Hey, folks,

Long time, no post, but I've been prepping a game for a few weeks (just ran the first session last night), and it seems like no one is talking about this one, so I figured I'd start: Valent Games' Super Console.

In short, Super Console attempts to emulate the experience of playing a Japanese console RPG - while it doesn't specify, it's pretty explicitly based on the Final Fantasy series, although I suppose one could make it do Dragon Quest or Phantasy Star if you were willing to do a bit more work - but on the tabletop, with live players and a GM - here, the "CPU." You're presented with two "sliders" to define the campaign play style - Style, and Genre. Style is basically how "meta" of a game you want to run - a Console game presents console tropes like Save Points and Phoenix Downs completely straight and without comment, where a Silly game might make light of their presence, and a Mixed game, which is a little closer to a traditional RPG, might see the MC ("Main Characters") actually digging into the mechanisms by which a Save Point warps time and space to bring back a dead character. ("Brutal" - a setting played completely straight with permadeath on and eschewing most metagame aspects - is presented as an option mainly to illustrate how it's not the preferred option.) The Genre slider boils down to what era in Super Console's "master timeline" you're playing (ranging from standard medieval fantasy a la FFI through "magitek" era as in FFVI, up to the space fantasy of FFVIII and later installments) - some classes and items are specifically called out as being absent from some eras, but mostly it's a stylistic choice. Games can be either "classed games" (as the earlier 8- and 16-bit installments, where characters have a class) or "tasked games" (where characters have advancement paths unique to them, often based around a signature weapon, like the later installments).

We're playing a mostly Mixed game (plenty of lampshading the console tropes for yucks, but the MCs can also use roleplaying or clever ideas to bypass some of the roadblocks an actual PCRPG puts in your way), in what I'd describe as an "Early Magitek" era. We're doing a tasked game, which is definitely slimmer on the up front prep time. Character creation is an absolute breeze - you pick a class, which gives you your starting primary stats (no rolls involved) and a starting special ability. Secondary stats (the ones you actually refer to in combat) are based on a quick bit of calculation (generally the average of a primary stat and your level, sometimes with equipment factored in), and you're done.

Combat itself (and most other game tasks) are handled through a really pretty ingenious system, mostly boiling down to two tables - a resistance table (for any task that might fail, usually hitting someone in combat or affecting someone with a status ailment) and a bar table (charting any change in a bar - these include HP bars, mana bars, XP bars, and (in some games) rage bars). Every attack or other combat action uses these two charts - the bar chart in particular is clever, as it sidesteps the headache of doing math involving HP totals in the thousands. All the math stays the same in a given combat, for the most part, too, so once you've run through the first round the subsequent rounds fly by. (All in all, we started late for our first session, ran through character creation, an "opening crawl," town-exploring, quest-giving, and gear-shopping, and with everyone learning the system as we went, we managed to get through two combats, which I was impressed with.)

Rather than give an exhaustive list of gear and enemies (an impossible task for a game that's supposed to last through 75-100 levels and cover multiple genres), they give you the math for creating both. Gear is assigned stats and any bonus effects, then you get the cost based on that (with guidelines for approriate gear by level), while monster creation involves picking a type or two and assigning a level (the level defines basic stats, the type modifies them), with "special effects" (status attacks, elemental defenses, etc.) assigned ad hoc by the CPU. We are given a list of example store inventories by level, and a small selection of example monsters built using the system (goblins and the like, just what you'd expect to see here).

The whole thing is very well put together, manages to address "genre emulation" withough getting lost up its own ass like some games that try that, and the system NAILS the "feel" of Final Fantasy mechanics while making them beyond easy to actually apply without, you know, actually being a computer. From my seat, as an aside, writing an overall scenario that uses all the must-have Final Fantasy elements while using them in a way that's not completely derivative is a fun challenge. A+ so far, I'll post updates when we have our next session. (Let me know if you have any questions!)

- DYA

Wow, ok. Kind of weird.