Fantasias are going to get lore now it seems.

[SannaR]

Not sure why Fantasias is what breaks the camel's back when we know there's actual plastic surgery and cloning. Let alone bioengineering. At least when it comes down to rp.

[Cleretic]

There's a roleplay discord community for Chaos and Light where most roleplayers hang out, which tends to discuss lore, advertise daily / weekly roleplay roulettes and much more. I don't mean it's enforced, I mean that since it's a general consensus whenever it's discussed or brought up that "Fantasias are not canon" it's handled in a very "Let's try something else or another angle if you want to change your character" in fc's and out in the open from personal experience.

Crystal also has a roleplaying discord--multiple, actually--and I'm under no illusions that your average joe is in there or have read any of them (And those discords definitely don't have any illusions that they can carry any weight at all in actual RP). Honestly, a discord is basically the embodiment of a bubble community; it feels all-encompassing when you're in it, but all it takes is to go slightly outside of it and suddenly every communal agreement you thought was universal is out the window. I'm sorry for assuming you had no experience, but I think it's important to recognize you don't have universal experience.

Take a moment to step outside of that bubble, and think about this from the perspective of someone who wants to use a Fantasia in their story but isn't sure how to, rather than from the perspective of a community that decided without their input that they can't.

Not sure why Fantasias is what breaks the camel's back when we know there's actual plastic surgery and cloning. Let alone bioengineering. At least when it comes down to rp.

Yeah, if anything plastic surgery was the more surprising and difficult to square thing. With Garlemald tech in approximately the era of the World Wars, and with no magical aid basically by definition, it's surprising that they have plastic surgery so good that you can make someone look exactly like someone else. We can't even do that in 2024! Was that always an option? Is that an option for us?

Granted, plastic surgery that perfect is a cornerstone of certain types of fiction that Werlyt was very much playing near.

[Hallarem]

Mission failed successfully, apologizing for assuming and then assuming in the next sentence. I'm not a suit to be fought, nobody can enforce on anyones roleplay beyond not welcoming them in a community if they start wilding out with crazy ideas that are lorebreaking or otherwise "impossible" for a regular joe to pull off, my opinion doesn't matter beyond it being my opinion. Anyone can play a three-headed dragon for all I care, or be an allagan plastic surgeon who survived and happens to be a clone of the emperor.

Yeah, I am thinking at it from the perspective of someone who wants to do it...aaaand.. they can do it right now if they want to, who cares, roleplay how you want, the opinions of others don't matter if you find the right people to vibe with and they agree with your roleplay. All I'm saying is if it becomes more prevalent and actual canon, and easy to access in lore, it will bite at the very foundation of roleplay. Your character being unique. Bio-engineering and cloning isn't exactly accessible to the regular joe either, so I don't know why this was brought up, that's allagan level stuff. Plastic surgery and fantasia aren't even in the same category in terms of impact. Like I said, IF they make fantasia canon, I hope they make it extra super giga rare. That's mildly acceptable to ME.

I'm outie 5000 from this thread o/ Don't think I can read another "You seem like the type of person who doesn't sort their garbage in different bins... Just a guess. By the way you type, you seem like a "paper goes in the plastic" type of guy."

[Cleretic]

...did he really just claim his experience was universal, and that Fantasias are just universally derided because he derides them? Because I'm not sure how else to read it.

I've never met someone outright hate Fantasias before. Even the people I've met in the RP community who aren't interested just sorta leave everyone else be (and fair enough, there's storylines I'm not interested in touching, so I just leave those people be). It's not exactly a common subject.

[SannaR]

...did he really just claim his experience was universal, and that Fantasias are just universally derided because he derides them? Because I'm not sure how else to read it.

I've never met someone outright hate Fantasias before. Even the people I've met in the RP community who aren't interested just sorta leave everyone else be (and fair enough, there's storylines I'm not interested in touching, so I just leave those people be). It's not exactly a common subject.

No clue. I only brought up the other ways a person can drastically alter their appearance even if those things aren't as readily available to the masses due to their original post being about not liking the idea that an item up til now didn't have lore and was in a gray area when it comes to cannon being the only "problematic" way a person could change how they look from an rp perspective. I feel as we're in a wait and see what the quest says. As it will be the 2nd for most free Fantasia that a person can get without spending any money.

I don't dabble in the rp community but I just don't see them giving it lore that would state that they're mass produced. That and I doubt giving it lore now will change the numbers much as people will already have it as part of their character's story if they used it to explain why they look completely different now. Like an OOC factor has always made the availability of the item have zero chance of how rare the item should be. I just again don't feel there will be a bigger uptick in the numbers of rpers wanting to write in Fantasia use than whatever percentage there already is just because of them gaining lore now.

[ZavosEsperian]

*snip*

I believe a history lesson in order to help bridge some of the gaps.

All the way back in ARR, there was only one RP community, mainly located on Aether, that NA and EU shared together. The reason for this was, for some reason, the Chaos datacenter was located inside of North America, not Europe, until 2015. Back in those days, the rules regarding fantasias in the RP community at-large was, for the most part, unified and fantasias were largely not canonical in the slightest, mainly due to lack of clarification from the devs and the amount of trouble fantasias would introduce into RP, particularly if they were considered common. The only thing regarding fantasias the players got from the devs at the time was this:

“Fantasia works in a unique way. It can’t simply turn you into whoever you want, or people could get away with anything. Crime would be out of control. Even on Earth, people have the opportunity to change who they are – cut their hair, get a facelift, find a new career or a different spouse – but we often aren’t willing to make those drastic life changes. Fantasia gives you the courage to make the changes you’ve always wanted to make. Maybe you are Lalafell trapped in a Roegadyn’s body, it’s time to break out! And all you needed was that courage in a phial!” - 2014 London Fanfest Q&A

The big issue here would be that since it doesn't either hard confirm fantasias to be real or not real, it didn't really move the needle as to how RP was viewed back in those days. This largely continued to be the view all the way through HW, as no extra clarification would be given and, while Chaos was now located inside of continental Europe, there was no incentive to move since the NA DCs were still located in Canada.

This changed in 2017, when the Crystal DC was created and the NA servers were moved from the Montreal, Quebec, Canada to Sacramento, California, US. Large communities of people were cut from each other due to the Crystal DC being formed out of servers originally on Aether and Primal, chiefly among them Balmung. Adding insult to injury, the EU players in particular would now also have massively increased ping due to the servers moving across the North American continent. As such, a large chunk of EU RPers elected to transfer from NA to EU, thus splitting the RP community into now EU RP and NA RP. Finally, the last time the devs said anything about fantasias would occur in 2019, during an interview with the localization team.

“While the Fantasia potion has some in-world flavor text, it’s mainly meant to be seen as a meta object. For example, you wouldn’t see it’s use, or reference to its use in storylines since in effect it doesn’t actually exist.” -Localization Team Interview 2019

Much time has passed since all of that, and while the EU players largely stayed the same, NA players changed which I will go into briefly below. Do note these are generalizations and do not reflect any given individual inside of a specific RP community. If you assume I am saying this about all RPers of a specific DC region, you would be extremely wrong.

EU RPers tend to prefer the structure of having characters that are extremely grounded in the lore, thus anything that is not canonical would be generally frowned upon in their respective communities. EU RP also tends to be considerably more closed off compared to its NA counterparts, preferring to organize their RP sessions inside of various Discord servers and FCs dedicated to the subject. Open RP is not as common as it is on NA DCs. Based on what Hallarem is describing, it would seem he is likely someone who RPs on EU DCs, where things tend to be more organized at least compared to NA and their aversion to fantasias in RP is indeed common among EU RPers.

NA RPers, unlike their EU counterparts, tend to use a lot more creative freedom within their RP. As such, you tend to encounter things that are not as strongly grounded inside of the canon of the setting, if there is any grounding at all in some cases. For NA RPers, this means items such as fantasias are not as significant of a problem and thus, there tend to be few issues involving fantasias inside of NA RP. In addition, while I do know organized RP does exist on the NA DCs, it is not as prevalent compared to EU where it is the main form used and NA tends to be more open, which is extremely obvious if you go to Limsa Lominsa Aetheryte Plaza, Balmung's Ul'Dah, or any of the large venues that exists where you can RP with people you may have never encountered before. Note you can encounter open RP on EU DCs, but it is not the main mode RP is done on those DCs.

And herein lies the problem. Comparing the two communities, significant differences exist between EU and NA RP in a host of different ways. Fantasias being allowed or not allowed being one of the contrasting points is one of them, and as such why you can encounter people, particularly EU RPers, who do not like the idea of fantasias being allowed.

Now that the history lesson has concluded, please note anything above that is describing a specific RPing community is a generalization. You will be able to find contradictions to the generalization were you to look and I am very much aware of this. If you ask me, RP should be a rather consensual affair where parties agree with what they find acceptable inside of RP and what they dont find acceptable inside of their RP, and ultimately this is what makes people enjoy RP is having fun with other people and their various ideas inside of some form of sandbox, where the sandbox can have as many rules or lack thereof as the people inside the sandbox want.

Finally, while I know the person you were talking to had their moments, it would do you some good to escape the bubble-universe you seem to inhabit. You would be a lot more enjoyable and a lot less miserable to talk to if you stop being as aggressive (particularly when you are wrong) and try to understand where the other person may be coming from.

[Cleretic]

I believe a history lesson in order to help bridge some of the gaps.

Get better things to do than spewing out a wall of text to claim superiority. Especially when it doesn't have any actual connection to what I've been saying.

The point I was always making is that the 'RP community' has no actual consensus or authority, and by nature cannot have one, because any power is ultimately entirely dismissable because someone can just say 'actually nah', and nobody can do anything at all to stop them, ever. You can claim trends, you cannot claim consensus or law, especially in enforcement. I don't care how much more 'structured' one community is compared to the other; both groups have exactly the same lack of capacity to actually enforce anything.

...except, as it happens, when it comes to the game's content itself. At the end of the day, the only things we can ever agree on are what the game says. The game itself is the supreme authority. We agree that Mhach exists, because Mhach is physically there; we agree that Mhach was in the Fifth Astral Era, because the lore tells us it was; we agree on how their skillset of Black Mage works, because there's a story about it. Nobody has any power to refute any of that on anything more than a small, individual scale.

Fantasias were in an odd grey area specifically because they didn't have clear lore, they only had nebulous answers in out-of-game interviews. However, they unquestionably exist as an in-game thing; they're as present in our inventory as soul crystals, Allagan currency, and animal skins. Therefore people will want to use them and nobody can stop them, even if they think they can or should... but there's no guidelines as to how you do so.

Them getting lore, even if it's just a thin 'they exist and here's a scene where you get given one', actually does solve the problem. ...you just have to recognize that the problem isn't 'people want to use Fantasias', as that guy seemed to think it was.

I don't particularly care if you think I'm 'enjoyable to talk to'. Because you're certainly neither enjoyable, nor talking to me; you just lecture for the sake of producing a screen full of words.

[MarianneviBrittania]

snip, snip, but no whips~

witnesses this post

[fulminating]

Level and story skips also exist as items in your inventory. Are they real in game? If so who wrote them - if you own one and play through the content it refers to anyway did your character really do it or did the in game author? Is your character just supplanting the true warrior of light ever after? This is an equivalent item to fantasia, not boar leather.

And yes, by nature of being an encompassing structured community they do have the power to enforce their cultural norms through exclusion or peer pressure. You are much more limited if the only person you can rp with is yourself.

[Cleretic]

Level and story skips also exist as items in your inventory. Are they real in game? If so who wrote them - if you own one and play through the content it refers to anyway did your character really do it or did the in game author? Is your character just supplanting the true warrior of light ever after? This is an equivalent item to fantasia, not boar leather.

Honestly, this is a fair equivalent, that we're probably only saved from having to deal with because the skips are boring. Fantasias are both interesting by themselves and potentially facilitators of interesting stories, there's plenty of reasons you'd want to write in a Fantasia. But skips are basically uninteresting by design; they exist to allow someone to not 'do the work.' And by and large people want stories to exist around their characters, so nobody (or at least, nobody I've ever met or seen) really wants to write in a skip book, because we all realize it'd be more fun for our characters to go through a journey to reach that destination, be that journey either in their present or their past. Meanwhile, the Fantasia can be that journey itself.

As it happens, I do run an RP venue that's got relevance here, a combination pharmacy/bookshop (As I've described it sometimes OOC, 'your one-stop shop for plot furtherance'). And in terms of specific instances around both of these in RP, Fantasias have come up a decent handful of times; people ask more around them than for them, probably because of that canon-iffiness, but it's clearly on the players' mind. On the other hand, nobody wants a skip book. A potentially similar thing that they do often want, though, are books about a job; not a book that will suddenly make you an expert at it, but a job that gets the ball rolling, allows them to write that story. And incidentally, it's usually for jobs that don't have an especially welcome 'in' for the average person; Red Mage, Dark Knight, Reaper. The stuff where you can't necessarily adapt the job quest.