D&D 5e FFT: The Basics

The Basics

Hey guys, so, today I'm starting a new series of articles.

In this series of articles, I'm going to be looking into how to mechanically use D&D 5th edition to run a campaign set in the world of one of my favorite videogames of all time, Ivalice, around the time period of said favorite game, Final Fantasy Tactics (Rather than FFXII, FFXII Revenant Wings, FFTA2, or Vagrant Story). I'm also going to be taking many hints from FFT's Mechanics.

Thinking about it recently, I believe D&D 5e is an excellent fit for a Final Fantasy Tactics campaign. Better than either 4e or Pathfinder - and I will explain why below Today I'm going to look at a quick and dirty conversion, but in the future I may add more detail to this to flesh it out further. I'm also going to take a look at what's already been done, for comparisons.

When I had the idea for this article, I did a quick google search, which turned up this blog post by a guy who calls himself Neuronphaser. I'll be drawing from his list of DMG optional rules to use, but I'll also be adding my own. However, I disagree with several of his class assignments, and will be redoing that from scratch, as well as expanding on what he's done.

This was originally supposed to be a single article I might return to and expand on, but even the initial piece is apparently more than I thought it would be, so I'm going to break it up into chunks, and tackle our subject over a few articles. By the end of the first few articles, you should have all the essentials needed to pick up 5e and run a FFT Style campaign set in the War of the Lions.

After that point, I will likely come back to this topic and expand on things to make it a more complete campaign guide.

So, what (in my opinion) is the core of Final Fantasy Tactics?

The Basics

• 3D Tactical Combat
• Mostly "Grounded" power level.
• Magic uses MP
• Themes: Very War of the Roses or Early Song of Ice and Fire succession war, with behind the scenes maneuvering by a powerful church, reminiscent of Dumas' Three Musketeers manipulative French Catholic Church, and an infusion of Cthulian Eldritch Horrors and Conspiracies.
• Enemies are "On Par" with PCs. Odds are good the fights PCs have will often be tough ones, against trained opponents. The focus is on intrigue and warfare and skirmish battles and infiltrations, rather than on dungeon crawling. The majority of fights will center around human opponents. You might use the Monster Manual occasionally, but most of the enemies will be NPCs
• Magic Items: I may end up coming back to this in a future post, but generally, how FFT Style magic items work, is weapons have a chance to proc a spell or a chance to deliver a carrier status effect, and magic armor gives you resistance/immunity/absorb against an elemental damage type, or immunity to a status effect, or a permanent (or limited use) ability to start a status effect.

Why 5e?

• The power level is much lower than either 4e or Pathfinder. This helps make it a better fit for FFT.
• 5e is popular, in-print, and I happen to (mostly) like it - especially on the GM side of things.
• It's streamlined, simplified rules should lend to easier modification to fit what we want than the expansive/bloated Pathfinder or 4e options.
• It has several optional rules that help get us part way there already!

Variant Rules

• For FFT Feeling Combat Flanking(DMG251)Facing(DMG252) and Diagonals(DMG252) are critical, so we'll be using them. Disarm(DMG271) is also fitting to the type of play we're looking for - Other Combat maneuvers may come up later in this article. I'd also suggest Initiative Scores(DMG270).
• FFT has Renaissance Firearms, and Bombs(DMG267-DMG268)
• Hired Swords and "Guests" use the Loyalty rules (DMG93). Morale rules (DMG273) are also very fitting for the themes and tones of FFT, even if the game itself didn't have any kind of retreat options. It's also worth considering.
• Spell Points(DMG288) are ideally suited to this world, so we'll be using those as well.
• Because it makes Martial characters more interesting, and most players really like them, I'm going to suggest allowing Feats(PHB165), but I may come back to feats later with either a suggested banlist or a suggested whitelist, for flavor or mechanical reasons.

The Main Houserules

• No Resurrection
  • You can "resurrect" and stabilize a character who is bleeding out, but you can't raise them from the dead if they actually die. Unlike in D&D, however, you can't (In FFT) use regular healing magic to fix someone who is already bleeding out, but we're not going to change that at this point.
• Magic is Magic
  • There is no distinction between whether magic is Arcane, Divine, Psionic, or what have you.
• Gods
  • While there the world is dominated by a monotheistic religion centered around the miracles of St. Ajora, which superficially resembles the Catholic Church around the renaissance, there is no proof one way or the other that any god(s) exist.
  • Priests & Holy Knights do not necessarily get their magic from their "god". Some may believe they do, but they have no proof to back that up. Paladin characters cannot "Fall", and it's entirely possible to have characters with such abilities that took no oaths. The class features and spells are abilities learned through training and study.
• Alignment, Mind Reading
  • Characters do not have alignments, period.
    Much like in real life, there's no clear cut answer to good and evil. It's not something you can see or test for, and the morality of individuals is nuanced and people generally have what they consider to be good reasons for their actions. - An Alternative to Alignment is going to be in a future post (I've never been a big fan of alignment, personally), and when it's done, I'll update this one and link to it from here. But in the meantime, I'm just going to suggest coming up with a backstory and personality, and skipping any alignment mechanics.
  • There are no spells that allow you to read someone's mind. Control it sure, but not read it.
    This is to play up uncertainty in people's trustworthiness. We *MAY* want to extend this restriction on information accuracy to disallow magical truth serums and accurate divinations, as well.
• Races
  • All Humans - Easy. You may be able to get monsters as allies, but most of them aren't particularly intelligent, and none of them are considered any better than leashed pets by society, so allowing them as PCs is ill advised. For now I'm going to leave it at Humans only, but I may revisit this for a FFT-Friendly race list, because there are a few hypothetical monsters which are intelligent enough to serve as PCs, even if they're not what I would call adviseable.
• Classes
  • Class fluff will be very malleable here. For our purposes, the default fluff for any class will be entirely irrelevant. All that matters to us is what their mechanics could make them suited for, and how well they can be made to mesh into the setting. So, for example, not all clerics will be priests (or even religious), and not all priests will be clerics.
  • As of this post, just consider that a class's fluff is irrelevant. Once I get to it, I'm going to give a matchup of what 5e classes are suited to stand in for what FFT Job (Considering published sources and existing UA articles). In some cases, simple houserules will be applied to make them a better fit for the Job. If I think a class's tone is way out of the themes or genre of the setting I will say so and suggest against allowing it.

Houserules 2: Maybe Nice to Have - Later

• All Spellcasters have Spells Known
  • This one would take some careful design. Out of scope for today.
• *All* Limited-Use-Abilities are powered by MP.
  • In FFT, MP is the only limited ability resource to track, rather than having a ton of stuff which is tracked separately.
  • Ideally, I'd handle this with a Ki Points:Spell Points:Superiority Dice:Etc Conversion Guide/table, such that everyone and everything (On the player side) used a single unified set of limited resources; however, that's its own big job, and it's not a very high priority.
• Dual-Classed
  • In the FFT World, all the people have the skillsets of two jobs, and a lot of the character customization comes from that dual-classed experience. That could be tricky but rewarding to translate to 5e. It would be really cool for a FFT Campaign, though, so I may look into some kind of "Gestalt Lite" houserules for 5e in the future.
• Brave, Faith, Zodiac Signs
  • Brave/Faith/Zodiac mechanics are a bad idea for tabletop. They add an extra layer of complexity without enough payoff to be worth the effect said complexity would have on game smoothness.
• Status Effects
  • FFT has a wide variety of interesting Status Effects, both positive and negative. Some might make interesting additions to 5e, particularly for a FFT Themed Campaign, but that is outside the scope of this article.
• Equipped Buff/Reaction/Movement abilities
  • It could be cool to have more FFT style Reaction abilities which can be learned. We will see what the future holds.
• Sunder abilities
  • Equipment is destructible in FFT. Most of it is also very easily replaced. A piece of sundered equipment is a small setback but hardly the end of the world. 5e Lacks a proper sunder maneuver. In FFT, there are several jobs focused on it.
  • We can get by without it for now, but it could be an enjoyable dimension to add in, in the future.
• Attacking Attributes
  • FFT has the ability to attack attributes instead of HP, as a major focus of a few jobs.
  • This has existed in older editions of D&D, but it was clunky and inelegant. If we add something similar to 5e, it needs to be sleek and easy to use, and also not super broken. It's a combat dimension I enjoy, so I may well give this a try at some future date, and if I do, I'll add it into my FFT campaign guide.

So, that's it for today. I'll be back to look at Part 2, wherein I will be examining the jobs in FFT as I see them, so that I can tackle Part 3, which will be a detailed analysis of the 5e Classes & Archetypes and how I can match them up with FFT Jobs.

Thanks for reading,

Hawkwinter