I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
I've attatched a document with another example 1st level character (a Dragoon), and two more monsters (a zombie, and a crab). I've run a few playtest battles, and everything functions pretty much as its supposed to: the thief was a soft target who had multiple actions, the crusader was standing strong, the white mage used whole-party healing to help everyone, the black mage managed to blow away a monster or two.
Next step is probably to give some sort of introductory adventure using the characters, to codify the new limit system (e.g.: come up with a few orisha and what limits they give) and to keep pumping out job rough drafts (red mage, reaper, and samurai are now on the most immediate to-do lists).
Actually, I think it's easier going from "all of FF" rather than a particular game. This allows me to pick and choose aspects from different FF games, to get a lock on the things that stuck in the series (and why they did so), and to ditch the stuff that didn't quite work, or won't work for a PnP game. I'm not beholden to, say FFXI's way of doing weaponskills -- I can use some of them, and I can use some of FF8's limit system or FF6's abilities for Cyan. I can take some of the most emblematic and dramatic abilities and turn them into FFZ abilities pretty easily....a "best of the best" approach, kind of.
I've actually made an effort to simplify a lot of things. Some of the rules are different, but whenever this happens, it's always more transparent than it is in D&D. This makes it pretty easy to balance, actually -- you can forecast the abilities of a character or creature of X level much more easily in FFZ than you can in D&D. The way that damage, stat bonuses, etc. map directly to level means that you're well aware of what a character of X level can do, and thus can more accurately challenge them as a DM. And between characters, it makes sure that each character fullfills a dramatically different role. Even in a party of "all fighters" or "all casters," there's enough variety so that characters don't often tread on each others' toes, and no one hogs the spotlight (there will be more evidence of this simplicity when I get to releasing the DM stuff).
Well, try a combat for yourself. If it doesn't feel much like FF combat, tell me how, and I can improve it. It feels like FF combat to *me*, but I'm probably biased.
This actually maps to FF pretty directly, though in a different way than expected. In FF, you continually imrpove in weapons and armor as your character gains levels and finds new towns -- each new location has an upgrade of weapons and armor. FFZ ties it to level, which suggests when your characters should be finding new rescources and improving their equipment in other ways (such as with AP or gil).
"Spending ages doing quests or finding materials or unlocking hidden dungeons" doesn't map well to PnP at all, where spending ages donig anything is just onerous. Instead (and, again, this is more evident in the DM documents), FFZ nurtures the idea of hidden treasures that are meant to be discovered -- it is assumed that you will be hunting for the ultima weapons, so the ability (and expectation) of the ultima weapons are ingrained in character advancement, much as treasure is for D&D characters.
This is true for FFZ, too, just using different terms: a monster's Level is tied to its Defense and Magic score for its spells which are tied to the expected Attack score and Mind scores of the players which is tied to them gaining certain rewards at certain levels.
FFZ expedites the process of awards, which makes determining which monsters are good choices much easier, thus allowing the DM to focus more on character and story development than on challenge selection.
Next step is probably to give some sort of introductory adventure using the characters, to codify the new limit system (e.g.: come up with a few orisha and what limits they give) and to keep pumping out job rough drafts (red mage, reaper, and samurai are now on the most immediate to-do lists).
Harm said:
Actually, I think it's easier going from "all of FF" rather than a particular game. This allows me to pick and choose aspects from different FF games, to get a lock on the things that stuck in the series (and why they did so), and to ditch the stuff that didn't quite work, or won't work for a PnP game. I'm not beholden to, say FFXI's way of doing weaponskills -- I can use some of them, and I can use some of FF8's limit system or FF6's abilities for Cyan. I can take some of the most emblematic and dramatic abilities and turn them into FFZ abilities pretty easily....a "best of the best" approach, kind of.
I've actually made an effort to simplify a lot of things. Some of the rules are different, but whenever this happens, it's always more transparent than it is in D&D. This makes it pretty easy to balance, actually -- you can forecast the abilities of a character or creature of X level much more easily in FFZ than you can in D&D. The way that damage, stat bonuses, etc. map directly to level means that you're well aware of what a character of X level can do, and thus can more accurately challenge them as a DM. And between characters, it makes sure that each character fullfills a dramatically different role. Even in a party of "all fighters" or "all casters," there's enough variety so that characters don't often tread on each others' toes, and no one hogs the spotlight (there will be more evidence of this simplicity when I get to releasing the DM stuff).
Well, try a combat for yourself. If it doesn't feel much like FF combat, tell me how, and I can improve it. It feels like FF combat to *me*, but I'm probably biased.
This actually maps to FF pretty directly, though in a different way than expected. In FF, you continually imrpove in weapons and armor as your character gains levels and finds new towns -- each new location has an upgrade of weapons and armor. FFZ ties it to level, which suggests when your characters should be finding new rescources and improving their equipment in other ways (such as with AP or gil).
"Spending ages doing quests or finding materials or unlocking hidden dungeons" doesn't map well to PnP at all, where spending ages donig anything is just onerous. Instead (and, again, this is more evident in the DM documents), FFZ nurtures the idea of hidden treasures that are meant to be discovered -- it is assumed that you will be hunting for the ultima weapons, so the ability (and expectation) of the ultima weapons are ingrained in character advancement, much as treasure is for D&D characters.
This is true for FFZ, too, just using different terms: a monster's Level is tied to its Defense and Magic score for its spells which are tied to the expected Attack score and Mind scores of the players which is tied to them gaining certain rewards at certain levels.
FFZ expedites the process of awards, which makes determining which monsters are good choices much easier, thus allowing the DM to focus more on character and story development than on challenge selection.
