Shin Megami Tensei: Persona the RPG. Who would you do it ?

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Shin Megami Tensei: Persona the RPG. Who would you do it ?

Post by silva »

Im replaying Persona 3 FES here and, man, what a crazy little jungian piece this is. How would you do an RPG about it ? I mean, what are the most important/central concepts for the series, and how would you translate it to the tabletop environment ?

The social link idea that fuels you persona powers are really cool, and it totally screams Apocalypse World's Hx (or Dungeon World's Bonds) to me, but Im sure one could do a much better job give a little patiance.

Another thing to consider is if players should be limited to just one arcana, or all of them like the series protagonists ("wild card" is how they are called, I think, having the power to wield any arcana persona as they wish).

So, ideas ?

*EDIT* just to make it clear, Im focusing on Persona 3 and 4 here, which makes Social Links an important feat of such translation.
Last edited by silva on Fri Jul 17, 2015 8:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Sakuya Izayoi »

I would use HERO, with strict point limitations on the teenagers themselves, but they all get a free summon on the scale of a real super.

I would probably just use an amalgamation of JoJo's and Persona instead of trying to force everyone to RP a specific setting that has no TTRPG sourcebook.
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Post by Leress »

The most important parts of the series are the demon fusion, balancing strengths and weaknesses, and the school setting. The first two did not have social links (which is good since I don't like social links). The first one had each character with the ability to change personas. There was also the ability to recruit other personas by talking enemies and getting them to give you their card.
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Post by silva »

Sakuya Izayoi wrote:I would use HERO, with strict point limitations on the teenagers themselves, but they all get a free summon on the scale of a real super.
And the Social Links... ?
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Post by Sakuya Izayoi »

silva wrote:
Sakuya Izayoi wrote:I would use HERO, with strict point limitations on the teenagers themselves, but they all get a free summon on the scale of a real super.
And the Social Links... ?
In a tabletop game? I wouldn't want to try it, it seems seems inferior to magic tea party outside of the visual novel style systems of the later games.

Closest thing HERO has is Dependent NPCs. You could require so many points of Dependent NPCs, who represent the arcanas you fuse your demon/stand/pokemon from.
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Post by silva »

Sakuya wrote:[social links] In a tabletop game? I wouldn't want to try it, it seems inferior to magic tea party outside of the visual novel style systems of the later games.
I couldnt disagree more with you on this point, Sakuya. In fact, Social Links are such an essential feature of the game that without it, it wouldnt be really a Persona game for me.
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Post by Grek »

Just because Social Links is important feature of the Persona video game does not mean that you should try to translate that mechanic into the ttrpg version. After all, how do you decide what improves a relationship with a NPC if you don't have scripted good and bad conversation answers? How do you decide who is and is not an important character?

If you're going to make Social Links be a thing at all, then what you should do is give every player one Arcana (which grants them Arcana Abilities), and allow them to use out-of-Arcana abilities only when acting in concert with other characters who do have the correct Arcana for that ability. But you wouldn't have a specific Social Link mechanic with specific NPCs, you'd just have particular roleplayed interactions with NPCs (and PCs) as individuals. At best, you'd have Social Link and Broken Link as advantage and a disadvantage respectively, which improves or ruins your interactions with a broad class of people like "Students" or "Teachers" or "Police".
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Post by Orion »

In Persona 3, only one character used Social Links. It's not an ability "normal" Persona-users have. I'm not convinced it would feasible to multiply that web of social links by five, so I'd suggest just leaving it out. Also, it doesn't even make sense unless you have the protagonist's ability to switch personas. You COULD give that to tabletop PCs, but fixed personas work too as long as they're individually interesting. Either way it's a major and pretty fundamental design decision. (I think I heard that Persona 4 used a system where each squad member could change personas within a limited set that didn't overlap with other squaddies; that could work.)
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Post by Leress »

Orion wrote:(I think I heard that Persona 4 used a system where each squad member could change personas within a limited set that didn't overlap with other squaddies; that could work.)
No, they don't, after a certain point in the game's story their personas evolve. In the first two games all the party members could switch personas.
Last edited by Leress on Fri Jul 17, 2015 11:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Koumei wrote:I'm just glad that Jill Stein stayed true to her homeopathic principles by trying to win with .2% of the vote. She just hasn't diluted it enough!
Koumei wrote:I am disappointed in Santorum: he should carry his dead election campaign to term!
Just a heads up... Your post is pregnant... When you miss that many periods it's just a given.
I want him to tongue-punch my box.
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Post by silva »

It just occurred to me that it would be like a card game, where the cards are Personas. I'm envisioning a pretty rot boxed set with a deck of deluxe big-seized cards, each with the Persona image + stats on the front, and on the back we could have one paragraph or two about the mythology/symbolism on that Persona.
Grek wrote:Just because Social Links is important feature of the Persona video game does not mean that you should try to translate that mechanic into the ttrpg version. After all, how do you decide what improves a relationship with a NPC if you don't have scripted good and bad conversation answers?
Just take a cue from Mountain Witch: 1. Quantify each link with a score (how do the videogame tracks it, through numbers or labels like weak/strong/etc ?), 2. Establish rules for each link to improve or worsen (e.g.: helping out a pal increases a link, interfering decreases it), 3. Feed this score back into the Personas mechanics (perhaps limit the Persona level based on it, or make it a bonus for using certain link-relative ability ?).

Voilá!
If you're going to make Social Links be a thing at all, then what you should do is give every player one Arcana (which grants them Arcana Abilities), and allow them to use out-of-Arcana abilities only when acting in concert with other characters who do have the correct Arcana for that ability. But you wouldn't have a specific Social Link mechanic with specific NPCs, you'd just have particular roleplayed interactions with NPCs (and PCs) as individuals. At best, you'd have Social Link and Broken Link as advantage and a disadvantage respectively, which improves or ruins your interactions with a broad class of people like "Students" or "Teachers" or "Police".
Interesting idea, and pretty much in line with I said above! Yeah, each PC would have an innate major arcana, which would allow him to invoke certain Persona types associated with that Arcana. Then, each Persona could also develop secondary abilities dependent on its user link strength with other Arcanas. Aaaaaaand BINGO! Now we have the important mechanic which the social links score should feed into. Perhaps establish some requisites for each secondary Persona ability based on these scores.

Now, even more interesting would be having negative social links scores as requisites for certain powerful Persona powers. So, say, if you want your Mind-based Persona to learn that kickass mental ability, you must have a negative social link with somebody of its opposite Arcana (say, Strenght ?).

Hmmm.. Good ideas breeding here. Keep it coming!
Last edited by silva on Sun Jul 19, 2015 10:51 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Orion »

Tabletop RPGs usually let mechanical character options dictate fiction, not the other way around. Each time a player gains a new persona, you could make them designate an NPC social link for that persona. The social link wouldn't have a level, and you wouldn't use it to level the persona. You'd just be connected to that NPC in some important way that generated plot hooks.
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Post by silva »

Orion wrote:Tabletop RPGs usually let mechanical character options dictate fiction, not the other way around.
Didnt got what youre saying here. Care to elaborate ? :confused:
Each time a player gains a new persona, you could make them designate an NPC social link for that persona. The social link wouldn't have a level, and you wouldn't use it to level the persona. You'd just be connected to that NPC in some important way that generated plot hooks.
I dont see the point in this idea. Personas are classified by Major Arcana (Lover, Magician, Chariot, etc) which are associated with people personalities. So "getting a new NPC social link each time you gain a Persona" dont makes much sense. I think the better way to implement this would be how Grek suggested above.

Or else I didnt actually get what you saying. Which is possible given my lazy english these days. :mrgreen:
Last edited by silva on Mon Jul 20, 2015 2:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Sakuya Izayoi »

Well, for example, if in this system, The World gives you the power to freeze time for everyone but you, and The Chariot gives you the power to use a sword really well, The World users have a lot more solutions to a given problem. Now, say Judgment gave you the power to transmute large quantities of worthless matter like dirt into precious metals, or even form minions out of it! With mechanics dictating the fiction, those guys go and rule the world and leave The Chariot users in the dust. Compounding that, Social Links are allowing people to take dips into the wheelhouse of another persona. People who link you to god-tier personae are going to be VERY popular, and can demand significant amounts of money to spend time with them.
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Post by Orion »

silva wrote:
Orion wrote:Tabletop RPGs usually let mechanical character options dictate fiction, not the other way around.
Didnt got what youre saying here. Care to elaborate ? :confused:
Many games allow you to spend character-building resources to create social relations. They do not typically allow you to earn character-building resources by cultivating social relations. For instance, Shadowrun allows you to spend BP to buy "contacts," so you can give up a point in Longarms to get a drinking buddy. Shadowrun does not reward you with Karma for making contacts, so you cannot gain a point in Longarms by drinking with your buddy. The Social Link system in Persona 3 created a correlation between your social life and your magic abilities. For instance, if you have the persona "Alilat," you are boning the student-body president. The tabletop game can maintain that correlation but reverse the causality. In the console game, you must first bone the president. Then, with the right ingredients, you can fuse Alilat. In the tabletop game, you choose a new persona when you gain a level. Choosing Alilat causes you to bone the president.
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Post by silva »

Orion, ok I got it now. But continue not seeing the need to invert the causality, as you put it. Letting fiction trigger mechanical effects is something done by tabletop rpgs since ever*, I don't know why this shouldn't be the case here, specially as it translates directly from the videogame.

*I had put a list of specific games here, but then I realized that every game in existence does this: when you get XP for killing a monster in D&D its the fiction dictating a mechanical effect, the same goes for when you accomplish a mission in Shadowrun, or when you declare studying downtime in Gurps. So getting an mechanical effect out of helping a social link friend has no difference whatsoever to what every other game out there does, really.
Last edited by silva on Mon Jul 20, 2015 5:38 pm, edited 9 times in total.
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Post by Orion »

silva wrote:I had put a list of specific games here, but then I realized that every game in existence does this: when you get XP for killing a monster in D&D its the fiction dictating a mechanical effect
Wow, fuck you. I was trying to show some respect because I owe you an apology from the Ruins Runner thread. I still have beefs with some of the design, but the truth is that I misread your work and let my contempt for you prejudice me, when the truth was that you had made the class substantially more viable. You also made a real effort to respond to criticism, so I learned that you apparently aren't trolling 100% of the time.

That said, c'mon man. You're seriously gonna quote mine me instead of responding to the subsequent post where I clarified that I was talking about social relations, more than fiction in general? Don't be a dick. Besides, your argument only holds for a very broad definition of fiction. I don't know, maybe I should have said that RPGs generally let mechanics set "color" and not "color" set mechanics. (Are freeform interactions with NPCs "color"? I don't know what half this stuff is supposed to mean) Killing monsters in D&D is a mechanical exercise. You can say that it generates a fiction, but that's a very flimsy add-on. You get a story about killing goblins because you used attack bonuses to turn equipped weapons into damage that reduced the HP of enemy units arbitrarily called "goblins." You get XP as a reward for manipulating the dice and you class features to run team red dot out of HP before you ran out of your own HP. The very brief step in the middle where you talk about severed heads or whatever isn't important.

I know you only like Narrativist art games, but that's just not a reasonable genre for a Persona adaptation. Persona is a hardcore JRPG dungeon crawl that appeals to player who like playing many combats and dumpster diving a complicated ruleset to find tactics that defeat otherwise highly-threatening monsters. If you're adapting one of the most crunch-heavy, tactics oriented console RPGs to a tabletop game, you should adapt it to be a crunch-heavy, tactics-oriented tabletop RPG. That means Persona Tabletop isn't going to be an Apocalypse Hack or a FATE setting, it's going to be a D&D heartbreaker.

D&D heartbreakers have very rigid conventions, many of which are rigid because they are required to moderate the tension between strategy board games and improv fiction. You should not reject the conventions of heartbreakers to adapt something from another medium if you can find a way to simulate it within heartbreaker conventions.
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Post by silva »

Lol don't need to get angry because I rejected you idea, Orion. And I don't know what a "D&D heartbreaker" is, and don't care. I'll do what I think is coherent with the original source, whatever you call it, and social links are an integral part of the source so that's it. I wont shoehorn the concept into your fave game or something. In fact, that's one of the biggest reasons some adaptations end up shitty, because they don't respect the original sources and simply shorhorn I into whatever system they like (see MERP, Conan d20, etc).

I'm glad to have your help in this, but the goal in this little mental exercise is to be faithful to the source. This takes precedence over everything else. But dont get pissed man. Not worth it. Nothing on the internet is, really. :wink:
Last edited by silva on Tue Jul 21, 2015 2:20 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Leress »

silva wrote: I'll do what I think is coherent with the original source, whatever you call it, and social links are an integral part of the source so that's it.
Here is the thing, social links are not integral. The have only been been in about half the games in the Persona series which is only one of several series lines of Shin megami tensei. Hell, even between those two game the people who are part of the social links are different from 3 and 4. (3 where NPC, while 4 used other party members).
Last edited by Leress on Tue Jul 21, 2015 2:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
Koumei wrote:I'm just glad that Jill Stein stayed true to her homeopathic principles by trying to win with .2% of the vote. She just hasn't diluted it enough!
Koumei wrote:I am disappointed in Santorum: he should carry his dead election campaign to term!
Just a heads up... Your post is pregnant... When you miss that many periods it's just a given.
I want him to tongue-punch my box.
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Post by silva »

Leress, yeah I know only 3 and 4 use social links, but then these are, in my small opinion, the ones which gave the series the edge and popularity it has today. Ive played 2 a bit and, while it has a kicking ass setting and story, Ive found gameplay a little on the typical tedious JRPG side.

Its more or less like Mad Max. When people talk about it, they refer generally to 2 onwards, since 1 is such a crappy shit that should be forgotten.
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Post by vagrant »

silva wrote:Lol don't need to get angry because I rejected you idea, Orion. And I don't know what a "D&D heartbreaker" is, and don't care. I'll do what I think is coherent with the original source, whatever you call it, and social links are an integral part of the source so that's it. I wont shoehorn the concept into your fave game or something. In fact, that's one of the biggest reasons some adaptations end up shitty, because they don't respect the original sources and simply shorhorn I into whatever system they like (see MERP, Conan d20, etc).

I'm glad to have your help in this, but the goal in this little mental exercise is to be faithful to the source. This takes precedence over everything else. But dont get pissed man. Not worth it. Nothing on the internet is, really. :wink:
Silva, you are a deliberately obtuse idiot (in this particular instance, and in others, though I by no means am generalising to assume you are an idiot otherwise.)

As Orion stated, Persona is a hardcore JRPG dungeon crawl. So, to be faithful to the source, as you put it, you would naturally make Persona a hardcore dungeon crawl. The most familiar dungeon crawl system to the grand majority of players is DnD, where 'heartbreaker' refers to a custom derivative or it.

No, nothing says you have to use DnD, but those are the assumptions the grand majority of people are familiar with. Following? What this means is that the mechanical abilities of your characters will define most to all you can do, and in the absence of pre-programmed NPC interactions, it makes implementing a Social Link system problematic in a tactical role-playing game. (Which is, to repeat, what you want if you want to stay true to the source.)
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Post by silva »

Yep, I agree the game is basically a dungeon crawl. I just disagree social links are problematic to implement into such a concept ( see Dungeon World ).
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Post by Orion »

Dungeon World doesn't have anything similar to Social Links, and it's not a tactical combat game, so you're 0 for 2. Social Links are also nothing like Apocalypse World Hx, and I don't know why you keep saying they are. Apocalypse world assigns numbers to your relationships with other characters, and those numbers affect your ability to do stuff to those characters. Persona assigns numbers to your relationships with other characters, and those numbers affect your ability to do stuff full stop. It affects your abilities in very specific mechanical ways, too. It would be pretty easy for a tabletop game to have a "power of friendship" mechanic where your NPC friends generated action points/fate points/luck points or whatever. It would even be doable to give out generic XP as a reward for social interactions. That's no what Persona Social Links do. Social Links mean "you cannot learn Fireball until you have found and banged one specific NPC in the town where you live," and very far out of line with the way tabletop RPGs work.

For one thing, The Persona video game only has a few dozen characters in it, so you can find the social links you need by brute force attack. A tabletop RPG has a countably infinite number of NPCs and finding the right one is pure DM pity.
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Post by silva »

Of course dungeon world doesn't have social links, otherwise it would be called Persona, not dungeon world. The example was just to illustrate that's possible to have mechanical effects tied to fictional triggers and relationships.
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Post by Orion »

Mechanical effects? Sure. I've never denied that. I've never said said it's a problem for social relations to have game effects. It's problematic for them to affect the character-design and leveling system.
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Post by silva »

Orion, just a sketch (this assumes social links provide complimentary powers to personas):

Chariot
Social link rank - Power

1 - Bash
2 - Cleave
3 - Mabash
4 - Macleave
5 - null
6 - Ubash
7 - Ucleave
8 - null
9 - Zcleave
10 - Zbash

I don't know the actual names of the powers so this stuff is just made up. But you got the point. The higher your score in a social link, the greater powers it unlocks to you.

Now, to increase your social link with each arcana you should do things related to it in a way that helps out/supports your link/friend. The Chariot is supposed to represent Inner Strenght so here are some suggestions:(I'm assuming all these must be done in the presence of your link)

- showing bravery
- fighting a stronger opponent
- putting yourself in the line of fire to help a teammate
- etc.

Don't remember how the game adds this. I'm visualizing a meter that goes rising until it reaches certain thresholds. Later I compliment, no time now.
Last edited by silva on Tue Jul 21, 2015 10:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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