I like it, but I do have a few questions, mostly just clarification points...
Haha, very astute questions, thankfully I have considered all of them in the making of this process.
So the spells the characters learn as a result of using their specific jobs, do they always have them regardless of job thereafter?
That is, does Scholar Edward have access to Bard Edward's spells?
Correct. Each character job (except for Kain/Edward/and Rydia's) will equal out to 24 spells learned to fill up their spellbook. As you can imagine this would mean that each character has their own separate Magic Menu and hence there is no delineation in Spellbooks any longer. One big problem one would normally considered are lack of available skills... well I extended Black Magic and White Magic to 42 Spells in each of their schools and a mishmash of physical skills for the more physically oriented characters (but due to the way this is set-up all characters will get some semblance of magic)
Rydia is... a bit troublesome. She needs to account for the 15 Summons which means she would only get 9 spells otherwise. I will have to consider how to approach that when the time comes.
Kain's Dragoon job will have Dragon Speak with 16 Dragons to get skills from, but he won't learn any spells naturally in the Dragoon Class.
Edward needs 4 Spell Slots empty for Read to work appropriately.
It is precisely the incentive to switch classes from a game progression perspective is to get the additional spells to complete the spell books.
How is the battle counter affected by job changes? If I'm at 254 with DK Cecil and I morph into P Cecil, will P Cecil be one battle away from his next spell? If not, then will he be 255 battles aeway? Or is this what those 26 bytes of SRAM are for?
Since we're on it, are Paladin and Dark Knight two of Cecil's jobs?
I have considered this... this is another iffy circumstance. First off, yes the 26 Bytes of SRAM stores Job Progression where necessary. (Dragoon Kain, Berserker Kain, Scholar Edward, Tellah, FuSoYa do not use this. Hence the Exact amount of 26 being necessary out of 31)
Dark Knight Cecil will advance and learn his spells, but when he turns into a Paladin the job counter for Dark Knight Cecil will be reset as well. This is actually to avoid missing out on Dark Knight spells since Dark Knight Cecil and Paladin Cecil will not be sharing a spellset because I don't want a "newly crowned" Paladin to have access to the Dark Knight spells since it would sort of spoil the feel of retrieving that power later on.
And as you can guess by now, Paladin and Dark Knight are two of Cecil's Jobs. The third is the Mystic Knight (SpellBlade abilities) since he seemed the most appropriate for that role.
Also - and maybe you've covered this in some previous post somewhere - are there enough Job IDs to handle three Jobs for every character?
Nowhere Near enough! The game supports 32 Classes all in all yes, but anything beyond 16 is an incomprehensible mess and not worth bothering about
But this plan never was going to utilize that though, I cannot change Equipment Indexes except in very specific circumstances and I only have two blank spots for that which are going to be used for Onion Knight Porom and Samurai Yang that look at the equipment a character has, and if the character has the proper Job equipped, their Class changes for that screen only to change equipment. And forget about adding an additional 19 sprites in-battle and out of battle, haha!
What will happen when you equip a Job, custom code will look to see what item is equipped in the "Job Slot" and change the Class Name based on Index. Much less messy than dealing with Actual class parameters *shiver*. Incidentally the end of battle will also look at the Job Slot as well to properly increment the Battle Counter. I may also throw in some stat readjusting when changing jobs but that could be trickier than I imagine.
What about Tellah? Does he have three Jobs? If so, are you planning on "pulling an Aeris" on the player, or will he be revivable? Or maybe FuSoYa will be Tellah part two (or four, or whatever)?
Tellah and FuSoYa are their own jobs Sage and Arbiter respectively, but they start or obtain all of their spells through other means outside of the Job System and since they are fully temporary characters I didn't want to have them gain abilities that you would later lose. Granted this does not mean I have ignored Tellah and FuSoYa. Tellah will have the lion's share of FFI spells as a sampler of many of the spell sets.
The clear worry present would be spell overlap, but I tried my best to make sure that each character still seems unique (granted there might be just a little too much curing going around, but I'll try to adjust the difficulty appropriately to utilize that). Each character has their own unique spell (unique among the Job Classes, no guarantee that Tellah and FuSoYa won't have them) to be obtained for Mastery (planned this has been a little trickier to parcel out than hoped)
