A Storytelling Game
FFZ is a game that revolves around telling a story. Much like the FF games that have inspired it, FFZ revolves around story, and uses the game to enhance, manipulate, reinforce, and play with the idea of a story.
A story and a game are usually quite different beasts. A story is usually a controlled environment, while a game often involves chance. Stories are frequently the creations of individuals, while games mandate a group. Games can be repeated over and over again in countless variations, but stories are generally only told once. However, RPG's blur the line between them, because they are collaborative, and filled with chance, but still involve characters, a setting, goals, and conflict. You are not your character in an RPG, so you experience the game something like a story where you can choose some actions of the main character (like a choose-your-own-adventure novel). Add in other players (with other characters) and you have others making choices that you can't control, but neither does the "controller" of the story (the GM). The event still has a one-off kind of experience (each FFZ campaign is a single story, and by and large, you don't re-play the same story after it is over), though it is flexible (certainly nothing in FFZ forces you to end the story, and many RPG's avoid any overt story structure).
Mostly in FFZ, as a GM, you need only concern yourself with a few devices that help you run the kind of FFZ game that will most closely evoke many of the FF games: that is, to tell a story in the context of this game. Note, again, that you don't have to follow any of this: it is advice and guidance for a particular effect, but as a GM, you get to set the parameters of your game. If you want to use the FFZ rules to run an episodic game that is well within your rights. Just ignore the parts of the advice below that don't apply to you. However, FFZ assumes you want to play an FF-like game, and, primarily, that means a story: a narrative campaign.
Variant: The Episodic Campaign
A game perhaps more based on a Crystal Chronicles, Ivalice, or XI or XIV kind of game would be receptive to an open-ended campaign: that is, a campaign with no outright beginning and ending, where each individual adventure is there for the taking, and is self-contained. This is considered an "Episodic" campaign: each individual episode is self-contained. Perhaps they all take place in the same world, perhaps not. Primarily, all you need to know about the campaign-level structure is that there really is none. Instead, most of the game is taken up with individual missions. Missions might include adventures like slaying a specific monster, recovering a specific item, running an item to a certain location, exploring a given region, or any one of a million possible mercenary jobs. The characters may remain consistent, or not, and all you need to concern yourself with is what this week's challenge is.
Episodic campaigns have a lot of advantages for certain styles of groups: namely, they are open-ended, never-ending, continuously-evolving, and very spontaneous. They change frequently, and you can get a large exposure to a lot of different rules and styles and challenges in a short time. There is nothing really linking the missions together, by default, so there is a lot of potential diversity. They are also quick to set up and run. However, they surrender story for pure game. This generally isn't a bad thing, but it can be unsatisfying: any computer can generate a character and a dungeon and run them through, and it doesn't leverage any of the inherent strengths of the table-top. In fact, you could theoretically play a solo-player episodic campaign. While this can be fun, FFZ generally prefers to emphasize the story, and the group, over the mission and the rules.
Mission Design
Missions should be self-contained events within the game, though each one will follow a rough structure: intro to climax to ending. The intro is how the characters find out about the mission: perhaps through contacts within a city, perhaps through something like a Clan Board such as exists in the Ivalice games, perhaps through some necessity such as the Crystal Caravans. The action then follows these quest-takers until they face the main obstacle to their goal. They normally win, and go back to their home, but perhaps not without sacrifice. Essentially, each mission is a one-session-long adventure.
The players should be able to choose among multiple missions, and they should also be able to choose multiple characters, with each character going on each mission. Because the missions are self-contained, the player need know nothing more than why their character is going on this given mission, which is something the player themselves can figure out. "Why would my character take this mission?" is a question that the player can answer for themselves, and for the GM, without the GM having to invest in anything more than a helping hand.
Episodic campaigns can contain a structure within them, but it is couched within the "missions" format. Namely, this happens when missions bleed into each other: acquiring a specific item leads to the NPC you helped unleashing a monster, who then must be slain, and in slaying the monster, you must follow it to it's home in a new region, etc., etc. This assumes that the missions take place in the same world, in the same general region, of course. There is no definite end to this chain, any more than there is a specific beginning, and players may ignore the chain at their discretion, since they can have the option of completing the mission, or picking a different mission. This is an advantage of the episodic format, and you should not force players to take any given mission (sometimes called "railroading" or "bottlenecking").
The Story Structure
The story structure is at the heart of FFZ, and of many, many other facets of dramatic action. You may be familiar with the basic structure if you have taken writing classes or the like; essentially it consists of three parts: Beginning, Middle, and End. FFZ appropriates this structure at all levels of play: A GM will use it to compose an entire campaign, as well as adventures within that campaign, as well as sessions for those adventures, as well as encounters within those sessions, and even within the rounds within the encounters. Of course, just like with the overall campaign, a GM can drop the structure at any point. It is an organizing principle, and no more. It is an unusually powerful and evocative principle, but it is not always appropriate. A GM has the luxury of abandoning it when it doesn't fit what their plan is.
The Structure in the Campaign
When using the structure to organize a campaign, the GM is realizing one of FFZ's essential FF-like traits: The fact that the game begins, grows, faces a climax, and then ends (and moves on to the next campaign). The Beginning of the campaign introduces the major characters, both PC's and NPC's, and sets up the major conflicts going forward. The Middle of the campaign resolves some minor conflicts, introduces more, ratchets up the tension, and drives the action toward a conclusion. The End of the campaign finally resolves the major conflicts, and puts the (surviving) characters in a state of equilibrium, leaving them behind, and turning attention elsewhere.
The Structure in the Arc
Each arc of the campaign has it's own structure as well. Each arc represents a major subplot of the campaign, an important pillar that goes to fuel the fire of the ultimate climax. The Beginning of the arc serves to introduce the arc's subplot and link it to the overall campaign. The Middle of the arc helps increase tension on the subplot, and narrow focus onto it. The End of the arc resolves the subplot, and connects it to the next arc, via the campaign.
The Structure in the Adventure
Each adventure has the same structure as the arc and the campaign. An adventure represents one resolved mission, an entire storyline that connects to the broader storylines. The Beginning of the adventure sets the PC's out on it the Middle of the adventure introduces some complication, and the End of the adventure brings it back to the arc and the next adventure, via the campaign.
The Structure in the Session
Each time your group meets, it has the same arc as everything else. A session is one meeting of your group. The Beginning of the session establishes the major conflict and introduces some of the broader themes. The Middle of the session raises the stakes and quickly makes things interesting. The End of the session resolves some part of the adventure, and spurs the group on to the next part.
The Structure in the Encounter
Each encounter within the session also uses the structure. An encounter is one major obstacle that the party must overcome. The Beginning of the encounter establishes the victory conditions and the mechanics for achieving them (combat or skills or some other mechanic). The Middle of the encounter introduces some twist or element that increases the tension, changing the game or putting the party on the defensive. The End of the encounter is the victory results and spoils — treasure and any points the party gains.
The Structure in the Round
The structure also hides in each round's actions. At the Beginning, the character's condition is established, and the player declares an action from a menu. During the Middle the player tries to execute that action, and deals with success or failure. At the End, the ongoing effects bring the encounter to the next round.
Success, Failure, and Forks
At every level in which you employ the structure, you create a chance for the player to succeed or fail. Each success or failure has a consequence. Sometimes, especially on small levels, that consequence is obvious. For instance, if the character fails to kill with their attack, then the combat could last longer, and the failure could have cascading effects: the party could fail the encounter, which might end up failing the adventure, which may end up failing the arc, which might give the villain a decisive advantage in the final confrontation of the campaign: if only you had succeeded in your deathblow, the world would not have ended!
Other times, the nature of the success or failure is more ambiguous. If you succeed in preventing the villain from getting her paws on this important relic, that doesn't mean she won't try again, and that also doesn't mean she doesn't have other methods to accomplish her unholy goals.
Most of the time, the results of the challenge should be telegraphed with foreshadowing. That is, you should give hints about what may lay beyond without being expressly obvious about it. A goblin with a knife foreshadows a painful death. A man with a scroll might foreshadow a more wizardly painful death, or it might foreshadow the arcane college that is hiring the goblins to steal certain important documents from rival scholars.
As a GM, you should know what happens if a player succeeds, and what happens if they fail. Neither result should be inconsequential: It should matter, in every die roll, at ever decision point, what the players do. The way in which it matters should be clear to the PC's. They should be well aware of what happens should they fail to stop the rampaging death machine. However, the success or failure must always (or almost always) be partial: a success needs to lead to the next challenge, and a failure still needs to lead to a challenge. They shouldn't "end" the story until the climax. The different challenges these lead to are forked paths: the party goes on one route if the succeed, and on another if they fail.
The Spoils of Success
When the party achieves a success, they receive some reward. On the level of encounters, this reward is usually gil or treasure of some sort. On the level of adventure and above, this should be more narrative: if they liberate the town, they gain a suite of allies and a place from which to launch attacks. If they slay the villain's lieutenant, they prevent needless deaths and perhaps create an opening to attack the villain himself! Success leads to a snowball effect: the PC's win, and make future victories more likely. Some evil is stopped, and some advantage is gained. However, until the final moment of the campaign, a success must always be partial. Consider making the victories Pyhrric, or making the PC's pay some price, even for success. Even if the PC's get lucky and bold, and manage to walk up to the Evil Emperor and cut off his head, if it is only the third session, you should have a contingency plan (such as a resurrected, undead Emperor). In general, as a GM, this is pretty easy: you literally can make anything in the world happen. As long as you remain consistent, your imagination is the limit.
The Consequences of Failure
When the party fails, they suffer some ill fortune. On the level of encounters, this generally means going back to a Safe Crystal and losing some bonus. On the level of adventure and above, this is more narrative: if they fail to liberate the town, the villain gains a toehold, and if the villain's lieutenant escapes, hundreds die and the villain becomes much better guarded. Failure leads to a snowball effect: the PC's lose, and this makes future losses more likely. An advantage is lost, and evil is on the march. However, as with victory, failure must always be partial. Even if the PC's are slaughtered by a random pack of goblins with butter knives, you should have a contingency plan (such as a helpful NPC warrior, or an instance of good fortune that later reverses). Failure can be harder to devise contingency plans for than success: you need to keep the game flowing, without holding the players' hands or making their failure essentially not matter. Fortunately, the Safe Crystal concept helps you with this: PC's can never escape the consequences of their actions simply by dying. Succeed or fail, the show goes on.
Forking Format
A useful way to represent and visualize the success and failure results for the GM is to draw a "V" on a piece of paper. The point of the V is the conflict, with one branch being the "success" result and the other branch being the "failure" result. Each result should lead to a new "V", which leads to another "V", and so on, until the end of the campaign, where the "V" ultimately represents the success or failure of the character, finally.
Decision Points
Though win/loose scenarios are the most common scenarios the FFZ party will encounter, they will also have areas where they must choose amongst several options, with some perhaps not being clear winners or losers. They must pick the right door, choose the right NPC to talk to, pick the right path, or the right dialog option, or even the right adventure. As a GM, make sure that this is also a significant choice. Taking the east path and the west path should have different results, and those results should be telegraphed to the PC's (the east path is bone-strewn, the west path is horribly overgrown). If the decision doesn't matter, you should skip it, or use a narrative gloss to pass over it. Don't stop the game and roll dice and have a discussion that ultimately won't contribute to the ongoing story: skip it, and save it for the important points.
Decision Dungeons
The basic model of a dungeon is where the party is in a room, and there are several paths to take, each of which has different consequences, and leads to different challenges. This model works well for representing the flow of decision points. To represent it, draw a box on a piece of paper representing the decision point, such as "Which NPC do they talk to?" Each branch from the box is a different NPC, and each branch leads to its own box, which has its own paths. For instance, if the PC's talk to Larry the Butler, Larry can tell them something that leads to another "box" with more options (perhaps he told them to ask the Queen, and the PC's can choose four different questions to ask her: she will only answer one).
Combining Decision Dungeons with a forking path is the essence of the flow of FFZ: the GM presents a choice, or a challenge, and the PC's make a choice, and either fail or succeed at the challenge. This leads to the next choice, and the next challenge, and on and on until the end of the Campaign.
The Unexpected Choice
Sooner or later, the PC's will make an unexpected choice, or they may achieve some great success, or suffer some horrible failure. When given four NPC's that they might talk to, a PC will invariably come up with a fifth, either from their own head, or from some unintentional breadcrumb you may have dropped earlier. In general, this kind of impromptu re-wiring should be encouraged. There is ALWAYS a third option, and, to further encourage this, the third option should probably be a little more likely to assure success than the given options (it is more likely to be a shortcut than a dead end). This is also true for "great success" and "extreme failure," and is essentially a way of getting lucky: it is unplanned, and unprogrammed, and it should result in a tremendous effect. These unpredictable results are part of what make the game of FFZ fun. Whenever possible, say yes, allow the larger effect, and run with it. If the PC's decide to talk to the poopsmith instead of the any of the four servants who saw the crime, perhaps the poopsmith has some unexpected, unorthodox knoweldge that proves useful.
Of course, the unexpected choice shouldn't always be a great success. About one time out of three, it should be a horrible failure, even worse than choosing a planned path. This time the PC's ask the poopsmith their questions, it turns out the poopsmith discovers they know too much…
Characters
Now that you know how to plan out and get your game flowing, turn your attention to the party itself, getting an idea of who they are and how they fit into the story you are setting up. This will also help inform your villain, as the antithesis of your characters. Have the players add the following traits to their character sheets, and keep track of what they add, so that you can introduce villains that oppose them on a deep, personal level.
Goal
A character's goal is what they want out of the world. It is fine if this goal is something simplistic, like "money," "fame," "love," or "freedom." The goal gives you something to dangle in front of the character as a reward, a reason for undertaking the various adventures. It can also represent something the villain prevents, or can offer if defeated. For a character whose goal is "to be rich," a villain who is already rich, or who owns a valuable treasure, provides a tempting target, while a character who wants "to fall in love" might be more motivated by a villain who threatens a love interest, or who seeks to make the character hated and reviled.
Motive
A character's motive is why they want to achieve the goal. It is the madness behind their method, the reason for their desire to risk life and limb for this goal. It may be an aspect of their personality, or an event in their history that inspires them. A character may want to be rich because that means security: they come from a poor family where they were constantly in danger of dying on the street. Another character may want wealth because it means power: they see the wealthy members of society buying and selling and influencing the direction of the entire town, and they want to be able to do that. Motives give you a history and a personality for a character, and thus enable you to build a villain that threatens them, or that was present before for them. Perhaps in a campaign with both of the above characters, the villain was one of the city's wealthiest members, using the law to keep residents poor, and themselves on top of everything, and as the party acquires wealth, the villain begins to use some of the power he has to take it from them, and to become a danger to their lives again.
Relationships
Have each player specify a connection between their character and at least one other character. The other player must agree to this relationship, decide how their character feels about it, and then specify a different connection between their character and another character. This continues until it gets back to the initial character. In this way, you can create bonds that can be tested and poked, especially by an astute villain. One character may be in love with another; the target of that character's love may not return the affection. That character, in turn, was the apprentice of a third character, and the third character feels a sort of "big brotherly" feel toward the second character. The third character and the first character, meanwhile, know each other because the third character is a friend of the parents of the first. The first character is a little intimidated by the third. As the GM, you can then create a villain who wants to test those relationships: one who perhaps also knows the parents of the first character, who traveled in the same circles as the third character, whom the second character has met before. The villain certainly knows about the unrequited love, and when the first character becomes vulnerable, the villain will use this knowledge to destroy him emotionally, not just physically.
Rivalries
Have each player specify a point of contention between their character and at least one other character. The other player must agree to the difference, decide how their character feels about it, then specify a different rivalry between their own character and another character. Rivalries should be generally low-key, the kind of thing that people can at least generally agree to disagree about, rather than the kind of thing that inspires divisive arguments. This doesn't mean it can't be closely-held, merely that it is personal: if Valdimir's closely-held religious views contrast with Baldric's atheism, this is fine, as long as neither results to a holy war at the mention of a different belief system. In the three-character example above, perhaps the first character determines he thinks the second is childlike, while the second character, unwilling to let go of her childishness, believes her parents chose questionable friends in the third character, who thinks that their apprentice (the first character) is exceptionally bratty. As the GM, your villain will use these rivalries to turn characters against each other.
Support Characters
Have each player specify at least one living NPC that they are close to for some reason. The NPC can be invented whole cloth by the player, down to their fine details. They may be a parent, or a mentor, or a close friend, or merely a friendly storekeeper that they usually visit for lunch. As a GM, you will resist the urge to kidnap, kill, or otherwise threaten this particular character. This is someone who will survive as long as the character does, and will serve as their contact to the "mortal world" beyond their heroic adventures. They may be a source of news or a reason to go on a mission (such as giving the PC a mission). A player may create more than one, such as a family, or even an organization (such as a thieves' guild), if they like, but one specific NPC must be their support character, and this one NPC is given a sort of narrative protection. Other NPC's may not be so lucky, of course. Support characters see beyond the given adventure, and give the world some depth.
Growth
Have each player specify one flaw that they hope to loose by the end of the campaign. This should be one aspect of the personality that the player (not necessarily the character) wants to diminish and weed out. Perhaps this is a vice they participate in, a bad habit, or a particular relationship that they need to work on. One character may want to avenge their dead brother, while another may focus on overcoming cowardice, or realizing there are more important things than money. The villain will test this flaw, and give them opportunities to overcome it, or suffer the consequences for not overcoming it.
Getting Player Input
In addition to making their characters, and making unexpected decisions, the players may take a greater hand in the way the campaign itself is structured. While their characters and the things they suggest with their motives and details (greedy landowners, parents, uncles, and lovers) certainly might imply certain world elements, this can be an ongoing process. You might take an off-hand comment by a player and treat it as true, or you might actively ask a player to give you information about some aspect of your world: give them a continent, or a nation. Fill in a few broad strokes (in this nation, undead are rulers) and let the player go wild with everything else. You might also ask a player to improvise an element of the world. You could give the parameters, and let the player fill in details. In some ways, the spells and job abilities in FFZ already work like that: they specify the parameters of the ability, and each player fills in the exact visuals and flavor. You may ask a player to tell you what lies at stake in a given choice, rather than giving them an express choice. For instance, above, the players had an option of people to talk to. Instead of specifying four choices, you could simply open it up to anybody, asking the players "Who do you find to talk to?" This can be broader, too. When choosing between two paths on the overworld, you could ask the players which town the East path leads to, and which dungeon the West path leads to, getting a name, and perhaps even a broad description of the region that, until that point, was emptiness on your map.
When getting player input, remember to use phrases like "You tell me," and "What do you think?" that prompt players for input. Also, remember to always twist what the players come up with. If the players decide that the West path leads to a dungeon full of lava-monsters, turn that dungeon into an old volcano, waiting to go off at a moment's notice. If the players decide that the East path leads to a town of elves, turn that into a town of elves under a sleeping spell. Add a detail to take ownership of the element again.
Note that this is mostly a stylistic consideration. As a GM, you will have to find the line where you're comfortable asking for player input. It can make improvisation very rewarding, but not all GMs are good at on-the-fly creativity, and need to use a better structure. In this case, once the PC's have their characters, they may be done adding world elements (at least until their next character). It is useful to use player input to work your way out of occasional dead-ends that your flowchart may have. Asking players to tell you what happens when you can't think of an answer, when they are stumped, when they take an unexpected course and you are stumped, when they appear to be disengaged from the story, or when the answer doesn't matter to you, can all lead to interesting twists and keep the game flowing, without compromising anything you have planned.
