Has anyone done a Job system?

I was looking at adding some optional classes for my RPG, Mannerism but what came to me was more like the job system from the old FF5.

Has anyone seen this done in game before?

Job System

You may change your job with a single test at any time. The manner you choose relates to the job you change to so do not be obvious about which job you want.

Set your intention to gain a job. Your task is channeling your emotion. If you are successful, you attune to the job relating to your chosen Manner. The skill used for this test is the job’s key skill. The difficulty is 5. You have the job and the benefit it conveys until you choose to change it.

The jobs are:

Warrior

While you are a warrior you may advance your Agility and Force to 6. But your, Imagination and Precision are capped at 3. Wounds you inflict are dealt twice.

Rogue

While you are a rogue you may advance your Movement and Speed to 6. But your Determination and Imagination are capped at 3. Relevant equipment to a task counts as help.

Cleric

While you are a cleric you may advance your Determination and Craft to 6. But your Speed and Precision are capped at 3. You may use divination magic and heal yourself and others outside of downtime.

Wizard

While you are a wizard you may advance your Precision and Academics to 6. But your Determination and force are capped at 3. You may use Evocation and Transformation magic.

Skald

While you are a Skald you may advance your Imagination and Social to 6. But your Force and Speed are capped at 3. You may use Illusion and Enchantment magic.

You may return to having no job without a Test. No Manners are capped but Manners and Skills may not advance past 4. If you complete a line that would advance you past 4 leave the boxes marked, do not advance.

You always have access to any specialties attached to your spells as well as magical traits.

The idea is that a job starts out as a very attractive prospect but as you get better at the one thing the other classes start to look better until eventually classless starts looking like the best option if you play for long enough.

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Even though it’s not quite in the spirit of how it’s intended to be used, I always thought the Aspects from FATE would be a good basis for a FF-style Job System, especially something more like FF Tactics where you can have the main abilities from the Class and one other previously trained class, and then utility abilities and maybe there was one other category that I’m forgetting, but those categories could then be loosely mapped to the different kinds of actions in FATE. So for instance, if your third Aspect was Black Mage, you could only use black magic for Overcome actions rather than Attack or Defend or anything else. Something along those lines. And then you could swap the aspects around and train new ones either freely (more like the games) or intermittently (for ease at the table).

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I wonder if specific stunts based on the aspects would work better in Fate. “Because I am a Black Mage I can Defend with Lore against Elemental Attacks.” or something like that.

Anyway, I like FF type JRPG games so I’m following this thread.

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People have told me that Fabula Ultima does this.

By “job system” I thought you meant rules for working for a living (and gaining skills) between adventures, but it looks like you are asking about multi-classing or changing character classes. Can you clarify what you mean? Because systems for both exist.

One where you can frequently switch classes trying to gain some persistent benefit that you can take with you when you eventually switch out.

I know it mostly from Final Fantasy Tactics (video explanation here; sorry the link starts in the middle of video). It’s appeared in many RPG videogames from Japan over the years.

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