Basements & Beards- Analogue Gaming Thread

[wulfenlord]

Sword-Chucks, yo! Sounds like my homebrew of The Dark Eye where the planet Dere (real creative anagram of Erde u guise) was a six-sided die, with the other side containing Faerûn , and the Drow trying to tunnel through :3

I am tempted to look into the newest hipster/edgy RPG Mörk Gryning or some shit, but my fear of seemingly everything being woke shit nowadays has stayed my hand. Anyone having good times with Bork Bork?

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Pretty sure you're relatively safe with Bort Bort, for a few reasons:

• It's a foreign game. From Sweden, mind you, but it's really mostly the Anglosphere tabletop industry that has been pozzed to Hell and back
• The game does not advertize itself as being the holy grail of diversity, made by an all-star casts of women and people of color. If a tabletop RPG is woke it generally tells you so outright.
• The art, while not traditional tabletop art, isn't really tumblr-y
• Speaking of art, all the art of humans is pretty darn *white*
• It's a dark fantasy setting. Woke writers don't like grimdark settings because the history, society and villains of the setting are likely "problematic" (because they're not a perfect utopia where everyone gets along fine aside from the most milquetoast interpretation of "fashist" where they're really just mostly-harmless bullies)

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Man, I just remembered some cancer from Pathfinder 1e, mainly because this Final Fantasy homebrew is also fully on board with it:

Archetypes: Mainly a result of Paizo hating prestige classes and multi-classes. They're like class kits from AD&D 2e. Swap out some class abilities for different class abilities to represent a slightly different class without having to come up with a different class. If there's no overlap in the removed abilities you might even have multiple archetypes.
Throughout PF 1e's runtime, Paizo has shit these out like it was going out of style. Balance was of course all over the place.
Paladins for example got a gun-focused Archetype (from the book with the Gunslinger class where every existing class got some gun-focused archetype or two) where Smite Evil was nerfed to the ground for some reason.
Meanwhile there's the Zen Archer who can use Flurry of Blows with bows, which not only lets him shoot more arrows per round than even the most specialized Fighter, but also lets you ignore one of the Monk's main drawbacks (any time you can't do a Full-Attack because you had to move close to your target meant that you take a huge hit both in the number of attacks and the Attack Bonus).
The Zen Archer's reign was briefly threatened when Paizo tried to stealthily nerf Flurry of Blows in a way that would've made all weapon-focused Monk archetypes unplayable (they basically argued that you you were never supposed to be able to use all Flurry of Blows attacks with the same weapon; apparently the Zen Archer was always supposed to waste half of his attacks kicking the ground).
What annoys me about Archetypes is that, while they offer more customization, it's customization that should've been part of the base class. But they just didn't want to disturb the holy customization levels of 3.X.

Racial Favored Class Bonus: Now that's the big one. This shit is annoying like you wouldn't believe.
So, the infamous Favored Class. In 3.X every race had a Favored Class (except humans, for whom their highest-leveled class always counted as the Favored one). If any non-Favored Class has more than 1 level over your Favored one you get XP penalties. It was basically some weird crutch to prevent people from going too crazy with multi-classing, and to slightly enforce level ranges like in the old style of multi-classing from AD&D (where you just spread our XP over 2-3 classes; except when you're a human because they had totally different rules for this for some reason).
The people at Paizo realized that was a shit idea, but for some reason they didn't want to abolish the Favored Class nonsense entirely. So instead they gave it a positive spin by letting you choose between +1 max HP or +1 Skill Rank every time you gained a level in your Favored Class. So far, so good.
Then they were looking for some new shit to fill their supplements and splat books with, and the Racial Favored Class Bonus was born. Take a class and come up with an alternative Favored Class bonus for every race that you can pick instead of the usual +1 HP / +1 Skill.
This shit got finicky real quick, especially since they "balanced" stronger bonuses by forcing you to take them multiple levels beore you even get a single benefit.
A +1/6 bonus to Bull Rush attempts? Boy, I can't wait to get that sweet +1 in 6 levels!
A +1 to my range with bows? Fantastic! What's that? This only takes effect every 5 levels because ranges only ever work in 5-ft.-increments?

I guess if you're lucky you find some race for the Sorcerer (or other spellcaster with a limited spell pool) that lets you learn an additional spell or so, but JFC, this shit is like the crown jewel of nickel-and-dime bonuses that Pathfinder is infamous for.

And WTF is up with Exotic Weapons, anyways? It has always been some weird seperation from the normal Simple/Martial Weapon groups, which needlessly limits 3.X to medieval fantasy Europe (a lot of Exotic Weapons are shit like firearms, ancient weapons or weapons from Glorious Nihon, meaning you can't play in Fantasy Japan without house rules or some Samurai/Ashigaru class, and 3.X isn't really known for having a good Samurai class), is generally a shit way to "balance" weapons (bastard swords are not worth it; without a Feat they're just shittier greatswords, and with a Feat they're slightly better longswords, except you just wasted a Feat), a bit weird (the problem with the bastard sword is highlighted by its axe-equivalent, the Dwarven Waraxe; at least dwarves just count it as a Martial Weapon), or pretty fucking weird (the Dire Flail, however the fuck you're supposed to use that without hitting yourself is anyone's guess).
Pathfinder once again decided to keep this stupid part of 3.X (for the core of 3.X is holy and shan't be tempered with). They fixed some things by nerfing what was probably the only cheesy Exotic Weapon (the Spiked Chain, an infamous incredient for annoying Trip builds), but then they made several things worse because they generally made Exotic Weapons better than their Martial equivalents to warrant the Feat tax, which let to the Falcata ruling supreme in many Fighter builds (since it's pretty much a longsword that has both a wider crit range and a better crit multiplier in a game where most weapons generally only boost one of these, and Pathfinder Fighters have a shitload of crit Feats).

[Kugelfisch]

I still fail to see how any of that shit is a big deal. It's just words on paper. You can just homebrew the fuck out of it, no?

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Words have power, and there will always be ones seeing them as holy gospel in their neverending quest to find the cheesiest build.

[Le Redditeur]

It's all words on paper and you can (and will) homebrew stuff to your heart's content. But it will always be funny how professional game designers can't come with "official" solutions to their own balance problems, while some autist can easily figure out a proper errata.

[Kugelfisch]

They don't like conceding mistakes.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

The common solution for 3.X, Pathfinder, 4e and probably also 5e tends to be "Let's just add a Feat in the next book that fixes the math a little", instead of, you know, fixing the math.

Sometimes the Feat fix is in the same book.
What's that? The Full Attack rules suck because it means your damage output takes a nosedive if you take more than one step? Here's a chain of trap feats that add extra dice if you make a single attack. At least 4e just gave you an extra damage die automatically whenever you go up a tier in power level.
Still not sold on the Full Attacks? Here's a Feat that let's you attack multiple targets with a single attack (Cleave), and here's one that let's you do an attack in the middle of movement (Spring Attack). And no, none of these Feats can be used together, no matter how much this would make combat cooler and more interesting.
What's that? Monks suck because they only get a full Attack Bonus when they do Flurries? Here's a Feat that gives anyone a full Attack Bonus when they do combat maneuvers.
Eventually they did give us a Monk that just has a full Attack Bonus progression, but that's a different variant class in a different book, because heaven forbid we actually change the core class in the core book, the holy scripture (probably) based on the infinite wisdom of the great prophet Gygax (except Gygax wasn't a big fan of 3.X, but that won't stop Paizo from pretending they are the true successors to his legacy).

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Welcome to Thoughts & Opinions, the opinion piece column where I present to you my thoughts and opinions about things and people.

You know what's great about @TheSpoonyOne? His old Final Fantasy videos.
You know what's also great about @TheSpoonyOne? His old Counter Monkey videos.
So why not combine the two?

Final Fantasy Homebrew RPGs

So far we've been mostly rambling about proper tabletop RPGs, but this time it is time to delve into the wide world of hombrew RPGs.
Unofficial Final Fantasy tabletop RPGs have been around for years in all shapes and sizes, but some autisms are shared by most of them:

• Excessive leveling. Not really a thing with newer entries, but expect a FFRPG to go all the way to level 99, or even level 100 for a rounder number. This mostly boils down to 80% of your level-ups doing nothing but make your numbers go up
• D&D-style race selection. Final Fantasy has always been pretty humanocentric, with few games using non-human races as anything more than to make the setting a bit more fantastical, and even fewer games having actual playable non-humans (who really aren't any more different from the human party members than those humans are from each other).
  Naturally the homebrew RPGs tend to go full-on D&D, cramming the book full with as many FF races as possible. You are almost guaranteed to find all the races from the MMORPG spin-offs, as well as dwarves to balance out the elves from those MMORPGs (do normies even know that some older FF games had dwarves?). Bonus points if the RPG goes full retard with shit like Yetis 'cause Umaro is a thing. They also really like adding "Vargs" aka wolf dudes to their list - because they had a single tiny village in FFV and a single character in FFVI, you know?
  Strangely enough, I have yet to see a homebrew RPG where Red XIII gets his own race.
• The usual suspects for optional rules. Whenever one of these games has a selection fo optional rules - be they part of the "official" rules or content created by fans - you are pretty much guaranteed to run into these two ones:
  Materia: Seems every FFRPG worth its name will eventually get its own take on the Materia system - ideally as close to the source material as possible, for FF7 is holy and perfect. Nevermind that having items that gain their own share of XP might work in a video game (where you can grind to your autistic heart's content) but is fucking stupid in a tabletop RPG.
  Map combat: Few FFRPGs have map combat as the default, instead opting to emulate the klessik turn-based games where positioning rarely mattered outside of maybe front and back rows. So they eventually get optional rulse for map combat, usually heavily tailored towards Final Fantasy Tactics (another game that is holy and perfect). Naturally this means that every spell and ability in the game needs to be updated to include information on range and area of effect (bonus points if this happens with little regard to how this chance their relative balance), as well as vertical reach because that was a thing in FFT (even though there is literally no tabletop RPG who handles 3D combat areas that way).

But enough about this, let's get to dem games!

Returner's Final Fantasy RPG (1e - 3e)

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Actually just called "Final Fantasy RPG", but the "Returner's" moniker is generally added to differentiate it from every other Final Fantasy RPG. It's pretty much the granddaddy FF homebrew, and the one with Yetis as a playable race.
It's pretty shit, basically. The 1st edition has been pretty much purged from the internet, 2e is yanky af, 3e is only slightly more tolerable, and pretty much every other FFRPG can trace its root at someone having enough of the Returners version. I'm mostly familiar with 3e, so let's rant about that.
One of the main issues with the game is that it's very design by committee, with too many conflicting ideas leading to classes (or "Jobs", as they are called in Final Fantasy) that are all over the place and pretty hit-and-miss (usually "miss"). And despite spending years in a beta status, there hasn't really changed much in the final product. Stats for Summons have changed slightly, Thieves are slightly less useless in combat because Daggers and similar weapons can no use Agility instead of Strength for damage, and several abilities have been renamed to I assume be closer to the most recent and official translation (fuck you, "Quadra Slam" will always sound cooler than "Flurry"). They also never really did anything to make the bolted-on percentile skill system interesting.

Jobs are separated into 4 categories (so a few Jobs could probably fit into two of those): Warriors hit stuff, Mages cast stuff, Adepts are something inbetween, and Experts are gimmick classes with their own special snowflake sub-system.
There's some weird "balancing" goin on in that Warriors work like Cyan from FFVI. They don't have MP and instead "pay" for their abilities by delaying their action. The stronger the ability, the longer the delay, so you better hope that your first 1-2 abilities are pretty decent.
Meanwhile Mages just pay for their spells in MP, and Adepts are pretty much Warriors that pay in MP instead of delaying shit. Experts for the most part are also MP-less.
Some of the most stinking turds inlcude Monk, Ninja, and Samurai, mostly because several of their preciously few abilities are effectively spells, aka they don't scale very well and run off of your Magic stat (which for these classes is neither very high nor a priority). This is especially puzzling considering the better-designed Dragoon and Knight both have abilities that deal magic damage, but have their damage scale off of the weapon damage (like just almost every attack ability that is not a spell). Very strange.
White Mages are also a bit odd. Not only did they get the Aero-line of attack spells, but the Holy spell also comes in lower-tier versions. They're pretty much Black Mages with more utility.
Experts are all over the place and for the most part not worth the effort. I guess Engineers can be pretty broken since their main gimmick is that they build their own abilities with inventions, and there's probably some broken shit in the fuckhuge item combination table of the Chemist. But overall, Experts suffer the most from the game never having any official rules to switch or change Jobs. A lot of these Expert Jobs are copied straight from FFV where a lot of them appeared, but would you really play an entire campaign just as a Dancer (who just like in FFV can only do random actions, with an added 1/6 chance of your dance failing)?
The lack of Job-changing is also weird considering they list examples for each Job from the games, with some characters appearing for multiple Jobs. Some examples are also a bit weird. Celes from FFVI for example is listed under the Rune Knight job, yet she doesn't really have much to do with the Job aside from the "Runic" ability. Aside from that she was pretty much a Red Mage.

ZODIAC

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Another oldie, and easily the most flexible. There are no races or Jobs, you just assign stat points and build your various "Techs" from scratch. Borrows more from Chrono Trigger and many 3D Final Fantasies (in that every character has his own line of equipment), as well as Final Fantasy Tactics (armor primarily provides additional HP and MP).
There's a bit favoritism towards magic-focused characters (raising the Magic stat gives you bonus Tech points and determines your upper limit of total Tech levels), but that can be houseruled. There are also "Command Skills" which emulate signature abilities of FF Jobs which can also be a bit hit-or-miss (would you rather want the Red Mage's X-Magic, or the Blue Mage's Peep which you can easily replicate with a Tech?).
Aside from those minor gripes, it's probably one of the better ones. The more flexible character creation also means this is the only FFRPG that can also do other J-RPGs.

Final Fantasy d6

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Probably the first of these to realize that going up to level 99 is a bit excessive. No relation to the D6 System popularized by West End Games' Star Wars RPG, though.
Job system and some balance issues aside (despite only having 4 stats you can turn some of them into dump stat by having another stat pull double-duty), it has some definite improvements over the Returners version. Jobs are more customizable, you can change Jobs, and equipment is a bit more flexible.
The game also veers closer to more modern FF titles in that you can have Limit Breaks, and instead of having a dedicated Summoner Job you instead can just have Summons that are either tied to as pecific character or can be used by everyone.
It's also the only one of these FFRPGs that goes through every FF title (up to XIII) for a brief overview and possible rules adjustments.

Returner's Final Fantasy RPG 4e

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Not entirely sure why this is the 4th edition, since there doesn't seem to be much an overlap with the previous editions. Visually it comes across as more of a continuation of d6, since it reuses osme of its art assets.
It's much less anemic than previous editions, that's for sure. Also much more customization, not only because you actually get to make choices within your Job, but there's also mandatory multi-classing in that everyone also gets to select a Secondary Job (which are a different selection from the main ones).
So you might pick the Warrior Job (which actually lets you mix and match klessik Dragoon, Fighter and other martial Job ablities) and then pick a Secondary Job like Defender (to protect your allies) or Berserker (to fuck shit up even harder). If that's still not enough customization for you, you can also be a Freelancer in order to pick-and-choose stuff from all main Jobs, and/or a Squire who can do something similar for the Secondary Jobs.
It also makes somewhat clever use of the ridiculously high levels: Instead of actually leveling up, your "level" is instead based on the sum of your stats.

Omega Fantasy

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The most rules-light of them all. Borrows a bit from D&D 4e and 5e in that you pick an Archetype (aka specialization) after your first few levels, though the choices can be odd (Warriors can either become Dark Knights or Samurai; Knights are their own Job and called Sentinels, and the closest thing to a Mystic Knight is a Red Mage Archetype), but still.
It also borrows from FF d6 in that you get Limit Breaks and everyone gets to be a Summoner - except this time around there also is a dedicated Summoner class. It can summon shit that actually fights on combat instead of just being a spell, though the selection is much shorter (pretty much just Carbuncle, Ifrit, Shiva and Bahamut, and you can't have both Ifrit and Shiva since they're in different Archetypes).
The game is so rules light, in fact, that most of the PDF is actually taken up by a bestiary, several adventures based on the games (including the beginning of FFI up to the first fight with Garland, The Tomb of Raithwall from FFXII, the opera scene from FFVI, and of course the Golden Saucer mini-games from FFVII). Also lots of sperging about Ivalice.

Final Fantasy X d20

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Probably one of the weirder ones due to the narrower focus. It commits one of the major cookie-cutter d20 conversion sins by just turning the main characters into classes. This is extra weird in the case of FFX since most party members are technically multi-classed (Tidus is a Fighter with a bit of Time Magic, Wakka is an Archer with a bit of Gambler, Rikku is a Thief with a bit of Chemist...).
Also for some reason there are Prestige Classes based on the various Blitzball teams. I've got nothing.

Final Fantasy d20

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The much more all-encompassing one that I've already mentioned in a previous post. Very autistic but hey, if you want your Pathfinder to be more animu there are probably worse choices.
This game does some very, very strange things, though:

• D&D-style pantheons. Most FF games don't really do religion, and even if they do it's generally not like the church has a direct hotline to their gods. But fuck it, this is Pathfinder aka D&D, so we need dem pantheons.
  Not only is Kefka a god, but also all Summons (with the shit you're actually ending up summoning being some kind of aspect of them or something). They also list the Occuria from FFXII as gods, but not Yevon from FFX.
• The most bloated race list of them all, including just about everything humanoid from the MMORPG games, and probably some shit from non-FF games. Who the fuck knows.
• Of course it indulged into all the Pathfinder excesses like a shitload of Archetypes and race-specific Favored Class bonuses
• The Dragoon's Jump ability revolves around the Acrobatics skill, since that's the skill in the D&Dverse that handles jumping. I think the highest you eventually get to jump is like 60 feet or something.
• There's a Cleric class, because fuck you this is D&D and we gotta use that stupid pantheon for something
• The Summoner doesn't actually work like the FF Summoner, since it's based on the Pathfinder version where you only get a pimped-out animal companion. At least you can have Bahamut at level 1.
• A more proper FF Summoner is actually hidden as the Master Caller Archetype
• If you just wanna be Yuna, you insead pick the Cleric class with the Yevonite Archetype, which grants you all the Summons from FFX, in the exact same order Yuna got them.
• Clerics also get to choose a "Deific Order". I guess Yuna is supposed to be a Pilgrim since that's the Valefor one? You could also just pick Kefkanite.
• Another Summoner Archetype lets you instead summon one of the iconic FF characters, which is weird in several ways. There's also neither Cloud nor Squall to summon, and some class choices are weird (Bartz of FFV is the iconic Chocobo Knight even though he should be the iconic Freelancer)
• The Freelancer class works a little bit like the one from Returners' 4e in that you get points to buy shit from other classes. You just need to be careful when buying class abilities that improve automatically as you level up, since you are forced to buy those ranks with points. At least you can also spend points to get 1d12 hit points and only good saves.
• I suspect this originally started out as a 3.X fork, since there's a very excessive list of Prestige Classes. Pathfinder doesn't really like Prestige Classes.
• There are several Prestige Classes that are basically a "Plus" version of one of the iconic Mage classes. Why these have to be Prestige Classes, I don't know.
• There's the Redeemed Knight Prestige Class if you want to be Cecil
• There's also the Weapon Collector Prestige Class if you want to be Gilgamesh
• There's the SeeD Prestige Class if you wanna emulate the gameplay from FFVIII, complete with drawing magic, getting Guardian Forces, and Junctioning like there's no tomorrow
• And of course there's the Soldier Prestige Class if you want to be Zack, Sephiroth or whatever the fuck Gackt's character is called again, complete with getting access to their iconic weapon. Or you can just be a generic Soldier if you want to be lame.
  Also for some reason you can wield Sephiroth's Masamune one-handed. I guess it's because he liked wielding it that way? He didn't optimize this very well though since he never carried a shield.

I might also do some rambling on the wide world of Pokemon homebrew RPGs, though that might take me two weeks hours to write.

[wulfenlord]

Wow, you really earned your DHI Premium sperg-gold for this post



Pocket Monster opinion piece will be greatly appreciated, but health comes first :3