Final Battle Tradeoffs and Disadvantages

One of the things that I've always stuck true to in RPGs is the attempt to ensure that tradeoffs are everywhere. In Final Battle, this is incredibly important, because otherwise a certain type of fighting becomes too prevalent. Final Battle is the RPG I had for years dreamed of seeing: a game where you could be anyone. I've always liked several different approaches to most anything, and I wanted to have a game where magic, technology, psionics, brute strength, and others could scrap fairly. I appear to have done a good job, because every Final Battle player I have ever GMed has played differently and constructed their party differently. That was one of the great advantages of Pokemon and all of it's predecessors and cheap imit.. I mean, successors: the vast difference of everyone. However, in Pokemon, you had a move limit. One of the integral things a player had to work around was streamlining: with only 4 moves, any erronous moves (like 2 of the same type or a weak one) were just not worth it. While that threw in a nice element of strategy, I prefer to avoid such ideas.

However, this may lead to people complaining about a number of balance issues. One that has come up in my mind numerous times is the fact that the different characters start becoming less important when their abilities are interchangeable. One of the reasons FF7 and FF8 never made me happy was that the characters did not know how to do anything on their own: they were subservient to their GFs or Materia. I mean, in FF8 you couldn't use an item without a GF's help! Of course, in the newer FF9, they brought back individual characters. But Final Battle has a dangerous aspect that threatens what I hated about FF7 and FF8: the ability of characters to assimilate all of someone else's abilities, making the other character's uniqueness irrelevant. Cell appears to make all of the other Z Fighters weaklings: he can do all of the things they can do. Vivi threatens to become obsolete if everyone can learn all Black Magic.

To answer this, I've pulled out an intuitive answer. In real life, can you really do everything? A person who has many hobbies and talents never gets incredible at any individual one. This is the major problem with specialization: for a scientist to make any headway at all, he must increasingly put all of his knowledge and development towards his science. No longer can a man of science also be a politican and a fisticuffs-man. This translates into RPG terms. A character who spends all of his time learning other people's abilities will neglect his own. Furthermore, he will likely never be as good as the original user. The trade-off, of course, is that the character has abilities of his own that even the score.

Another good balance is the equipment balance. I have some sort of Dinotopia or Dinoworld book that begins to make my argument. A young woman is arguing with a scientist, one of the main characters. She says that all things have a downside. He says that shoes don't have a downside. She says that shoes prevent you from feeling the grass on your feet. While that is a nice, romantic answer, I have another one: you have to put on the shoes. While that may not appear to be a downside, it is when you think about it like this: the problem with all equipment is that you have to have it. Equipment may be nice, but it can be stolen, break down, be destroyed, be too heavy, and so on. Of course, this can be rendered obsolete by dimensional pockets, but the same problems still apply: you have to be able to teleport it in (so if the pocket is raided or no teleportation is allowed...), you have to remember to do so, and so on.

And, of course, the final frontier: money. The amount of money someone can spend is limited. Let's think honestly about the cost of being an adventurer here. Psychics probably have it the best off as far as needing money, but they still need food, water, transportation, equipment, and so on. Mages suffer here. They have to buy new spells, are likely part of several guilds (which also demand money), buy components, and they still need clothes and food like any other human being. Techies must constantly buy bullets, E-Clips, new guns, repair kits, parts, cleaning stuff, missiles, grenades, and so on. Now, if you have a tech-and-magic type of guy, what is he going to buy? Is he going to focus on upgrading his guns or buying new spells and components? Believe me, it's a hard decision; I've had to make difficult decisions about where I'm going to spend my money in another RPG, Lords of Power, that my friend has. I either buy new sniper rifles and upgrades to Bleeder (yes, I'm playing as DF), or I buy new spells and... well, upgrades to Bleeder (magical instead of technological). Adventurers also don't make the most money, and, of course, here the coin is flipped. An equipment person is likely to make the most money: he can demand more money for expenses (not just food but bullets), trustworthy (not everyone relies on the fickle forces of magicks or the powers of the mind; some employers just like a good bullet to the back of the skull), and so on. A mage can ask for money for components and likely has a easy way of proving his work (he can show the crater of his enemy), not to mention the money he can make creating water and recycling steel. Psychics can put on wonder shows and can be terribly efficient killers, but they're hard to trust. An employer will feel that they can't hide anything from a psychic, which means only the honestest employers will ask for a psychic. Furthermore, most psychics players will play aren't the type to be asked for jobs by entirely honest people. Money can be a great way to stop people from diversifying too much, especially in the early stages of games.

That sort of thought and balance has been inebriated into every corner of the game. Often, my efforts to explain the balance system may appear defensive. If that is your impression, give me an e-mail (siva69@hotmail.com, for the 5735th time). I like the way I do my balances, since I created them. But that doesn't mean your balance argument isn't valid, and that I won't listen to it. On the contrary, when I play other people's RPGs and see other designer's balance methods, I tend to assimilate them. I still keep my system and idea intact, but make it a little more fitting of the new RPG I am infatuated with.