In the middle of Final Fantasy XIV’s post-Stormblood patches, there’s a scene where the characters need to purchase a specific katana. An exact price for the katana is not given in-game, but Alisaie at one point states that it is the price of buying and furnishing a small house, which ballparks it at somewhere between five to ten million gil. This is treated as a ruinously large amount of money that should not have been paid and will have a serious downstream impact on the finances of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, which leads directly into the plot that requires taking on extra work.
At the time, of course, my character could easily have bought more than a dozen of the katanas if she wanted.
The point here is not that this in some way was poor writing; it wasn’t, it gives a good idea that in-universe, and that much money is a substantial amount and not something you can just shrug off. But it does serve as a useful segue to consider the many things in any MMORPG that your characters might be capable of doing that do not, in fact, map nicely onto the things that your character is supposed to be able to do.
To some extent, this is part of the problem of diegesis in roleplaying butting up against the reality. You know that in-universe, your character cannot just get up and get back to things in the event of death. Grignr the orc does not drop to zero hit points, respawn, and then say, “Oof, that was a doozy, huh?” Dead is dead, except it isn’t because this is a video game and should be treated as such.
But there are other things to consider in that regard. In City of Heroes, odds are good that your max-level character is, in fact, an Incarnate. The simple mechanics of the game make that just the path you need to go. But at the same time, in-universe, Incarnates are vanishingly rare. Not every level 50 superhero should be Incarnate. Most of the major heroes in the game aren’t Incarnate. This is something rare and special. And that means that technically, your Incarnate powers aren’t something your character can do.
Except that, like… you can do these things. You can do these things easily.
The extent of this can vary, but odds are pretty good you’re going to run into it. In World of Warcraft, inscription is the profession that makes books and scrolls and paintings, which you may recognize as two very different things. Is your character a scribe who writes intricate books? That’s fine, but does that mean you’re equally accomplished at painting? The game says you can do both! If you’re playing a Shaman but your character isn’t much of a spellcaster, how do you handle that when you could change your spec at a moment’s notice?
In FFXIV, you are well-served to level all of your crafting and gathering professions together. But what if your character isn’t a crafter in-character? How do you handle the fact that in-game you can make the best dishes available, but in-character your character could figure out how to burn a bowl of cereal?
The answer is that it’s complicated. But there are solutions to the problem, and the two big ones that are worth considering here are finding alternative explanations and leveling the scope. And just for ease of explanation, we’ll be covering those in reverse order.
Leveling the scope is basically an understanding that in any sort of story, the characters are going to have strengths and weaknesses. Even if you have two characters who can theoretically do all of the same things, in reality one of them is going to be better at some stuff and worse at other stuff. The Street Fighter series started with a Ryu and Ken that both had identical movesets, but over time they’ve both diversified so that even though both characters can use the same basic moves, Ryu is much better at fireballs and ranged control while Ken is a much better close-in character.
Let’s go back to FFXIV: It’s quite possible that you and your friend have both leveled every combat job, and so, mechanically, both of you can do the same things. But that doesn’t mean that your characters are the same. Your character might be better with magic and just find it more natural, especially healing spells; her character is a lot better with ranged weapons and anything involving dexterity. The fact that you have a basic level of familiarity doesn’t change that you have specialties in practice, something that gearing usually bears out as well.
But alternative explanations help provide something beyond “pretending you can’t do what you can do” because that’s focused around explaining the things your character can do… but not the way the game says it’s done.
Case in point: Suppose your character in Guild Wars 2 is a leatherworker in mechanical terms, but in-character you don’t want her to be capable of crafting things. Instead, you could easily explain it as she is a very good merchant who has a knack for calling on the right people and getting just the right leather goods delivered into her waiting hands. Or maybe she’s a hunter and has a contact who is very good at turning each specific hide into a bespoke piece. Mechanically, the net effect is the same (she turns leather into useful stuff), but it has a different flavor along the way.
Obviously, this isn’t always a one-size-fits-all issue, but it is something you can work with. How do you square leveling cooking in a game where your character shouldn’t be able to cook? Well, there’s a difference between cooking functionally (a skill everyone should have) and cooking well (a skill some people have and some don’t; I think I’m pretty good, but Chris puts me to shame). Your character might be a max-level chef because he can make the ingredients edible and nutritious, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t taste like wet cardboard.
Ultimately, there isn’t a single solution, but I also think it’s important to recognize that sometimes you have to be willing to suspend your mechanical disbelief in order to keep things grounded. As was the case when I wrote about how FFXIV’s story doesn’t know you’re playing a video game, you have to remember that as far as your character is concerned, this is real life. Yes, you can just peace out of a problem and don’t have to worry about eating in-game in a lot of games. Your character does not have that luxury!
There are going to be some things that your character can do that aren’t possible in a strict diegetic reading of the game. And that’s OK. You can internalize that fact and play around it. That doesn’t mean that you’re ignoring the mechanics from top to bottom, but it does mean recognizing that sometimes reality does not line up with the limitations of a pretend game, and that’s where you need to sand off the edges a little.
If you’re an old hand at roleplaying in MMOs, you can look to Eliot Lefebvre’s Storyboard as an irregular column addressing the common peaks and pitfalls possible in this specialized art of interaction. If you’ve never tried it before, you can look at it as a peek into how the other half lives. That’s something everyone can enjoy, just like roleplaying itself.
