Summary
- The FF14 TTRPG starter set is beginner-friendly, with premade character sheets and scenarios for practice.
- The TTRPG mechanics are faithful to FF14, great for players, but confusing to tabletop players unfamiliar with the MMORPG.
- The starter set is great for beginners but ultimately is limited in content.
The great thing about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 14 is that you have the whole world to play with. There are so many possibilities, whether it be with online friends, strangers via the Duty Finder🐓, or sometimes even just NPCs to fill the gaps as you muscle through it alꦐone. But a TTRPG is a different matter entirely. I was so keen to play that I completely overlooked that I needed other people to play it with me. For real, in the flesh, not summoned from my online friend list.
No one I know in the real world actively plays Final Fantasy 14 anymore, but I ha🐠d two friends who had at least da🦂bbled in the game at some point. They were my only hope, and fortunately, they were more than willing to check out the TTRPG for the first time alongside me.
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The game comes with 12 premade Adventurer Sheets, covering Warrior, Dragoon, Black Mage, and White Mage, with Level 30, 40, and 50 variants, and a rule summary and strategy guide sheet for each job. You’ve also got the Player Book, which is essentially a beginner’s guide to the core rules, and a Gamemaster Book that includes three scenarios based on the main story of A Realm Reborn. On top of that, there are three different encounter maps, markers and character token cardboard punchouts, and, of cou🐓rse, some lovely dice.
Overall the starter set is, as you’d expect, very beginner-friendly, with various tutorials and comi🃏c books (a neat change of pace from sifting through a whole encyclopaedia of rules) to make it easy to digest, as well as scenarios to🍎 practice through in the Player Book before you even get to the Gamemaster Book scenarios. Between the three of us, we have some Dungeons & Dragons knowledge, but we still decided to work through the basics to get the full experience of the starter set.
I was a bit disappointed there were only four jobs to choose from, but I’m well aware that Square Enix will be expanding on these, having . Ultimately, I found myself going for Warrior while my friend chose a White Mage so we felt somewhat evenly prepared. That left the most confident and char🅷ismatic of the three to take on the role of Gamemaster. He was the obvious choice, williꩲng to put on voices for each NPC and get into the role like I never could. Whichever character I end up playing always ends up just being me.
The tutorial scenes in the Player Book introduce you to the basic mechanics, all of which will be familiar to anyone who has played D&D or any similar d20-based TTRPG, but naturally with a hefty FF14 flavouring. In the first one, we were helping a guy with an overturned cart. While our White Mage forgot this was a tutorial at first and immediately suspected the poor guy of foul play, I meanwhile — as the Warrior no less — failed to roll anything high enough to right 🍌the carriage. Ultimately, once her suspicions were cleared, theꦜ White Mage rolled more Strength than me and set the cart straight. How embarrassing.
The next scene taught us about opposition checks, as the NPC I was attempting to chase down rolled a natural 20 and got away. After catching up with them again and rolling to stop them, I landed… a critical fail. Luck was not on my side. It’𝐆s like the TTRPG knew I sucked at Warrior in-game and it was ensuriꦦng I sucked at Warrior here too. You can safely assume that everything I did during our first session went poorly.
Our particular adventures, triumphs, and many, many failures aside, there were some things I found particularly interesting about the FF14 TTRPG. For starters, if you roll below a challenge rating when fighting enemies, it doesn’t mean you miss the hit entirely. Say you roll below the creature’s defence of 16, you’ll get to u🐟se the base effect of your attack. If you reach or exceed the CR, you make a Direct Hit, naturally inspired by FF14’s real mechanics, which means you do more damage. For someone roll-cursed like me, this is a godsend, and side-steps D&Dജ’s big problem of missing a roll and wasting your entire turn.
It’s not just Direct Hits that the TTRPG takes from the video game; how it utilises AoE and markers, allows players to combo specific attacks, and how the GM can even decide when your Limit Break gauge fill🌄s so you can unleash a special attack all feel very much like the critically acclaimed MMORPG which even has a 30 day free trial… you get the gist. I think it would have been more fun if we had a larger party than our little duo, and that’s certainly something I’d like to try in the future once we can hunt down more willing participants.
It even has the Companion mechanicꦦ, which lets you have a Chocobo playing alongside you to help you add to your party when you don’t necessarily have the physical people there to make up the numbers.
One thing I noticed quickly is tha💎t the comics and scenarios were more easily understandable for me thanks to my extensive time with FF14 than my friends who don’t play, and so they frequently had to re-read the rulꦐes to fully understand some of the mechanics. It assumes you have some understanding of the game, but that’s not always the case for board game players, especially when, like me, you don’t necessarily have other FF14 enthusiasts in the same postcode.
While the basics the scenarios want you to experience are given quite some detail, anything beyond the scope of the scenario you’re presented with — and the Gamemaster book only has three scenarios, so there’s a lot more to discover when you move to the full game — the information becomes pretty thin. If you wanted to dig into a specific mechanic or rule more within the Gamema🌳ster Book, the information just isn’t there. It’s undoubtedly going to all be in the when that launches, but for those trying to play now, it means you’re left with a bit of a hollow experience. There's also a Scenario & GameMaster Guide on the way at some point too.
The Final Fantasy 14 TTRPG Starter Set is a limited window into a very promising game. It’s well suited to beginners because of its wealth of handholding, verging on railroading, that ultimately doesn’t contain enough to keep the party going for long despite its hefty price tag. We’re left waiting for the release of the Standard Rule Book and more options so ܫwe can build out a bigger campaign, in many ways making it feel like we played a demo, or more fittingly, a trial. Only this trial can’t proclaim containing the same breadth of content as the 30-day trial that gives you unlimited play time up to level 70! Did you know about Final Fantasy 14’s incredible trial?
Final Fantasy 14 fans will take to it with ease, even as their first exposure to TTRPGs, and its faithfulness to the game is a big plus in my book. However, I’m aware TTRPG fans unfamiliar with the source materꦐia𝐆l may struggle to grasp concepts, lore, and the world around them as easily as a more traditional setting like D&D’s Forgotten Realms, which further restricts the audience for which the Starter Set is suitable. It’s a good jumping on point, though it should be cheaper, and I can’t help feeling that I would be more satisfied if there were a bit more meat on this bone.
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