May Update

[Zaxton Books]

Job System Redux
As I'm sure you have heard by now, it has been my intention for some time now to return the Fantasia board to the Job System. This is in keeping with our heritage as a Final Fantasy Tactics Advance-themed role-playing website. However, upon consultation with various staff members, including Zvane, who is responsible for the current Meta-Skill and Attribute system that we currently use, a consensus has been reached regarding the re-implementation. This is not the Job System that most of us remember, with its hundred-page-long database of jobs used by single characters. The era of the Personal Job is over.

I'll take a few days to draw up the official documentation, but here's what we're looking at for rules:

• Humans, Nu Mou, Bangaa, Moogle, and Viera characters will use the job system from the original FFTA for their basic jobs.
• Seeq and Gria will use the FFTA-2: Grimoire of the Rift job tree for their basic jobs.
• Custom Jobs will fall into one of two categories: Basic Jobs and Advanced Jobs, depending on their power level. Basic jobs are jobs right out of the bag on a character as they are being approved. Advanced Jobs will be usable only with certain requirements met.
• The Requirements for an Advanced Job will be created by the approving staff, in consultation with the job's creator. Requirements may include a character having spent a certain amount of time with a certain number of basic jobs, a story event to be played out before the job can be used, or a time delay between a character's creation and a character taking the job.
• Jobs that are slight flavour variations on other jobs of roughly the same skillset will no longer be approved. It is nice to share.
• Unlike attributes and innate-elements, Meta-Skills for individual characters will be retained in place of the C-Ability. Clan Meta-Skills will no longer be used.

Board Cleaning

The board will be undergoing a cleaning session on Saturday, May 14. Any topics older than 30 days will be moved to the Unsorted Database. In light of the size of the board and the limited number of man-hours in the day, I would like to ask the following:
-Character Compilations get updated.
-Clan Pages get updated, and active clans receive a bump if the last post is greater than 30 days old.

Character Creation Changes
As should be expected, when the new Job Rules go up sometime before the 20th, the Character Creation Template will be changing. At that time I would ask that all members update their Compilations accordingly. After the creation of these new rules, there will be a 3-day freeze on all clan wars, after which only characters made with the new template (or at least with all the information of the new template) will be available.

Also, in order to avoid the kind of character spam that people like myself generate, there will be character back story length guidelines. While our goal is not to be an elitist role-play, after having spent much of my too-long hiatus playing on the Masquerade Project, I have seen that even those of us who are not natively english-speaking are capable of much better out of their characters.

Accordingly, Moderators and Administrators will be the only users permitted to approve new characters. Self-stamping of characters will no longer be permitted for anyone but Purple Azulor and Azureman... and since neither of them play with us anymore, that should be plenty fair.

[Wall of Sound]

A personal response to the stricter guidelines for character stories:
Because of the nature of my roleplaying style and method of character development, I like the new characters I make to have as little background info as possible so that I may develop them spontaneously during my roleplays. As such, the bios for my characters will most likely not get any more descriptive than the ones in my compilation. If this is a problem, please tell me.

[Zaxton Books]

It's not a problem, per-se. It becomes problematic when people with two-paragraph bios are using Advanced Jobs that can wipe out whole clans by themselves.

It was a bit of a problem back-in-the-day, is all.

[Wall of Sound]

Ah, okay. I don't plan on stuffing my characters with advanced jobs, anyways.

[cielo]

So, question here.

Who's all agreed to this? Because personally I like the way things have been for a while--we didn't have all the clutter that went with jobs, and writing was more freeform without having to stick within the boundaries and limitations of two jobs. Less defined roles meant more individualized characters.

Next thing you know with all the old jobs and static abilities we're going to have to do status bars again, something I seriously chafe under.

[Zvane the XIII]

After some discussion and consideration, I have to say that simplicity and individuality's got to reconcile.

That means, those defined two set of skills can be performed in plenty of ways, I doesn't mean I am all for jobs, but I came back here and started RPing, getting myself worked into the old system, with a new mentality.

[Aredjay]

Looking over the suggested changes, it looks fine to me. ...though a few of my characters haven't really been extensively used, and were more for comic relief, so we may be seeing even less of them in the future. (And let's not forget the Fire Emblem ripoffs!)

[Zaxton Books]

Alright, you know what, **** it. Rewriting the system is too much of my personal time to waste if it's going to piss half of you off.

I was trying to make the system a bit easier to understand for players who are going to be drawn here by the idea of the game being what it originally was and what the setting still is: a Final Fantasy RP. We have a freehold on creativity, and that's fine. That's admirable. But go big or go home, I say. If we're going to be focused on original, homebrew RP, we should go whole-hog and get our own damned setting.

I'm leaving it as what it is now, and anyone who feels like changing it can do it themselves.