JRPG style TTRPGs

[jian]

FabU is well worth a read but I do think it’s a bit inconsistent in how all the Skills balance, and there’s very little scaling for stats/checks since you’re generally rolling two dice (your stats, rated d4-d12) and adding them, occasionally getting a bonus. So even quite experienced characters may have difficulty reaching a routine DC (10) let alone higher ones (13+) even with their best stats. This is a problem when you need to roll those numbers to activate some of your Skills.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Fabula Ultima: great ideas, good art, weak mechanics and math. I think it’s worth reading for inspiration even if you never play it.

 

[GMMichael]

Has anyone played these and what do you think of them?

Haven't played, but reading these is great fun (which is a good sign):

Final Fantasy RPG 4th Edition - FFRPG 4th Edition Resources - Final Fantasy RPG 4th Edition
Uses a cool attribute system that is more like humors than personal traits.

Final Fantasy d6 - Final Fantasy D6
More of a traditional structure for an RPG than 4th Ed, and an equal amount of awesomeness.

PS - both are free (donations accepted?), unlike the $182.99 starter kit from SquareEnix.

 

[Jahydin]

Just picked this up myself:

Plan on writing a small review here once I get a chance to read it!

 

[jian]

Just picked this up myself:
View attachment 384740

Plan on writing a small review here once I get a chance to read it!

Oh yes, I’d forgotten about that one. Hope you enjoy it and look forward to your review.

 

[Iosue]

Characters are highly customizable. While they use the word "class" to describe what you're taking levels in in the translation, it's more like skill packages. Like taking levels in "fighter" gives you bonuses to attacks, access to certain feats, and that's really it. "Fighter" doesn't even give you your initiative bonus. But that's fine, because no one is just a fighter. You're expected to take at least two "classes," and this means you have a lot of flexibility. Like you can combine fighter with priest to get something like a D&D cleric, or you could instead take levels in Enhancer to learn breathing techniques to buff yourself, or you could take levels in Scout to be able to be a skill monkey.

It bugs me that the fan translation used "class" for the ginou. Something like "Feats" for sentou tokugi (combat specialties) is fine, because the sentou tokugi live in the same design space and accomplish the same role. But I think the ginou is a place where Sword World design specifically deviated from D&D, and has a completely different mindset. But calling them "classes" just encourages thinking of them in the same way. (I also called them skill packages in my Let's Read of SW2.5, but now I realize that even better is the term "skill set."

Speaking of combat, do you remember how the playtest for 5e indicated that it would be modular, and that like you could add in a tactical module if you wanted it to feel more like 4e combat? SW2.5 actually pulls that off. There's three forms of combat. Basic has a front line and a back line, and it works well for combats where you don't plan on having exact positioning be that important. Standard Combat has specific distances and more rules for things like movement and cover, but it's over a 1 dimensional line. I recently ran this for an encounter where the players were ambushed on both sides, and it worked great. And then there's advanced combat that expands things onto your normal 2d map. You could easily make a campaign that focused on one of those combat types entirely, or you could do something like use basic for the smaller fights and advanced for the big boss fight.

IMO, because melee in SW2.5 is so "sticky", the GM really needs to give a lot of thought and effort to the environment and terrain to make the Advanced Combat worth the extra bookkeeping. There's nothing inherent in the system itself that is very "tactical". No forced movement, no bonuses for position or formation. You've got your skirmish zones and the characters that outside the skirmish zones looking in. Unless there's specifically a reason that the outside characters need to move between and/or around skirmish zones, I don't think there's much point in going beyond the Basic or Standard Combat rules.

I rather like the setting as a whole. It has a good aesthetic (and I think the sort of fantasy world you see in most isekai stuff derives from some form of Sword World), and I'm a sucker for magitech. The default setting is one where society progressed to roughly 20th century level through magitech, but 300 years ago, that civilization got destroyed. So there's a nation trying to rebuild the old mana powered train network, and a dungeon might be the relics of a subway station or a mall.

Very much agreed. Raxia, and specifically Alfreim, are gonzo in the best way. Labyrinths created by pseudo-sentient magic swords! Magitech ruins! Pocket dimensions of evil that just pop up anywhere and can take any form!

Negatives:
So they decided to go the BECMI route and have multiple core rulebooks covering different tiers of play. On one hand, this allows someone in Japan to spend like $10 and get all they need to try the game out with their friends. On the other, it means things are spread out among several different sources. To make matters worse, a lot of stuff that feels like it should be core is in supplements. Like do you want to use point buy rather than rolling for stats, have work skills that represent what the PCs used to be or still do outside of adventuring, or the rules for that Advanced Combat system I mentioned above? Those are all in a supplement called Advanced Treasury that's otherwise mostly a condensed list of items from all the other sources until that point. It can be difficult to know what to read or where to find something.

It's nice that you can spend 10 bucks and have plenty of game to last you and your friends for a long time. But yeah, if you have all 3 core rulebooks, you almost have to buy Advanced Treasury, just to have the complete equipment lists.

That said, I like not needing one book for characters, one book for monsters, and one book for GM advice, and I also like not needing to buy one huge tome for the info.

Damage from players is weird. They wanted granularity between weapon damage, but also wanted to use 2d6 for everything. The solution is the Power Table. Each weapon will have a value, and when you're doing damage, you roll 2d6, then look at the row that matches your weapon's power and find the column that matches what you just rolled. It's not super hard (and you're expected to just write that row on your character sheet, so you're not looking at the full chart every time), but it can be a little clunky, particularly since it was made by hand rather than based on a specific formula (though the idea is that each increase does 1/6 of a point more damage on average than the previous row). That said, I play on roll20, where someone already made a character sheet with macros that handle this, so it's really no issue for my game.

The Power Table is definitely my first big WTF? moment when reading Sword World 2.5. Like, is Sword World still stuck in the 80s?

Now I love the Power Table. It's not just the granularity, though having 82 different weapons to chose from in Rulebook I alone, each with a slightly different damage profile, is certainly part of the fun of Sword World. It's also the scaling. In 5e, for example, a higher level character deals more damage because they get more attacks and/or their damage die gets bigger (e.g., d6 to d8) and/or they get more dice to roll. And that's fine, that's one way to do it. But with SW2.5, you get weapons that have a higher power rating, and you're dealing more damage while still just rolling 2d6. Add to the that the exploding crit rating? Rolling on the Power Table is just so much fun.

It is a bit old school. Modern design seems to eschew referencing tables. But that doesn't make it bad, at least in my XP.

I'm not sure I like how skills are divided. Like I said above, combat focused or magic focused classes don't get much outside of combat or magic. You'd think there might be a whole bunch of different classes for other skill packages, but not really. Almost all of them are in a class called Scout, and then there's a ranger which has almost as many, but some of their skills only work outdoors, and the Sage, which is knowledge skills. Other classes might have one or two things (like the Tactician, which lets you buff the party and reminds me of a 4e warlord, also gets the initiative skill), but if your goal is to be able to use a lot of skills, you don't have many ways of accomplishing that. That said, this game is more designed around the idea that at least one party member has a given skill to roll for the party than around everyone rolling for a check, so it's not like literally everyone needs scout levels or something.

See, this is the kind of thing I mentioned above. You start thinking of the ginou as "classes", and then the koui hantei (action checks) become "skills", and the whole thing seems a little weird and off-putting.

The Fighter skill set applies only to melee combat checks. The Shooter skill set applies only to ranged attack checks. The Scout skill set applies only to scouting-related checks. None of these checks are distinct skills; you can't improve one at the expense of another. The whole idea is that if you want to be proficient in those checks, you take a level in the overall skills set, and improvement in the skill set improves all those checks. The Fighter [Skill Set/Class] and the Scout [Skill Set/Class] are not opposed to each other. They are both there to let you achieve the kind of character you envision. The only question is which skill set you want to concentrate on.

The character sheet doesn't list individual skills. It wants you to just know which class to use and what stat to use with them. A new player can't just glance down to see the options they have, and they may need to reference the book to see if something is even an option for them when they wouldn't for most recent D&D editions and derived games.

That's because the action checks are GM-facing. Ideally, the player just notes what they want to do, and then the GM decides if an action check is warranted, and if so, which check for the PC to make.

 

[timbannock]

There's also Heroes of Cerulea. (I have no experience with it, but it seems cool!)

My experiences:

• Fabula Ultima has a lot of good things going for it, but its devotion to modeling early console RPG combat causes it to become a little hard for me to sync fiction and mechanics. If that's the feel you're going for, though, it's great. The classes and mechanics are, overall, fast-playing and fun.
• Break!! would have been my go-to game if it wasn't for two things: I don't really like roll-under systems for some reason that I can't define, and I could build the same basic game with a roll-over system by simply combining stuff I already have, namely Shadowdark (with a few of the optional modes flipped on), Errant, and Knave 2e, and notably that combo is more directly compatible with 99% of the OSR stuff out there than Break!! is. But as far as esthetics and completeness, Break!! is perhaps one of the best games out there.

 

[overgeeked]

• Break!! would have been my go-to game if it wasn't for two things: I don't really like roll-under systems for some reason that I can't define, and I could build the same basic game with a roll-over system by simply combining stuff I already have, namely Shadowdark (with a few of the optional modes flipped on), Errant, and Knave 2e, and notably that combo is more directly compatible with 99% of the OSR stuff out there than Break!! is. But as far as esthetics and completeness, Break!! is perhaps one of the best games out there.

You can easily switch from roll under to roll over. Roll under with D&D-like stats becomes roll 1d20+whole stat vs TN22. If it's roll equal to or under, it becomes TN21. The math is identical.

If that's the only thing keeping you from playing Break, it seems like a worthwhile fix.

 

[timbannock]

You can easily switch from roll under to roll over. Roll under with D&D-like stats becomes roll 1d20+whole stat vs TN22. If it's roll equal to or under, it becomes TN21. The math is identical.

If that's the only thing keeping you from playing Break, it seems like a worthwhile fix.

For sure, but it wasn't the only thing. The immediate compatibility with other OSR stuff was more the issue for me and my group.