As you may have noticed, we're currently discussing the Bag of Holding Rogue special. There is is some confusion on how it is meant to be interpreted. Could you explain how it is supposed to work for us?
Let me answer that question in two parts.
1) The Idea When I Wrote It: Picture the Rogue having two inventory pages. One that's (3 + 1 for every 5 CON) big, in which the Rogue can carry whatever it wants, be it weapons or items. The second inventory is the Bag of Holding, which can hold as many items as the Rogue wants, but any weapons they pick up, if there's no room in the main inventory, cannot go into the Bag of Holding; it has to, instead, go to the Supply Line, or be dropped if there is no Supply Line/Merchant. The idea behind this was to allow the Rogue to run all around the map, unlocking every treasure chest they so please, and not have to worry about inventory, but without the issue of them being a walking armory.
2) A Possible Alternative In A Later Edition: Instead of a particular limitation of what can or cannot go into the bag, instead, the Rogue can hold everything in the bag, but cannot use any of it; it has to be traded out to other party members; the Rogue alone cannot swap items from main inventory to Bag (at least, not without help from another player in an extended trade chain). Also, if the Rogue dies/is forced to retreat while items are in the Bag, they're all lost, gone, abandoned.
Basically,
its intent was to be a big old swag bag the Rogue carried around; capable of collecting everything, but highly impractical to actually whip them out and use them in the heat of combat.
Were awareness and parity made while keeping in mind that enemies would keep class abilities?
One of the things I really wished I got done before putting the beta out there was an Enemy guidebook, or at least a section that detailed baseline enemy stat; while obviously not ALL class skills are available to the enemy (since enemies are jerks who don't rescue their allies), by and large, terrain based skills and stat boosts like Inspiration were planned to be included for enemies. Obviously, they wouldn't work exactly like they do for the players themselves, but, in general, yes, even enemies outside of bosses were planned to have some form of class abilities.
When and why did you start working on the book?
Hm, one question that's been on my mind is why exactly you decided to out the rulebook together in the first place?
Did you plan to release the rulebook somewhere?
Back around the release of FE7 in English is where this story begins. A friend of mine and I were really into it, and RPGs, so we wanted to play an FE style RPG. We spitballed some ideas that were pretty blase, gave it a test run, and lost steam/interest. After that, the idea just sat on my laptop for years.
Fast forward to 2010; I had just graduated from The Art Institute of Vancouver, having completed the Game Art and Design program. I was now looking for work in the game industry, and, too keep myself busy, I decided to try working on a project. I decided to start with Tabletop game design, like a board game or RPG. I noticed there were RPG books for a lot of franchises, like Dr. Who, Star Wars, Everquest, so on. So I decided to go back to the Fire Emblem RPG, and try my hand at it again.
Realistically, I figured it'd be fun to just share with some friends, but I also figured it might not be a bad supplement to my portfolio for future job searching. And, as a sort of selfish and kinda unrealistic dream, to actually get this released would be amazing, but, you know, keeping it as a freeware game for download and stuff, that'd be the big goal at the end of it all.