don't. Speaking of which, the next section is entirely about...

4.b. Soul crystals

A question that arises often with new players is whether or not your character has to have a soul stone in order to do certain things. The short answer is, no, not really. The long answer is...it's complicated.

Soul crystals are almost all imprinted with the memories of previous mentors in a technique, so they allow characters who own them to learn skills at an extremely accelerated rate. Generally speaking, there isn't anything contained in a soul crystal that can't be learned normally; however, like any complicated set of techniques, it could take a lifetime or longer to master to the same degree.

On the flip side, soul crystals aren't instant mastery themselves. It takes time and diligent practice to attune to the memories stored inside of one, so just finding a soul crystal doesn't even guarantee that you can immediately do much with it.

There are a few exceptions, which I'll list here, current as of Endwalker.

Even in these cases, however, it's not impossible that there could be other ways yet unexplored in lore that would allow use of the same abilities without a crystal.

4.c. The Warrior of Light

Let me be blunt for a moment here: if you openly RP as the Warrior of Light, you will drastically narrow the pool of people who will RP with you down to single digits.

Now, that doesn't mean that you can't. Of course, as was stated earlier, you can do whatever you want, but playing the canonical WoL very publicly is one of the fastest ways to exclude yourself from the majority of RP.

That being said, you can sort-of-kind-of do it anyway: get a small group of friends together, and advance through the main story as a team. If you keep it to the side as a kind of alternate universe thing, and separate from your 'real' version of your character, you can have your cake and RP it too. Or, if you really, really want to RP as the WoL without separating it at all, keep it on the downlow so that people can interact without requiring their own character to flip out about meeting them or rudely disbelieve them: the canonical WoL doesn't seem to go around announcing who they are to every single person they meet either.

RPing as the WoL seems to be more popular outside of Crystal Data Center and on social media, so it can be a bit of a culture shock to come to Crystal and find that not only is it mostly original characters, people expect you to not roleplay as the character the game says you are. If you're coming from outside, it's just something local to get used to.

4.d. Canon NPCs

Canon NPCs are much more viable as RP characters than being the WoL themselves, though they still have some detractors. That being said, don't let that stop you if you want to do it. Roleplaying as canon characters is the norm in enough fandoms that it's not actually uncommon in FFXIV, either. Just be aware that you might encounter other people playing the same NPC, and the more plot-important your NPC, the more you narrow your potential RP partner pool.

4.e. "I heard you can't be a white mage/black mage/dragoon/etc…"

White mage is an unusual class in that white mages are chosen by the Elementals of the Black Shroud. Black mage draws on the land's aether rather than the caster's, and its more powerful spells require so much aether to cast that without a specific technique pioneered by a long-dead mage, prospective black mages will literally burn themselves from the inside out in casting. Dragoon is a specific rank in the Ishgardian military, of which there are only a certain number of active dragoons at any given time.

However, all that being said, if you can justify loopholing something, go for it. A rogue white mage outside of the Shroud would similarly be outside of the Elementals' jurisdiction, and could have found an ancient soul crystal in Amdapor. By the time of Shadowbringers, black magic is being experimentally researched again under the Thaumaturges' Guild's auspices. One of the order of dragoons could have been killed in duty, or retired. Something this major for a character would reasonably take a lot of work with their backstory and the lore around their class, and might well be a central focus for their plots, but it isn't impossible, either.

4.f. Mixed race characters

There is an enormous amount of misconception circulating about the possibility of characters of different races having children. According to the lore team, it is completely possible, it's just very uncommon due to cultural distaste for it. In Heavensward, we see a half-Elezen, half-Hyuran character, and in Stormblood, there is a quest that mentions a half-Au Ra, half-Hyuran character who is described (with some horror) as having very few scales at all. Furthermore, plenty of confirmed half-Garlean, half-Hyur characters exist in the lore.

There's a very common bit of fanon that states that mixed race offspring take after their mother in appearance, but it's just that: fanon. It's commonly cited as having been 'stated in a Live Letter lore panel' or 'posted to the official forums' at some time, but the lore team has always been very fastidious about compiling Live Letter information on the official forums and no amount of searching has turned up an actual source for the statement. It's safe to say that mixed-race characters take after both of their parents in whatever proportion their writer sees fit; this is supported in the few mixed race characters that we see or hear about ingame. There are, as far as we know, no restrictions on which player character races can procreate with each other aside from imagination, and potentially birth difficulties from having a small mother carrying a very large baby, if you want to get into realism. (Beast tribe races do vary greatly, however, with many of them having decidedly non-mammalian reproduction, making mixed children with them an entirely other topic.)

It's common in RP to refer to mixed characters as any number of terms that really would be much better avoided. One that comes up frequently is 'half-breed,' which in real life has a lot of ugly history and baggage with actual people of mixed heritage. The game itself uses it sometimes in dialogue, but keep in mind that the game is also portraying characters who are themselves fairly racist and against racial mixing. It's a good idea to do a little homework on how to refer to mixed race people in real life, and then take that into your RP. This doesn't mean you can't portray a mixed race character (or a racist character for that matter), but it does mean that if you are going to do so, you should remember that RPers come in all colors and backgrounds, and to be mindful of the comfort of those around you.

4.g. Lore abiding, lore bending, lore breaking

The lines between following lore, bending lore, and breaking lore are vague, and largely personal. Some people prefer to stick to a very strict interpretation of lore, extrapolating as little as possible and working with what's explicitly shown. Some like to play it fast and loose, using whatever's at their disposal and justifying it only as much as they feel they need to in order to have fun. Most fall in the middle somewhere, or even adapt their lore level to whatever they're doing in the moment. All of these approaches are valid.

Speaking very broadly, the definitions of what's lore-adhering, lore-bending, and lore-breaking are as follows. Something that adheres to lore has been shown ingame or in the associated lore books or discussions, or reasonably follows from what's been shown ingame without any assumptions being made. Something that bends the lore takes some assumptions and a few leaps, but still feels in line with the rest of the lore presented, and doesn't actually contradict anything presented. Something that breaks lore overtly contradicts the given lore, or at least has nothing to do with it, such as bringing in a crossover character from another game.

...Except, FFXIV itself sometimes runs events featuring crossover characters from other games, presents ridiculously lore-disregarding situations in sidequests, or even outright changes the lore or introduces apparently incompatible information, so, what gives?

It all ends up coming down to people's comfort, and communicating with them about what you do and don't want to roleplay. The closer you get to lore-breaking, the more people are more likely to not want to RP with that particular concept. If you're playing something that's very far out and you expect to be having a long-term plot arc with someone who's not aware, it's good form to be upfront with this so that people can make an informed decision.

4.h. Character names

On the surface, it seems that FFXIV uses character race as a shorthand for how they should be named. This is true to a certain extent: Eorzean characters usually use the name conventions given during character creation. This is actually because those conventions are specific to Eorzean cultures. Non-Eorzean characters are named according to their own culture's conventions. A Midlander from Eorzea would usually have an Eorzean name, but a Midlander from Dalmasca would have a Dalmascan name, and a Midlander from Hingashi would have a Hingan name. And that's assuming they haven't changed their name, adopted a nickname, or didn't have parents who named them something else for some reason. Even in the lore we have examples of characters with names that are usual for their situation, so as long as you have a reason that your character is named what they're named, you don't have to adhere strictly to the name conventions to still adhere to lore.

4.i. Adapting characters with 'special' traits or from other universes

It's a common temptation to give your character some extremely special trait. Maybe you want them to have highly unusual eyes, or incredible magical powers. Maybe they're the last practitioner of a forbidden art, or a vampire, or they're a transplant from another universe entirely. It could be that you've been playing one character across multiple continuities and you want to bring them forward into FFXIV too.

Before jumping in and doing it, ask yourself these things.

In almost every single case, you can find some way to adapt your character to the game's lore well enough to get by. It's worth trying, especially for your first character, to build something that's more on the lore-friendly side and not trying to shoehorn in a character that doesn't really fit the setting. Think of your first character as training wheels; you can work out how to fit a wild concept into your RP once you have a firmer grip on what the lore is and isn't.

4.j. Fuck the (lore) police

No matter what you do, regardless of what you decide to write, at some point you're going to encounter some guy who's decided that you're wrong and your character is bad and they should come over and personally tell you about it, even though you aren't even RPing with them.

License to RP

The holder of this license is hereby entitled to roleplay anything they damn well please.

______________ _{. . . . . .} ____/____/____
Name _{. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .} Date

4.j. Fuck the (lore) police

Fuck that guy. You can do what you want. You have a license.

4.l. Where can I learn more lore?

The world has a ton of lore, but fortunately, there are a ton of resources for it, too. (For the record, I'm not affiliated with any of the links in this section.)

There are (at the time of this FAQ) two lorebooks, Encyclopedia Eorzea and Encyclopedia Eorzea Volume II. These are ridiculously dense, having earned a fair amount of memeing for how small their font size has to be in order to fit it all in. They're written from the viewpoint of an in-world scholar attempting to chronicle everything they can about the world of Hydaelyn, so they aren't infallible, but they are both solid and massive.

There's also Sounsyy Mirke's Lore Index, which is absolutely packed with topical information and geared towards RPers. This is probably the single most invaluable player-curated lore page out there.

If you're looking for more of a searchable database style, GamerEscape is a fairly complete wiki of FFXIV information, handy for both quest text as well as item descriptions. Garland Tools' database is also a good searchable source for quest dialogue, and it's got other gameplay tools available as well. LoreSearch.net is a database of searchable quest dialogue, item descriptions, FATE blurbs, and more.

There are other resources out there, of course, but those are the really big ones.

• Chevron Down

Chapter 5: What Day Is It? What's The Weather? Who Else Is Even Here? And Other General Community Conventions We Just Kinda Got So Used To That We No Longer Notice

Every community's got little norms and customs that those who've been there a while have forgotten about, and knowing them will make your RP life much smoother. Let's start with The Big One, the one nobody can agree on, and get that out of the way first.

5.a. The elephant in the room: the ingame year

You heard that right. We have no idea what year it is.

What we do know is that at the start of A Realm Reborn, the Seventh Umbral Calamity happened five years ago, starting the Seventh Umbral Era. We also know that every Era starts a new year count, and that at the end of A Realm Reborn, the Seventh Astral Era begins, so that was year one, again, as years don't seem to be zero-indexed. But past that, we aren't given any specific lengths of time. In fact, the devs have described the main story as taking place within a 'time bubble,' so that whatever length of time you want to imagine it as having taken is accurate. Obviously, when multiple strangers need to agree, though, this is hardly ideal.

This is handled one of several ways, depending on the group and context. It can be completely handwaved, and nobody states the exact date, which is easiest. It can be estimated based on how long it reasonably might have taken for the ingame events to occur, though this is the least easy to get people onboard. Some add a year per expansion pack. Many also simply count real-life years since the launch of A Realm Reborn, which is the easiest way to calculate character ages, if not how much time has passed in RP.

To put it really simply:

To put it even more simply:

"there is no consensus, and i will never know peace lol"
~ Sounsyy

5.b. Day of the week, time, weather, and the handwaving of all of that

Eorzean time reckoning is simpler than the real world, but in ways that make it more complicated to convert to the real calendar. Sixty seconds make a minute, and sixty minutes make a bell (hour). Twenty-four bells make one sun (day). Sennights (weeks) have eight suns, named after the elements, and moons (months) have thirty-two suns each. A year has twelve moons, and twelve years make an epoch.

Of course, this means that it's practically impossible to convert on the fly to mention what day of the week it is, when your Friday could be any one of eight other days. Most RPers simply use the Earth days of the week for simplicity's sake.

The ingame clock runs quickly enough that an entire Eorzean day passes in 70 minutes, which is far too fast to RP according to ingame time. Regardless of ingame display time, the current time is generally regarded to be whatever time it is where the Data Center is located, vaguely, or whatever time the scene is stated to be happening. Yes, sometimes you'll be playing out an afternoon scene in the middle of the night ingame, but that's fine and acceptable.

5.c. What's the world called?

The no-spoiler version: the world is called Hydaelyn.

The slightly-maybe-kinda-a-spoiler for Endwalker version but someone is going to ask so I may as well answer it here, but also, if you don't want to know anything at all about Endwalker, you can skip this and still be correct: the world is still called Hydaelyn, because the number of people who have heard any differently at this point is in the single digits and there seems to be no real rush to change it anyway.

5.d. Sharing spaces

If you're not RPing inside of player housing, there's always the chance that someone could walk into your RP, or alternately, the place you wanted to RP is taken already by someone else's scene. That's easily resolved, though — you're already playing pretend, so use your imagination and imagine that they aren't there, if you don't want to interact. You can switch to /party chat or /tell to make this easier.

Alternatively, you could take your entire scene to a lower-population server, where the location you're eyeing is much more likely to be free.

• Chevron Down

Chapter 6: No, There Are No (Official) Addons: Making The FFXIV UI Cooperate

No, there aren't. FFXIV does not have addon support, there are no addons, TRP isn't a thing. I know! That's terrible! Probably. I never played WoW beyond level 8 a decade ago so I'm taking it at face value from everyone I know who has. But that's how it is. That doesn't, however, mean that you have no ways to customize your HUD to look good for RP. In fact, FFXIV gives you more control over it than you might realize.

While there are mods and they do exist, they are against the Terms of Service, and I therefore won't be covering them here. If you really need to know more about them, Google is right there.

6.a. HUD layout basics

Open your System menu, and go to HUD Layout. You'll see that you have four different 'tabs,' and each of these is a different saved HUD layout. Pick at least one to be your default RP setup, and your eyes will thank you later. You can also set up different layouts for different kinds of RP or content. On top of that, you technically have two HUD layouts per layout — if you go to your Character Configuration menu and toggle between mouse + keyboard and controller, you'll find that your current HUD will change, and it will save settings separately between the two (but still ultimately linked to your HUD layout save slot, so you can't mix and match.)

For each save slot, you can choose any onscreen elements you want and move, resize, or hide them as you see fit. Job gauges, however, are a bit different, in that they have an expanded and a simple mode, but cannot be hidden. The only element you can't change through this screen is the chat box, which has its own entire set of options elsewhere.

6.b. Chat box options

The chat box is deceptively customizable. By default, you'll have three tabs: General, Battle, and Event. The + button allows you to add a fourth tab, and the gear button opens a massive amount of options. You can change how others' names appear, what system messages you want to see, enable/disable and change the format of timestamps, choose what colors you want which kinds of messages to be, and most importantly, you can filter which messages you want to appear in which tabs.

You can, as an example, set your General tab to be all of the messages you usually use for gameplay, but set the Battle tab to only say, party, tell, emotes, yell, and random number messages, which are commonly used in RP. (These two tabs cannot be renamed, but the other two can.) You could then set the third tab to display only FC chat and linkshells, set the second tab to display, and pull out the third tab into its own window. This way, you'll have a window that's just your immediate RP scene, and a second window for your social chats.

You can even set each chat window to display timestamps independently, and even to have different font sizes, if you like.

One final tip: while it's not grouped with the chat box menu, you can assign people on your friend list to friend groups, which are each marked with a symbol before messages they send. This can provide a visual cue to help sort people out if there's heavy chat scroll where you're RPing.

6.c. GUI options

For RP, I highly recommend turning off most of your UI in one of your HUD layouts. Your hotbars can go, your quest list can go, just declutter everything you don't immediately need for RP. Whether you want to keep your party list is up to you; it can be handy if you RP a lot in party chat, but you can also use the HUD layout screen to shrink it to take up less real estate on your screen.

If you have custom emotes macroed, or just want to keep a certain list of emotes and such on hand at any given time, you can set hotbars to be visible in one layout but not others. You can even change the shape of your hotbars, and set them to show empty slots as invisible. Mess with all of the options and get a feel for what they do, and as you RP more and figure out what works for you, your HUD will evolve into something more useful.

6.d. Macros

Once you've got your HUD set up the way you like for RP, you can use a macro to swap to it with a single button press. Simply make a macro consisting of /hudlayout # (in which # is the actual number of which HUD you want to use), and you can use that button to change instantly. Making a second macro with your usual combat HUD's number will allow you to change back just as instantly.

• Chevron Down

Chapter 7: Conflict Resolution: In Case I Didn't Say "Communicate" Enough Times…

Hey, remember how I said I was going to keep bringing up the C word? I wasn't even in the vicinity of joking. One of the absolute most important things you can do in any group activity is maintain healthy lines of communication with your co-activity-doers, and that's no different in roleplaying. While the characters are fake, the players and their feelings behind the scenes are real, and where there's feelings, there's the potential for fires of the dramatic sort.

So what can you do ahead of time? Arm yourself with the basics of communication and conflict resolution. Be respectful at all times, be as polite as you can manage, but be clear. If something bothers you more than you're willing to shrug off, ask yourself why, and think of how to convey that without passing undue blame or sounding like you are. Word things in terms of your feelings, admit when you realize you're in the wrong, and if you're too heated to discuss something right now, it's okay to ask to put it off until later so that you can make better decisions.

This section might seem a bit vague, but it's impossible to cover every single way that toes can accidentally be stepped on. Try to take in the key points and keep an open eye to where you might need to apply them to your own RP relationships.

7.a. It's just RP

Sometimes you're going to find yourself getting salty over RP. There's not going to be any predicting what causes it. Maybe you'll lose at something governed by /random rolls that you feel like you should have won, maybe you'll get tired of someone's weird characterization, or someone will do something OOC that irritates you, or maybe it's something more serious. Or maybe you're just hangry. Whatever the case, you're going to get mad at some point, guaranteed.

That's okay. It happens.

Take a step or two back and a few breaths. At the end of the day, some things are minor and aren't worth getting bent about. It's just RP.

7.b. It's not just RP

...But at the same time, if you find yourself or someone around you getting more than occasionally salty, maybe it's time for a deeper examination of what's going on. If someone's character keeps doing things that irritate you as a player, if you're finding your scenes interrupted and can't stand it, if someone's pushing for a ship that you really don't want, even if you worry that someone else is being mistreated, that's a cue that you should have a chat with the other people involved.

People are not their characters, and characters don't necessarily reflect the views of their players. If a character is behaving in a way that makes you really uncomfortable, you can always try to talk to that player about it. If, on the other hand, someone comes to you with a complaint, resist the urge to take it personally — it's scary having to tell someone something negative, so if it seems like they're talking to you in good faith, hear them out the same way you'd hope they would if if were you coming to them, and try to come to a good conclusion for the both of you. Compromise can take some negotiation, but it's worth the effort.

Whenever you're having a tough conversation, it's always okay to take a second to gather your thoughts so that you can try to be as clear as possible. Miscommunications are almost guaranteed to happen, but if you're sincerely making an effort, most people will recognize and appreciate that. Apologize for mix-ups as they happen, and be as respectful as you can be.

If you do try to talk to someone and get a poor reaction, and trying to express yourself clearly isn't working, you're always allowed to just walk away. In some ways, it really is just RP, and not worth losing too much sleep over. You won't get along with every single person you meet, and that's just normal.

7.c. Boundaries

Everyone's got at least one topic they just don't want to RP about. If you're sitting there thinking, 'yeah, but, I really don't,' that just means you haven't encountered it yet. If and when you encounter subject matter that you don't want to write about: don't.

It's really that simple. You have the right to RP whatever you want to, and on the flip side, you have the right to not RP whatever you don't want to, and so does everyone else. Whether a topic is too personal, too dark, too gross, or even too silly, you can and even should be up front with fellow RPers if the plot is straying somewhere that you don't want to go. It can be something as complex as reminding you of a real-life traumatic experience, or as simple as a topic you just find incredibly, creativity-crushingly dull. Now, you can't reasonably stop other people from RPing about something that crosses a boundary, but you can let them know that you'd like a heads-up so that you can sit out if that topic does come up.

If someone else expresses a boundary, just remember that you don't have to understand it to respect it. Nobody is obligated to divulge why they don't want to be involved in any given thing; just adjust for their comfort however you agree upon, and carry on. Being a good RP partner includes letting people decide what they need to do for their own sanity.

7.d. Dramatis personae

That all being said, yes, sometimes you will encounter people who are not acting in good faith, whether they quite realize it or not. There are a lot of red flags to keep an eye out for in the world of roleplaying, and FFXIV is no exception. If you feel…

Get the hell out of there. You can try to talk to the offender first, of course, if you think there's a reasonable chance that there's been a misunderstanding, but RP shouldn't cause you real-life suffering and anxiety. It should be an enjoyable hobby. Emotions can run high, sure, but if it crosses over into causing you real distress and interrupting other parts of your life, it's time for you to evaluate who and what is causing this and figure out how to get away from that. Roleplaying should not cause you to feel threatened or hurt, and if it does, you have every right to withdraw from whatever is hurting you.

• Chevron Down

Chapter 8: There Will Be Blood Bleed

So, let's talk about bleed. There's you, the writer, and there's your character. Your character feels emotions you aren't really having, but you emulate them so that you can write them, and you feel emotions your character isn't really having, but you mostly try to keep those out of your writing. There's a sort of emotional line between you and your character that you try to maintain.

Of course, when it gets to reality, things are never so simple. You may feel happy when your character is triumphant, and you might feel sad when tragedy strikes. People participate in media because it makes them feel things, in a safe, controlled manner. Horror actually scares you. Comedies make you really laugh. The tears you might shed over a tearjerker are genuine tears. Stories provoke real reactions, and that's why humans love them. We're a story-telling species by nature, and RP stories are immediate, personal, and intimate. When you frame it that way, it's no wonder that we sometimes end up feeling what our characters feel, and on a biological level, your brain doesn't differentiate between the burst of chemicals from a story or from a lived experience. This is what's called bleed: when your character's emotions bleed into your own, or vice versa.

There's this kind of notion in the general RP community that all bleed is bad, and that only 'bad roleplayers' experience bleed. Nobody wants to be thought of as a 'bad roleplayer,' let alone to think of themselves as a 'bad roleplayer' (whatever that even means), so as a result, bleed tends to go undetected until it's at such an extreme level that it's harming your relationships with other RPers. Let me be blunt and maybe a little controversial for a moment. Bleed can, will, and does happen to almost everyone, and it's nothing to fear. It is, in fact, entirely normal, and acknowledging it before it gets to a worrying point is the best way to make sure it doesn't get to that point at all.

When bleed is an actual problem is when it starts manifesting as you having your character's feelings in a way that's inappropriate towards another character or player. For example, runaway bleed can cause your character's romantic interest in another character to transfer to you having a crush on that character's player. Alternatively, if another character treats your character poorly, you might end up hating that character's player, even if you know logically that it's just a story and they don't wish you any ill at all. Many roleplayers don't call it bleed until it gets to a damaging point, but it exists on a continuum and isn't really different in kind, only in degree.

Keeping an eye on your feelings will not only help you to be aware if someone around you is acting dubiously, but also if you yourself are at risk of crossing boundaries best uncrossed. If you think you might be having enough bleed to be a problem, talk it out with someone you trust, and consider taking a break from whoever or whatever's causing the bleed so that you can get your head back in order. It doesn't mean you're a 'bad roleplayer' or that you need to entirely quit, but it does mean that you should do a thorough gut check to make sure you don't accidentally hurt someone close to you.

• Chevron Down

Chapter 9: Anxiety

The funny thing about RPers is that the vast majority of us are very socially anxious creatures...which is silly, because we have a hobby that's entirely based around, you know, interacting with other people, but here we are anyway! Sure, there are people who can just wander up to anyone else and strike up a scene, but that's definitely not everyone, and if it doesn't describe you, either, read on for some pointers on dealing with the jitters.

9.a. Everyone wants what you got

The most important thing to keep in mind when your nerves start getting the better of you and you find it hard to ask people if they want to RP is that yes, they do. Really. It might not specifically be with you and your character, and that's alright, but roleplayers want to roleplay. Sounds too simple when you put it that way, doesn't it?

When you go up to someone and invite them to RP with you, you're offering them something that not only do they want, but they're probably nervous about asking you for. The worst that can happen is they say no, and then nothing changes. Nobody will think less of you for going out and being proactive; if anything, they'll most likely think, 'man, that one person is really fearless, that's kind of cool.' (As long as you aren't actually pestering them after they've said no. Don't do that.)

9.b. Everyone has what you got

In which 'what you got' is nervousness this time. And honestly, it's understandable. You're going up to people you might not know and asking them to spend their valuable time with you. That can be scary! You aren't a lesser roleplayer for feeling that way, and it's something that almost every single person in the entire community has felt at least once, if not countless times. The best way to get through it is to just try, again and again. Practice makes perfect, or at least practice makes better, and the more times you try something scary and have it turn out safe, the less daunting it'll be the next time you do it.

9.c. The cool kids' table isn't real

'RP popularity' is a concept that sooner or later you're going to encounter. The truth is that it's basically fake. If someone has a lot of RP partners, those are relationships they've cultivated, not something they've been given. There's no magical ticket to 'being popular' in RP any more than there was in school, and yes, that does mean that some people pull it off by being mean, or rich, or pretty, and those are generally the sorts of RPers that you should be more cautious around. (I'm not going to say to avoid them entirely, because judging books by their cover is poor form, and I'm also not the boss of you, but a little circumspection never hurt anyone either.)

RPers who are 'popular' might seem extremely intimidating to talk to, but they're just RPers, and most of the time, they didn't even get a vote in their own 'popularity,' they just kept putting themselves out there until enough people knew and liked them that it happened. You don't need to act any differently yourself or treat them any differently. If someone does try to make you treat them like they're cooler than you, that's a warning to stay away from that person.

In the unlikely but possible event that you find yourself becoming 'popular,' don't let it go to your head. Knowing a lot of people or getting a lot of RP isn't an indicator of personal worth. You can still take breaks, and you can still tell people no. Even if the whole server knows your name, you're still just one person, with one person's capacity for interaction, and you're allowed to have the same boundaries, preferences, and needs as anyone else.

• Chevron Down

Chapter 10: An All-Ages Chat About 18+ RP And Consent (Mostly Consent)

Alright, so here we are, I promised I was going to somehow talk about ERP without making it not safe for work. And I am...kind of. I'm going to talk about the ethics of adult RP, which are really the ethics of any RP, only far more important because of its sensitive subject matter. This includes not only sexual RP, but also violent, disturbing, or excessively dark topics.

There's a second C word that hasn't come up as much as Communicate has: Consent.

When you're talking about any sort of content that could be objectionable or troubling, consent is absolutely vital. It is in fact against the game's Terms of Service to "use profanity or any language that a reasonable person would find offensive." This does include explicit language such as that used in ERP. But, at the same time, the GM team realizes that people are roleplaying, that the game itself has some coarse language, and that adults are going to write adult content with each other. If nobody issues any complaints to the Help Desk, they don't get involved. If all parties involved consent to the language being used, no blood, no foul, basically. This basic tenet, that they only investigate offensive content in the event that they receive a report, has even been explicitly stated in an update to the Terms of Service, which is linked a bit later on.

If some parties present haven't consented to this kind of RP, however, that's where things get messy. Going up to someone and telling them in excruciating detail what you would like to do to their anatomy would be predatory and disgusting, unless they had consented to this conversation and were enjoying it, and it's no different just because it's inside a video game. Moreover, public chat modes can only be assumed to have not consented: anybody of any age could show up at any time. Bystanders don't want to read adult RP, and many of them will rightfully submit reports to the GM team if they encounter it.

The ethical way to engage in adult RP of any sort is to do it in a way that no uninvolved parties find themselves involved without having consented to be there. Tells, party chat, or using private housing are all acceptable ways to do this. (On that note, do not use a stranger's home or apartment for ERP, no matter how nicely decorated it is! That's still involving a bystander who didn't consent.) If you happen to type your chat into the wrong venue, apologize and be more careful next time. You can also do such RP outside of the game itself, via Discord or similar, where you have complete control over who can read what.

Consent is an ongoing contract that can be revoked at any time, too; if someone decides they no longer wish to participate in adult RP for any reason, immediately stop and let them exit before anything further is written. Remember also that not only can minors not legally or morally consent, but that you can be investigated and arrested for engaging in adult roleplay with underage players.

As of the latest update to the official help article, Prohibited Activities in Final Fantasy XIV, this is all actually codified in the game's terms of service. If roleplayers engage in private, adult RP and no report is issued, then no investigation will be made; however, if roleplayers write adult matter in public, they may be investigated even without a report being made, and if anybody witnesses and reports adult RP, then the people doing it will be investigated. Making sure that everyone present consents to participate in whatever is going on not only is the right thing to do, but it also protects you and other participants from being reported, investigated, and potentially suspended or banned.

• Chevron Down

Chapter 11: The Wrap-Up

There's always going to be some detail or future change that it isn't possible to predict or write about, but hopefully this gives you some idea of what the community norms are for roleplaying on FFXIV's Crystal Data Center. Everything is accurate at the time of writing, or at least as accurate as you can get when trying to describe the preferences and norms of thousands of otherwise unaffiliated people, and I'll try to keep it updated if anything major changes. If you spot any glaring errors or omissions, feel free to ping me about it via Discord, where I'm Nevi#1505.

Now go forth armed with your new knowledge and roleplay already!