—Part 1: Where do I go to say ‘walkups welcome’ and then go AFK?—
See, at first I kept trying to find the equivalent of Orgrimmar/Silvermoon where I could find folks hanging about in-character for me to interact with. But instead of always being found in a singular area I found that the walk up role play scene kind of rotates through a series of player-run roleplaying venues and events that reliably open at regular times.
These venues have a wide range of themes, from shady underground brawling rings to upscale fine dining restaurants, and its quite easy to find several that your character might thrive in no matter their in-character background.
I find that the most accessible events are the ones where everyone takes a turn being the center of attention, like
-music festivals:
https://mogstock.carrd.co/#
-fight clubs:
https://saltyseawitch.carrd.co/
https://beatup.carrd.co/
https://soulfire.carrd.co/
-open mic nights / talent shows:
https://rainbowroomstage.carrd.co/
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/772924785247125514/862734066020122714/My_Post_57.png (The Lotus Flame’s poster here doesn’t mention that its an open mic night but they are! They also have lots of fun themed nights!)
Etc.
because even when youre not onstage you always have something to talk about with the people in the audience with you.
I find that chatting and having unrelated rp when someone else is onstage is quite accepted, even expected during these kinds of events! And people there are always willing to chat with whoever sits down next to them at the bar! Its a great way to meet people and have fun, short, memorable interactions.
And then there are the venues that are simply player run restaurants, libraries, bathhouses, Etc. that are far too numerous for me to even begin to list here haha!
(All these venues and events tend to advertise both ingame and on discord (https://discord.gg/RYMEvnEe) and external websites like https://crystalshouts.com/ )
I’m a waitress at Third Eye Sushi and I enjoy helping facilitate the roleplay of our guests by creating a setting/atmosphere for them to interact with, and for natural IC friendships to form in!
Now all that being said, I have randomly wandered on roleplay out in the wild on some occasions! Here’s how you can spot them:
you can tell that someone is intending to roleplay if they have floating “RP” letters just to the left of their username. That would indicate that they are either currently in-character or looking for someone to roleplay with (or they just concluded some roleplay and forgot to toggle it off haha)
You can turn on this roleplaying bat-signal thing by typing “/roleplaying”!
—Part 2: I miss TRP—
Unfortunately roleplaying mods aren’t as universally used here as in the Wyrmrest community. FF14 has some official roleplaying support tools that are better in some ways but worse in others.
You’ll have a little section of your character profile where many roleplayers type up a little message detailing what their character is doing or a short description of them, but there is nowhere near enough room to type up backstories or full descriptions. So instead most of us post a link to our “carrd”, a free service that lets us make a small, very customize-able website about each of our characters!
I’ve seen people do some very creative things with their character’s carrd, but for the most part they all have sections for:
- A Profile: listing general personal details and a description of their personality
- Hooks: possible reasons to interact with the character in question, perhaps hiring them for a job or maybe they grew up in the same hometown or learned magic/swordfighting/smithing from the same master etc.
- OOC: a list of the kinds of roleplay the player is interested in pursuing (action/adventure, slice of life, criminal), and what kind of connections they’re interested in making (friendship, business partner, rival, romance).
Here’s a some good, simple character carrds as examples:
https://freethemorbol.carrd.co/
https://lajvati.carrd.co/
I find that when setting up longterm shared storylines FF14 roleplayers highly value OOC communication about what everyone is comfortable with and what kind of character development they are open to having!
A carrd is not by any means required of course but I think once you get used to making them they’re just as good as a TRP, with more room for creativity, too!
Another roleplaying addon some of us might be used to was um, “Narcissus” i think it was called. It let you arrange and pose your character in front of various backgrounds for screenshots! This is one area where the official version FF14 includes in the game is actually far superior! Next time you log in just type “/gpose” and look at all the options you have!
Anyway sorry for the wall of text, hope this helps!!
And will catch up and move forth! Looking forward to all the activity and VIBES this week.