Final Fantasy 9: Complete

Cleared FF9.

Of the FF games, this is probably my favorite of the PS1 era ones that I've played (7, 8 and 9 -- 10 still not played).

Paranoia in Table Top Role Playing.

In real life, if a group of people find a discarded doll in a forest, they'll, maybe comment that's weird. Maybe take a picture. Move on. But, if a high-level adventuring party finds a doll in the woods, things are not that simple.

Final Fantasy Record Keeper 5-Star Ability Advice

Fun fact: I play Final Fantasy Record Keeper. I wrote out this email to a friend, and realized, I should share it.

RPG Maker Game: Inventory, Random Encounters, Money and XP

I've been thinking about the RPG Maker Game more, and I've decided to do some things that will make JRPG purists hate the game. First, I'm shifting to an episodic system. Every other change follows from that decision.

Meet Officer Regina Posey

Officer Regina Posey is a single target damage dealer who focuses on two major "mechanics." First is the idea of one big turn. The second is the concept of a high tech blaster that attaches to her pistols and revolvers to augment their power with "Add-Ons." When you use her, she brings Truth, Justice and one very large gun to the table. She's competes with Jenny to be your most competent single target damage dealer, and I think should consistently out perform there.

Kiley is here. Dr. Pras is here. Chris Anderson, Security Chief at the Carmichael Group. Wes, tech genius for Emerald Squadron. Victoria is a heavy weapons specialist. George is a tank with power armor.

The Dream World's last two characters (Lydia and Muriel) can be viewed here. Click here to see the party's healers, Nybal and Silas. You can click here to see the first three characters' skills (Arthur, Perry and Sherwood).

You can also find all the images here. You can note that some people's class names have changed as development went on! The Dream World characters can be found on this blog here. The Real World characters can be found on this blog here.

Call of Cathulhu Introduction

“Grandma, tell us a story,” came a chorus of high-pitched, mewling voices. Grandma looked over the kittens, each struggling for a prime spot in the basket on the library table. Winter in Vermont is cold, even inside, and none of the little ones wanted whisker or tail outside their warm bubble.

Grandma, a long-haired, graying calico, paced around the basket, looking over the stacks of books, fading forever into the darkness. “You’re not old enough, yet, for my stories.”

“We are, we are!” The kitten chorus echoed through the empty walls, bouncing around.

“You’re too young,” Grandma said again, primly sitting in front of the basket, licking a paw until they quieted down. “You will all be asleep before I start.”

“We won’t, we won’t!” They waited for her to finish smoothing her whiskers.

“You haven’t seen enough of the world out there,” she flicked her tail out the window. “In the darkness, beyond where we have you safely kept.”

“Tell us a story!” Grandma paced, leaping across to another table, where she turned again. She arched her back, stretching, before jumping back to the kittens.

“What do you know of the world? Any story is going to be meaningless to you.”

“We know about the humans,” said one of the kittens.

“And we know that there are things outside,” said another.

“Like other cats! And birds! And more humans,” said a third. “And… other things.”

“Do those other humans keep other cats,” asked the fourth. Here Grandma snorted, then sighed heavily.

“See? You are too young; the humans do not keep us. We keep them,” Grandma said, turning to the window again. “We keep them from the other things in your dreams. But, still. You are too young to understand. You won’t listen. A story would be wasted on you.”

“Tell us a story. We promise to listen!” The meows turned into a roar, until Grandma sighed and settled in front of the basket.

“It seems I’ll have no peace until I give you a story,” Grandma said. “So, listen now. Listen to how we keep them; how we watch them.”

---

Curl down, young kittens, and listen
A tale of wild cats gone missing.

They came to their clowder,
Under oak and spoke together.

First came Tumble, swift and fine,
Quick to act, and the first in line.

Next bright Bumble, sweet and gold,
Always brave and always bold.

Next came Rumble, stubborn and proud,
Un-catlike and very loud.

Next is, Mumble, first to speak,
Eyes blue as a spring creek.

Last is Jumble, who always dared,
Despite being small and scared…
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A Call of Cathulhu adventure for 3-5 investicators.

Meet Kiley Shoust, Empath

Kiley is a young woman who was abandoned by her family and who found herself a home in an orphanage at the outskirts of Carmichael City. There, she's learned to come to terms with her Empath abilities, which allow her to channel psychic energy, allowing her to both lash out mentally at enemies and to sooth the minds of her allies. Beyond the somewhat understood psychic energy manipulation that Empaths have, she also is an expert at healing by taking other's injuries onto herself.

Dr. Pras is here. Chris Anderson, Security Chief at the Carmichael Group. Wes, tech genius for Emerald Squadron. Victoria is a heavy weapons specialist. George is a tank with power armor.

The Dream World's last two characters (Lydia and Muriel) can be viewed here. Click here to see the party's healers, Nybal and Silas. You can click here to see the first three characters' skills (Arthur, Perry and Sherwood).

You can also find all the images here. You can note that some people's class names have changed as development went on! The Dream World characters can be found on this blog here. The Real World characters can be found on this blog here.

Pallington Manor, An Adventure Using the Call of Cthulhu Rule Set

Fifteen years ago, they became your best friends, together in the rain, confused, but together.

You met after school on the first day of your senior year, like something out of a 1980s teenage escapist movie. The principal calling out delinquents’ names, reading out your offenses, threatening that “Adams High School doesn’t graduate hooligans.”

Meet George Evers, Armored Infantry

George is a reluctant fighter, a bit morose and no longer interested in fighting the good fight. He's probably the hardest character for me to write, and I feel like that's because he started as a sort of goofy big brother character until I realized that Wes/Chris already had that dynamic down. So, I decided to focus more on his background, and I came to decide he'd probably be kind of a moody guy for SPOILERS reasons. Either or, I feel like he, Regina and Alicia are going to be the hardest to write since they don't fit into the core group as easily.

Chris Anderson, Security Chief at the Carmichael Group. Wes, tech genius for Emerald Squadron. Victoria is a heavy weapons specialist.

The Dream World's last two characters (Lydia and Muriel) can be viewed here. Click here to see the party's healers, Nybal and Silas. You can click here to see the first three characters' skills (Arthur, Perry and Sherwood).

You can also find all the images here. You can note that some people's class names have changed as development went on! The Dream World characters can be found on this blog here. The Real World characters can be found on this blog here.

New Basic Rules, A Quick Note

The new D&D Basic Rules are posted.

I expect I'll do a full read over the weekend and give you a lot more insight as I go. But, just after skimming the opening [which I'll re-read again], one thing stands out to me as kind of... awkward. Especially given the reason we moved AWAY from 3.5/3.0 to the 4E model was to fix the very problem.

Go read The Wonders of Magic section.

Though, the section on the Wonders of Magic makes me leery for our brave non-magical people. All of their examples are ways adventurers are screwed without their magical helpers. You need clerics or you will DIE. You need bards or you will be OVERWHELMED. Without wizards and druids everything is TEN TIMES WORSE. Even if everything is more balanced, someone may have wanted to say something about warriors and paladins being a protective shield in front of their more vulnerable members, just so it didn't seem like the warriors were just sort of there for other people to be awesome around.

RPG Maker Combat System

Before I go any further with making items/characters/skills, I need to sit down and decide combat numbers. On the one hand, I like how the HP/damage scales through Ch.1 (at the end, your tank has around 1.3k HP and his base attack does around 120~, while your damage dealer has around 750 HP and does around 160~, but can reliably do special attacks that pump that 300~.)

That feels like very Final Fantasy numbers. The problem is that it gets unwieldy FAST. So, what's the other possibility? Make the numbers much smaller, removing the multipliers. At the base, a regular attack is your Attack Value * 4 resisted by an enemy defense value * 2 [with a +/- 20.]

What I'm tempted to do is retweak the numbers to get rid of the multiplication. So, instead, your tank would have around 130 HP by the end of chapter 1, the damage dealer would have around 75. The difference in their basic attacks would be 12 to 16, with the damage dealer being able to put out about 30 damage with a special, with the boss going from having nearly 1500 HP to having about 150. Nothing changes except the scope of the numbers, but it would make it easier for me to balance in my head.

So, here's my question for RPG Players: Do you prefer the large abstract numbers of Final Fantasy/Star Ocean titles, or the smaller, more easy to understand numbers of a more tactical game like Fire Emblem?

The Dreaming Path

Ever since I played the early Final Fantasy games, I've wanted to make an RPG. The biggest thing standing in my way has always been a complete and total lack of technical skill in coding, programming and art. Enter, RPG Maker.

In this image, Arthur, our first character, uses a spell.

As you can see, RPG Maker has solved a lot of these problems for me. Finding a script from their Wiki to make the party's sprites appear in combat, we currently have a fairly solid system for an old-school, turn-based J-RPG. But, we really want to try and make things different than other games. The first thing you'll notice is that the title implies that dreams are going to be a powerful theme.

That's true, in more ways than one. Right now, I've only finished the first floor of the starter dungeon. It is a bit surreal, a bit silly, and fairly simple. The enemies there are basic starter monsters. They just attack you. As you're all alone, though, you'll need to guide Arthur to safety. The first dungeon will take you from level 1 to 7.

End of June Role Playing Event

In June, I am going to run a Call of Cthulhu one-shot. There is a crew of 11 people that the players can elect to choose from. The transport plane housed 13 people (plus the pilot for 14); only 11 remain. While the lead-in short will give the characters some traits and the like, they'll be flexible Pre-Genned PCs, meaning that the only thing definitively set is their profession and last name.

PAX Overview and Haul

Total list below the picture; apologies for late blogging. Blame Verizon. Also, next year, more photos. For more photos, and a few of Cheers, click here. I also think I need to finally get a better camera sometime this year.

My favorite costume. Hooray Chrono Trigger. Boo Chrono Cross.

Making More Time In Your Games

People like table-top role playing games, but the general consensus is that a lot of the role playing has subtly turned more into combat roles than character roles. The main reason for this, I am going to posit, is pure economics. Resources, specifically.

The first resource is Time. The average time people have to game drops as they age and responsibilities kick in. The two times in your life when you have the most time to play games are at the bookends of it. For everyone else, there isn't time for a day-long delving into the lair of the dark lich. Combine this with the second resource/problem: Players, like any other actor in an economy, are rarely rational actors. These are the two biggest factors standing in the way of getting more RP in your RPG.

So, how do you get more out of your RPG?

Final Fantasy 4: Onward to The After Years

FF4 is a surprisingly quick game (completed in under about 17 hours played.) There are a few points of real difficulty, but even those can be breezed through by simply doing fights as they come. I reached the end game on the moon at about level 57 across the party by the time we used the crystal in the last fight. Simply knowing how the Active Time Battle system works this time changed the whole world. I knew what counters were used by what monster; Behemoths were no longer a long, drawn out fight once I realized they countered every hit with a nasty attack. Rubicant was no longer a stopping point once I realized how his cloak works; and the water turtle demon Caganazzo, or whatever, was a push over.

Final Fantasy 3: The Last of the NES Era

After beating the Cloud of Darkness, we say a fond farewell to the NES era Final Fantasy games. Even though I was playing the remake, I still felt the danger of things going wrong in the battles enough, and there was a real hint of danger throughout the game play. Coming off of FF2, the body count among our heroes is much lower, and the tone is lighter. Most of the world is not destroyed, and our friends are reunited in the end. FF3 sets up a nice, hopeful spot between the depressing worlds of FF2 and FF4.

Final Fantasy 2: Complete

I finished Final Fantasy 2 yesterday evening. One of the most interesting things about this is that it was actually, for all its NES-level story-telling capability, a fairly dark game. A lot of heroes end up dead, and our heroes do not reconcile with each other at the end. Leon is sort of a proto-Kain, but he pulls it off better since he doesn't seem to slip in and out of mind control as easily as a cartoon character. As with FF1, the early limitations really showed in the game; grinding by hitting yourself and your friends in the head is... thankfully a system Final Fantasy dropped. The other problem with FF2 is that, much like some of the later Final Fantasies, your characters start to blend together, ability wise, if you're going for max effectiveness. By the end of the game, Firion, Mariah and Gus were only different in that Firion swung two lances, Mariah used two swords and Gus had two axes. All three could heal and buff effectively, and attack magic was of nominal use.

This is another game that is fun in the sense that you get a feeling of overcoming challenges, until you hit the mid-game when some odd combination of equipment and spells lets you sit on easy street until a random encounter in the final dungeon with monsters that do a percentage of your max HP as damage. Then, once you clear the two floors they are on, it is smooth sailing. I expected the boss to actually transform into a super powered. final true evil form. He did not. Oh well, on to Final Fantasy III, which brought us the Job System as we think of it.

Below are some pictures from my failed adventure to the Air and Space museum today, as the lecture I was hoping to attend was canceled.

Final Fantasy 1: Complete

 Between down time in Delaware and the train up, I've completed reading Redshirts and finished FF1. Tomorrow/later today, I'll be starting up on FF2. This is one I don't even think I started. But first, let's reflect on what we've learned from FF1. Why the delay? NaNoWriMo has done a number on my pushing through Final Fantasy.

First, the game did not age well, even with a graphics update. The dungeons start off incredibly harsh, but by late game, you can trivialize them all with usable equipment. The only resets I was forced to make were in the ice caves in random encounters against multiple dark wizards who spammed Fire 2. The actual figuring things out part was fun, but I wonder if anyone who didn't have the where-with-all to talk to everyone would be able to do it. I finished the game, on Normal, at average party level 31. A bit high, but there were too many encounters that, even with a thief, attempting to flee ended up costing too many resources if we failed.

For when it came out, the game was innovative, fun, and it gave people a chance to dabble in party creation and minor customization. The amount of character customization is going to go up (then ratchet back down later in the series), but for an NES-era game, the initial four-man choice gives it some potential. There was a time when the purist in me would want to suggest people start with FF1 for learning the series; that part of me died when I realized that, while I liked the novel challenge of managing resources and juggling potions and antidote supplies, most players will not.

Oh well, let's see what FF2 brings. Oh? Red Shirts? I approve (even if at some points it is written in present tense.)



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P.S.,

Hopefully everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving! Now that the festivities are over, if you plan on going out into the wild during Black Friday, have fun. If you can. It just seems unnecessarily hectic and crowded. Two things I do not like.

Dissidia Duodecim...

... is the most fan service-y thing I have ever bought. I saw a screenshot of Laguna shooting Kefka... IN THE FACE.

I was sold. Right now, I'm just playing through the prologue, but, you know, I think this will be a great handheld time waster at bus stops. So far, I am gravitating towards the mages (like Terra and Kuja,) but I can be persuaded otherwise.