05-10-2016, 09:40 PM
Hello everyone.
I've been a Forum Emblemier for a while now, playing Fire Emblem Play by Post games all over the internet for about 7 years. These have ranged from Freeform RP, to straight up Fire Emblem on a forum. Hell, I even got my start on this very forum way back in the day with Skylessia, and I think after all this time I'm ready to throw in my hat as a Forum Emblem GM. To facilitate this, I've created this system that draws from many different Fire Emblem games in order to give the feeling of the more recent games, while still remaining as balanced as the GBA games could be at times. I drew particular inspiration from aje8's setup, and by proxy, Thesummoner's setup from the Giant in the Playground forum, but have thrown in some Fates style changes as well.
Here's a link to the Homebrew Document.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Q: What does PEACH stand for?
A: Please Evaluate and Criticize Honestly. This includes both advice and critique.
Q: Why do Trainees have lowered growths? Aren't they supposed to start weak and grow strong?
A: This is something of a misconception that pops up a lot. Trainees grow stronger because they get 10 more levels than other characters plus promotion bonuses when they promote. The Three Trainees from Sacred Stones actually have pretty poor growths and bases to offset this. What you might be thinking of is an Est or Nino archetypal character. A character who joins much later than the others and at a much lower level than the party average in exchange for sizable growth bonuses.
Q: Why haven't you doubled HP investment like most systems?
A: I have adjusted both the growths and base stat totals to account for the minimum HP thresholds which often are the reason for the HP investment doubling in the first place.
Q: Why is there a minimum on growth rates?
A: Minimums prevent players from dumping weaker stats into oblivion for massive unintended benefits such as sword users dumping skill, or everyone dumping luck.
Q: Why is X class penalized/benefited by the base stat rules?
A: My goal was to bring parity to classes in a way that didn't cripple their unique strengths and to compensate knights for the loss in movement. Movement is king, and those with more need to have meaningful tradeoffs. One to Two range units don't have to worry about an awful Enemy Phase offense by being defenseless like Archers against melee or melee against ranged, so they have to pay for the massive leap in versatility. Fliers already pay for flight by losing all terrain bonuses and being weak to a common weapon type. Mages hit a defense stat that is almost nonexistant on the majority of the classes, can counter in melee, can attack at range, and often have solid utility tomes. My changes to bases align with the core series and most Homebrews of FE games. In particular, despite mages receiving large penalties (-5 base stats, -20% growths) this is a straight buff from the gigantic base and growth penalties they have in Fire Emblem Fates.
Q: Why not both Strength and Magic? Why only one?
A: Hybrid classes are by their very nature, insanely difficult to balance. Because they have to split their bases and stats between two different offensive stats, hybrid characters often teeter on the brink of being overpowered by being able to hit every unit in their weak spots at all times, or being able to barely do competent damage to any unit because they're all over the place. Fates and Awakening try to solve this by loading up the hybrids with tons of free stats and growths to bring them to parity for the other classes, but I personally feel that someone shouldn't be rewarded for being versatile with more stats to increase their reliability. In the end, I couldn't find a way to meaningfully implement hybrids in both a satisfying and balanced way, so I had to make the compromise to cut them out entirely.
Q: Why no weapon durability?
A: I'm gonna be honest here. Weapon durability has always been an insignificant hindrance to 99% of Fire Emblem players save for LTC runs of certain games in the series. Either you got to shop in between chapters making it needless bookkeeping, or you just wasted a turn ferrying an item mule back and forth. I've opted to save players and myself the headache. This does mean that I needed other balancing levers to pull from which is why...
Q: What are these odd effects on weapons?
A: Drawing inspiration from Fates, I've used add effects and add penalties to weapons in order to fine tune each weapon class to have a niche. I don't know if they're all 100% balanced, but I could definitely use advice here.
Q: Why aren't you using Fates style Weapon Triangle Advantages and Disadvantages based on rank?
A: I'm not using this because it's a real pain to manage all the bookkeeping. It also obfuscates the significance of the weapon triangle until much later when the player has already been conditioned to ignore it because the effects are so minor which is why I use the series standard +/- 15 hit +/- 1 Might.
Q: Why are you using pre Fates stat calculations?
A: Fates has very awkward stat calculations such as (Skill/2)-2 for crit rate or 3(Speed/2) for avoid. Not to mention the humongous luck nerfs. To keep things simple, I am using the GBA/GC formulas.
Q: Incapacitation? Why not permadeath? Barring that, why not just let players come back for free?
A: Dying and losing a character isn't fun. While the element of tension and suspense of hitting 0 hp must exist for the game to have meaningful consequences, Forum Emblem games with one and done death systems tend to die very, very quickly due to player attrition. This element still leaves death on the table as a meaningful consequence, but also makes it so one bad crit doesn't end a character and an entire game.
Q: What are these Status Effects?
A: They are a framework for either other people wanting to add items and weapons in that cause them, or an element that is easily stripped out by those who do not. I felt that their inclusion outweighed the negatives so I added them in, though they are incredibly rare.
Q: X Class isn't here and it's my favorite! What gives?
A: I am using a very heavily modified version of the Fates class trees that brings it more in-line with the GBA and GC classes. I also renamed classes to their classic names to foster a feeling of nostalgia. If you really want to be a samurai, feel free to rename myrmidon on your name plate, or thief for ninja and so on.
Q: Do these unpromoted class bonuses like Myrmidon's Crit +5 stack or get replaced by a promoted class's benefits?
A: They stack. So Myrmidon to Swordmaster gets Crit +15, Avo +10 for example. These are based off the Fates bonuses, but slightly modified along franchise lines.
Q: What are Class Base Growths? Do I have to set my growths as these?
A: Class Base Growths are growth rate bonuses added on top of your character's personal growths to reinforce the intended roles of each class.
Q: What are Class Base Stats? Do I have to use these?
A: While generic unnamed mooks do in fact use these, you do not have to. They exist as a means of calculating Promotion bonuses.
Q: What are promotion bonuses and how do I calculate them?
A: As mentioned in the doc, Promotion bonuses are found by subtracting the base stats from your intended promotion choice and your current class. In rare cases, this does mean that some stats can go down on promotion, though I tried to make this as uncommon as possible,
Q: Why don't daggers have status debuffs?
A: Raw stat debuffs that are dynamic and changing every turn on potentially multiple units a turn on both phases, mid phase are a massive bookkeeping headache.
Q: What are braces?
A: Similar to earlier FE games in the series, I tried to give dancers a bit more to do than just being a refresh bot. I gave them other strong utility tools that should see them making more significant choices in combat other than just "refresh the biggest hitter."
And that's all. Let me know what you think/give me advice/criticism in the posts below. Thank you for reading!
I've been a Forum Emblemier for a while now, playing Fire Emblem Play by Post games all over the internet for about 7 years. These have ranged from Freeform RP, to straight up Fire Emblem on a forum. Hell, I even got my start on this very forum way back in the day with Skylessia, and I think after all this time I'm ready to throw in my hat as a Forum Emblem GM. To facilitate this, I've created this system that draws from many different Fire Emblem games in order to give the feeling of the more recent games, while still remaining as balanced as the GBA games could be at times. I drew particular inspiration from aje8's setup, and by proxy, Thesummoner's setup from the Giant in the Playground forum, but have thrown in some Fates style changes as well.
Here's a link to the Homebrew Document.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Q: What does PEACH stand for?
A: Please Evaluate and Criticize Honestly. This includes both advice and critique.
Q: Why do Trainees have lowered growths? Aren't they supposed to start weak and grow strong?
A: This is something of a misconception that pops up a lot. Trainees grow stronger because they get 10 more levels than other characters plus promotion bonuses when they promote. The Three Trainees from Sacred Stones actually have pretty poor growths and bases to offset this. What you might be thinking of is an Est or Nino archetypal character. A character who joins much later than the others and at a much lower level than the party average in exchange for sizable growth bonuses.
Q: Why haven't you doubled HP investment like most systems?
A: I have adjusted both the growths and base stat totals to account for the minimum HP thresholds which often are the reason for the HP investment doubling in the first place.
Q: Why is there a minimum on growth rates?
A: Minimums prevent players from dumping weaker stats into oblivion for massive unintended benefits such as sword users dumping skill, or everyone dumping luck.
Q: Why is X class penalized/benefited by the base stat rules?
A: My goal was to bring parity to classes in a way that didn't cripple their unique strengths and to compensate knights for the loss in movement. Movement is king, and those with more need to have meaningful tradeoffs. One to Two range units don't have to worry about an awful Enemy Phase offense by being defenseless like Archers against melee or melee against ranged, so they have to pay for the massive leap in versatility. Fliers already pay for flight by losing all terrain bonuses and being weak to a common weapon type. Mages hit a defense stat that is almost nonexistant on the majority of the classes, can counter in melee, can attack at range, and often have solid utility tomes. My changes to bases align with the core series and most Homebrews of FE games. In particular, despite mages receiving large penalties (-5 base stats, -20% growths) this is a straight buff from the gigantic base and growth penalties they have in Fire Emblem Fates.
Q: Why not both Strength and Magic? Why only one?
A: Hybrid classes are by their very nature, insanely difficult to balance. Because they have to split their bases and stats between two different offensive stats, hybrid characters often teeter on the brink of being overpowered by being able to hit every unit in their weak spots at all times, or being able to barely do competent damage to any unit because they're all over the place. Fates and Awakening try to solve this by loading up the hybrids with tons of free stats and growths to bring them to parity for the other classes, but I personally feel that someone shouldn't be rewarded for being versatile with more stats to increase their reliability. In the end, I couldn't find a way to meaningfully implement hybrids in both a satisfying and balanced way, so I had to make the compromise to cut them out entirely.
Q: Why no weapon durability?
A: I'm gonna be honest here. Weapon durability has always been an insignificant hindrance to 99% of Fire Emblem players save for LTC runs of certain games in the series. Either you got to shop in between chapters making it needless bookkeeping, or you just wasted a turn ferrying an item mule back and forth. I've opted to save players and myself the headache. This does mean that I needed other balancing levers to pull from which is why...
Q: What are these odd effects on weapons?
A: Drawing inspiration from Fates, I've used add effects and add penalties to weapons in order to fine tune each weapon class to have a niche. I don't know if they're all 100% balanced, but I could definitely use advice here.
Q: Why aren't you using Fates style Weapon Triangle Advantages and Disadvantages based on rank?
A: I'm not using this because it's a real pain to manage all the bookkeeping. It also obfuscates the significance of the weapon triangle until much later when the player has already been conditioned to ignore it because the effects are so minor which is why I use the series standard +/- 15 hit +/- 1 Might.
Q: Why are you using pre Fates stat calculations?
A: Fates has very awkward stat calculations such as (Skill/2)-2 for crit rate or 3(Speed/2) for avoid. Not to mention the humongous luck nerfs. To keep things simple, I am using the GBA/GC formulas.
Q: Incapacitation? Why not permadeath? Barring that, why not just let players come back for free?
A: Dying and losing a character isn't fun. While the element of tension and suspense of hitting 0 hp must exist for the game to have meaningful consequences, Forum Emblem games with one and done death systems tend to die very, very quickly due to player attrition. This element still leaves death on the table as a meaningful consequence, but also makes it so one bad crit doesn't end a character and an entire game.
Q: What are these Status Effects?
A: They are a framework for either other people wanting to add items and weapons in that cause them, or an element that is easily stripped out by those who do not. I felt that their inclusion outweighed the negatives so I added them in, though they are incredibly rare.
Q: X Class isn't here and it's my favorite! What gives?
A: I am using a very heavily modified version of the Fates class trees that brings it more in-line with the GBA and GC classes. I also renamed classes to their classic names to foster a feeling of nostalgia. If you really want to be a samurai, feel free to rename myrmidon on your name plate, or thief for ninja and so on.
Q: Do these unpromoted class bonuses like Myrmidon's Crit +5 stack or get replaced by a promoted class's benefits?
A: They stack. So Myrmidon to Swordmaster gets Crit +15, Avo +10 for example. These are based off the Fates bonuses, but slightly modified along franchise lines.
Q: What are Class Base Growths? Do I have to set my growths as these?
A: Class Base Growths are growth rate bonuses added on top of your character's personal growths to reinforce the intended roles of each class.
Q: What are Class Base Stats? Do I have to use these?
A: While generic unnamed mooks do in fact use these, you do not have to. They exist as a means of calculating Promotion bonuses.
Q: What are promotion bonuses and how do I calculate them?
A: As mentioned in the doc, Promotion bonuses are found by subtracting the base stats from your intended promotion choice and your current class. In rare cases, this does mean that some stats can go down on promotion, though I tried to make this as uncommon as possible,
Q: Why don't daggers have status debuffs?
A: Raw stat debuffs that are dynamic and changing every turn on potentially multiple units a turn on both phases, mid phase are a massive bookkeeping headache.
Q: What are braces?
A: Similar to earlier FE games in the series, I tried to give dancers a bit more to do than just being a refresh bot. I gave them other strong utility tools that should see them making more significant choices in combat other than just "refresh the biggest hitter."
And that's all. Let me know what you think/give me advice/criticism in the posts below. Thank you for reading!