Fire Emblem in D&D

[sage20500]

Could a group of people theoretically do a Fire Emblem type of campaign using 3.5 d&d? A group of friends are interested in trying to play a Fire Emblem themed table top, but out of all of them I have the most expierence with table top rpgs, and i've only played 3.5 and 4e d&d, while dabbling somewhat with World of Darkness Mage the Ascension. How would you guys go about trying to do this? Or is there a better system I should be looking at that would suit their purposes?

I think the biggest issue against using 3.5 or 4e D&D is that several of the people in the group who wish to play are essentially against any system that can have a single combat go over 1 hour easily (One of the guys has played 4e d&d before and the length of time that most of the fights seemed to take for him threw him off of it completely, and at least in 3.5 if the DM and players are not playing rocket tag then combat can drag out pretty long as well. They essentially want to use a system that will mimic how Fire Emblem did things, in that fights are challenging, but can be dealt with quickly if you use proper tactics and strategy, and if you **** up then your character will most likely die because of that single mistake (Being a 4e veteran player myself I must say that as a DM you have to be going above and beyond the call of duty to realistically try and wipe out a pc party with on level encounters.) How ever if you guys can think of any fixes we could use for 3.5 to make this work out then I'm all for hearing them.

[Fizban]

Another one eh? The main thing you need to do is drop the standard vancian casters since 3.5 spellcasting doesn't mesh with Fire Emblem in the slightest. Fire Emblem casters are Warlocks: they blast with lower weapon-equivalent damage all day, can miss their shots, mostly ignore armor, and all the big fancy effects come from staves or other magic items a Warlock could make once they get high enough level for Imbue Item.

Everything after that is just how detailed you want to get by adding prestige classes and other material, as well as how good you are at finding the existing stuff that does what you want.

The only "fix" to get the game working on a tactical knife edge is lots of careful balancing by the DM. You could absolutely go through and re-calibrate AC, hp, and damage values via normal methods (no fiat required) until you reach fire emblem style accuracy and round to round battle flow (as long as the PCs are built to match the same standards, balanced between each other). But The core system still isn't set up for that: fire emblem always lets you go first, and always starts you far away from your opponents-only on the higher difficulties will surprise reinforcements possibly be allowed to attack first, and even then you either know where they'll show up from previous playthroughs or can still make a rough guess. DnD has rolling for initiative, stealth, ambush, even flat invisibility which are all designed to upset knife-edge balancing acts.

If you build your monsters/NPCs to replicate fire emblem combat, you have to build your encounters to replicate fire emblem encounters, which no matter the setting or plot around them are fairly dull by DnD standards.

So if you want a fire emblem themed game it's absolutely doable, but if you want to use DnD 3.5 to reproduce fire emblem combats then you're gonna put in a lot of effort to end up worse off. The main solution to combats taking a long time is to uh, get better at fighting. Powerful characters fighting powerful monsters will end combat quickly even without rocket tag and the rest is on the players/DM to be ready and take their turns quickly. Even then 1 hour is a pretty good time (2 minutes per turn x 5 people=10 minutes per round) so if that's too long then I don't know what to tell you.

[Silva Stormrage]

If you are fine with homebrew there are a couple FE themed homebrew classes:
Tomes in general: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?284816-Tomes-Arcane-Weapons-from-Fire-Emblem-d-amp-d-3-5
Dark Mage: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?285407-The-Dark-Mage-the-Sorcerer-and-the-Summoner-3-5-Fire-Emblem
Peagusus Knight: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?285611-The-Pegasus-Knight-the-Falcon-Knight-and-the-Dark-Flier-3-5-Fire-Emblem&p=15320240#post15320240
Myrmidon: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?303383-The-Myrmidon-the-Swordmaster-and-the-Assassin-3-5-Fire-Emblem&p=16024509#post16024509
Laguz: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?295834-The-Laguz-Shapeshifter-Therianthrope-3-5-Fire-Emblem&p=15745239#post15745239
Archer: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?310136-The-Archer-the-Sniper-and-the-Bow-Knight-3-5-Fire-Emblem&p=16260666#post16260666

[Battleship789]

You can mimic the stories and feel of Fire Emblem using 3.5 (high fantasy with an emphasis on nobility/politics), but the gameplay will almost certainly be very different, even with the suggestions mentioned above. You would probably be better off running a game that actually uses Fire Emblem mechanics, which are relatively easy to convert to tabletop (d% rolls for basically everything), and free-form roleplaying the non-combat sections. I am pretty sure there are some games in the PbP section that are being run with the above in mind, and have created things like custom skills and character generation guidelines (like point buy systems), though I don't know of any currently running off the top of my head. You could probably kindly ask a DM of said games for some of their mechanics notes and be able to run a game off of it. Maybe someone in one of said games will even post in this thread! *hint hint*

[Scorponok]

I run a lot of these skirmish type encounters in my game. It is possible, but I find it is only easier to do with lower levels.

What seems to bog down a lot of battle is players not knowing their characters, so they'll have to look up save DCs, touch ACs, etc. while it's their turn. Magic users having to look up how exactly their spells work also slow things down.

I'd keep all the enemy NPCs at between levels 1 to 2, with maybe bosses being level 4, have only a select few types of straightforward spells allowed (and expand this list when they master the simple spells) and not allow special attacks like trips, disarms, grapples until someone has taken the time to really study the rules and can run the special attack without having to look up the rule for it.