META POST: Old-School Final Fantasy & AD&D

[auronlu]

Again, I wanna thank Seventhe and Lassarina for inspiring this mega Final Fantasy marathon. I really, really needed a brain break after relatives and holiday stress. Playing Final Fantasy I has been just the cure. (My early caveats about it being old and a bit rudimentary have fallen away...it's great fun!)

While playing these first few days, I've had many thinky thoughts. So. FINAL FANTASY META. SPOILER FREE. You do not have to have been following my silly playthrough to read these comments.

Final Fantasy I box art (note enclosures)

AD&D manuals (same set I owned)

Topic the First: How vintage Dungeons & Dragons shaped Final Fantasy I, and how FF games immediately began to pull away from their D&D roots.

As soon as I started playing FFI, I started getting AD&D flashbacks. Stripped clean of later Final Fantasy layers and additions, FFI's game mechanics, character classes, monsters, and a ton of details are clearly a video game adaptation of original, vintage, first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which I started playing in 1979 after graduating up from the Basic set.

Until now, I'd missed the fact that Final Fantasy's White Mage class was actually AD&D's "Cleric" class, a fighting priest who was allowed in battle so long as he/she didn't used edged weapons. Hence: hammers, clubs, flails, morning stars. (I usually played the party cleric, so why did I fail to notice this?) D&D clerics served pagan or invented fantasy deities, carried some kind of holy symbol, and had temples or churches -- does any of this ring a bell in later Final Fantasy characters? The cleric class had decent HP, although not much as fighters, and had (I think?) high endurance. Clerics could cast healing and purification spells and turn undead to powder. All this was ported straight to FF's original White Mage, who was thus NOT simply an inverse of a black mage.

Whereas the Black Mage ported D&D's old "Magic User" character class (called something else these days, essentially a wizard). MUs were notoriously low on HP, although they were smarter than everyone else.

Likewise, I don't think old D&D thieves really were that big on stealing, since we usually just killed off monsters and ransacked the corpses for treasure. Instead, thieves were simply stealthy and quick and evasive and good at picking locks and discovering traps. Again, in FFI, the thief doesn't have a "steal" ability and is more of a nimble fighter.

So the oddities of original FF character classes, with white mages being buff and thieves not stealing, are due to the source material. (Although the thief's not stealing may also have been due to programming; it was probably easier to have a "now let's add loot, gil, and XP to the party inventory" subroutine separate from the battle subroutine). Also, that explains why original Final Fantasy makes you pick a character class before the game starts, and that's it. Whereas later FFs alternate between the "character locked into role" system of D&D or "job classes" or "sphere grids" which let you develop multiple roles per character.

The world of old Final Fantasy was populated with critters lifted straight from AD&D's monster manual:

• Bahamut, king of the good dragons, patron of heroes, vs. Tiamat the evil dragon, promoter of chaos,
  
• liches, skeletons, zombies, mummies, ghasts, ghouls, and the other undead
  
• gray oozes and ochre jellies and green slime
  
• giant lizards, dinosaurs (whut?!)
  
• wolves and wargs, sabretoothed tigers
  
• weretigers, werewolves, werewhatsits
  
• mindflayers, evil eyes, ankhegs (invented for D&D)
  
• ogres, goblins, trolls, clay golems
  
• drow elves
  
• And many others.

Also, we've got old-school D&D Elves and Dwarves, which were borrowed from (and changed from) those of Tolkien's Middle-earth.

(A lot of D&D, as you can tell, was developed as a game system to mimic/codify the "adventure party on a quest" concept popularized and practically invented by Tolkien. Clerics (and, later, Bards) were an original D&D concept, but Rangers, Fighters, Magic-Users derived from LOTR. So too did beautifully-illustrated world maps, a staple of any good D&D campaign.)

Final Fantasy's shops, inns, dungeon crawls, maps, the perils of getting killed in the field and having to be resurrected in town, camping, character stats -- nearly all derive from D&D, although MP was a Final Fantasy innovation. Essentially, just as D&D was a game that let us roleplay adventures like those in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and other fantasy books inspired by them, Final Fantasy was a video game adaptation of tabletop roleplaying, allowing the computer to serve as Dungeon Master (GM) and for us to play D&D solo. It wasn't the first game to do so -- Ultima, Might & Magic, Temple of Apshai and many others had done so before -- but it was a particularly effective video game adaptation of D&D mechanics.

At the same time, Final Fantasy wasn't only a video game adaptation of D&D. From the start, it began to move away from D&D tropes and mechanics (the white and black mages wielding light and dark magic, for example, and the "red mage" hybrid of the two).

It's fun watching how many seeds of Final Fantasy concepts were planted with the original installment. A few I've noticed:

• Crystals ("Orbs" in the original NES game... later spheres, mako, magicite, etc)
  
• Elemental magic (the fire/fira/firaga sequence, although they were called Fire1, Fire2 and Fire3 in the first English port)
  
• Colors of magic: adding to the widespread concept of white and black magic, FF developed its own concepts for blue, green, time, and earth/geomancer magic.
  
• Ships, airships (a very anime component) and subs. Also the folding canoe, although it disappears in later games.
  
• Warriors of Light are mostly absent from Final Fantasy VII onward, but there are still vestiges of the stock heroes of FFI-V in later installments
  
• Pirates
  
• "The Big Bad broke the world 400/500/1000 years ago, and now we've reached a crisis so it's time to fix it" backstory
  
• Character classes morphing in some fashion [ETA: now that I think about it, this came from AD&D, in which the "druid" subclass started as a cleric and had to play as such for about five levels before specializing; the "ranger" started out as a fighter, and the "illusionist" started as a magic-user. FFI adapts this as a mid-game class upgrade.]
  
• Haste, Slow, Blind, Poison and "status effects" (Inspired by D&D "Saving Throws" against poison and paralysis, but FF expanded the concept of Status Effects and ran with it)
  
• Classic Final Fantasy weapons like Mythril Knife and Excalibur, Coral and Ice Blade (although I'm playing the 20th anniversary remake, and some of these were added to the remake)
  
• Ninja class -- distinctly Japanese, and it would pop up again and again in FF, as well as Samurai
  
• Dancers. There's a dancer npc in the very first village, and I noticed them all over III; later they become intermittent job classes.
  
• Recurring Final Fantasy monsters like Ochu, Cerberus and Gigas (some of these names are different in different remakes of Final Fantasy I, but I think it was "Gigas" in the original Japanese?)
  
• Villains mucking about with spacetime.

Chocobos, Summons, Mist, limit breaks and more complex weapons/spells/character customizations were yet to come, but nearly all the raw material is there.

Of course, because I know certain patterns in Final Fantasy games, I'm looking for them. It's like watching a new Indiana Jones movie: there will be some surprises, but you know a lot of what to expect. So I've got a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek game meta in my playthrough write-up, with my characters anticipating character class upgrades, chocobos, an airship, etc. They've read FFwiki and know what to expect.

I can't experience FFI as a first time gamer, devoid of expectations or knowledge of the series. So I'm not trying to. I'm dialing up and seeking out the nostalgia.

(1/7: Edited to kill the EXCESSIVE CAPS and make thoughts flow better.)

Comments

[heavenscalyx]

I think the Red Mages may be a sort of combination of the spellcasting fighter classes of D&D (rangers and paladins and sorta bards), since they can also wear armor and use weaponry (at least in the version of FF3 we're playing right now).

A lot of these AD&D concepts filtered out to other Japanese franchises, I notice, like Suikoden, and I wonder if they came straight from D&D or via the FF franchise. Not sure about the order!

Remember that there were actual straight-from-TSR D&D videogames that came out for the Commodore 64 (and probably some other machines) in the late 1980s/early 1990s, inspired by Temple of Apshai etc. Also! One of the first (if not the first) dungeon-delving games I ever played was an online multiplayer version of Moria (=0moria on PLATO, which I first got onto ca 1981), that actually gave you the impression of navigating down tunnels, etc. Monsters did not appear in the hallway, but their icons appeared on-screen while you fought them. 100 levels down, one fought Asmodeus. D&D and its adaptation into videogames has a long history that I would love for someone to write about. :)

[auronlu]

Moria rings a bell but I can't place it. There were also all the Rogue style games, ascii art, later very simple graphics, just one character with a weapon encountering one beastie at a time.

ETA: oh, right, that does explain red mages. They carry along nearly to the present games, btw, although they were so absent from the FFs I started with -- VIII, VII, X -- that I wasn't aware they existed until I played IX. (Not Freya, who despite her outfit is more of a dragoon, but minor npcs.)

*swears after failing to find the official FFXII game art which showed Fran in spiffy red mage hat, which would've made her much more like Freya*

[heavenscalyx]

Moria was one of the rogue-style games, all ascii and stuff, until the instance on PLATO in the 1970s, =0moria had a primitive 3D first-person-shooter-style view and the ability to communicate with other people who were playing at the same time (so not "true" multiplayer play). (Hey, it looks like there's a PLATO emulator available, complete with some of the classic games.) This was followed up by =2avatar, which was very similar, with the same first-person graphics, but it included code for party adventuring. UofD didn't get =2avatar until the summer of 1986 -- I'm not sure when it was rolled out on the main server at CERL.

[crankyoldman]

This is why I sort of roll my eyes at the people who call White Mages weak or unnecessary in any of the FF games (though I agree they shouldn't nearly always have to be female, I think IV on that became almost REQUIRED). They're based on clerics! YOU NEVER DO A CAMPAIGN WITHOUT A CLERIC UNLESS YOU ALL WANT TO DIE.

I do miss the hammers, clubs, flails, and morning stars. Aeris totally could have totally used a hammer in the Slums. And Yuna would have looked badass with a morningstar.

[auronlu]

Oh gosh, yes, Aeris would've been hilarious. Although I think she retained the "fighting priest" role in her backstory, attitude, and plot role even if she was not much of a fighter in combat mechanics. Remember her church! I guess Yuna, too, is a religious figure, and she's supposed to "fight Sin," but in practice she has others do the physical fighting for her.

(My old GM posted just above, and I still have the figure she painted for me of my female grey elf cleric who spoke softly and carried a big hammer.)

[fireeye]

The Clerics in D&D are actually based on a RL religious... inquisition? something or other, I forget. I recall finding that the "martially-trained religious man who carries only blunt instruments because spilling blood is sacrilegious," was real somewhere though, and I only recall it because I was kinda surprised but can't for the life of me remember maybe I dreamed it.

The original Japanese Final Fantasy had enemies ripped directly out of the Monster Manual that had to be changed for subsequent releases to dodge potential lawsuits. Beholders being the one I remember.

Which is funny because the MM ripped off other things and was sued, but FF was ripping off specific-to-D&D monsters which they later decided could have gotten them in trouble.

Also the House spell in D&D and One-Shot Tent/Cabin/Houses.

The canoe is in later FF's. Just not the Later FF's.

A lot in the FFI/II/III remakes have been overhauled to make them more Final Fantasy. But there's still a lot of D&D in there.

FFI was also an Ultima adaption in some ways (bits of the Time Loop story particularly mirror bits of Ultima I), but yeah, both were notably inspired by D&D and I seriously doubt FFI got all its D&D out of Ultima.

... I almost want to join this Quest ...

[auronlu]

I came to FF with VIII, so I've really been enjoying getting to know the vintage FFs in the past year now that they're finally all available in some form or other on a console that I own. This is my first playthrough of I; I've done the iPad retro version of III, the PS1 port of V (lacking the fabulous GBA script, but I just looked it up online after each session), and still need to play II and IV for the first time. Also, I never finished VI.

I remember that point about clerics as well, and vaguely remember that it was supposed to be some rule for priests going on the Crusades. It has the right ring of medieval Christian hypocrisy, but in retrospect I wonder whether it's historically documented or one of those modern fantastic reimaginings of the middle ages.


ETA: a while back I did an OCD Final Fantasy etymology project looking up origins of the names for tons of monsters, summons, and characters. It was fun to see all the old D&D names in the original FF games, later replaced with non-MM names. And yes, as I have an old Deities & Demigods manual with the Gray Mouser and such (although the Chthulu stuff had already been taken out due to lawsuits), the irony is rich!

(And good to see you aboard!)

[melchar]

Heh heh - I have an original copy of 'Deities and Demigods' - which was given to me as a prezzie by a gamer chum who called it 'Deities and Demi-wimps' ... in hopes I'd bring in some 'offworld gods' for him to beat up.

The Cthulhu stuff in it is ... okay. I like the Elric art [and some of the stats for Moorcock's critters]. The Lankhmar stuff was kind 'meh'. And I do still refer to it from time to time. But then, none of my gaming books can -ever- be considered 'mint' because I paw thru them, highlight bits and enjoy the heck out of them.

[lassarina]

YOU SHOULD JOIN OUR QUEST

I mean hi

we would love to have you >_>;

[auronlu]

Yes! :)

[melchar]

Actually the 'canoe' is also from D&D - i.e. the 'collapsible boat', one of the least useful magic items from the original pamphlets. ...and I was there for them. Starting Easter 1973 ... and have been actively refereeing longer than many of my current players have been alive. Scary...

[auronlu]

Oho, that rings a bell!

And congratulations. Look, HC, we are NOT the oldest D&D players in this thread!

(I still mourn a Basic D&D set once in my possession which had the cardboard chits with numbers on them in lieu of dice, since it predated d4s and d8s and all the rest. That set was a prized nerd relic passed down from hand to hand at my alma mater, where it was traditional to hand down mathoms on May Day accompanied by a list of all previous holders of each Gift. I hope it's still being treated with the reverence it deserves. But I still have the green-slime-colored d12 from my own basic set, which lies back at my parents' house along with my old AD&D manuals.)

[melchar]

Yep - 55 years old now [and reffing for -40- years come this Easter. Yipe!] I haven't met many gamers -older- than me - and no one who is both older and has -continually- played the whole time [much less reffed].

Plus - heh heh - I have several copies of those hardbacks in the picture, if only because they are the books still in most use.**

Very few folks still play 1st ed D&D, tho. I've found a -lot- of folks playing 2nd ed AD&D. I ref 2nd ed AD&D -and- have separate campaign worlds for 3rd ed D&D - and currently play 4th ed D&D. It is highly likely that I'll be reffing a 4th ed D&D game within the year. [I also ref a LOT of other games - including reffing 12 text/response at a place called 'the Warren' = http://www.boojumbunny.com/forum/]



** - my campaign is an on-going world that I started in 1973. I was all of 15, but had already devoured -everything- I could find in fantasy,sf&horror [published by 1973] - and developed a Byzantine world: lots of feudal politics, moral quandries, very powerful NPCs that weren't going to be pushed around by visiting PCs with a few levels under their belt - and dungeons that were -built/stocked- by mages who scry'd on the carnage thus created as entertainment since they didn't have TV. This -still- explains why monsters and treasure chests will be found in an underground complex. ^_^ I also had an active pantheon, each deity with their own spell list/clerical requirements - and enough disparity from the 'rules' that it wasn't really D&D ... but it WAS about 85% compliant with 2nd edition AD&D.

[auronlu]

Wow. Very impressive, especially that you've maintained and expanded one world this long! The fiction world I wrote when I was young is still in my head, but I haven't done anything except cannibalize tropes and character archetypes from it in decades.

HC had an impressively complex AD&D world developed, but I was usually a player rather than GM in her games or other people's in the 80s and 90s. I never entirely adjusted to D&D 2nd ed and have forgotten it entirely now. I switched to Werewolf in the mid-90s. After early grad school, I fell off the tabletop gaming bandwagon and switched to MU* rpgs for about 10 years, then video games, which are easier to play in work/life because they don't require juggling multiple people's schedules or a longterm commitment.

I'm really impressed that you continue to find a life/work/gaming balance with reffing! Although forums like yours help, since at least you don't all have to be on at the same time. I did forum-RP for a while on a LOTR forum, but there we were diceless and doing freeform storytelling RP.

*scuffs foot* I was born two years before D&D was. We started playing a simplified form of it when I was in third grade... a friend and I had a small portable chalkboard, and she'd draw the rooms as I came to them (I think she was making it up as she went along), while I had a little halfling figure I'd move along and roll dice, and it was all wandering monsters and treasure without much of a plot. We got graph paper and did the same thing during a 3 day school field trip to Williamsburg, where we stayed up VERY late in our hotel room! I think she had a basic set. Then I got the Basic set for Christmas, and we started upgrading to AD&D and finding a few friends to play with us, and off we went.

[melchar]

Possibly because it hit me at the right age [15], D&D and gaming in general has been a huge part of my life. It forced me to stop being a bookish, introverted nerd and go out, actively recruit people so I could -ref- for them. I have seen gaming used as therapy by a lot of my friends ... who are some of the better-adjusted people I know now.

Plus I found my hubby thru gaming when he wandered up to my table. We fell in love and have been married 26 years now. All things can be found in gaming. ^_^

[heavenscalyx]

Wow! I started GMing the summer of 1980, I think (that puts me at coming up on 33 years -- ow!), running a half-basic D&D, half-AD&D campaign for my neighbors. First characters in the game: Leif Gildentree (the half-elf) and Purple Prep (the cleric). It became a family epic for the Gildentrees and various color-coded clerics for the next couple of years. I accumulated more AD&D books (all of them the later printings' covers) and did a homegrown D&D world (with some special mechancs) for some high school friends. By the time auronlu started playing with me, I'd moved out of the first homegrown world into a second. I didn't really do ongoing D&D worlds, though -- I kept starting new ones.

I only ever run 1st edition when I run a D&D one-shot these days. I played 2nd ed for a while in the 90s, but the rulebooks got left with the Evil Ex, and I have a 3rd ed PG, but never got into it. I have no interest at this point in acquiring the 4th ed game. I did overhear some folks discussing what I guess to be their 4th ed game on the train the other day -- sounded exciting. :)

My ongoing campaign world has been a superhero universe I started my junior year of college (ca 1987) and which has been running nonstop since (started as a V&V game, morphed into Marvel Superheroes, and now is systemless). I also ran White Wolf games forever (I started running Vampire within a week of the 1st ed book coming out, and then got involved in writing for Mage and a bit for Trinity later on). I haven't run anything for a group for 4-5 years, but I've been GMing for my wife consistently through the 17 years we've been together, so I stay in practice. :)

[melchar]

I loved playing V&V! I ref Champions [the Hero system] in its various versions.

As for 4th ed D&D, it's a fun game. IMO it's not the same game as 1st ed, 2nd ed D&D or even 3rd ed ... which all can be adapted to play with each other. Not even close. But it's fun to play.

[heavenscalyx]

W00t!

[lassarina]

This is fascinating to me because although I'm passingly familiar with D&D (mostly 3.5; I've played a handful of oneshots, a few oneshots of 4.0* and the main campaign of Neverwinter Nights) I didn't realize how much was specifically swiped from good old Gygax.

Didn't Bahamut and Tiamat originally have their roots in Babylonian mythology? Or did D&D so transform them that that's useless except for the names?

* Okay, I'll just say it: I rather like 4th ed. I was introduced to tabletop via White Wolf, and whereas making a 3.5 character is an endeavor of six to eight hours and many tears and MUCH swearing and throwing of things, making a 4.0 character took me only about two hours and everything made sense! Although I couldn't help laughing at the aimed-right-at-you-WW contempt in the 4.0 handbook for "games that tell stories." Like stories have cooties or something, idk.

[auronlu]

Tiamat is a water/chaos goddess in Babylonian mythology, transformed in D&D mythos much in the way that Final Fantasy has transformed characters like Gilgamesh and Shiva (who is usually male, in Hindu mythology, and a god of flame not ice).

Modern interpretations tend to make Tiamat a sea serpent or dragon, but I'm not sure when that got added to her myth; ancient texts don't describe her and just make her the mother of dragons, serpents, scorpions, and other monsters.

Bahamut is a giant fish -- very much like Leviathan -- in Arabic mythology. He was not a dragon and had nothing whatsoever to do with Tiamat. Gygax and D&D invented the idea of Bahamut the "Platinum Dragon," benevolent king of all the good dragons, patron of heroes and courage and Lawful Good, an opposite number for Babylonian Tiamat.

And I'm sure that modern D&D is good; I just have trouble adjusting to new systems when I learned AD&D at the same time as my division tables and rules of English grammar. It's hardwired. And ppphhhlllt to 4th ed for pooping on storytelling systems; they rock if you have good players.

[lassarina]

Ooooh, fascinating. Thank you for digging up the details! (My brain accrues tidbits like unto lint, it's kind of ridiculous.)

4th edition was great for me, because it was slightly less of the crunchy bits and more streamlined, designed to make it easier for new people to get into it. This, naturally, hacked off a lot of the fans of 3.5 who then went to play Pathfinder instead, where they could...do more math, I guess.

I love Storytelling systems. I am admittedly a huge fan of very specific White Wolf systems (and not so much of others), but there is nothing quite like the moment when you get so in character you sort of forget who you are for a minute. XD We have a large and very skilled gaming group to choose from here, and I love it so much.

[heavenscalyx]

whereas making a 3.5 character is an endeavor of six to eight hours and many tears and MUCH swearing and throwing of things, making a 4.0 character took me only about two hours and everything made sense!

Good grief, were they trying to emulate Iron Crown's RoleMaster? Every time I made a character in RoleMaster, it was a full day's effort of calculations and filling in bubbles and charts and... yeah. (Of course, then combat was a pile of charts: a chart for each weapon or spell damage type, and a chart for each type of critical that you could get with each of those, and charts for fumbles, and oh god don't roll a 66, 99, or 00 on a fumble, or it would be all "Fetch a mop" and and and...

Yeah, there were reasons ICE went under, taking the ChartMaster systems with it, I'm pretty sure. (Though they were the first company to have the actual Tolkien license, IIRC.)

[lassarina]

Well, you had to roll (4d6x7 drop lowest drop lowest YOU'RE MY FUCKING BANE) your stats, and then figure out your in-class skills, and how many of those you got, and then you had to figure out how much gold you had and if you had spells and what they did and what components you needed (if a wizard) and then re-do the math twice because you did it wrong the first time* and add up al of your bonuses and penalties from your rolled stats...

*I am actually pretty good at math, but D&D 3.5 math makes me WEEP.

4E still had the 4d6x7 drop lowest drop lowest stat system, but so much of what you did was in powers: at level 4 you pick two free powers, one encounter power, and one daily power. here is your list. Some of it is restricted by the flavor of this basic class you are playing. Go!