The Good

As the first Final Fantasy game on a ‘next-gen’ console, FF13 has a lot to live up to in the graphics and sound department. For the most part, it succeeds brilliantly. This is a gorgeous game, no doubt about it.  The effects are good, the areas stunning, and some parts really show off the power of the new systems, particularly the Archelyte Steppe.  Some areas fall to the ‘brown is realistic’ trap of modern games, but on the whole the colors are varied… though they could be more vibrant.  The plains seem a little washed out, in my opinion.

Nitpicking aside, let’s move on to the characters. Aside from Hope(who gets better but is always something of an annoyance), the characters are actually pretty nice. This is subjective of course, but I thought they did a good job of taking a standard archetype and playing around with it a little for each character, making them a bit more complex.  One of the other nice changes is that any romance theme is severely understated in this game… the adventure is about the characters and their interrelationships, with no overarching love story happening.  Not to say there isn’t any romance in it, as Snow and Serah prove, but it’s secondary to the main plot. It’s a refreshing change, really, since romance in a JRPG is rarely handled well.

The new combat system has its flaws – which I will cover later – but it is a new system with its own advantages. You only directly control one person, but you can set AI strategies on the fly. As a result, the combat system more involves swapping AI strategies on the fly and adapting them to the challenges than individually setting commands. Combined with the healing at the end of every battle, this makes for a fast, furious, and dynamic system that does have its moments. The lack of worry about HP and MP maintenance is nice, though they do have a ‘Technique Point’ system used for the more powerful abilities.

All in all, I can’t say I didn’t have fun, which is important. That said, I can’t say it was the most epic game I’ve played lately either. Which brings us to…

The Bad

I’m going to try to focus on parts of the game that are objectively bad, rather than stylistically suspect.  For that, go to the next section.

First off is the combat system. This is a big problem for the FF team lately, because let’s face it… most other RPG serieses out there settle on a system and refine variations of it, occasionally exploring new territory. There’s a big, big reason for this.  Doing it this way allows the system to be ironed out, problems in play found, and revisions address those problems.  Meanwhile, the past four FF games have completely reinvented systems, so they have all the warts any new system has.

In this particular case the battle system has some pretty huge warts. I mentioned earlier the need to swap AI routines – called Paradigms – in order to deal with threats.  This is done in-battle and on the fly, but sometimes the swap is instant, and sometimes it takes 2-3 seconds.  There’s no way that I’ve seen to tell why it sometimes takes longer, but this can be really annoying if you’re hurriedly selecting and pick the wrong one by accident, or if you’re just trying to change and the enemy slaughters you while you’re swapping.  Even when you’re not selecting ‘Auto’ for the single controlled character, the turns are often moving so quickly that manually picking abilities is impractical. There’s no time to strategize, which might be ‘realistic’ but not very RPG-ish.  Not to mention that the battle goes by so quickly and dazzles with so many effects that you really don’t get to enjoy the visuals and the great rendering of the monsters and characters. Even pausing the screen only results in a blurry, smudged image.

The real pet peeve I have with the battle system, though, is that it’s position-based in the most lazy ass way.  I like position-based systems, normally. What this means is that certain attacks, both from monsters and PCs, are area-effect attacks and can hit multiple targets.  This is fine with me, except that there’s no way to directly control your PC’s movement on the field!  Knowing that the big bad boss has an attack that hits a group for massive damage doesn’t help when you can’t tell your group to scatter! It smacks of laziness and artificial difficulty, to me.

Speaking of artificial difficulty, they’ve put a preemptive attack system in this one that allows you to ‘surprise’ enemies by taking them from behind or unawares. In theory, this is a nice addition. In practice, it stinks because it doesn’t make any logical sense.  Sometimes the enemies will know you’re there the moment you step into their ‘zone’ even if their back is turned. Other times you can run right up to their front and get a surprise attack. If it were consistent and predictable, this would go in the Good section… but instead it’s a feature that turned out more annoyance than fun.

Normally I wouldn’t rant about a story as being objectively bad, but there’s an important point here, as well. Many people have criticized this game for its linearity, particularly how some maps are literally a straight corridor full of enemies. I don’t actually have a problem with this, although it makes the game feel constrained to me.  What makes it more constrained is the actual plot, which has the main characters bumbling around and bouncing from situation to situation, mostly reacting and running. At no point do they actually sit down and come up with a workable plan on what to do next.  For a game whose theme seems to be ‘Screw Destiny!’ this is really, really lazy. Not only was the player not in control of where to go or what to do, it felt like the characters weren’t either. It could be argued this was intentional, but if the whole point of the game is to say ‘Do your own thing’ then at SOME point someone should actually, I don’t know… decide to do something on their own.

The Ugly

Now we get to stylistic things that I think are a bad idea, but not necessarily bad design. I’m getting a little tired of a seeming rant, so I’ll try to be brief.

The first thing that comes to mind is the Datalog. A lot of the mythology and background isn’t expressed in exposition… which is fine, as that can get dull. The problem being there’s so much of it to absorb that you kind of need to read the datalog for hours to really get an idea of WTF anyone is talking about. Even worse, if you read the synopses of the various events, they often make you wonder if the writer was watching the same cut scenes, as it’s common for there to be direct contradictions between what is said and what is in the synopsis. Another lazy dev moment.

Secondly is the linearity. At some point the game does open up, but by then it feels like you’ve just run through a 30 hour tutorial. Then you’re sort of thrown to the wolves with very little guidance, a direct opposite of how it was working before. It was jarring, to say the least.

Third, this is Final Fantasy, but where’s the Fantasy?  I recall the word magic mentioned maybe like… three times in all. Everything else has a distinctly sci-fi bent, to the point of anti-gravity and monorails and hovercycles.  Even the Mage role in Paradigm setup isn’t called a Mage… instead they call them Ravagers, when they’re clearly a ‘mage’ type. What?

I’m sure there are other gripes I have, but I don’t want to make it sound like I hated the game.  So, I’ll stick with the biggest gripe of all: Endgame.  I don’t mind bonus dungeons or bonus post-game material, but when the world opens up for you in Chapter 11, you see all this cool stuff around… but it turns out it’s all too tough for you until after you’ve cleared the storyline.  Literally hours and hours of the actual ‘game’ parts of the game are held back until you’ve ‘finished’ it, and that sort of thing leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

The Adventure

For the example adventure, I chose Destiny of Kings, module N3 in the Novice series.  Supposedly, this module is for 4-6 characters of levels 1-4.  I laugh at this assessment, and you’ll see why.  For the curious, here’s a quick summary.

The King of Dunador has been killed, and the Crown Prince is missing on a pilgrimage.  The PCs have been recruited by the chief adviser to find the Prince and bring him back safely.  The King’s brother has other plans, though, and has solicited the help of Duke Aimar to put forward his own claim to the throne.  This leads the PCs right into a political mess, especially once they find one of their only allies has been killed before they’ve even started…

The Party

For the first session we had four players, who made up a pretty nice group of characters with one glaring weak spot.

• Rimia, the female human Ranger, who fights with long sword and long bow.
• Elrai the elf Thief.
• Copperfield the human Illusionist.
• Peng, the placid human Monk.

As you can see, the party lacks a Cleric… or any real healing ability at all. They do have an abundance of sneakiness and special abilities, though.

The Session

Elrai’s player didn’t realize I’d specified EST, apparently, so they were over an hour late.  I’ll note the point that he came in, rather confusedly, but fortunately he didn’t miss any of the ‘action,’ just exposition.

Meeting Hollend

The party first met Hollend, the King’s adviser.  Copperfield’s master was an old friend of his, so he solicited help from the Illusionist, who sent his pupil guarded by some local friends.  Thus the adventure begins at the Three Feathers Inn, where Hollend meets with the players and dumps about eight paragraphs of exposition on them describing the general situation. After dropping a map of the area and some portraits of the Prince and the Patriarch of the local Abbot on them, he gives them 200 gold and fresh horses – very generous!

It’s all just a set up, though.

Fontenmere Abbey

Hollend suggested they begin their investigation at Montinelle, Duke Aimar’s stronghold and the local hub of civilization. There they could look for clues and resupply.  However, if they were ever in trouble, he said they could go to the nearby Fontenmere Abbey and hide out with the Patriarch there, who was also a loyalist of the old king and the current prince.

The players, of course, would have none of that.  Buying some rations at the inn, they immediately set out for the Abbey. Because following the scripted plot in a 1st Edition game is for chumps. This is the point where Elrai arrived, so they had no clue why we were out here and had to be provided some quick summaries.

The characters found the Abbey in shambles, and first investigated the outbuilding, which had been a kitchen.  They found some treasure there, platinum in a box with a few applications of antitoxin that would prove useful, shortly.  They also found a horse tethered nearby, indicating someone was at the Abbey. They chose to leave the horse unmolested.

Spiders!

Investigation of the burned kitchen and its half-dozen corpses was finished, so the party moved into the Abbey proper and started searching rooms. The first room had little of interest, but the second showed obvious signs of a violent search… and had two Huge Spiders in it.

Now we get to the messed up part of 1st Edition. First, Huge Spiders are 2+2 HD creatures with poison that, if you fail the save, kills you within six rounds unless neutralized.  Since Slow Poison alone is a 2nd Level spell, this is pretty deadly to a ‘Novice’ group.  In fact all the encounters in this book are ridiculously deadly for 1st level characters, which is one reason to laugh at the listed difficulty. One of the random encounters is 2 Perytons, which can only be harmed by magic weapons!

Of course the real issue is the fact that combat in 1st Edition is terrible.

Initiative is rolled with 1d6, highest goes first. Weapons have a Speed Factor that affects when you can go.  Weapons with a high Speed Factor, when used against quick weapons, actually allow the fast weapon user multiple attacks. THAC0 and Base Attack Bonus hadn’t been invented yet, and instead the DM looks up the AC and level and class of the attacker/defender on a matrix to see if a roll hits. Firing into a melee involves math with dividing up the total of the body masses and… yeah, it’s complicated for the DM.

So, our party of four was nearly wiped out by these two spiders. After a valiant struggle that critically injured the Ranger and Monk, the party killed both and settled down to rest. And to heal, as the Ranger was poisoned. If they hadn’t found that antitoxin earlier – and if they hadn’t been able to identify it thanks to having a Monk in the party – the Ranger would have been dead right there. From the first encounter.

Rewards

Since we were still adjusting to the system, had a late arrival, and were playing online(woo typing), they didn’t get that far. They decided to stop for the night and look into healing(1 HP per day of bed rest, and nowhere to rest, so that’s not going to work out well), as well as search the room. Finding 400 gold really helped things out, especially since gold gives XP directly in this system.

Total gains for one combat and a bit of exploration: 969 XP

EDIT: Fixed Downloads page, I think, but lost my count. I could recover it, but it’s not that important to me.

In an effort to show some friends how gaming’s come along in the decades since the formative years, I’m doing some retro games. First among these is my first game, AD&D 1st Edition. Not Basic D&D, though I played some of that… AD&D. This is what I cut my teeth on, so there’s a strong nostalgia factor, but now that I’m older I can understand the rules a little more easily. For Part 1 of this series, I’ll be talking about how 1st Edition is different from ‘modern’ D&D(referring to both version 3.X and 4th) and how my own game will be set up. Future installments will cover summaries of the game sessions, both to relate interesting game stories and commentary on how the game system affected play.

Optional and House Rules

First Edition wasn’t like Third Edition… or even Second. Both of those Editions of the game had a large collection of supplementary material, largely the ‘Complete’ series for 2nd and the various class books, which were later expanded into ‘Complete’ books, for 3rd. But First Edition was in the early days of gaming, and though there were a few supplements and even some third party add-ons(Role Aids from Mayfair Games, for example), the bulk of the rules both official and optional could be boiled down into a short list of books:

• Player’s Handbook
• Dungeon Master’s Guide
• Monster Manual I & II
• Manual of the Planes(covering the Planes, of course)
• Legends & Lore/Deities and Demigods (same book, different name. Covered pantheons of gods)
• Fiend Folio (more monsters, including the now-infamous Githyanki)
• Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide
• Wilderness Survival Guide
• Unearthed Arcana
• Oriental Adventures, Dragonlance, Greyhawk, and other setting books.

The vast bulk of the rules were in the PHB and DMG. The Survival Guide series(and Oriental Adventures) introduced Nonweapon Proficiencies, while Unearthed Arcana was a collection of rules refinements and additions which included the Cavalier, Thief-Acrobat, cantrips, and I believe the Barbarian class.  I’m not using the Unearthed Arcana, but I will be using the Non-Weapon Proficiencies rules from the Survival Guides. The DMG also has an alternate rolling method that I’ll be using. The “official” rolling method is 3d6 in order, but nobody uses that now. Method I in the DMG is the more familiar 4d6 drop lowest, arrange as desired.

This short list of materials isn’t to say 1st Edition lacked rules or options. For one thing, these books are incredibly information-dense. The Survival Guide series alone has a ton of generic information and specific rules to deal with those situations that explorers might find themselves in. If you cut out all the fluff from Frostburn, Stormwrack, and Sandstorm and put them all together, they might just begin to approach the usefulness of the Wilderness Survival Guide. 1st Edition didn’t have a need to fill page space with Prestige Classes and magic items… they put information in there, instead.

Most of the additional rules and spells and equipment for 1st Edition came from Dragon Magazine, which was back in the day an incredibly useful resource.  For example, when I first began playing, I’d often use the shield rules presented in issue #127, which allowed attacking with shields and refined the defense bonus. And that was just one article! That issue alone also covered a slew of new magic and mundane bows, some optional combat rules, video game reviews, book reviews, and the infamous Editorial from Roger Moore on Tucker’s Kobolds. Given the lack of playtesting these rules had, I won’t be using any Dragon Magazine rules or classes even though I have the CD collection of Dragon. The only exception is for rules not covered in the basic books, like the aforementioned Shield Bash.

System

You might think from all the gushing I did about the sourcebooks and Dragon Magazine’s quality that I have a thing for 1st Edition. Nothing could be further from the truth. While I do look back fondly upon it, you have to realize that at the time, options were limited. D&D was practically the only game in town, and the industry was in its infancy, still developing techniques to differentiate itself from the more mature wargaming industry. This edition was a mess of rules and holdovers from that, and lacked the streamlining and standardization of later editions. The fact that it worked at all was something of a miracle. Dungeon Masters had to track so many variables and conditions that most just let things slide. Let’s take a look at the system, in brief.

Attributes

Attributes in 1st were mainly used to qualify for classes. Unlike in 3rd or even to some degree 2nd, characters only had a real use for attributes if they were extremely high or very low.  Most didn’t start a real payoff for high scores until around 15 or so, and the only official way to raise them was through the Wish spell or certain one-use magic items. Every one had its own chart, too, so there were no standardized bonuses like in 3rd. Often, the associated roll was a percentile roll, such as with Strength’s Bend Bars/Lift Gates or with Constitution’s System Shock.  Constitution also limited how often the character could be raised to the Con score itself, and only assuming the player made the Resurrection Survival check. If they failed, the character couldn’t be raised. Ever.

Races

The list of races should be familiar to any 3rd Edition player: Human, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, Gnome, Half-Elf, Half-Orc. Most stat adjustments were a +1 to 1, -1 to another deal, but the real bonus was languages and special abilities. Demihumans lived longer, spoke far more languages at start, and had far superior special abilities than humans. They were also the only ones who could Multi-Class, but more on that later, once I get to The Price of being Demihuman…

Level limits. That’s right, a Half Elf(for example) could only ever reach 8th level as a Ranger. Full stop. So for short term campaigns, demihumans are great. Just don’t plan on actually getting far in a campaign beyond middling level.

Classes

Before I get into the actual classes, I’ll briefly cover multi-classing in 1st. It sucked. Multi-classing could only be done by demihumans, and involved taking two or even three classes at first level. XP was divided evenly between each class, and when a class leveled up, it granted a fraction of the HP and benefits to the character. Did I mention that each class had its on XP table? That’s right… thieves level up faster than mages, etc.  Which class used which abilities and how advancement was tracked was a huge mess, and I was never particularly clear on it. Dual-classing was different, though. This could only be done by humans, but was more similar to 3rd Edition’s system. Similar, but not the same. A dual-class character advanced as one class for a time, then gave it up /forever/ to play as another class. Until they reached their previous level, they earned no hit points(and some other stuff), but kept their previous total. Once they match or exceed their previous level, they can use the abilities of both classes. Messy, huh?

The classes were divided into four basic classes, each with one or more subclasses, plus one ‘special’ class and one optional class. I’ll cover each in the order they’re in the book.

Cleric

Basically like every other edition(except 4th, which changed things drastically anyway), the Cleric is the healer of the group and a pretty good basic class. They can use any armor and use non-bladed weapons, supposedly because they’re forbidden from shedding blood. Even Evil clerics. Yeah, whatever. Spell progression was a little odd in 1st, because cleric spells only went up to 7th level, not 9th. Clerics could still turn undead(and evil clerics could turn Paladins!), but holy water was a pain to make. Also… Spontaneous casting? No such thing. Pray for your spells and that’s what you get, no trading for heals.

Druid

The cleric subclass. I won’t be spending a lot of time on the druid because I don’t have my book with me, so I can’t remember if they got wild shape(I think no) or anything like that. They were required to be True Neutral and had an extremely limited weapon and armor selection, plus they had some fairly hefty requirements.  In spellcasting, Druids had their own spell list, up to 7th level like clerics. The spell list had more attack spells than the cleric, but healing spells were either less effective or learned more slowly. Cure Light Wounds, for example, was 2nd level for Druids… though realize that Druids got 2nd level spells at Experience Level 2. They also had to fight other druids to advance in the upper levels.

Fighter

If Charisma is the dump stat of 1st, Fighter is the dump class. Fighters in 1st… suck.  Their only real class feature is the ability to get a full 18/00 percentile strength, and that required having an 18 strength to start with. If your stats were that good, most likely you could qualify for another class. They did get marginally more Weapon Proficiencies and such, but Ranger or Paladin were otherwise far superior. Weapon Specialization didn’t exist, either(I think it was intro’d in Unearthed Arcana), so they didn’t even have that. The one real advantage they had was they didn’t have the restrictions on equipment that Rangers and Paladins had.

Paladin

Paladin was the second-hardest class to qualify for, requiring a 17 Charisma on top of good ‘fighter’ stats. On the basic 3d6 in order system, this was pretty tough!  The advantages were a limited ability to turn undead and at later levels cast cleric spells, much like in 3rd. They also gained the lay on hands healing ability and could use most arms and armor, though had some restrictions on magic items. They did get a Paladin’s Warhorse, but could own no more than what they and their mount could carry, and were required to tithe 10% of all wealth to their church. Even so, they were one of the most ‘badass’ classes anyone could be… so long as you stayed Lawful Good.

Ranger

The 1st Edition Ranger is a drastically different beast from his later counterparts. No dual-wielding, no thiefly skills. The Ranger could track and gained a very good bonus against giant-types, but was unrestricted in weapon type or armor. They also gained limited cleric and magic-user spells. Unlike other Fighter classes, the Ranger started with 2d8 HP instead of 1d10, and their HD capped at 11 instead of 9(all classes in 1st Edition had a Hit Die cap, after which they gained a flat number of HP unmodified by Constitution, usually 1-3 per level), making them far superior to the Fighter, other than the lack of ability to have henchmen or followers until 8th level, and the limitation of owning no more than they and their mount could carry.

Magic-User

Not Wizard, not Mage… Magic-User. I’m going to call it the mage anyway, because I’m lazy and not a pedant.  Besides, it should be familiar. Can barely use any weapons at all, can’t use armor, has very few HP. Can cast spells, of course, and uses the long-maligned but familiar Vancian system of memorizing from spellbook, then casting to ‘forget’ the spells.  This paradigm didn’t change much over the first three editions, though the addition of Metamagic Feats gave a little something to the 3rd Edition version. Magic-user spells went all the way up to 9th Level.

Illuisionist

Unlike in 2nd/3rd, the 1st Edition Illusionist was an elite class, not just a specialist. They had stricter requirements, yet their spells only went up to 7th level. They did, however, have a completely different spell list with some impressive stuff in it. Otherwise they were fairly similar to Magic-Users.

Thief

Ah, the Thief. In 1st Edition, the game didn’t really have ‘skills’ per se.  Sure, there were Secondary Skills or NonWeapon Proficiencies, but both were optional systems. The Thief, thusly, had several special class abilities such as Climb Walls, Pick Pockets, Open Locks, Read Languages, etc. All of these were percentile-based, and adjusted by race and attributes.  They also had the backstab ability and Thieves’ Cant. Of all the classes, Thieves progressed the fastest in level, and had a decent spread of weapons they could use. Not a bad choice if you didn’t qualify for an ‘elite’ class, really.

Assassin

What? Assassin? Yep.  Assassin was a subclass of the Thief, and required some good stats plus an evil alignment. They used Thief skills at a 2 level penalty(meaning they started to at 3rd level) and could backstab, plus use poison. I don’t much like Assassins, so I won’t go into the rules for them much. Best to think of them as evil, combat-focused thieves.

Monk

As if Assassin weren’t bad enough. Monk is the fifth class, the ‘special’ class. It’s very hard to qualify for, harder than Paladin in some ways, and very… Eastern-influenced. Monks have low hit points, using a d4, though they do start with 2d4 instead of 1. But they get open hand damage, falling damage reduction, and lots of special abilities. In fact, this article is getting so long I’m going to skip describing their abilities. It’d take a while.

Bard

The old joke about the Bard in 1st is: “My DM doesn’t allow them.”  Bard is the optional class, and is in fact found in the Appendices of the PHB along with things like Psionics(do NOT get me started on 1st Edition Psionics), so it’s often forgotten about. Possibly because it’s a pain in the ass. Bards get a lot of special powers, fight as fighters, and cast druid spells in addition to using thief abilities.  The reason for this is because to be a bard, a character must play as a fighter, change to druid, and change to thief(not necessarily in that order), then become a bard by seeking out a bard college.  It is, in other words, the prototype for 3e’s Prestige Classes. It doesn’t help that the bard rules are contradictory to the main rules. In order to be a bard you have to dual-class, which should logically limit it to Humans… but supposedly it’s open to half-elves as well. Whatever.

Combat

This post is already running long, so I’ll try to be brief… even though combat in 1st was a huge mess. AC went from 10 down to the negatives, and the lower the better.  To hit was done by looking up tables and charts, not calculated.  Weapons had a speed factor that delayed when in the round they could be used… and 2-handed weapons got no bonus beyond their larger damage die.  This made sword and shield by far the most effective combo.  Weapons also had further bonuses/penalties against certain armor classes, which just muddled the issue further(and was often ignored), and then there’s the fact that each character had a limited number of Weapon Proficiencies that were limited to one specific weapon each. Only fighters could attack multiple times in a round, and even at top levels, only twice a round… except against creatures under 1 HD, in which case they could do a number of attacks equal to their level. And don’t get me started on Saving Throws…

In case you haven’t guessed, the last two months have been ‘busy’ as in ‘hellish.’

I freely admit that my new computer and a ton of Sword of the Stars may be contributing to this slowness.

However!  Lest I lose sight of my goal completely, I endeavored to do a little work on Fantasy Frontier again.  Mostly, I rewrote some loading code and wrote some config file classes, eliminating my need for a third party library that was giving me linker headaches.  Progress, right?

If you’re wondering why it took so long to do terrain generation, it’s because I had to rewrite the entire section about four times.   A lot of algorithms look fine on paper, but in practice they don’t do so well for making a good landscape. I’m still not 100% happy with the way it does things, but it’s close enough that I can use what I have and move on, to tweak it later.  This is especially true once I change some of the constants to config parameters so I won’t need to recompile.  Since I don’t have overworld or biome generation done(and might not this release at all), I’ll probably use a specification text file for the first alpha release.

Next week’s tasks will be minor things like rearranging the UI and adding various progress bars, maybe time progression.  Fairly simple tasks. After that comes the entity stuff, and that will be more difficult.