Final Fantasy Donjon

[Chris Gardiner]

So after our first Donjon game at the weekend, several of us decided that it would be the perfect system to run a Final Fantasy-esque RPG with, for the following reasons:-

1) Materia as magic words: Materia for those who haven't played FFVII, is this magic gem stuff that, in the possession of a person, lets them use a certain sort of magic. So you get fire materia, ice materia, etc. Donjon's magic word system would fit this perfectly. You find a piece of materia, you get that magic word.

2) Donjon's emphasis on 'kitting up' when in town fits very much with the frenzied shopping expeditions that occur in the FF games as soon as you enter a new settlement. Plus, because Donjon lets you apply any sort of ability to an item, it would be easy to represent the sorts of ability-granting items that appeared in FFIX.

3) Looting the corpses and levelling up! Both FF and Donjon are all about this.

4) Inventing your own abilities. All the FF characters have very distinctive looks, powers and skills. Since Donjon lets you make abilities up, it's a good system for making unique, differentiated characters.

5) Attributes: The Donjon attributes are pretty similar to the ones FF uses.

6) Boss monsters: Donjon is the best game I've come across for doing boss monsters. Abilities that give extra initiative dice and damage reduction prolong their lifespan, and the odd weird ability to make the players go "Argh! What's it doing now?!"

7) In both games, it's almost impossible to die. In FF you pop right back up at the end of battle, just like in Donjon.

8) Final Fantasy is very plot-based and a bit railroady, which doesn't initially sound very Donjon. However, if you prevented the players from using successes on dice as facts unless they have some sort of background trait that fits with the current situation you can get something similar. For example, a character has the background 'Amnesia' (there's always at least one in FF games). On entering a new village, the GM tells him that he feels as if he's been here before. Now the player can use any successes he gets to state things about the village, representing his returning memory. He could use this to uncover secrets, find escape routes, have relationships with residents, etc.

9) Carryover dice in Donjon can be used to represent the sort of over the top attacks, summons and limit breaks that appear in FF. Each action builds up more and more dice until you let rip. Perhaps a good way to make use of this is to give characters limit break abilities, which they can only use to provide bonus dice, and only when they're out of flesh wounds.

Anyway, it's early stages yet, but I'm enthusiastic enough to keep working on this. It could be neat.

[anonymouse]

I actually ran a few FF-donjon games myself, and it worked out fairly well. I really do wish I'd thought of materia, though, I don't know why I didn't. You're right in that it works brilliantly.

I worked Limit Breaks pretty much as you describe, but every two successes equaled one LB dice -- treated it as a pool. When it hit 4 points, you could make a Level 1 attack. And so on.

You could take a page from FF X and also have Limit Break/Overdrive abilities; such abilities would allow you to gain LB dice from things besides taking damage.

Anyway, let me know if you'd like any input. =)

[Clinton R. Nixon]

It would probably not surprise anyone that I played a crackload of Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy Tactics, both of which did influence the nuttiness of Donjon.

[Chris Gardiner]

You could take a page from FF X and also have Limit Break/Overdrive abilities; such abilities would allow you to gain LB dice from things besides taking damage.

I've not played FFX - how do the Overdrive abilities work?

I'd definitely like some means of people getting more limit break dice, or access to limit breaks faster, based on non-combat things, like relationships with other party members, oaths, and so on.

[anonymouse]

Not played FFX? Get thee to a PS2! It's definitely my favourite of the franchise.

Overdrives are Limit Breaks, just with a different name. At the start, each character's bar fills up when they get hit, just like 7.

However, as the game progresses, you can unlock more ways to charge up. For instance, if you use a lot of healing magic, you'll eventually unlock a 'Healer' ability that allows you to charge your bar whenever you heal someone, based on the amount of HP restored. Once you kill X number of baddies, you wind up with the Slayer ability, which charges your bar when you kill an enemy. There are a whole bunch.

You can only have one selected at a time, though, and stuff like Healer or Ally (charges on your turn) do a very small amount.

You could definitely have ways to charge up based on social situations, but I'm not entirely sure how well that would really work with Donjon.

*edit*

Another nice change with Overdrives is that they're not all straight attacks. Rikku's overdrive - the thief/mechanic of the game - is 'Mix', which allows her to mix two items to produce an effect. Most do damage, but there's also ways to heal your party, induce status effects, et cetera.

[Mike Holmes]

Just to back the man up, FFX doth rock indeed. All must play.

Mike

[anonymouse]

While it didn't show up in 7, Blue Magic has been in 6, 8, and 10 (I remember almost nothing of 9, so can't speak to that), and is definitely a favourite of mine.

A character could take a Blue Magic ability, and give it however many dice as usual. These dice represent "slots", and he doesn't choose magic words.

A slot can be filled whenever a character is hit by an enemy's magic spell. The player decides whether or not he wants to permanently spend one of his slots on that spell; if so, he gets that -exact- spell, it uses up a slot, and it's rated at 1 die.

Example: Strago gets hit by the spell Divide By Zero, cast on him by the Emaciated Pretty-Boy. He has Blue Magic 3, and decides to permanently spend one of his slots in it to learn that spell. He can now cast Divide By Zero, even though he doesn't actually known any of those words seperately.

If you wanted to go the FFX route, Kimhari uses basically the same system but it's themed as 'beast fighting'; think Gau, but instead of turning into the monsters, he just learns one of their attacks. So in that variant, you wouldn't learn spells from enemies, but you'd gain the use of their abilities, again rated at one die: if Kimhari got hit with a Jump attack from a Annoyingly Fast Dog-Thing, he could now have a Jump 1 ability.

Probably have to be some rule against advancing gained abilities this way.

[Chris Gardiner]

The Blue Magic idea's neat!

There was Blue Magic in IX, too - Quina could eat enemies and learn special abilities from them.

[MachMoth]

Blue Magic has a long line in the FF games:

1 & 2: Well, they didn't think of it yet
3: My Japanese is horrible.  It had a class system, so it might have been there.
4: Never got around to it.
5: Yeah, Blue Mage is one of the coolest classes in the game, and you can learn it really early.  And, you get like a Blue Tuxedo Mask Costum (minus the hat).
6: Strago carries the torch through the later part of this classic
7: Ah, but blue magic did not get neglected.  The Enemy Skill materia let anyone play the part of the daring Blue Mage.  The enemy skill Beta proved useful through much of the early game (if you could survive through it)
8: Yeah, um... only played a little of this one.  It was in there though.  It had to be.
9: Quina the Blue Mage.  It was a stretch, but it worked.
10: The Holy Gem that doth ownz yoo.  Um, and it had blue magic too.

What great wonders await the Great Blue Mage.  Will his powers bend the balance of X-2?  Will Blue Magic join the host of online class powers in XI?  It damn better, or I ain't shellin' out the cash every month to play it.  

Now my next frontier, placing Blue Magic into a good round of Final Fantasy Fate (boo yeah, FFF).

[Mike Holmes]

What about monster trapping? Need special equipment?

Mike