Persona System

[JNAProductions]

Looking for a system that would work well with Persona. Asking for a friend, since I've never played the game myself, but he says he'll run a game if one of us can find a good Persona system.

[Arbane]

FATE, maybe?
Or Monsters and Other Childish Things.

[JNAProductions]

FATE, maybe?
Or Monsters and Other Childish Things.

Would FAE work? Because I know FAE has an SRD, but does FATE?

And looking at MaOCT, it's $15. While I'm not opposed to buying a system, I'd want to know it works before I get it. Can you tell me more about it? Because, on first blush, it doesn't seem the most appropriate for what little I know of Persona.

[tyckspoon]

If you're looking for the variant where each character only has one Persona, any system with a decent way of handling things like Magical Girls or transforming superheroes can do that ok. Heck, you can largely treat the Persona users as superheroes and the Persona manifestation is just a special effect on their powers - the games, at least, generally have the characters performing physical combat and taking hits directly, with the Persona only showing when they're doing something overtly magical or superhuman. The anime renditions usually show Persona combat as something more like Stands or Fate/Stay Servant combats.

[JNAProductions]

If you're looking for the variant where each character only has one Persona, any system with a decent way of handling things like Magical Girls or transforming superheroes can do that ok. Heck, you can largely treat the Persona users as superheroes and the Persona manifestation is just a special effect on their powers - the games, at least, generally have the characters performing physical combat and taking hits directly, with the Persona only showing when they're doing something overtly magical or superhuman. The anime renditions usually show Persona combat as something more like Stands or Fate/Stay Servant combats.

So, the main Superhero system I can think of off-hand is Mutants and Masterminds. Would that work well?

[MrSandman]

Would FAE work? Because I know FAE has an SRD, but does FATE?
.

Yes to both questions.

Here are the srds for both of them and several other Fate goodies: https://fate-srd.com

[Arbane]

Would FAE work? Because I know FAE has an SRD, but does FATE?

And looking at MaOCT, it's $15. While I'm not opposed to buying a system, I'd want to know it works before I get it. Can you tell me more about it? Because, on first blush, it doesn't seem the most appropriate for what little I know of Persona.

FAE should work fine, I'd think.

I don't actually know MaoCT all that well, but it's a fairly simple system about playing kids and their decidedly not-so-imaginary friends. I've heard good things about it.

Here's someone on YouTube doing an actual play of their Persona game (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQwiuXehEiQ). (Warning: I haven't watched it yet, so no idea if it's any good.)

[JNAProductions]

I'm currently looking at Mutants and Masterminds. It's got the good crunch that I enjoy.

I'll bring up FAE and FATE to the others, though, since they're a little less mechanics minded than myself.

[Florian]

Looking for a system that would work well with Persona. Asking for a friend, since I've never played the game myself, but he says he'll run a game if one of us can find a good Persona system.

Hm... Basically, there is no good Persona system per se. The difficulty here is that you play high school students by day and go adventuring by night, using more or less personal summoned monsters instead of your regular human characters, with the monsters evolving based on the plot, not regular XP and stuff like that, so it can happen that your "character" rapidly changes. I´d either use a system that is simple enough so you can create new monsters to use on the fly, like Savage Worlds, or one that is abstract enough to handle it, like Fate Core. Another option would be to home-brew something based on the PbtA engine, which would be quite cool for Persona, as well as the parent series.
Personally, I don't think that something 3E-based would be a good fit.

[Arbane]

Hm... Basically, there is no good Persona system per se. The difficulty here is that you play high school students by day and go adventuring by night, using more or less personal summoned monsters instead of your regular human characters, with the monsters evolving based on the plot, not regular XP and stuff like that, so it can happen that your "character" rapidly changes. I´d either use a system that is simple enough so you can create new monsters to use on the fly, like Savage Worlds, or one that is abstract enough to handle it, like Fate Core. Another option would be to home-brew something based on the PbtA engine, which would be quite cool for Persona, as well as the parent series.
Personally, I don't think that something 3E-based would be a good fit.

Personae are projections of their users' minds instead of independent creatures, so representing them as (mostly) just SFX for superpowers is a perfectly good way to write them in rules.

[Razade]

Hm... Basically, there is no good Persona system per se. The difficulty here is that you play high school students by day and go adventuring by night, using more or less personal summoned monsters instead of your regular human characters, with the monsters evolving based on the plot, not regular XP and stuff like that, so it can happen that your "character" rapidly changes. I´d either use a system that is simple enough so you can create new monsters to use on the fly, like Savage Worlds, or one that is abstract enough to handle it, like Fate Core. Another option would be to home-brew something based on the PbtA engine, which would be quite cool for Persona, as well as the parent series.
Personally, I don't think that something 3E-based would be a good fit.

Masks: A New Generation is a PbtA game and would work 100% perfectly with pretty much no real alterations to the Playbooks as long as you're willing to squint.

[Alhallor]

Don't know if it's still relevant but I'm currently looking into Princess the Hopeful (that's actually free) that seem to be pretty easy to convert into a Persona-like game (You even have a Transformation there.)

[Grod_The_Giant]

So, the main Superhero system I can think of off-hand is Mutants and Masterminds. Would that work well?
I'm not familiar with Persona, but M&M works pretty well for anything that features high power levels and characters with very different thematics-- it's great if you want your party to include Iron Man, Hellboy, Batman, and the Flash; less well if you want Batman, Robin, Nightwing, and Batgirl. Multiple Personas are easy enough to handle-- off the top of my head, you could have everyone use big Summon effects, with alternate effects for different Persona.

If your GM would prefer a simpler system, it also looks pretty close to one of the sample magic systems I laid out in STaRS.

Our world is not alone. Almost every culture in human history has known this simple truth. The idea has many names though the ages—Hell, Faerie, Asgard, Mount Olympus, a thousand more. Today, we know it as the Otherworld, an empty plane of black mists and white rock, as unreachable as the stars above and as close as the underside of a dream. However, the Otherworld is not as empty as it appears, for entities great and small haunt its depths. They too have hopes and dreams. And one day maybe, just maybe, an Entity and a human will have same dream.

Humans who’ve met and befriended Entities in their dreams are known as Callers. Each Caller is connected to a single unique Entity, a Companion (Sentient) that they can manifest (or dematerialize) as a Minor Power. Each Comrade’s entity is unique, and they grow and develop alongside their masters in the normal manner of Companions.

But like all things in life, there is a darker side to the truth. When a Caller dies, their Entity lingers on the edges of our world for a brief time, lost and alone. Another Caller, if they are close enough, can claim the Entity for their own—either by befriending it through kindness or enslaving it through raw willpower.

Instead of a single Companion, such a Caller instead possesses Variable Trait (Companions) 3 (enough to afford a sentient Companion), along with the same Minor Power to summon and dismiss them. If they have three or fewer Entities, they qualify for a Drawback (Limited to Pre-Selected Companions); otherwise, the ability is versatile enough that the Drawback no longer applies.

[Man_Over_Game]

For those not familiar with the Persona concept, it's basically about weak mortals being able to summon larger beings that are physical manifestations of their personal personality (who they are when nobody is looking).

In the game series, the Persona has been both a physical being that can fight on your behalf, or a representation of such a being that is only used for conjuring special attacks and such. In other words, it COULD be an actual summon, or it COULD be just some colorful way of casting spells.

Although, the Persona series mostly assumes it's an actual summoned creature, and the whole "it casts your spells" thing was likely more of a limitation from the gaming mechanic rather than the narrative as intended.


So...anyone know of any games that do well with making your summon fight for you? Pokémon or Metabots or something like that?

[Arbane]

So...anyone know of any games that do well with making your summon fight for you? Pokémon or Metabots or something like that?

Pokethulhu. (Not kidding - it's a parody game, but the rules are simple and fairly solid.)

[JeenLeen]

For those not familiar with the Persona concept, it's basically about weak mortals being able to summon larger beings that are physical manifestations of their personal personality (who they are when nobody is looking).

At least in Persona 1 (Playstation) and 2 (either Innocent Sin or Eternal Punishment, whichever was released first in the US), whatever Persona you are currently using also impacts the "weak mortal" with things like resistance or immunity to given damage. The beginning of Persona (well, the scenes right after they starting getting personae) strongly implies if not outright states that the only reason the PCs aren't auto-killed while fighting demons is that they have personae which boost their durability and health.

I think Mutants & Masterminds could mirror this well. The overall Power Level could correlate to the PCs' power, with so many points allocated to passive things (like immunities, resistances, boosts to stats) and so many to powers manifested by summoning the personae overtly. Alternate effects to allow multiple personae or switching between them.

[khadgar567]

Or you guys can still be around the 3rd edition by using pathfinder and spheres of power there is a drawback for persona users allowing you to create them at 1st level

[JNAProductions]

Or you guys can still be around the 3rd edition by using pathfinder and spheres of power there is a drawback for persona users allowing you to create them at 1st level

Why would I want to use anything related to 3rd Edition D&D?

[Milo v3]

Persona can be covered by most superhero systems whether that's Marvel Heroic, M&M 3e, or Fate without much issue for if you just care about having the powers of the characters represented in a decent system.

Chuubos Marvelous Wish Granting Engine can cover the powers as well, and can also cover the school and social aspects of Persona but it takes abit to get your head around the system and isn't necessarily easy to introduce people to.

There is also Geist the Sin-Eater 2e, which is the second edition of a roleplaying game super-heavily inspired by Persona 3. An rpg where you play a group of people who have died but came back because a god of death was placed inside you, now you go into tartarus to fight shadowy spectres wearing masks by partially summoning up your death god to do attacks, elemental attacks, and various supernatural powers, even having two categories of power based on that category of persona user who hangs back and does scouting and recognizance for the group from outside the dungeon. Oh, and you get stronger by increasing your social links. But it isn't technically persona, it's heavily persona inspired and very ghost-related.

So yeah, I'd say decide if you want the system to cover the powers of persona users (in which case use a superhero system of your choice), if you want to be able to cover the powers and slice-of-life parts of the persona series (chuubos), or if you want something that is reminiscent of persona but not necessarily with the same lore as persona (Geist the Sin-Eaters 2e).

[Enixon]

Why would I want to use anything related to 3rd Edition D&D?

Because you asked for systems to emulate Persona and the person you're being rude too knew of a third party sourcebook that they thought might work? :smallconfused:

[JNAProductions]

Because you asked for systems to emulate Persona and the person you're being rude too knew of a third party sourcebook that they thought might work? :smallconfused:

It was not my intention to be rude to them-only to express distaste at 3rd edition and its derivatives. They're fun for what they are, but I'd VASTLY prefer other, more coherent, cohesive, and baseline functional systems to them.