D&D 5e FFT: Jobs 1

Job Creation 1

Today's article is the start of Job Builds! In this section of our Quick & Dirty FFT>>D&D5e Conversion, I will be going through all of the Jobs, and figuring out how to get a reasonable approximation of them in D&D 5e, using only: Published Materials, UA Materials, and (if necessary) freely available Homebrew. When needed, adjustments will be made here to make it fit. I'm not going to be doing any number crunching or playtesting here, so I'm going to avoid making any new abilities, and will instead look for ways to "swap like for like". Expect to see mashups of other archetypes and such in this series, that's how we're going to get 34 Jobs built out in a reasonable timeframe.

Assassin & Ninja

I took a stab at writing both of these jobs up separately, but it mostly came down to Ninja lacking Quivering Palm and Stunning strike, possibly with Two Weapon fighting added on as a combat style. I think they're close enough that I'm going to merge them, but you could take the time to make them into two very similar archetypes on Monk. For our immediate purposes, I'm going to say they're the same archetype.

Way of Shadow Monk — is our best fit. It's gives us the closest option to our Chi Blocking attacks, and has our ninja stealth.

Way of Shadows Monk could really use some tweaking to better match the sort of skills Lettie and Celia have, so I'm going to make a lens to do just that. By Lens, I mean alternative view on an existing class. "Small" modifications to the combination of Class + Archetype. I expect I'll be making a few of these.

Way of Shadow, Assassin, Monk

A mysterious assassin who specializes in both stealth and disabling targets.

Proficiencies

Armor: none
Weapons: Bow (Short), Crossbow (Hand), Darts, Knives, Shortswords, and Longswords. These weapons count as Monk Weapons for you, and are the only weapons that do. Additionally, Longswords count as light weapons for you.
Tools: 1 From Disguise Kit, Forgery Kit, or Poisoner's Kit
Saving Throws: Strength, Dexterity
Skills: 2 From Acrobatics, Athletics, Deception, Insight, Investigation, Perception, Stealth.
These Proficiencies replace the Monk Proficiencies.

Way of Shadow

Quivering Palm: At level 17, you gain Quivering Palm. This replaces Opportunist.

Poisons

Charm, Petrify, Sleep, Paralysis. However, (Variant Poisons are a topic for a future post...)

That gives us our Assassin/Ninja Job, fitting nicely in line with what an Assassin does, and our Assassin theme, from FFT.

Monk

Unfortunately, there is no official Monk Archetype that yields a close match to the FFT monk. So I looked to see if there was a close match that someone has homebrewed, and again, I couldn't find anything. Our options are to play a different, non-FFT style of monk, or to come up with something. For our purposes I'm going to come up with something.

There are several archetypes with a single feature reminiscent of the FFT Monk, so I'm going to frankenstein something together from several of them.

Open Hand Monk — Has Quivering Palm @ 17, which is basically Doom Fist. The rest of it is not a good fit.

Four Elements Monk — Has Unbroken Air @ 3, which is a good Wave Fist technique, but everything else it brings is a bad fit, and it can't fill the healing and debuff removal role that Monks fill in FFT, it also lacks a Doom Fist Analogue, which is of course, part of Open Hand. (It's an option that's pointless before level 6 because it just doesn't scale well with HP, so I'd suggest we instead use use the revised version of Unbroken Air from Way of Four Elements Remastered (Unofficial))

Mistweaver Monk (Unofficial) — Has various support & healing abilities, which fill the support role (better than an FFT Monk ever can), Giving tons of healing and status effect removal. We like it for Expel Harm.

Jade Serpent Monk (Unofficial) — We're going to take Strikes of the Jade Serpent @ 3 as our "Chakra". No Proficiency with Brewer's Supplies, however.

We didn't find a good Earthslash/Shockwave ability, but we've covered most of the other iconic Monk abilities. This will do, for "Quick & Dirty", which is all we're going for here - we've got too many campaign changes to do to spend a ton of time on each class. So, now, to put it together.

Way of the Open Hand, Ascetic, Monk

Proficiencies

Skills: Add Medicine to the list of skills which can be chosen for Proficiency.

Way of The Open Hand

Strikes of the Jade Serpent: Monastic Tradition available starting at level 3. You count as an ally for the purposes of this ability, regardless of whether that is normally still the case in 5e. Does not come with proficiency in Brewer's Supplies.
Unbroken Air: Replaces Monastic Tradition available starting at level 3.
Expel Harm: Monastic Tradition available starting at level 6.
Wholeness of Body is not available to Monks with this lens.

That gives us a decent approximation of FFT's Monk. It's not perfect, but it's much closer than what we started with, and for our quick n' dirty total conversion, it will do well enough. Because Monk took a bunch of searching to find appropriate abilities to substitute, it took much longer than I thought it would; so, for today, that's the collection. 3 Jobs down, 31 to go. I hope you enjoyed the article. Next Batch coming this weekend.

Hawkwinter