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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4127586" data-attributes="member: 2067">Pretty much yes on all these.(a) is solved by the "Less XP or More Enemies" idea, and 4e's scale should be nice (and in 3.5 or SAGA, you can do what you always have to do in an encounter anyway and eyeball it).(b) can be solved, in my mind, by making it something that everyone just gets (thus making sure that no one person gets the larger suite of actions), or by resolving those actions abstractly (so the player maybe gets to roll an extra d20 at the end of his turn, to see how his friend does, not the whole suite of actions).I think the second solution might be the best, but you have to walk a fine line with regards to believability here. If the player gets a suite of "commands" he can issue a given "pet", and then rolls a dice to resolve the entire rounds' worth of actions, I'd say it's probably believable. This goes to 3e's Handle Animal skill in some ways. But you'd have to ensure that friendly wizard sidekicks could still be wizardy, and that friendly dire bear companions can still give a big ol' maulin'.I'm also kind of a fan of "combos," but FFZ already has room for those, and they'd be wierder to add to most d20 games.That only works with certain effects.I can believe that it takes me a minor action (or even maybe a move action!) to issue a new command, but it shouldn't take me any actions to keep directing my friend Ed to swing his sword. Talking is a free action, right? I can believe that giving a direct order takes a bit more, but not much more...I can entirely believe that it takes my whole turn to give orders to the avatar of Orcus I just called out of the Abyss, every round I want to keep him here instead of sending him back from whence he came. When we're dealing with blantantly magical effects, some sort of concentration or "action loaning" makes sense. When we're dealing with blatantly mundane effects, it doesn't really pass the believability barrier to do that. There's a continuum there, but different people will hit it at different points, and you're going to need something else to handle the blantantly mundane effects.Combos, man. The idea in FFZ is that you pool your actions to get a greater effect: you get to use two powers at once, or change how your powers work, or get to use a more limited power earlier (a limit break or something). Think in terms of teamwork benefits or sharing spells -- less actions, but actions that carry almost twice the punch and have double the versatility. Also, think in terms of the powers that leaders (like warlords) give. Having a cohort *makes you a leader*. When you act, they act in concert, doing things like moving or attacking.That's a good point, and a cool idea, but I could see it stepping on toes unless we fall back into 3e's model of cohorts/companions/summons being weaker. If the conjurer can summon a fell beast who is a better striker than the rogue (even if only for a little while), who needs the rogue?Versatility is fine, but there needs to be potency in it, too, or else you wind up with the 3e Bard: "I suck equally at everything!"I've been wrestlin' with it in FFZ, too, though my problems have been more in translating a "you have an entire party's worth of actions" into "you have one person's." Things like "Save or Suck" have a history in the FF series, and they're fine when you only loose one suite of options for a round or two, but if it's a character's entire suite? And that's the only character they play?Really starting to puzzle out the fine line between running a "unit" and running a "character." <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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