How to make a Persona-ble campaign

[whisperwind1]

Ah? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!?

Seriously though, I love Persona as a franchise and was wondering what the best system would be to run a game of it? I'm not talking any established Persona canon though, like the only constant would be the Velvet Room. But in terms of crunch, i'm not quite sure what fits best. I'm tempted by Geist, but its not that powerful for Persona, any suggestions?

While i'm at it, how does one adopt the plot of Persona to a cooperative tabletop RPG? Dungeon Crawls get old, you can't use the video game logic for story and character progression. How would that translate?

[Amaril]

Ah? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!?

Seriously though, I love Persona as a franchise and was wondering what the best system would be to run a game of it? I'm not talking any established Persona canon though, like the only constant would be the Velvet Room. But in terms of crunch, i'm not quite sure what fits best. I'm tempted by Geist, but its not that powerful for Persona, any suggestions?

While i'm at it, how does one adopt the plot of Persona to a cooperative tabletop RPG? Dungeon Crawls get old, you can't use the video game logic for story and character progression. How would that translate?

I might be able to help. A while back, I spent some time running a solo PbP game on these forums that was modeled after a Persona video game, with my unfortunate player being the Wild Card protagonist. I'm...not happy with how I handled it, but at the very least I think I learned what not to do.

I unfortunately can't remember the name of the system I used--it was something fan-made--but it really wasn't fun to play with. There was a lot that was just incomplete, but I think the main problem was that it was too granular. It tried to emulate the mechanics of the video games as closely as possible, and ended up relying on formulas that I needed a calculator for, just to resolve a single turn. I think your first move should be to try to distance yourself from imitating the way battles play out in the video games, like you suggest. Go for something rules-lite, something that encourages creativity rather than just picking what skill to use and who to target, or else it'll get repetitive real fast. Maybe something like FATE, which I find does that well enough for pretty much everything (I'm tempted to suggest hacking Apocalypse World, but that's mostly because I'm in love with that engine right now, and it's probably a bad choice). Honestly, the Persona combat system has never really felt much like what I imagine an actual Persona battle would be like anyway.

The second thing I'd focus on is not trying to play out a whole year in detail, the way the video games do. Instead, I'd go for an episodic approach, like one of the anime series based on the games (which, to be fair, I've never actually watched). That'll help you shift the focus away from dungeon crawling and instead create varied, unpredictable challenges that better fit the theme of the current plot point. This might seem like a stretch, but for the social interaction parts, I'd actually point you to the homebrew system High School Harem Comedy. It's designed for exactly the kind of stuff that goes on during the downtime of the video games--sillier in tone, but I'm not suggesting you use it as it is, just as inspiration. I've been playing it for around a year straight, and having a blast. So, I think a good approach would be to have each episode include a section of something like that, and then a sort of monster-of-the-week encounter that may include a dungeon but doesn't focus on it, ultimately building toward whatever greater plot suits the game.

For character progression, I actually think the game logic of fighting making you stronger kind of works in Persona. Winning battles boosts your confidence, which allows you to harness your Persona more effectively. Probably not just winning battles, but general RPG experience mechanics based on overcoming challenges seem okay. If you want to include Wild Cards, I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to come up with a way for Social Links to play a role. Using FATE, maybe each Link is an Aspect, and you can use the Invokes and Fate Points they grant to call new Personas. I don't know, just a thought.

Is any of that helpful at all?

[Mechalich]

Hypothetically, you can use Pathfinder for this. All Persona-users are Summoners, the Eidolon represents their persona and it upgrades with their increase in level just like in the persona games (well 3, 4 and presumably 5 anyway). Everyone's a partial caster just like in the games and has decent combat ability. The rest of customization is handled by archetypes, feats, and skills. You probably want to require everyone to choose a different archetype and the spell lists should be modified to represent something closer to Persona's magic system (which mostly means adding level-based evocations and healing and removing the out-of-combat spells). This does preclude any character having the wild card and utilizing a demon/persona fusion minigame, but that's probably something you don't really want to deal with anyway. Persona reconfiguration using evolutions (which should probably be allowed at some regular interval) and spell preparation for crawls will cover the customizability angle anyway.

The real trick is the out of combat component. You need some sort of social resolution mechanic to represent the development of social links - you probably want to structure it so that the party as a whole has the same social links and each player can contribute to them all - with everyone choosing which link to work towards but only one player at a time handling the narrative tests to rank up at a time. So everyone could pick which job to spend time at or friend to hang out with or club to go to each day, but you'd sequentially let each player have rank-up tests. Social link gain wouldn't unlock new personas, but would be used to unlock additional evolution points for the eidolons (which would not be part of normal level gain) and possibly new spells.

The key question is how to handle the rank-up tests. Perhaps you can let each player pick one of three approaches - say gentle, stoic, or tough love, and award one, two, or three dice worth of points based on which one you have pre-scripted as most appropriate.

In terms of pacing you'd probably want to balance that game around short crawls and short social link expansions - the actual games provided perverse incentives to sort gameplay into huge blocks of one or the other, especially P4, and you'd want to avoid that. An average single level of a Persona-style dungeon is manageably, with an number of encounters well within the traditional D&D workday model.

[holywhippet]

Which part of the series are you mainly thinking of? Persona 1 and 2 had very different systems to 3 and 4. I'd even say that you could easily adapt the rules of 1 and 2 into a tabletop RPG easily enough. For that matter you could probably build your own home grown system for 3 and 4. I suspect the stats for each persona could be obtained online and possibly the experience points required to level each one up. I suppose the question is if you want the PCs to be wild cards like the main character from 3 and 4 or have a fixed persona like the support cast. Then again the other problem is if you want to keep the elemental weaknesses for monsters and characters as once your PCs know a monsters weakness you can expect them to hammer it repeatedly.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Geist is explicitly inspired by Persona 3, but more generic superhero systems are probably better for emulating the setting of the video games rather than the Word Chronicles of Darkness.

I've seen good games of it run with Mutants and Masterminds, and I'm playing in an excellent Persona game using Valor, which is the perfect game for playing JRPGs at the tabletop in general.

[Hunter Noventa]

I tried at one point to port Persona character types into Pathfinder classes, but there's just not a very good way to do it because of the sheer amount of content.

Of course, every Persona user is something of a Summoner/Sorcerer/Physical Hybrid, while the Wild Card throws in some Binder from 3.5e with how they can swap around.

Dammit now I'm thinking about how to do this thing all over again. Of course, the new Vigilante class provides some precedent for Archetypes wildly modifying the base class, including saves and BaB...the real trick would be Balancing a Wild Card against a class limited to a single Persona/Arcana.

[Arbane]

I keep thinking the 3.5 Binder would make a pretty good Persona-user class. (Or possibly Pathfinder's new Medium class?)

ISTR reading about someone running a Persona game: They used d20 Modern rules for the characters, and D&D 4th ed for the Personas. No idea how they spliced the two together.

The question is, do you treat the Personas as semi-separate entities (like Stands in Jo Jo's Bizarre Adventure), or as a "special effect" for the character's powers?

[Coidzor]

Well, a major factor is the web of interconnected relationships that allow human beings to function.

So there's gonna be a lot of SOCIAL LINKS SOCIAL LINKS SOCIAL LINKS-

Err, I mean, socializing.

There'd be a lot of alternating between reaching certain points in dungeons and returning to a base camp/stronghold/city and investigating things socially and with detective skills in stark contrast to the all out war that is the combat portion.

Naturally resting inside a Persona Dungeon isn't really possible, which helps with this.

[Arbane]

So there's gonna be a lot of SOCIAL LINKS SOCIAL LINKS SOCIAL LINKS-

Err, I mean, socializing.

Maybe take a look at Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, and similar? ISTR interpersonal relationships are a Big Deal in those games.

[Hunter Noventa]

The question is, do you treat the Personas as semi-separate entities (like Stands in Jo Jo's Bizarre Adventure), or as a "special effect" for the character's powers?

In the games they're absolutely the latter. Anything but the most basic physical attacks requires summoning a Persona, and they fade immediately afterwards. But they do provide passive buffs, and in fact, it's their stats you use to do said physical attacks.

Naturally resting inside a Persona Dungeon isn't really possible, which helps with this.

Persona is also MP-based as opposed to spell-slot based, and there are items and passive effects that can regenerate both easily. The right setup could have you regenerating SP every round of combat, and then a chunk more after each combat.

I wonder...would it be more fair to treat the attacks that come from personas like martial maneuvers if you were going 3.5/PF with it I mean.

[Aleolus]

*Ahem* Persona is an anime-style game, which was then turned into a full anime. There is a game system, which is currently owned by White Wolf, designed specifically for anime-style gaming. BESM. I would strongly suggest giving it a look. 3rd edition if you can get your hands on it, though second is also playable. I've not looked at first edition, but what I've seen about it indicates its very buggy

[Nerd-o-rama]

Also, if you're going BESM, play Valor it's better do not play BESM d20. It sucks and misses the point of an open-ended point-buy system. The Tri-Stat editions work, though.

[Aevylmar]

I'd just go with Marvel Heroic + Free Roleplaying, but then I'm on a Marvel Heroic kick right now. Each Persona is a different powerset linked by Alternate Power; designing new character sheets is easy, so you can come up with new personae (and new Shadows) without much trouble, and I've honestly never found a social combat system that worked for me.

I think the only difference would be fiddling with the Doom Pool mechanics - there's less of an episodic feel in Persona, and more of an onrushing doom. Some system where instead of paying 2d12 to resolve a scene, whenever you get 2d12 you remove it from the pool and the Dark World gets even darker - maybe that steps up one of the base new adventure dice in the doom pool, or adds another one...