Dev Diary - Entry 3, 15th. Jan. 2018

CAUTION: This entry contains spoilers to Final Fantasy XX/Final Fantasy 20XX. If you believe you are involved in this game, viewer discretion is advised.
Remember how I said that last week I wanted to try my hand at character creation and perhaps some monster creation? Well, I hope this suffices for y'all. Presenting Lady Lluisa, AKA FF XX's Cid, and Bombs. Say hi, all.
In designing characters and monsters, it's difficult to know exactly what you're doing without getting your hands metaphorically dirty up to the elbows. Balancing monsters/characters often relies on the feel the GM is trying to evoke from their game, the power of the opposing party in the conflict and what can be done with the agent in question in the game. For example, I've seen semi-realistic FF games where monsters like Malboro and Bombs simply don't fit due to there being a more rigid adherence to "real world" tone and themes. Trench warfare and walking stinking tumbleweeds apparently just don't mesh well together.
But that's what's so great about systems such as these - at the end of the day, it's not about slavishly adhering to any one set of rules or regulations, but about creating what you want to see and finding ways to do that. Case in point: the most difficult part of the Bomb (aside from creating simple advancement rules - more on them later) was finding a way to mimic their expanding mid battle in a way that makes Bombs intimidating to face down both mechanically and physically. Settling on a large increase in Earth stat allows it to become literally a bigger threat not only by increasing it's resistance to brute force attacks, but by putting it a bit further away from death as well as increasing the eventual damage caused by Self-Destruct it reinforces the feeling that something very bad is about to happen. The increase in fire levels is just enough to signal that the Bomb is growing stronger to the party without means of reading HP, and the decrease in Air stats gives the party a way of fighting back. It was an interesting design challenge - I'm keen to hear feedback.
And then we have Lluisa. Lluisa's idea built up out of reading the Phalanx class and realizing "Hang on a minute... that Willpower ability works better the lower HP modifier a character has." and then building from there. Lluisa's concept is that of the well respected general, the leader of a small group of soldiers that is capable of protecting, restoring and organizing her squad to ensure victory. From there, a story role spins itself out which we'll get to later. At the moment, she's more there as an example of not taking anything at face value - especially gish builds.
Finally, there's something that struck me about the rules as I read them - especially the specific world rulebooks. Namely, that it's a very valuable skill to be able to look at mechanics and theming separately. A lot of the rules suggested can be flavoured into something completely different to the suggested effects in the book. My go-to example for this is found in the FF6 rulebook - specifically, the Magicite rules. The suggested rules work well, but there's other ways of looking at the mechanics depending on what you want to achieve with them. One idea is the idea of having the Summons being the literal worshipped Gods and Goddesses of a world, and the "summoners" in an FF6 world are devotees, acolytes and worshippers of one above all others - the replacement of certain skills and abilities of jobs are the markers of a "holy mage" or "divine crusader" in the world and demonstrate a genuine, deep devotion to a certain credo. Ifreeti acolytes may be devoted to the dancing flames of destruction, while Ramuhan clerics are the instruments of his divine judgement.
Anyways - that's been a rather long-winded entry today, and I am sorry if it's convoluted and somewhat confusing. This is my first attempt at keeping regular notes over time and at the moment, it's only just better than a stream of consciousness. I hope that this is useful in some way, though, and I thank you for your time. Next week, I hope to be able to show off some form of map for the game, as well as some more mechanics experience.