World of Balance is a tabletop RPG in development designed to mimic the bizarre, winding plotlines and overpowered combat of high-fantasy Japanese computer RPGs and anime. It does this by deliberately avoiding mimicing their mechanics -- the intention is to create a game that feels like Final Fantasy, rather than one which exactly imitates the way it works.
The system is designed to make task resolution -- which, admittedly, is usually combat, but not always -- quick, cinematic, and descriptive. Everything at a price, though: the way we manage this is by making combat fairly abstract and downplaying realism. This means that your character's statistics might not necessarily represent the same thing all the time.
Because of this, it makes sense to explain what the stats are before we get into character generation, and the best way to explain what the stats are is to describe the combat system. Once we're done there, then we'll explain character generation, before moving back to filling in the gaps that our broad brushstrokes on combat left.
5. Combat: A more detailed approach
26/10/07: Rewrote rules for bidding in to combat to be less complex. Focuses no longer have to be destroyed one by one: one finishing move gets 'em all.
19/10/07: Changed the rules for Inappropriate Skills, removed some places where "Cherry" hadn't been changed to "Limit".