Nightmare LPMud Character Classes
	     Originally written by Mikla and Xymox 95111
			Last Modified: 951111

As a character on Nightmare, your learned abilities, also known as
skills, are determined by your class.  Before you join a class, you
have no skills and are able to do virtually nothing. It is thus
essential that you join a class as soon as you have determined how you
wish to play Nightmare.

How do you wish to play Nightmare?
Nightmare can be played towards many different ends, limited only by
your imagination.  Each class is designed to fit a different playing
philosophy and experience.  For example, some people prefer pure
"hack-n-slash" gaming.  Fighters are well suited to this type of
player.  Other players, however, prefer socialization and role-playing
over monster killing and adventuring.  Fishers are ideally suited
towards this end.
 
When you join a class, you will be provided with set of skills both in
which your class excels over others as well as which determine your
success within your class.  In addition, you gain an improved ability 
for learning, both through training and experience, those skills that are 
associated with your class. 

What you choose to do with these skills is  up to you. Membership in a
class only suggests that you have certain  talents that you tend to
specialize at or that you are simply just  naturally good at. Once you
join a class, you are a member for life,  and it becomes your primary
source of power. In the reality of Nightmare, there are seven basic
classes of people:  
  
    clerics, fighters, fishers, kataans, mages, monks, and rogues.  
 
There are help files on each of these.

Each class has four primary skills, as well as other skills which are
important to them.  The primary skills determine your level.  Level is
simply a way to measure how good you are at your class.  It does not
serve as a method for comparing players of different classes.  In
other words, the only thing you can say about a level 10 fighter and a
level 10 fisher, is that the fisher fishes as well as the fighter
fights.  It does not suggest that the fighter should be able to fish
as well as the fisher, nor that the fisher should be able to fight as
well as the fighter.

Upon becoming a high mortal (level 25 and higher), a player can choose
to join a second class.  This means that the primary skills of that
second class are added to the list of primary skills you already have,
meaning that you could end up with a total of 8 primary skills.  The
primary skills for the new class are all set to 1, no matter what
their level was before you joined.

This may sound harsh, but really it means what it is supposed.  For
example, say you are a level 25 fighter who decides to become a
mage.  You would expect to become a level 25 fighter and a level 1
mage after you join the mage class.  And that is exactly what
happens.  We do, however, give you a fancy new name, saracen.  And
your level as a saracen depends on the primary skills of fighters and
mages combined.
 
You may be asking the question, "Why the hell would I do that if it
costs me levels?"  Multi-classing, however, is not something that
every player will choose.  It is an option, much like chosing to be a
cleric instead of a kataan.  Some people prefer the added dimension
that multi-classing can bring to the game for them.  Others do not
wish to make the sacrifice.