Dev Diary - Entry 4, 22nd. 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. You should know the drill by now.
This week, instead of hard mechanics as initially planned, I'd like to talk a little about musings prompted by OmegaFantasy last week. Namely, what is important in choosing a particular system for a tabletop game and what are the core themes and/or elements that make a Final Fantasy game a Final Fantasy game, and not just a Final Fantasy clone.
First off, let's dispel a common misconception - that elements like Chocobos, the Holy Trinity of Ramuh, Shiva and Ifrit, limit breaks or angsty girls and boys unfeasably young for adventuring make a Final Fantasy. This is, in my opinion, categorically untrue, just as much as beholders and red dragons don't make a Dungeons and Dragons or mutants and power armor don't make a Fallout. To quote one of my more liked sources on game design, Extra Credits: "You can pack your JRPG with all the chocobos, moogles and malboros you want, but if that game doesn't have vibrant characters and an emotive story, then it utterly fails as a Final Fantasy game." This is important - especially when you think of the FFs where these have been absent. No moogles or Ramuh in FF8, yet it's undeniably a Final Fantasy game. Heck, malboros weren't even a thing until FF6, and there they were called Oscars.
(Also, obligatory shoutout to Extra Credits here - if you're designing a game, they're good people to have in your back pocket.)
But I'm getting ahead of myself. First - what makes mechanics good for a given type of story?
This is a little bit like the old question of where art begins - I'll know it when I see it. The best way to find how a given ruleset plays is by getting one's hands dirty up to the elbow in the system's guts and seeing how it all ends up. It's difficult, but the hard truth of the matter is that deep experience with a wide variety of systems is the only truly reliable way to know how any given system works and what feel the mechanics evoke.
That being said, some common trends do occur in matching mechanics to themes. Funnily enough, a more "gritty" or "realistic" theme (note that those quotation marks there would be in 64 point font - I find reality to be very unrealistic, ironically.) doesn't necessarily mean more deaths or failure states. Consider how many times someone is knocked out in your average Final Fantasy and compare that to a game like Fallout or Baldur's Gate - and then compare it to things like Baldur's Gate 2, where raising dead becomes somewhat passe. I think what makes a game more gritty is that failure states linger, not necessarily more of them. In Dungeons and Dragons, I know that I am much more scared of things like lycanthropy or vampirism - or, depending on the version, the worst of the worst, level drain or ability drain - than I am of death at higher levels. This is, I would guess, a result of such conditions being incurable. They become part of your character, and part of this thing that a lot of time and effort into has been changed by factors outside my control.
So, we have permanent consequences for non-critical failure states. Is there anything else? Other elements that seem common to games that are enjoyably difficult seem to be (from my assessment): lack of ability to easily restore to a full ability state, either by limiting the effectiveness of resting or by having recharge times on some abilities on the scale of 1/adventure rather than the ever nebulous and potentially abusable 1/day; the addition of non-mechanical pressures such as plans moving ahead regardless of PC focus or ticking clock with a story consequence for ignoring; and a limiting of the amount of tools that can be brought to bear on any given problem, either by time constraint (yes, you could use a grapple gun to climb the building, professional glass cutters to enter and the finest autopick apparatus to brute force your way in, but you have three days to source your materials. Rope, a hammer and a hairpin it is!), lack of resource in the world (Curing this disease requires a rare root, found only at the bottom of this mine. If you're getting it, get all of it, since half the village will need it by the time we're done here.) or other such means. All of this leads to an interesting question: where is it okay to limit player agency in your game and in what fashions?
So, when looking at rules systems in terms of what sort of game they would support, ask yourself a few questions. What negative outcomes produce lasting negative impacts? How long do these last for? And what can a player not do as a result of these consequences? These questions go a long way in determining what sort of game a system supports. Also ask how many different options a given character has, and note how big any section is that is class, race or player specific (it's telling that the 3.5 edition D&D Player's Handbook, for example, has roughly half it's content devoted to magic users.) Note the progression of a character, and make checkpoints. What should a given character of race/class/specialization X be able to do at start? At 20% progression? At 40%? And so on. How often can they do this? How long can they keep going before they have to stop for the night? How far can they go before they have to head back to town and restock on ammunition/magical reagents/hand lotion for bruised fists? These are all very good questions to get a baseline, but as previously said, the best way to learn what makes system X or system Y good for certain games is, sadly, still through trial and error.
Now, for the question that's been burning through my mind for a week - what makes a Final Fantasy a Final Fantasy? What is that je ne sais quoi that one can point at and say "That fits!"? Well, I might not have the one true answer, but my studies have come up with a few ideas on the subject.
Final Fantasy games are defined, for me, as examples of stories focused on the triumph of the human spirit over forces (natural, artificial or a mixture of both) that at first blush seem greater than any one person can resolve. It's about celebrating difference without requiring it, confronting exclusion without normalizing it and coming to terms with one's failings in a world where, while history might not forgive you, the people that matter to you will.
It's not about the monsters, though the monsters tend to be individual parts of a greater force that poses the real challenge. I would argue that it's not that you face Bombs, Red Bats and the occasional Beur (Buer? I can never remember that one). Instead, it's the party braving the Fire Cavern. One does not fight off waves of Shinra soldiers and machines - one storms Shinra Tower. It's in recognizing the important points, not the trappings said points use, where we achieve insight. Overall, the environs are challenging the PCs when they crawl through a dungeon, not the individual denizens of it.
Similarly, when summons play more than a pure mechanical part of the story, they are almost exclusively presented as forces of nature not unlike living earthquakes, thunderstorms, blizzards and hurricanes. They could easily topple whatever buildings or even small towns they wanted to, should they desire to. But humanity not only stops them, they tame them. They weaponize them. The summons become an extension of human will with which to shape the world. And the summons accept this - either through requiring proof, or the proof being humanity's continued existence after the centuries of strife and turmoil the world continues to throw at them. Summons are awesome and powerful because they are clear goalposts - my will to see humanity survive can conquer volcanoes, it can conquer the heart of darkness, and with Bahamut by my side, you can see that even the dragon king himself recognizes my devotion.
Limit breaks? Literal mechanical reinforcement of one's will overriding physical limits, only this time it's a little more on-the-nose. Main antagonists? Most are remembered for how well they are able to damage the party's heroic drive, not their destructive force. Kefka isn't good because he destroyed the world, he's good because he won. Sephiroth is awesome with his cool sword, sure, but it's the way he plays Cloud like an old fiddle that people remember. The Emperor is a threat that demands attention due to his threatening the main character's homeland and brother (Yeah, I went there - so sue me. Maria makes a much better main character than Firion.) Jecht works so well because of the unfinished business he left with Tidus. Everything works on this idea that, if one believes, one can move mountains, shake the earth and maybe, juuuuuuust maybe, at the end of the day, maybe you can stop that one force of nature.
Now, that isn't to say that Final Fantasy is a license to ignore all laws of biology and physics. The biggest moments in Final Fantasy (and in JRPGs in general) occur when something happens that is just flat out unstoppable, and the party has to deal with the limits of their power. Aerith dies. The World of Balance gets reshaped by a mad general. Darkness descends upon the land and daemons walk the earth. Ignis loses his sight, or Barrett loses his arm, or Dagger descends into depression, or a myriad of things that cause the PCs to have to size themselves against what their drive costs them. I once heard somewhere, I can't recall where, that the best Final Fantasy villains are Final Fantasy heroes up until a single point in their lives. At that point, you lose something dear, and your reaction determines your fate. The heroes keep going. The villains blink.
To finish on a slightly lighter note - mechanically, Final Fantasy is light fantasy. In mechanics, very few things end up sticking to the players long term, and systems where such consequences are few will make for a better "fit" than systems where a KO means a risk of losing an arm through a roll of the dice or poor stat management. Where the main drive lies in a Final Fantasy game is in the social game, and more so in the core setup - in, at session zero, identifying what forces of nature oppose your players, what their drive is and how it can be tested in order to see how they react to that. And if they go off script and decide that villainy is more their style... well, that's a subject for another day.
Thank you for your patience in entertaining my ramblings - next week, I hope to (finally) get some mappy goodness for you all to see. Until then!