Fixing 4e: Mapping new abilities

[Manxome]

So, first off: if any of you have played Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, but have not played the original (the one on the PlayStation with the Zodiac Braves, the Lion War, etc.), then you seriously need to go play it right freaking now. Seriously, go play it. I'll wait. The port for the PSP is presumably also acceptable (I haven't personally seen it).

Then, you need to stop referring to FFTA as FFT, because it's confusing and provocative.

The most favorable review I've seen of FFTA (not that I've looked hard) said something along the lines of "OK, lots of people hate this game because they're comparing it to the original FFT, but if you forget that you've played that and look at FFTA as a completely unrelated game, it's really not that bad..."

I'm more friendly to FFTA than most people I've met, in that I will admit there are actually a few things that it does better than FFT. And in that I didn't stop playing it until I got to the point in the narrative where the judges decided to stop hunting you and the game reacted by increasing the number of simultaneous laws to 3.

And when I talk to people who have played FFT and then tried out FFTA, the judges and the bullshit laws are the one thing that they invariably complain about. At great length. Repeatedly.


Admittedly, people might hate them less if they were implemented in a less bullshit fashion. The laws change frequently and there is no indication at all anywhere in the normal battle interface to tell you what they are--you can look them up, but it requires going to a screen that you otherwise wouldn't use. Basically, the entire user interface is carefully designed to trick you into breaking the laws accidentally so that you'll get penalized. And the penalty for breaking a law extends beyond the end of the battle and is worse than anything your actual opponents can do to you, so the single most important thing about playing the game is to use a poorly-designed interface to frequently check and remember arbitrary, bullshit rules that have nothing to do with anything else in the game.

Then you've got the fact that the laws are presented as a narrative part of the game world but implemented as an abstract ideal that has nothing to do with the behavior of anyone or anything within the game world, which doesn't help. There are points where, in the narrative, the judges are actually under explicit and specific instructions to apprehend you, and they find you, and they fight you, and during the battle, the judge continues to be invulnerable and takes no action except to enforce the day's laws while you trade blows with run-of-the-mill guards. And then when you win, and the judge is left standing in the middle of a pile of the corpses of his allies, he just kind of walks away.

And there are specific areas of the game world where judges don't go and laws are not in force, and they're supposed to be scary, because without the laws, people can actually die! But of course, in actual fact, they're your favorite places and you breath a sigh of relief when you get to visit them, because the risk of death is a small price to pay.


Calling the DM "the judge" is amusing and I approve. But if you want a way to force people to use different abilities in different battles, you want to throw out the entire FFTA system and start from scratch. In fact, you probably don't even want to look at FFTA for inspiration, and whatever you end up using, you don't want to call them "laws," because it will alienate a bunch of players that would otherwise be attracted to the idea of a tactics-like RPG.

[Ravengm]

You can null the laws with cards. And since you should have enough money to buy the game at later levels where the laws actually pose a meaningful hinderance (such as "don't use magic"), it doesn't matter all that much.

[Username17]

Yeah, gotta say that Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was stone cold awesome and I preferred it to FFT. There was a button to check the laws, which you could do at any time if you forgot what they were. And it told you what the laws were going to be before you selected your team and outfitted them with equipment and jobs for the upcoming mission. My sympathies for those who were unable to keep track of the laws and their effects in FFTA is pretty limited.

-Username17

[Koumei]

I could keep track of them, I just refused to put up with that bullshit. I mean, if "Pick your favourite small group of people, storm-trooper like a bitch, then flatten every enemy in the game with your superior levels" is good enough for Pokemon, Makai Kingdom, Disgaea and FF7, then it can damn well be good enough for any game.

FF7 will likely forever be my favourite of the FF games. It might even remain the only one I can ever be fucked playing through to the end. For tactical games, I think I'll stick with Nippon Ichi.

[Manxome]

You can null the laws with cards. And since you should have enough money to buy the game at later levels where the laws actually pose a meaningful hinderance (such as "don't use magic"), it doesn't matter all that much.

The cards weren't purchasable with money, you had to trade cards for other cards. And the set of cards available for trade was small and changed at random. And you couldn't carry very many. And you had to have the correct type of card to nullify a particular law.

But, most importantly, a sucky system doesn't cease to be sucky just because there exists some way to (partially) disable it. If your defense of laws is "yeah, but you can turn them off," then you've already granted my point. If the best thing about the system is that it can be circumvented, then why would you even consider emulating it in another game?

Yeah, gotta say that Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was stone cold awesome and I preferred it to FFT. There was a button to check the laws, which you could do at any time if you forgot what they were. And it told you what the laws were going to be before you selected your team and outfitted them with equipment and jobs for the upcoming mission. My sympathies for those who were unable to keep track of the laws and their effects in FFTA is pretty limited.

Yes, they tell you the laws at the battle start and you can choose to go and check them again, but unless you go out of your way to check them, there's no reminders or warnings of any kind over the course of the battle. If the UI designers were not assholes, then commands that violate a law would be colored in the menu, or present some other kind of warning. I only accidentally broke laws a couple times, but that was enough to establish that the system was bullshit.

I shouldn't have to remember the laws, because they're arbitrary and have nothing to do with anything and mostly don't even affect me. Any amount of effort I need to put into making sure I don't accidentally violate them is too much. Especially when the penalty for that accident is effectively that I have to reset and start the battle over, because that's less trouble than actually dealing with their legal system (not to mention that one of my characters was just permanently removed from the battle at zero action cost to the enemy).

Even with UI issues aside, you can't pretend it was an elegant system. There were lots and lots of laws that could negate a character's entire schtick, some schticks were subject to many more laws than others, and a given ability could often be rendered illegal in 3+ different ways.

Even so, I might well have gritted my teeth and finished the game if not that they apparently expect you to fight the exact same handful of battles over and over and over, and don't even scale up the levels of the monsters or anything. The "area under attack" and wandering rival guilds have precisely one set of enemy units for each location or guild, and their levels, skills, equipment, classes, and even starting formation never change. And the ones that you fight at the beginning of the game are still constantly popping up at the end.

Anyway, I could go on at great length about all the myriad ways the game fell short of its predecessor, but I kind of doubt you want to hear it, and this is getting kind of off topic. It's not like I'm going to stop you from making up and publishing whatever rules you want, but IMHO, the laws in FFTA are eminently unworthy of emulation. A system that made things weaker rather than "illegal," that affected a more wisely-distributed set of abilities, and that was intelligently integrated with the UI and the narrative could have been an interesting and valuable addition to the game. The actual system of laws they used was not, and I cannot identify any redeeming qualities that it possesses.

And I at least think it's a good idea to distinguish between FFT and FFTA when you're discussing game mechanics.

[Orion]

Actually, I'm pretty sure the wandering guilds levels scale to your party average, though if you accept lots of recruits your average level essentially never goes up.

[Maxus]

Er, yeah.

I haven't played FFT, but I own FFTA and recently went through most of a save file on it.

The laws were a pain, until I got in the swing of pressing the L button at the beginning of a fight.

The multiclassing, though...now that was the real stuff. White magic on, well, anyone? Why, yes, I'll take some power-leveling with that, too. Assassin-summoners? Big reptilian dudes who smite people? Ninjas, paladins, and monks? Sounds fun!

Really, though, I liked out how multiclassing was so in favor of doing it. So I could build up the main character to have Holy Sword (high-damage Paladin ability), and then run around the battlefield with a greatbow smiting the shenanigans out of people for six or seven squares away. I figure we could take a few notes from that multiclassing system, actually.

[shau]

I actually did not mind the rules so much, since I thought they were fairly easy to avoid. I hated the fact that abilities came from weapons that you were not guaranteed to find and that you randomly got new party members. Getting into random fights with people in the hopes that a new ally would be available so that I could build the all assassin team I wanted was about as fun as ripping my nails out.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

http://1.1.1.2/bmi/www.vgcats.com/comic ... 040906.jpg

[JonSetanta]

I actually did not mind the rules so much, since I thought they were fairly easy to avoid. I hated the fact that abilities came from weapons that you were not guaranteed to find and that you randomly got new party members. Getting into random fights with people in the hopes that a new ally would be available so that I could build the all assassin team I wanted was about as fun as ripping my nails out.

You've pretty much summed most D&D sessions as well.