My friend Todd Harper had raised an interesting point in comments a bit back, one that was reinforced when I listened to an old Brainy Gamer podcast that discussed Persona 3. Michael Abbott was a big fan of Persona 3, I haven’t played it but I quite like the sequel, and mentioned how it’s choice to eschew realism was refreshing. This makes me wonder if I’m showing a poverty of imagination to want to implement guns in 4e. I still think it’s a worthwhile project to put a light amount of work into, but in some ways Todd’s idea is more interesting. As a bit of background, in Persona 3 and 4 (and probably earlier games) each character has a “persona” that is attached to them and has a combat powers set. The main character multiple personas, can get more from combat, and can fuse them to make more powerful personas. That out of the way, here’s the comment:
Random thing that may or may not be to your taste: I know an idea I bounced around for a bit, and which other friends I know took and developed quite a bit more for their own use, was a modern game with a Persona theme. You simply used the basic classes and for the most part, your powers and class features were a function of the Persona you were using.
If you're fighting monsters instead of primarily other people, I think the MODERN = GUNS AKIMBO thing is a little less necessary; you can run in and swing your short sword at whatever all day if it's a shambling monstrosity with six legs and a face that's nothing but a set of giant Angelina Jolie lips.
Plus if you want to have someone like Jin from P3 (who used grenades), you can adapt alchemic items from stuff like Adventurer's Vault and either up the damage or tweak the effects.
You know, now that I think about it, there's another advantage here: in the current 4e game I was in, I started as a sorcerer but switched characters midway through (because with two other meleers, as a Dragonsorc all my powers were useless since they were constantly in the way). But if you have a character switch a Persona, they can effectively try a new class or build with a relatively plausible in-game explanation.
This makes sense to me. I’d earlier commented to some friends that in some ways a main character in the Persona games was a meta-rpger with a stable of characters. The question raised by such a proposal is how to handle skills. In Persona the protagonists skills/attributes completely distinct from the combat power-sets. Social links are used to build more powerful combat options, but that link also goes one way. Some sort of dual-world system, a la Persona, may work well to both play off the combat strengths of DnD while at the same time having a less violence driven storyline. The DnD approach would necessarily be different than the Persona console RPG approach, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t good ideas worth stealing.
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