It should come as no surprise to anyone that has followed anything I’ve done in the past year or so that I am a fan of Fantasy Flight Games’ Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion, and Force and Destiny. More importantly, I’m a huge fan of a lot of the things that Jay Little did when designing the mechanics that go on behind the game and drive it forward. I’ve never been a fan of the idea of rolling the dice for the sake of rolling the dice. If you’re going to pick up the dice, the action should have some weight and importance to the story. The narrative dice helped to make every single roll of the die important not only to the characters, but to the story as well through the use of several different axes of success and failure. Each time the dice were picked up, the players knew that it was important and could have ramifications on the story. Hearing about the idea of an action failing but still having something positive come out of it was exciting to me. Seeing it in action was mind-blowing in it’s simplicity.
But like many other gamers and designers out there, I saw the potential of this engine to run games other than Star Wars, and even other than science fiction. A lot of people started using it to play fantasy games. One poster over at the d20 Radio boards was simply running a generic fantasy world. One gamemaster converted his 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons game into the system. A few other posters were working on running The Elder Scrolls with the system.
My mind, however, went to a different kind of fantasy when I started thinking about what this game could do. It went to something I had spent countless hours in my youth and even into my adult years playing. It went to something that had gone through so many incarnations in it’s lifetime, stretching the boundaries of just what “fantasy” was, going from classical, Gygax and Tolkien inspired fantasy to science fiction and everything in between.
My mind went to Final Fantasy.
One of the strongest things about this idea was born when I saw how the game’s engine handled the Force. When rolling to activate a Force power, you gather up a number of “Force Dice” (white 12-sided dice) equal to your character’s Force Rating, and roll them, sometimes by themselves and sometimes as a part of bigger action depending on what you’re trying to accomplish with that particular use of the Force. Each face of the Force Die generates either dark side points or light side pips which are used to power these abilities. As you invest XP into improving your Force powers, you need to generate more and more of these points to activate the upgrades. Each face of the die has either one or two of these pips on them. The total number of pips is the same between the two, but the distribution is different. There are more faces with dark side pips then there are with light side pips, but that dilutes the potency of the dark side results, meaning that you will have a greater chance of rolling one dark side pip than two, whereas with light side pips you have a much greater chance of getting the more potent result of generating two. A character generally cannot use dark side pips to power their Force powers without suffering some ramifications in game from “touching the dark side.” And seeing as a character that is just starting out with the Force only has a Force Rating of 1 and thus only rolls one Force Die when activating his powers, it becomes easy to see that the temptation to use the dark side results will be there. This not only serves to almost perfectly model the use of the Force during the era the game is set in when the Emperor had all but eradicated the Jedi and their vast libraries of information and knowledge on the Force, but also, rather ingeniously I might add, gives a nod to the classic line in Episode V when Luke asks Yoda if the dark side is stronger.
“No. No. No. Quicker, easier, more seductive.”
“But enough of that!” you are saying. “This post is supposed to be about Final Fantasy! Right?” Well, yes. Technically. But how the Force Die was used in the game was the launching point of of this mental exercise that later developed into a full-fledged system hack, so bear with me. Some of you more astute readers may have already picked up on where I’m going with this. If so, good for you. You get a gold star.*
Final Fantasy has always had a rich tradition of magic in its games. And more often than not, there’s a clear delineation between black magic and white magic. Black magic is the stuff that tends to hurt people and white magic is the stuff that tends to heal people.
There are two kinds of pips on the Force Die. One that is a white circle, and one that is a black circle. One side to power white magic, one side to power black magic.
Now, obviously it wasn’t going to be quite that simple in practice, but in concept, the idea was the perfect springboard. The distribution would work quite well in theory – while the level of success would be skewed slightly towards the black magic spells, the number of points generated on those dice would make it harder to hit the required number to activate all the upgrades a high level caster would want. Obviously the higher prevalence of magic in these kinds of games requires me to consider a few additional things about the game. Force using characters can invest several hundred XP in their character just to get a Force Rating of 2 or 3 – since magic is the mage’s primary form of interacting in battle, that might need to change a little bit for a Final Fantasy hack. I’m undecided yet if a mage would be able to suffer strain to activate a black magic spell with white magic points by suffering strain or if increasing the rate at which they might be able to gain Magic Rating increases would help solve that. Maybe certain equipment or talents could grant bonus Magic Dice or give bonus points of a certain color. There are a lot of ways that this can be figured, and a lot of things to consider.
The spells themselves could all be presented as the Force powers are – a basic ability that you can buy and then a series of upgrades you can purchase to modify the spell instead of just being able to cast more powerful versions of the spell like you get in the console titles. For example, looking at the classic Fire spell for an example, the basic power would simply allow you to cause damage to a target within a short distance from you. You can then spend XP on upgrades to buy the basic Range, Magnitude, and Strength upgrades to increase the basic power of the spell. What about giving it the Burn quality? That sounds like a Control Upgrade to me. Mastery upgrades as they were introduced in Force and Destiny gives a lot of room to create signature abilities to emulate some of the higher level spells, such as removing damage type to emulate the more powerful Flare spell and get around resistances.
Some initial thoughts anyway.
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Ben Erickson
You could treat the elemental spells a bit like the Multi-Goo Gun from Special Modifications. You don’t declare what goo you’re squirting, it’s just implicit in the specials you activate. Burn? Ok, that was acid. Knockdown means you used lubricant, and so on.
On the Red Mage front, instead of attacking everything in the power, what if some of the improvements came from talents? That would allow you to limit the Red from getting the White or Black “capstone” abilities.
I think you have the seed of an idea here, but yes, you’d definitely need to modify it substantially. My first thought is that force dice might be a good way to abstract out MP and merge it with strain. For example, if you increase the strain cost of using the wrong-color pips to 2 per pip, but remove the destiny and conflict costs, it would be a good way to handle the concept of “low on MP” without all the bookkeeping.
You’d need to make Unleash a little easier to get in the FP prereq department, and might need to put FP or skill rank limits on some of the upgrades to limit how fast you can upgrade to Firaga.
I’d suggest splitting Discipline into two skills, White Magic and Black Magic. And potentially a third Green Magic category for status effects, if splitting them up between White and Black is too much — but on the other hand, the Bind power seems like its various effects cover like 90% of the FF status effects. (e.g., the ‘strain on an action’ upgrade? That’s poison. The ‘stagger’ effect? Stop. and so on)
However, it might be worth approaching this a little differently. If magic is a black mage’s primary method of attack, it shouldn’t require two pips just to make it happen at all, and Unleash is a little too beefy. You’d probably want to create a replacement power that starts out just letting you use Willpower/Discipline (or Black Magic) to do an attack dealing 5 damage to one target, and expands from there — basically building a new power out of the ‘hurl’ upgrade of Move, only instead of throwing objects of silhouette 0, 1, etc, you’re calling up bursts of lightning, fire, or ice, which you can make bigger, reach further with, or spread around to multiple targets with the appropriate upgrades. Combined with my previous thought about using pips and strain to abstract MP use, a black mage could pretty reliably pull out a Blizzard or Thundara without having to have an excessive number of force dice as his disposal — you really could start with just one die and upgrade over time, since you wouldn’t need to depend on rolling the right color of pip.
And in that case, you could let Unleash stay in the game as the really high-end attack spells that don’t fall under the -a/-ara/-aga chain, like Flare, Holy, Ultima, etc.
I suppose I should have clarified a bit – the spells would be their own unique trees, not just tweaks of the existing Force Powers. The basic idea would be to have the “lower level” classic spells that the mage could buy into and then evolve into the “higher level” -a/-ara/-aga chains, so they could be effective from the get go with only one or two dice to roll and keep up with those using weapons to deal damage. There’s definitely stuff to mine and steal from with those powers are inspiration, but they would definitely need to be their own thing. Skill requirements on various upgrades is an interesting idea though.
I do like the 2 Strain idea. Might be worth toying around with.
I don’t know that I find it necessary to split Discipline between the two types of magic (and I’ve never been a fan of “green magic” – Blue magic? Okay, that is it’s own beast. But not green, the status spells were always traditionally split between white and black just fine.) Discipline covers a lot more than just “magical power” so it seems a little unnecessary to me to split up the skills like that. Where does resisting fear fall under? Resisting temptation? Soldiering on despite being mentally and physically exhausted? The single skill works just fine, in my opinion.
The main reason I was thinking about splitting the skills up is the Red Mage, who’d have to buy into both; the idea of trading power for flexibility. But on the other hand I suppose that could be represented simply by how many XP you spend to buy new powers versus upgrading your existing powers. You might still need to have something in place that stops a Red Mage from just buying hard into one attack spell and one heal, making him nearly as effective as both a black and white mage at the same time (like a limitation that Red Mages can only ever reach the third tier of upgrades on a spell tree, or something).
Are you thinking to have a single “attack spell” power where you choose Fire, Blizzard, or Thunder at the time of casting, or three different elementally-aligned powers? My first instinct is to say one power with a choice of elements would be the smoothest way to handle this, providing a sort of parity between the Black Mage’s one damage tree and the White Mage’s one Cure tree. There’s probably a balance benefit in handwaving the damage types, too, in that you inherently advance in all your attack spells at the same time rather than, say, buying all the way down to Firaga before you start investing in the first tier of Blizzard.
But while Fire, Thunder, and Blizzard are identical in the games except for the damage types, there might be some interest to be had in making the different elements actually act differently in play. For example, Thunder might have more difficult-to-upgrade damage, but is cheaper to buy magnitude increases for, while Blizzard has easier range boosts or side-effects that the game doesn’t do (like slowing or immobilizing your target, or making the ground slippery) and Fire is better at raw damage output (including an optional Burn quality). The big risk with that is, of course, making the black mage much more expensive to master than other spellcasting-focused specs.
I’m of several minds on how the spells would be distributed.
I can see the benefits and drawbacks of both a single attack spell or splitting up Fire/Ice/Lightning. Elemental and damage types would definitely have a role to play in the game, so it’s something that is worth exploring.
And to be honest, I don’t know that I really have a problem with black magic being more expensive to master than white magic. It encourages specialization, and it encourages players to think about the route they want to take their characters and how they want them to be developed, as well as encouraging the GM to play to both the collective strengths and weaknesses of a party. If a black mage can cast all of the elemental spells at the same efficacy, that dulls that ability. And it allows each element to become its own thing in the game.
As far as a red mage type of character… I don’t know that I like limitations on how far they can advance in a tree, but I’m sure there’s something that can be found with enough brainstorming to keep that from happening, whether it’s fewer Magic Dice increases while giving them the ability to exchange MP types for less strain.
Or something. There’s definitely something there. We’ll have to see what shakes out and what holds after some testing.
I do like the idea of the Red Mage having fewer available MD increases, and the idea of something like ‘flip one pip for free’ is nice.
I do think the three trees of attack spells is the more interesting way to go (as I said above), especially if there are different add-on status effects for each element.
One potential balance would be for the Cure spells to just be more expensive to buy into or use (more difficult to create than destroy, sort of thing), and I’d definitely say the Remedy tree would need to be a separate power.
By the way, bit pedantic, but just to mention it, you said “-a/-ara/-aga chains”. There are no “-a” spells; those are just -ara tier spells for base spells that already end in an R sound. There’s no Firara and Curara, only Fira and Cura. In games that have a fourth tier of spells, the top tier is -aja.