Competitive RPGs

[Depression Moon]

I've always wanted to put my RPG parties up against other people's versions of them, especially in games like FFV where you can make your characters take very different paths.

If a game had a vs mode with gameplay like FFV I was thinking in order to make it balanced while still being fun is to remove character levels. This would prevent many matches being lost or won simply because one player was on a siginificantly higher level than the other. I also think that removing the ability to equip abilities from other jobs because given some jobs mixing two abilities on unrelated jobs could create something overpowered. Also have everyone have access to the same items during battle. This would prevent matches from going on forever if two people have an inventory of 99 phoenix downs and megalixirs.

The vs mode should also have all the weapons for every job class available from the start, so that if you're the kind of player who just wants to play the multiplayer you don't have to go through the single player just to unlock everything and not to mention that would also make it easier for tournament organizers.

I can already see some jobs probably being not that useful for competitive play. If it's using FFV's job system then the following jobs will hardly see any play:

Geomancer
Berserker (Being unable to control a character would be a heavy setback for competitive play)
Dancer (Too random)
Chemist
Thief (They deal too little damage and stealing could be practically useless, unless it allows you to steal directly from a player's in battle inventory)

My personal team would be:

Mystic Knight (decent damage, high mag def, and consumes less MP than a Black Mage)
equipped with a str increase accessory

White Mage (healer, buffer)
equipped with an auto-haste accessory

Time Mage (hastega, graviga, meteor)
equipped with an auto-regen accessory

Red Mage (all around average stats, has access only to low and mid level black and white magic, but can dual cast)
equipped with a Ribbon