Running the plot of Final Fantasy X

Question

FFX is one of my favorite games of all time. The story, world building, themes and plot twists are something I wish more people could experience. No one else in my d&d group has played the game and so I thought it would be a good opportunity to tell the story through a d&d campaign. Others online have had this idea in the past but I haven’t found many tips that would help me run it. For those of you players and DMs who have also played this game, any tips? My first thought is have the player party experience the world through Tidus’s lens, but that would require a lot of dmpcs to guide the party (Yuna, lulu, auron) and I dislike that idea. I could have 1 player take on Yuan’s role but I don’t want to pigeonhole the character into Yuna’s personality for the sake of the plot. My primary concern is what role does the party take?

I ultimately want them to learn about the world, becoming introduced to its mysteries, become invested in defeating sin, feel manipulated by Yevon and finally defeat sin on their own terms. Any tips to make this plot work out without railroading the players too much?

Answer 1

Use a very bare bones plot summary and be flexible

I've run campaigns using the plot of video games in the past including Skyrim (twice), The Last of Us, Fallout 4, and most recently Elden Ring. Over these campaigns I've learned a few things and gotten better at realizing what makes a good campaign in these settings. Here are the three main lessons I learned.

1. Don't use the player characters from the game. I tried using them for Skyrim and The Last of Us and the players were very shoe horned into roles. You seem to have intuited this in your analysis of using Yuna. Have your players build their own characters and just set them in the world at the start of the story.

   In my most recent Elden Ring campaign the party started as Tarnished in the Round Table Hold, each of them meeting their finger maidens (if you're familiar with the story of Elden Ring you'll recognize this as a deviation from the main storyline, but it worked better so that no one player is more central to the plot). This gives them player freedom and sets up the story without shoehorning them into the roles of the game.

2. Pick up on some key pivotal moments to serve as landmark events, you don't need to copy the story exactly.

   For my Elden Ring campaign this meant some prime events that fit well with large groups (Frontal Assault on Stormveil Castle, Alliance with Caria Manor to assault the Academy, and Radahn's Festival were the first three major plot points). This won't be as challenging for FFX since multiple characters is expected, but you still want to choose events that your players will be excited to participate in.

3. (Most importantly) Be willing to stay from the strict lore to add to characters and locations your players become invested in.

   Almost invariably your players will be more interested in regions that are less prominent in the game world. In my case it was the Village of the Albinaurics. My players took a more heavy note of their plight so I added more characters and story options in the "early game" for assisting the Village and it became an almost base of operations as the campaign brew on. Be flexible with the world's lore and be willing to do some extra custom work to help your players become invested in the world.

Applying it to FFX

Here are those three ideas roughly applied to FFX:

1. Perhaps the party is full of travelers who are shipwrecked on Besaid Island. You can still leverage Yuna (who they learn about from other NPCs in the village) but perhaps just as a prominent question giver rather than a main adventurer. This skips a bit of the early game, but jumps right into the main questline so that the players can see the overall objective.

2. Some major plot points that fit D&Ds storytelling:

   • Defending Kilika from Sin (it's very hard to do a lost fight in D&D so ensure the focus turns quickly to saving survivors rather than winning the day outright)
   • Gearing up on Luca and Assaulting Operation Mi'ihen
   • Dungeon Crawl in Djose Temple (I'd encourage you to make this more of a traditional dungeon crawl as D&D is really good at these)

3. One example of necessary adaptation is if your party ends up liking Luca a lot. Then you can add some city politics and intrigue (perhaps they investigate a rigged Blitzball game). You can look to Water deep: Dragon Heist for ideas for city adventure elements.

   Another might be an interest in the history of the world where you might need to invent past summoners or ancient ruins for them to learn about and explore.

Conclusion

Overall, you primarily are telling a new story that is only partly related to the one of the game. Focus on the elements of the game world your players show interest in and let the D&D game drive the plot rather than the original story.

Answer 2

Don't

Computer role-playing games and table-top role-playing games have a fundamental difference: Only the latter can truly accommodate player agency.

You say it yourself in the question itself-- you want to run the plot of Final Fantasy. You recognize it at several points in the extended text of the question. If you do this, you are by definition constricting the players' agency so that it runs along the rails of the plot you want them to experience.

In other words, you will railroad your players.

If you must do something like this, let them play in this game world, but without the expectation that they will run through a pre-built plot that you want them to experience.

Answer 3

"This is your story."

A lot of DMs set their campaign in an existing videogame world in order to try to capture the feeling they had when playing it. The challenge is that you can't do that just by copying surface details like places and NPCs. You have to think hard about why FFX made you feel that way, and work out how to create a campaign that makes your players feel the same way.

Spira itself is actually an excellent setting for a D&D campaign. There's a clear campaign structure (the pilgrimage), a rationale for the party (the Summoner and her Guardians), a well-defined goal (defeat Sin), solid origin lore for creature types which map easily to existing D&D monsters (fiends = fiends, machina = constructs, sinspawn = aberrations, various humanoid types, unsent perhaps count as celestialssince they're essentially made of the same stuff as fiends, etc).

Here's my advice. Unredacted spoilers for FFX of course follow.

1. You have to let your players create their own original characters in the world. Yuna isn't the only Summoner in Spira, even during her own pilgrimage. If your players haven't played FFX, they won't be familiar with the characters in order to play them. There's no point in making them DMPCs, because the characters won't have the same meaning the players that they do to you.
2. On the other hand, if your players have played FFX, or watched a Lets Play of the game, the original game's plot twists won't hit like they did when you played the game. If you have them play the original characters too, then it's just fan character RP, which is fine, but it's not really a D&D campaign. Fundamentally, you can't railroad the players to recreate the story of FFX. You have to let the players make their own decisions and tell their own story.
3. Accept that some of the plot points will not carry well. A major conceit of FFX is that Tidus, an outsider, is the only person in the world who doesn't know that Yuna is going to die at the end of the pilgrimage, and it only works that way because he never asks.
4. It's somewhat acceptable to railroad the players from place to place, since FFX takes place across a pilgrimage between pre-determined spots, so the overall path is obvious. However, you have to let the players solve them in your own way. You don't have to stick to the exact route or timeline of FFX. You'll have to invent your own dungeons and puzzles for the temples, in particular, since they won't convert easily to a tabletop game.
5. Disable raise dead. Aside from the fact that it doesn't canonically appear in FFX, it creates opportunities for the kind of bittersweet moments that define FFX's story. A Guardian sacrificing themself for the Summoner is absolutely appropriate to the lore. Even if the Summoner dies, you can still continue the campaign with another party, but make it clear that the party disbands when the Summoner is killed, being that the Guardians are defined by their bond to the Summoner. (It may be an interesting twist, if the players are really attached to their characters, to continue the campaign and have the Summoner come back, only to be revealed later as an Unsent.)
6. Mechanically, there is no Summoner class in D&D 5e. Tasha's Cauldron of Everything has some summon spells, although they're spread across classes and not as powerful as the FFX ones. My suggestion is to make the Summoner a cleric (since Yuna is also a healer and a key party member), and give them unique summon spells of each spell level which can only be learned at each of the Temples, and which are always added to spells prepared. Be careful not to make them too powerful. You also can't enforce FFX's rule that the other party members suddenly vacate the field when a summon appears, since D&D doesn't work that way.
7. Heavy armor isn't a major thing in Spira, probably due to the tropical climate. This is going to reduce AC for some classes.
8. Consider how D&D's character classes will fit into Spira, and how Spira fits into D&D's rules. You'll need to prepare a document for your players advising them of the races and class options available. I suggest re-skinning existing races to fit Spira's species, perhaps adding a warlock patron equivalent for Sin, re-skinning existing monsters, etc.

The fundamental point I want to make is that D&D is a game of playing your own character and making your own choices. As Auron says to Tidus, "This is your story." You aren't going to evoke the same feelings as FFX just by leading players through the story. You can use the same setting as a backdrop, but from there you have to ask how to recreate the same feeling and tone.

Answer 4

Plotwise, just let them be a summoner party doing the Pilgrimage in the same world, and let them discover the plot of the game as their own characters.

None of them needs to be the very characters from the game for the overall plot to work, the important plot twists are pretty much all of a "secret conspiracy" nature that will shock anyone doing the Pilgrimage. I'd drop the character related plots from the original game unless the players want to opt into the backstories, and even then just use the story beats (secretly undead, isekai'd guy with disappeared father, child of the last great summoner, etc) but let them develop the story. They all (with one exception) would be denizens from the world, you wouldn't need guide NPCs, they can just know what they need to know.

Mechanically I wouldn't recommend, though. I don't see D&D5e being a good fit for the kind of narrative fights FFX uses (lost battles against giant kaiju, summoning, etc) or the character classes and abilities from the original.