Exalted: Final Fantasy Style

[Dave ST]

As a collective of geeks and gamers I'm assuming most of us here have seen the Advent Children movie or played one of the several Final Fantasy games that have been released over the years. The magitech armors and vehicles, the gunblades and magic spells, the summons and total WTF value of a universe that incorporates just about every action/sci-fi angle anyone could possible imagine.

About two years ago Vivi and started work on a Final Fantasy-esque game universe and decided that the Exalted game mechanic worked best for outlandish anime-ish magitech world we were going for. We've played several test games and they turn out very well the only thing so far that is stumping me are the charm trees. See, we've set the Essence system set up to where everyone is just plain human and thus equal. The unique abilities that the PCs possess are simply possible due to extensive training and honestly don't require much explanation beyond 'it's a game, we say so'.

There are no Solars, Abyssals, Lunars, etc. Essence pools are calculated as a purchased background, starting at 'Awakened Mortal' (28 essence max) and ending at 'God' (150 essence max). The enhanced and awesome combat would be a direct result of using charms and thus spending essence to increase your fighting abilities. Awesome parries, multiple attacks, firey swords etc, would all be the character spending those points and more powerful characters have a larger pool to draw from.

Now, the part that's really chapped my ass, is that all the charms across all the seperate Exalted types are useful in some way but all the charms vary in power considerably. Dragon Blooded charms are considerably weaker than Solar Charms in several ways, but can be incredibly useful in groups. The power levels are skewed considerably.

In the past we've tried games where we just made an 'aligned' character. I made a character 'aligned' to Darkness so he was an emo little Kadaj-like PC who's powers called on the element of shadow. Vivi made an PC 'aligned' with Water so her powers all focused around the water element. Typical and text book FF right? The problem came in where Abyssal Charms were considerable more powerful than Dragon-Blooded charms and the Shadow PC quickly over powered the Water PC.

What I'm looking for are suggestions on how to make the charms trees more 'universal' in certain respects and still remain unique to each individual character. Just saying "You buy any charm at anytime from any book." is the easiest way to do it, but that quickly got out of hand too...

Oh, if you have questions about how we designed the other stuff about the world, just ask.

[Jeremy]

I'm not too knowledgeable about FF myself, but from an Exalted perspective, I feel I can offer advice. I'll start with the Excellencies.

You should use the baseline Solar Excellencies in the Core Rulebook, with Terrestrial Reinforcement (Ability), Ravening Mouth of (Ability), Fateful (Ability) Excellency and any other non-Solar special Excellencies you feel can be adapted appropriately.

Basically, I advice the use of those baselines and Ability centric focus in your excellencies, as Attribute based Excellency set-ups are a little too broad for FF's personalized and class-specific focus, as are the Infernal Excellencies.