"Cid. There's always a Cid." FFd20

[elliott20]

hehe, if my own experience of formatting documents is anything worth a damn, formatting is probably one of the most arduous and yet arguable most important factor in improving the usability of the document.

well, if it wasn't for the fact that I'm going on vacation soon, I'd volunteer to do it for you.

[Goober4473]

It's all nice and formatted in Word. I just don't want to have to do it again. Turns out those documents total 77 pages.

[elliott20]

oh okay, I thought you meant you didn't even format it in word either. This is actually very nicely done.

I'm reading over your base classes though and the fighter class feels a tad weak. It's basically a fighter with less flexibility.

[Goober4473]

Yeah, maybe I should give them Two-Fisted Monkey Style...

But seriously, that's one of the things I probably need to fix. Maybe just give them bonus feats like D&D Fighters, and make feats for the cooler abilities they have now.

[Blackdrop]

Pretty Nice Goober. I do see one point which my system is going to differ from yours. Your using traditional D&D spell Slot while I'm going with Spell Point system.

Nevermind

[Goober4473]

So are you interested in working with me, do you want to do your own thing, or are you just bored and need a time sink?

[Blackdrop]

I actually want to do my own thing. 'K?

[Goober4473]

Sure. Feel free to use anything from my stuff, as long as you give me credit.

[Arranas]

Well, there's not ALWAYS a Cid... FFI, for example...

Not that it's really that relevant, I suppose...

[Zeta Kai]

For the record, considering how different each game is from one another, I think it is somewhat futile to create a unified FFd20, as there is nothing even remotely like a unified FF universe. Almost every game exists in its own separate world, with varying levels of incompatibility.

FF7 d20? Sure. FFX/X-2 d20? Great. FFT d20? Why not. But all of them together in one game is likely to be a disappointing mess that will ultimately satisfy no one, due to the slew of compromises such as pastiche would have to implement.

[Blackdrop]

Wow, your a downer. Who needs prescription drugs when we have you.

j/k

But, eh. See earlier post to Tengu.

[Zeta Kai]

Don't misunderstand me, Osiris. I'm not making the argument that FF & D&D are incompatible. Considering their intertwined fantasy-based roots, I believe quite the opposite. Few things could be easier to convert to the d20 rules.

My supposition is this: Combining all Final Fantasy games into one universe will a) alienate/disappoint/annoy fans of any given aspect of any game that is not included reverently or b) create such an all-inclusive, compromising mish-mash that the universe will make less than zero sense & basically be a confusing mess.

Imagine if you will, a fusion of Record of the Lodoss War, the Legend of Zelda cartoon in the 80's, the D&D cartoon in the 80's, & the Dragon Warrior cartoon in the 80's. Some would say "Do0d, that's teh awsum! Mak eit now pleez!" But it would probably either ignore so much from each source that it would be it's own beast, or would try to include everything, with all of the horror that implies.

[Tengu]

Actually, they do. Final Fantasy is level-based, class-based, unrealistic fantasy. This is what d20 does best.

D20 does a bad job at portraying heroic high fantasy. Also, the best FF games are either classless, or with easily switchable classes - a FF RPG game should allow much more character customization than d20.

While d20 rewards specialization, in most FF games the muscle-types can still cast decently, and the casters fight decently.

In FF, attacks miss much less often and deal much less random damage than in d20. You also don't face enemies that can one-shot you if you're unlucky at the lowest levels.

Limit Breaks are cool. Try introducing them.

Generally, the feel of FFT or FFTA is not the one I'd try to represent, since they are borderline strategy games and you do not really feel attached to the characters, and due to the strategic nature they suffer simplifications on the field of character options.

[AjaxTorbin]

at some point in teh evolution of anyones gaming group someone will say 'HEY, final fantasy iS COOL, lets make it D20!', and owing to the nature of the gamer, we'll agree.

when this happend to my group about 4 years ago we made a system, well, discused making a system.
in the end we figured out a few things.
(if i reiterate a few things sorry, just bear with me)

1 you can not have the best of all worlds.
-----we had to choose which FF to base our stuf off of. we all knew FF7, FF9 and tactics farly well , and so, after many fase starts desided that Tactics was teh best to actuly pull insperation from

2 magic. we figured early on that magic was much more 'open' in FF than in normal D&D. afetr some argument, weather or not we should allow all classes to have magic, we figured out that we could use spell points, FOR THE CHARACTER LEVELS in addation to the points from class/spell levels. so this way every character gont SOME spell casting, (like cantrips) but wasnt as good with them as say, a Black mage.
------RULE: your character gets their wisdom, charisma, or intelegence, (chosen at creation-may not change) in Personal Spell Points. the character, if not a spell casting class, must choose TWO schools of magic from wich to cast. all otehr schools are BANNED from use with Personal Spell Points.
these points recover once per rest and can never be used to cast a spell higher than that stat modifier. EX: with a 16 wisdom Tifa can cast third level spells, and has 16 personal points.
once we fiugured this part out, we had all sorts of things ine could do with Personal Spell Points,(PSP)

3 this was something i was aganst at first, but the others wanted some type of limit break effect, one wanted them to be useable nearly at will; one once per day/week, ect. ect., it was me, ironicly teh one who didn't want them at all who came up with a solution, base them on PERSONAL SPELL POINTS(thats what we called the points you got as a character; the other points are CLASS POINTS) and as your personal points were limited and didn't change a whole lot we felt this was a good thing to tie them to. we just made the better Breaks cost a whole lot more.
teh othe thing we learned was KEEP THEM SIMPLE, no weird limit breaks, remeber, most limit breaks LOOKED cool, but just did damage in the end.
(we also said teh player may decide what his Break looked like, like with magic Missle)

4 Classes. we all had a class, or two, we wanted to see:
I wanted a Sharp shooter/archer class and some type of Dirvish/Whirlwind attack class; another wanted to be sure there was a Red Mage that was worth something, one that there was a Blue Mage(teh one that 'aquired' abilitys from monsters, like in FF9) one guy wanted Ninja and Thief to be in (and different enough to matter) so what we did was each take TWO classes and 'made' them to our likeing then came back a week later to go over each others work. in the end we came up with teh following:
---1 each class should be the pardigm of their 'style'.
---2 they should NOT get their greatest ability untill high level.
---3 multi classing, while not totaly out, isn't realy a GREAT idea (jack of all, master of none-thats Red Mage teritory)
---3 each class must have a spicific nich but also be able to stand on its own
following these guid lines we worrked out a system;
there woulkd be abilitys, great abilitys and ultamate abilitys. an ability started at 1 or 2 level, a great ability started no earlyer that 8, no later then 10 and a Ultimate no earlyer than 16. uesing this and the charts from the Dungon Masters Guide, (the ones that show how much avarage damage is per character level) we worked each ability into this framework.

Now, i pause here to give you an idea as to what we were shooting for.
we wanted a slightly higher fantasy that 'normal' D&D, so we wanted a 1LV white mage to be like an optmised healing cleric, (human, healing domain, domain focus[healing]) basicly we wanted the primary ability of each class to be the equivalent of building a regular D&D character do do ONLY that. with this in mind we made each class to be slightly MORE powerfull than a D&D equivilent.



TO BE CONTINUED . . .