MMO Terminology in FFXIFollow

Never heard of that.

I've heard people calling their characters "toons" though.

I wouldn't consider the character creation in FFXI "rolling" either. To me, "rolling" a character involves some form of manipulation of the base stats during creation. The base stats of FFXI characters are set in stone by race and class during creation.


While we're on it, people who refer to their characters as "toons" need to die in a fire.

Edited, Apr 23rd 2009 9:22am by Usagi

I approve of this message.

*edited for botched tag*

Edited, Apr 23rd 2009 9:24am by Banggugyangu

Agree with Usagi - it's not "rolling" if the stats that you are assigned upon creation are standardized. "Rolling" implies dice, which indicates that there is some sort of luck involved. Not so in FFXI. I prefer calling it "creating a character" (long-winded, I know...)

I've heard of rerolling characters on MMOs, not so much in FFXI though. But to me when I think of rolling a character I think of the D&D days when you actualy rolled dice for stats. Which process tended to include how much can I smudge the die rolls before the DM catches me cheating. 18s across the board yo! :p

Yeah rerolling came mostly from dungeons and dragons due to how they generated player base stats. You rolled 3 six sided dice. However it was possible to get a pretty useless character if enough rolls were low, so rerolling came to mean redoing your initial stat rolls in order for you to have decent stats for your job. A thief with 5 dex is pretty worthless.

It's not all pencil and paper rpgs though, some like champions let you buy stats out of a pool of points, no dice-rolling allowed. Some like battletech and car wars you just built your "character" out of a pool of cash. I think mostly TSR games like d and d, top secret, and star frontiers used rolls for character generation.

Most players now don't actually need to reroll in pen and paper rpgs, I think now you just take more dice than you need and choose the best rolls. If you usually roll 3 6-sided dice, just roll 4 or 5 instead.

You do actually reroll sometimes in ffxi, someone who starts out as one race but switches to another can be said to reroll since its usually stats that drive the decision, like HP or MP.

While that's true for battletech, in the attachmentr MechWarrior game where you mainly focused on the NON giant robot aspect of the universe still had dice rolls determining base stats, was 1d8 though.

used to play D&D alot, but switched to MW 3rd Ed. Had all the AeroTech books and we made a home style game based off of Cowboy Bebop universe with no giant mechs, only ships, dropships, and lots and lots of guns.

Sorry for the tangent. Still miss the good old days of Pen and paper games. You'll never really realize how limited you are in a MMO till you play an old fashioned table top game.

I voted no, but I will sometimes use the term "rerolling" if I am talking to someone who plays a differen MMO, just so he'll know what I'm saying.

I'll also call drops "Loot" if I'm talking to someone who never played FFXI before, and occasionally use other non-FFXI related terms, just to pass the language barrier and get straight to whatever content we're talking about.

Once, however, I had a LS member who recently joined FFXI from WoW. He called his chatracter a "Toon," and I pretended I didn't know what that was. I put too much work and respect into my character to call her a "Toon." >.>

Yeah, it seems people don't mind someone calling making a new character rolling or rerolling, but it's not a generally used term.

Calling your character a 'toon' in FFXI though is grounds for heads on pikes. I'm not sure which MMO started that trend, but back in the days of D&D it was a character, and back in the early days of virtual worlds online it was an avatar. None of this 'toon' funny business. And FFXI characters look nothing like cartoons.

Ty Ker, I fixed it >:

Ah cool! Learned some RP history from that article.

So the question is then, how and why did the term get attached to MUDs and later MMORPGs?

In some MUDs, your initial stats are random (in a xdx format, the MUD I used to play had a 3d6 "3 dice each dice has 6 side" formate I think) and you can add a few bones points to whatever stats you want (That's why it's call "rolling"). Sometime you don't get that good a stats for your new character, so what you do is delete the one you have and redo the whole process, and that's why it's call "rerolling".

Not sure about MMO, may be some MMO has random initial stats too? Sure not FFXI :)

shanecf


I lol'd.