I’ve officially run my first raiding party in Final Fantasy 14. Technically twice. The first time, I was mostly quiet and just the nominal party leader, letting people figure things out and act according to their own wills just avoid being too controlling. The second time, though, it quickly became clear that we needed someone to pay attention to the mechanics that were happening and make calls about what to do. I asked if anyone wanted to do it, fully prepared to do it myself, and someone immediately cracked the joke that it sounded like I volunteered, so I started doing it. It wasn’t that bad. Took a bit of practice to be able to split my attention between my role’s needs in the battle and the mechanics everyone else needed to be warned about, but most of them were for everyone, so it wasn’t splitting my attention too much more than usual. Especially because I’m almost always looking for this stuff anyway, even when someone else is calling the shots, so I don’t become dependent on that specific person/voice. My goal is to figure out fight mechanics and find the balance necessary to perform them perfectly while also keeping my rotation going as much as possible, not just get through the fire enough times to never go back, so it’s a pretty natural fit. Except, of course, for the fact that I have mild aphasia (specifically “anomic aphasia”) as a side effect of my antidepressants, so sometimes I have a difficult time producing a noun I need in a moment and that’s a bad thing to run into when trying to call shots in a raid. Thankfully, I managed to avoid the problem during my shot-calling debut, but I’m going to continue to be the shotcaller as this group carries on and I feel like it’s only a matter of time until I can’t produce the word I need and everyone dies as a result.

The easiest counter I’ve got to the aphasia is to rely entirely on common words. For whatever reason, I tend not to lose those (generally I lose the names of things and proper nouns), so I shouldn’t have a problem with simple directions like “move right” or “center” or “pairs” or “groups,” all of which are simple calls to make that don’t require more than a single word that has plenty of synonyms I can fall back on if I need to. Other than “right” and “left” of course. For whatever reason, those direction-terms don’t have much in the way of easy replacements if I happen to lose one of them except, you know, as “not left/right” versions of the direction I do remember. I’m hoping that, between the simple nature of the commands and the repetition of the callouts, I won’t find myself in a situation where I can’t complete a callout, but there’s no way to know for sure. I’ll keep on my toes and hope that there’s someone else who can make the call when needed if I fail. Unfortunately, it’d probably still result in a lot of death given how little margin for error raids have, so best avoid it all together if I can.

The other aspect of raid leading that I’ve had to lean into is talking with my fellow players after the fact and addressing any problems. Like one player whose constant panic was a source of constirnation for many, myself included. I had to have a talk with that person about what was going on, why they were panicking, and what we could do about it for future raids. Which is thankfully sorted for at least the moment, but it remains to be seen if the conversation had any lasting impact [things had improved during the latest session, so that was good]. I also have to do the organizing and role assignments, which is work I’m fine doing (and inclined towards doing, too), but it does mean that I’ve had a constant list of things to do since raiding was first proposed and it does not look like that’ll be letting up anytime soon. Gotta help a player acquire some gear, gotta talk to another about filling some holes we have as a group, and gotta make sure I’m as prepared as possible for each new raid so that I can more quickly settle in to shot-calling than I did last time. Took me about ten runs before I had it down. At least once I get it down, I can keep it going indefinitely (barring any aphasia moments), to the degree that another player commented on how consistent I was. I’m not sure how to take that, and probably wouldn’t still be thinking about it if it wasn’t for the fact that it jiggled loose some other stuff I’ve been thinking about on-and-off, but I’m not upset by it. Consistency is good. Also, thanks to being neurodivergent, I tend to rely a lot on specific phrasing to carry intonation, so if I repeated anything I say a bunch, it would also probably sound pretty consistent. Except for a few things I’ve got that I can and will say different just to amuse myself.

I figured that this is where things were going to end up when I started this server. I’d been thinking about setting up a raid group anyway, for Savage raids and ultimates, but I expected someone more experienced to take lead. No one else stepped forward and I’ve been thinking about my responsibility as the administrator of this little community anyway, so I just… went with it. It’s difficult to feel confident in myself, despite my practice and all the thought I’ve put into it (as you’ve already read) since all of my previous attempts at shotcalling ended so poorly. And that was before I was dealing with this current aphasia. Overwatch, Destiny 2… All of my experience doing “higher-end content” and trying to call shots as the one with the intuition for when to press the attack or retreat in Overwatch and the one with the observation skills in Destiny 2 inevitably came to an end when I’d struggle to come up with the name of something and either get gently made fun of for it and then get pushed aside so someone else could do it or just getting pushed aside so someone else could do it. My greatest success in Overwatch was when I wasn’t in voice chats with people and had to use pings and built-in voice commands to direct things and Destiny… well, where reacting to stuff became my job and I just stopped trying to lead. Years of each game, my main two massive multiplayer online gaming experiences, where I’d eventually fail in a way that set the group back because I couldn’t produce a word, has left me nervous about how this is going to go. I’ve got more time in Final Fantasy 14 than all other online games I’ve played put together, so maybe being that deep into the game will help fix the problem (if I’m that immersed in the game, I shouldn’t struggle as much to name things from it), but only time will tell and I really hope it doesn’t tell at a moment of high tension that gets everyone killed…