When the idea that I might want to make tabletop games first wormed its way into my brain, I set myself two goals. I wanted to make an RPG based on Metal Gear Solid; and I wanted to make an RPG based on Final Fantasy 7. Neither of these projects ever went anywhere, as is typical with the wild aspirations of youth.
Recently, a thread Dan D posted on G+ set me to thinking about this for the first time in years. I’m surprised how many ideas I have. I want to let them pour into my keyboard. Let loose with an unmoderated stream of consciousness and see where things go. I make no promises about the quality of this post, or how many follow up posts there’s going to be. This might become The FF7 Fangame Blog, or I might never mention the thing again once I’m done here. Depends on where my heart goes.
The first question that needs to be answered is: what do I want out of an FF7 game? The PS1 original was a jumble of bland gameplay strung together to justify a poorly written melodrama. It’s not the sort of game I’d like to make, or run, or even play in. If I’m rejecting the core essence of the original game, what is left to play with?
Looking back on the game 20+ years after its release, there are a few elements that still speak to me:
- The juxtaposition of high and low technologies.
- The phenomenally underrated art of the backgrounds.
- The music, obvs.
- Exploring the destructive impact of capitalism not just on the environment, but on the very idea of what it means to be human.
- The grand sense of scale. Starting out feeling insignificantly enveloped by the megacity of Midgar; then seeing Midgar disappear over the horizon as you set out into the wider world.
- The feeling that these characters had real agency (even if I, the player, was on rails). They subverted my expectations. They changed their circumstances. They strove, and overcame.
That sense of being an agent of change in the world needs to be the core of the game. It doesn’t matter whether the players are a force for good, or for evil, or just for some obscure personal cause. What matters is that they strive to make their will manifest in the world.
Which leads nicely into the next question that needs to be asked: what rules need to be different from the way I normally play D&D? I have no intention of reinventing any wheels that can be avoided. Attacking by rolling a d20 against your foe’s armor rating works just fine. I see no reason to change it.
However, gaining experience points for treasure or for killing monsters makes no sense to me in this game. Seven isn’t a megadungeon, nor is it a hex crawl. It’s something different from what I’ve done in D&D before. The best term I can come up with for what I’m thinking is Political Sandbox. As in: it’s a world full of people and communities and systems, and the job of the player is to enact their will to power. I’m not 100% happy with the term, but it’ll do for now.
What I’m driving at is that players should get experience points as a reward for the change they create in the world. They might affect their change in any number of ways: they could employ persuasion, or trickery, or bribery, or brute force. So long as the world is altered to suit their will, the players get rewarded.
It’s not something I’m going to be able to figure out in this post, but I’d like to systematize this somehow. I don’t want the referee to be completely responsible for arbitrating what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps any change has a very low baseline chance to go the way the players want? The players then need to accomplish tasks and put assurances in place that will raise the chance that the player’s desires will be carried out?
That feels like it could be made at least as easy to manage for a referee as treasure is.
Regardless of the specifics, I think I ought to actually be able to use the Simple XP system I wrote way back in 2011. I wrote that thing in literally the first month that I took blogging seriously. It’s among the most popular posts I’ve ever written, and it’s kinda cool for it to be relevant again.
Okay, I wrote a lot about how experience gain will work. What else needs to change from how I normally run D&D?
There’s some irrelevant stuff we can get rid of to free up space for increased complexity elsewhere. This isn’t a game about managing diminishing resources, so most of the bookkeeping I normally insist on can be relaxed. Encumbrance can be a vague “whatever feels reasonable.” Nobody will need to worry about rations. Ammunition is inexhaustible.
It’s tempting to wildly inflate health and damage numbers to better emulate the feel of a Final Fantasy game. It’d only be fun for about 10 minutes, though. Eventually all the 4-digit calculations would get tiresome. I’ll stick with d6s for most stuff, I think.
Materia are a vital part of the setting. Bits of congealed souls which grant the character wielding them special abilities. Not only will this need to be the magic system, but in the original game it’s also how characters gained mundane abilities like “Steal.”
I’m thinking that materia should not only replace the magic system, but should replace character classes as well. The PCs are all 1hd shmucks without their materia. When the players earn experience points it doesn’t make them any inherently better. Instead, the players spend their experience points to decide which materia they want to advance.
I don’t know what will determine how many materia a character can equip simultaneously. I don’t like the idea of just slotting them into weapons and armor. Maybe characters have to swallow their materia? It’s inside your body, part of you. If you swallow too many of them you get sick and can’t function. If you want to swap one materia out for another, it takes a couple days to get everything sorted.
Materia would be used to cover even very basic advancements. Early in the game players would be able to acquire a Vitality materia, which they could level up to improve their health beyond its starting value. Other materia might grants common class abilities, like bonuses to attack, or sneak attack damage.
There’s no need for MP. Materia which allows their user to cast magic spells can be used a number of times per day according to their level. So, when you first get the Fire materia, you can cast Fire once. If you put experience points into it and get it up to level 2, you can cast Fire twice. There’s no need for more advanced fire spells (Fire 2, Fire 3), because we’re keeping everything limited in scope.
I realize there’s a lot of potential for exploitation in letting people mix-and-match class abilities, but it sounds fun, so I say try it.
I don’t think the game would need any kind of skill system, just a simple resolution mechanic for handling skill-based tasks. A baseline 2-in-6 or something. If the character wants to be really good at a skill, they’ll want to seek out an appropriate materia.
I am out of ideas for now. Thank you for indulging me.
One approach I’ve tried for experience de-linked from looting treasure/money was to instead link it to reputation with various factions in the world (this was for a Dark Heresy hack of Stars Without Number). That reputation was then also linked to acquiring stuff (you ask factions for stuff, your rep is the stat you test against, basically).
Where I think this might be helpful for what you explain above is that you could track “change in the world” through the relative power/status of different groups and how they feel about the PCs. Want to start a peasant rebellion? Now there’s a peasant rebellion faction and the players have great rep with them. Their excesses become the Terror? Now the PCs can try to take them down by making a shaky alliance with remaining nobles. Or the neighboring country. Or monsters. Whatever works.
Maybe not a perfect fit for your purposes, but thought I’d share. I laid out my approach (more focus on the buying than on the XP side) here: http://blessingsofthedicegods.blogspot.com/2015/03/factions-reputation-and-acquisition-for.html
I like your approach, but I don’t think it’s a good fit here. Factions are something the referee creates and presents to the players, which would essentially limit the player’s choices to stuff that already exists.
I’d rather the players set their own goals, independent of anything that exists in the world already.
None the less, good stuff, thank you for linking.
Well, if the adventuring party starts off as small fish (AVALANCHE had, what, five people at the start of the game? six if you count the kid, seven with the mercenary?), you’ll need to move in a world of existing power groups. Eventually you might be able to form your own, or change the ideology of someone else’s, but even then. Agency in a political setting is about manipulating the existing forces, building alliances, and things like that.
I could see a system, similar to your ship and town level up systems, where each faction has a number (“power”, maybe, or “reach”) analogous to both its HP and its EXP, probably with each point rooted in something (“this faction has power 12. Two of those points come from its strong, well-established leader, three from this base (one from keeping the location secret, one from keeping the base operational, one from xyz research project located there), their sweet helicopter is worth one power,” and so on), where changing any faction’s strength in any direction is worth EXP for the PCs.
So, unite two street gangs (power 3 each) to raid the secret base and shut down the research project, and in the process given them a sense of purpose, efficacy, and unity (+1 power), and you’ve created a power 7 faction where there were only power 3 factions before (4 EXP), and taken 2 power off the corporate tendril that’s running that base (2 EXP) for a total of 6 EXP that adventure. If you happen to corner the leader of the hostile organization and assassinate him, that’s 2 EXP more. If you steal their sweet helicopter, that’s 1 EXP for taking it away, 2 EXP if you find a custodian who can fly, maintain, and fuel it.
Creating a new faction where there was none before counts as raising it up from power 0. Loose collections of alienated individuals (a slum where neighbors don’t know eachother’s names, the random collection of people that happen to be passengers on a given train, etc.) are also power 0 factions. An active riot might be worth a few points of power, depending on its scale; if you incite a riot and manage to get to a natural breakpoint without it being broken up, that might be worth EXP.
Synchronizing the ways faction power is trying to be linear (HP) and exponential (EXP) might be a trick though. Might need to split it out into two stats. I’d still argue that damage to a faction’s “HP” should be worth player EXP, but the amount of value a resource has to have to be worth a faction HP should increase as it grows (alternately, a large org has many times its actual HP in resources; a crippling blow that only takes out an eighth of its actual capabilities may nonetheless cause it to dissolve). I could also see a level-up scale where a capability (which might not need mechanics; the “capabilities” of a faction are adventure/encounter seeds, not mechanics) is added every so often based on EXP.
Some parts might be subsidiary orgs, with their own damage capacity before they stop passing damage on to the main body (or only passing on, like, one point of damage per capability lost, or something).
It’s easy to spitball and hard to system, though.
“I’m thinking that materia should not only replace the magic system, but should replace character classes as well. The PCs are all 1hd shmucks without their materia. When the players earn experience points it doesn’t make them any inherently better. Instead, the players spend their experience points to decide which materia they want to advance.”
So, the actual mechanics will take more from FFVIII, using FFVII as a backdrop?
(this is more as suggestion than as a critique! The sui generis format of “equip magic instead of things” was a bit weird in FFVIII, but i think it would works wonders in tabletop format)