Sorry for the silence from Paxmar the Pacifist - I’ll have to catch up on her journal quickly as she’s leveling like crazy lately. It helps that there is an abundance of newbie zones so she can travel around, cherry-picking the best quests. I’m also being very careful to tick off exploration experience locations to make sure I don’t miss any.

My biggest problem is dealing with other people in-game without coming across like an idiot. Blind group invites have always annoyed me but now, suddenly, they are a relief. I can just decline and carry on my way. When someone sends me a tell asking me if I’d like to group, well, that’s more complicated. Do I lie? That doesn’t seem very pacifist, really. Do I preach? Ugh. Do I say “I won’t be involved with the shedding of blood” and hope that the person has a sense of humor? I don’t know. [More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

Sorry that the Furious Pacifist has been so quiet - she ended up with blood on her hands and so we had to have a virtual jumping off a cliff ceremony. Turns out you just can’t trust gnomes…

Paxmar wrote:

It was wonderful to arrive back in Baubbleshire after my time away. Neezer Grund greeted me before I’d properly made it off the boat and just about talked my ear off! I promised I’d come back to him and went straight over to the Deductive Directory to see if they had any work. There were plenty of jobs but nothing that I was qualified to do. I was beginning to despair again.

That’s when I made a wonderful new friend, Talwith Darkcloud was his name. He saw that I was at a loss and offered to help me out. I told him I wasn’t afraid of hard work but I didn’t know how to get started. He said they were in serious need of more skilled labor in Baubbleshire and that if I was willing to learn a trade, he’s happily teach me. He gave me some basic tools and a bag to put them in and immediately put me to work making simple things.

What a relief to be back in a sensible place [More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

I made a pacifist character, Paxmar. I posted an introduction while I considered how to format this. I think what I’m going to do it put Paxmar’s journal in a text box, like so:

Paxmar wrote:

I decided that I am going to the Queen’s Colony as my father had told me he wished me to do when I came of age. He died in a bloody battle against the clockwork on Faydwer, trying to repossess what he originally believed was ours by birthright. All I have from him are letters that he wrote to me, care of my mother, while she stayed safe in Baubbleshire. The first letters were all about justice and honor and victory. Later letters speak of blood and lost friends and hardship and dying dreams. In the end, he wrote of doubts and dismay. He stopped speaking of the clockworks as scrap metal with bad electrics and started describing them as real beings, with thoughts and feelings of their own.

[More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

I’ve made a new character on EQ2: Paxmar. She’s a bit different from my other alts in that she’s a pacifist: she won’t kill anything. Exploration, run-around quests, cataloguing is all good. But no hurting things and certainly murdering is not an option.

She’s also vegetarian but that’s pretty easy to deal with. She does need food and drink for regen when sprinting through aggro areas but she doesn’t have a weapon and she’s not particularly bothered about her armor. It’s oddly liberating not to be even thinking about spell upgrades.

She’s a gnome, because I thought the wild hair and glasses and serious look suited her. She’s a fury, simply so that I could make the pun in the title. Although having someone able to port will be useful, I have to admit.

She’ll be a tradeskiller - I’m not sure which tradeskill yet although obviously she won’t make weapons.

She won’t help other people kill - healing in a group that is killing doesn’t make sense to me, although she would of course heal someone if she saw them hurting and not in the process of hurting someone else. She’s planning on doing a lot of traveling and book quests.

I’ll be posting irregularly about her progress to see how far I can get with a rabid pacifist gnome. I’ll also be doing an in-character version which will be fun … and will give me a chance to explain why she has two kills against her showing on EQ2players. Oops. :/

I’ve made a special category for “pacifist”, so if you only want to follow the adventures of Paxmar, you can get her updates by subscribing to her own personal feed.

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.