PDA

View Full Version : FFT: Does the system lend itself to a tabletop RPG?



Larkas
2013-08-13, 03:46 PM
So, I've been thinking of porting Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions' system of character building/development and battle for use in a tabletop game. It seems perfect for the port, what with it even having rules for movement and area of effects, necessitating only minor tweaks to have a satisfying experience.

However, that is only half of an RPG. Do you guys think it is possible to build from the FFT base to encompass things like social encounters and games of investigation? Should I port another system's pieces to cover for that?

Anyways, I'm just brainstorming, and I'm trying to assess the feasibility of the system for use in RPG games (as opposed to a tactical miniatures' game).

valadil
2013-08-13, 03:55 PM
I've seen a few instances of a table top version of FF Tactics. Never played one but they look interesting.

I'd actually ignore the social part of the system at first. Get the rest of the game down and then figure out the social mechanics.

Grinner
2013-08-13, 04:08 PM
It definitely has some interesting mechanics (like the job system), but I think a direct port of the combat gameplay would make for a terrible RPG. Not only is it mathematically intensive, but imagine playing as just a single character.

Gavran
2013-08-13, 04:16 PM
I've loved FFT forever, was in fact my first tactical/strategy game, but I don't think it'll work very well. There's nothing at all to draw on from a non-combat angle, and really the game isn't particularly well balanced. I think it'd be more sensible to take the parts you like and put them into a different system.

... and don't let your players be calculators or mimes.

Seerow
2013-08-13, 04:17 PM
Yeah a direct port would be pretty rough. I used to be part of a community that would run play by post FFT matches (before someone worked out a hack to allow multiplayer online), and while it was certainly doable, a single update (ie a single player's turn) could easily take an hour+ for the ref to work out. So some sort of adaptation definitely necessary.

Larkas
2013-08-13, 04:28 PM
Oh, don't worry, I don't intend to do it without any adaptations. I want to keep them to a minimum, but the game has to be playable.

@Seerow: Did you guys keep a record of the matches, or at least the rules, somewhere for me to check? I'd certainly like to take a look at that!

Seerow
2013-08-13, 04:55 PM
Oh, don't worry, I don't intend to do it without any adaptations. I want to keep them to a minimum, but the game has to be playable.

@Seerow: Did you guys keep a record of the matches, or at least the rules, somewhere for me to check? I'd certainly like to take a look at that!

It was on a gamefaqs board. I'll check to see if it's still around, but chances are it's all been deleted for innactivity by now.


Edit: Apparently not.

Here you go: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/571942-super-tact

Or for a direct link to a sample match: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/571942-super-tact/51720823

And a link to the VT7 rules: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/571942-super-tact/39095579

Unfortunately the Random Tournament seems to have been lost to the internet for good. That was probably the best thing to ever come out of that board.

Grinner
2013-08-13, 05:04 PM
Unfortunately the Random Tournament seems to have been lost to the internet for good. That was probably the best thing to ever come out of that board.

Have you checked the Wayback Machine?

Seerow
2013-08-13, 05:15 PM
Have you checked the Wayback Machine?

"The Wayback Machine does not have this URL."




But yeah, random tournament was where a bunch of characters are pregenerated, and everyone who entered got to bid on which characters they wanted out of the group.

In particular, one character got hit really hard. A Female calculator named Nina, whose skillset and equipment came out as bad as you can imagine in every possible way. The person who wound up getting her picked her last, and got it basically for free.

Then enter the tournament itself, where Nina could do no wrong. If she made an attack? It crit. If an attack had a chance to miss? It missed. Her team made it to the top of the tournament, and Nina was the one to strike the winning blow.

From that point on Nina became enshrined in the community as an avatar of the RNG gods.

Larkas
2013-08-13, 05:41 PM
Hahahaha, that must've been precious! Well, thanks for the links that are still around, Seerow!

Arbane
2013-08-13, 05:45 PM
A tabletop version of Final Fantasy Tactics?

I thought it was called "Dungeons and Dragons, 4th Edition."

Larkas
2013-08-13, 06:02 PM
Yeah, no. You can't change classes. Your class level is fundamentally tied to your character level. AFAIK, there isn't a MP system. There isn't the variety of abilities found in FFT. 4E might be nice, even though it's not my cup of tea, but it's not even close.

Hunter Noventa
2013-08-14, 10:40 AM
I do remember that ages ago there was a conversion of the FFT basic classes to 3.0 rules. Nothing fancy about changing classes or anything like that though.

It might be interesting to try and work up the classes for 3.PF style rules, create a sort of subsystem out of it.

The tricky part would be keeping the exp gain and levels balanced, since even if you made every class 8 levels (how many job levels there are in FFT), you'd get over 20 after only a few classes. Of course, in that game, Job levels and exp levels were separated.

Damn, now I want to write this up. *shakes fist*

Gnoman
2013-08-14, 04:08 PM
Trying to do it on a DND framework wouldn't work too well. The unique wrinkle of the FFT system is that it creates a hybrid of Point-buy (for skills) and Level systems (for stats). That is something that no existing system can handle.

Just for the fun of it, I think I'll go through the original game mechanics and see what could be directly ported and would require abstracting or eliminating. If nothing else, it should be an interesting intellectual exercise.

Hunter Noventa
2013-08-15, 08:04 AM
Trying to do it on a DND framework wouldn't work too well. The unique wrinkle of the FFT system is that it creates a hybrid of Point-buy (for skills) and Level systems (for stats). That is something that no existing system can handle.

Just for the fun of it, I think I'll go through the original game mechanics and see what could be directly ported and would require abstracting or eliminating. If nothing else, it should be an interesting intellectual exercise.

Then you're going to want the Battle Mechanics Handbook (http://www.m-l.org/~greerga/fftnet/fftmech/) that literally dissects every formula in the game for you.

You are right that some parts of it are hard to translate to d20 or 3.PF framework. I've got some sick twisted abomination that's a combination of the Factotum and the Tome of Battle in the works almost though.

It's...well it's something, that's for sure.

Gnoman
2013-08-15, 04:10 PM
From a skim, this is actually far less complicated for most purposes than I had realized. If we eliminate the zodiac compatibility, and use tables for Brave/Faith interactions (even better would be reducing Faith to the static Faith/Innocent statuses only, which would greatly simplify magic damage), most actions could be handled with a single to-hit die roll (technically 2 die rolls, since it would be easiest to use D100 for all actions.) Coming up with the target number would still be somewhat cumbersome with a lot of skills, but that could probably be alleviated by good record keeping and tables.

Now, I'd actually quite like to come up with a system, but it's more work than I can handle by myself with any real speed. If anyone else is interested, a collaborative effort would be great.

Grinner
2013-08-15, 04:31 PM
Now, I'd actually quite like to come up with a system, but it's more work than I can handle by myself with any real speed. If anyone else is interested, a collaborative effort would be great.

Maybe. A collaborative project would be a welcome break.

Being an RPG project, I think certain allowances would need to be made for the medium. A direct port or something similar would be impractical, even with miniatures. Basic combat resolution could remain largely the same. However, complex things like movement, height, and reach could be simplified into abstract decisions, rather than having to micromanage these things.

Gnoman
2013-08-15, 04:38 PM
That's the work that I was referring to. However, the fact that the game world is already divided into fairly large increments for mechanical purposes would simplify them a great deal. For grid-based combat, things would work easily without many changes, except for perhaps things such as simplifying the effects of water or height for easier calculation. If you go whole-hog and use miniatures with rulers, it might be a little harder. I can't see anybody using this in a descriptivist combat, since the entire point of the game is the tactical combat.

EDIT: For me, I think the trickiest thing to handle would be speed, as the tick system seems a bit fiddly when a computer isn't doing it. A table might handle this, but I'm not sure without a little more work. Thoughts?

For now, I'm going to work on a basic character sheet, and take a good look at what each stat is actually used for. That will help in deciding what can be easily pruned or reduced to a static number (for example, the HP damage from a standard weapon attack can be listed next to the weapon, and modified ad-hoc for elemental effects or critical hits, I think).

Grinner
2013-08-15, 05:40 PM
I can't see anybody using this in a descriptivist combat, since the entire point of the game is the tactical combat.

Sort of...What I'm thinking of asks the same question ("How will you confront the enemy?"), but the answer is formatted differently. Tactical combat is essentially a decision-making process. All that really matters is that the players receive information about the state of combat and make a call about how to proceed. Tactical RPGs often involve a plethora of variables, granted, but I don't see why the model can't be streamlined a bit.

Instead of putting everything into a grid-based format, with all of the micromanagement that entails, everything is regarded as a field instead, and characters move between these fields to accomplish their goal. Moreover, each field can have a number of properties, each of which modifies the character's own properties.

For example, a hill might have Height 3. An archer standing on this hill would gain a bonus to his attack against anyone standing in a field of lower Height.

Properties like Height would also impede movement. A character standing on a field with Height 1 would have a hard time getting up to our archer, but he might be able to move to a nearby field of Height 2. Or, with enough Jump, he could just hop on up.

Also, characters would be limited in their ability to attack depending upon their weapon. Melee weapons would only be able to strike at characters within the same field. Ranged weapons would be able to strike at characters one or more fields away, possibly gaining a bonus to their reach based upon height. Spells would each have unique properties. An energy arrow spell might be able to add Height as a bonus, but an energy blast or something like that would have a static range.

And now that I'm thinking about it, it would be kind of cool if groups of characters were able to enact joint tactics while standing within the same field. Something like "Hold the Line" or "Pincer Maneuver".


EDIT: For me, I think the trickiest thing to handle would be speed, as the tick system seems a bit fiddly when a computer isn't doing it. A table might handle this, but I'm not sure without a little more work. Thoughts?

Tick system? Like delayed spellcasting?

Edit: Also, are you going off of FFT or FFTA/A2?

Gnoman
2013-08-15, 06:28 PM
FFT

By tick system, I mean the way AT is determined. Put simply, each game "tick" increases every unit's CT (Charge Time) by their Speed. When a given unit's CT reaches 100, they recieve AT (Active Turn) and/or decrement whatever counter is currently running by 1 (Crystallization, spell casting, Death Sentence, etc). Units that recieve AT at the same time go in order of their Speed stat, IIRC. Directly using this on the tabletop (without the use of a computer at the game table) has the potential to be somewhat tedious. However, it is a core component of the game that I'd really like to preserve, not least because reworking every ability that keys off of or affects speed, along with spells, would be a royal pain; but also because it creates the tactical situations and synchronicity that are a major appeal of the game. What I had in mind was possibly creating a table along the lines of Star Fleet Battles impulse charts (or even cribbing them directly, as they're part of the free demo game.)


EDIT: If you want to work on your "field" system, go right ahead, but the system is ALREADY designed for grid movement, so I really don't see any appeal besides the possibility of simpler mapmaking.

Grinner
2013-08-15, 06:59 PM
EDIT: If you want to work on your "field" system, go right ahead, but the system is ALREADY designed for grid movement, so I really don't see any appeal besides the possibility of simpler mapmaking.

Yes, but grid movement and RPGs don't really mesh that well to me.

Really, my proposal was intended to cut out the unnecessary complexity. Do remember that you're working in a different medium, and different media have different strengths and, conversely, different weaknesses.

I don't think this will end well, so I'm going to bow out. In my mind, a faithful port of the game won't work, because it's like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I wish you the best, nonetheless. :smallsmile:

Gnoman
2013-08-15, 07:12 PM
You're quite right about the "square peg round hole" argument, but I happen to "like" grid-based combat in tabletop, so the situation is "round peg, smaller round hole".

In any case, my concerns about Brave and Faith seem to have been confirmed. Only a small number of skills (all monster, as far as I can tell) and weapons use Brave in their calculations (it's mostly used to trigger reaction abilities), so that stat should be fine as-is.

Faith, on the other hand, is used in every single spell calculation, which is incredibly impractical for a tabletop game sans computer. (I'll note at this time that, if you're playing online or already use a computer for calculations, then all the mathematical crunchiness could easily be handled with a properly formatted Excel spreadsheet. However, I'm going to work on the assumption that such is not available.)

kidnicky
2013-08-17, 09:21 PM
When are we doing Super Mario Bros?