No Exp or leveling, ever.

I'm working on my hack, but before I go forward I want to know if this is possible (and not too hard): No leveling up, ever. The level you start as is your level for the rest of the game. HP and MP will be static from the moment you get a character and enemies will not give exp.

Now, I don't know how to do this because I'm not smart. I have checked the tools (FF3usME and FF3 Editor) and all I can seem to do is change hp and mp at level 1. Everything else is calculated using a curve (using FF3usME) and I can't get to have a reasonable number be the starting HP (using FF3 Editor, which lets your set the HP at level 1).

It seems I can't set the hp at level 1 to anything higher than 255 (I think).

Maybe if there was a way to change the starting level for when you get a character, but I can't find any info on how.

Another way is to make it extremely easy to get to level 99 but then the character will be under-leveled in that first battle. Too awkward.

The best I can do is make it so characters have a maximum of around 200-400 hp, but that's too little and will make it hard to balance the game.
Anyone has any ideas?

Disabling experience gained is easy, there are many ways to do it, one being setting those 6 bytes to $EA:

Code:

C2/5E4C: 20 35 62     JSR $6235      (Add experience for battle)

C2/5E56: 20 35 62     JSR $6235      (Add experience for battle)

For your starting level, the actors starting data only allow party average -2 to +2 iirc, There is once again more than one way to set a custom HP / MP one could perform a custom party average on the character (event command $77, see C0/9F32). But personally I would modify the event command $40 use at character recruit (see C0/A07C) and get the correct HP / MP /level(?)) from 2-3 tables, one for each data. You could use actor ID as table index. This solution (or any in fact) require a fair understanding of assembly coding, so it's not something you can achieve without actually putting both hands in assembly learning.

As far as I can tell, you could just:
1. Change everyone's starting level to "average+0."
2. Except Terra's, change her's to "average+5" instead(she will now start at level 8, thus everyone else will too).
3. Put some ridiculous HP/MP growth for levels(Base HP of 255+7 levels of 255 HP each is a total of 2040 HP).

Not sure if that's quite good enough, but 2000 HP is not too short of endgame HP for vanilla.

You can try to alter the $C0/9F78 function. The function calculates the starting level when a character is created.

As example, the following code will force the starting level of any character to be 50:

Code:

org     $C09F78

    LDA #$32        ;set start-up level to #$32 (50)
    RTS             ;return level

The characters still will have their level alteration as setup in their startup data. You can easily setup them for zero alteration with ff3usme.

Indirectly, you can edit the HP/MP growth table and the additional HP/MP in the startup data to setup a fixed value for the character HP/MP.

I must also say that without level up some abilities won't be updated. Specifically, Sabin's Blitz, Cyan's SwdTech and Celes and Terra natural learning. They are dependent of level alterations to be updated.