<!-- MHonArc v2.4.4 --> <!--X-Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: Massive brainstorm rant about an imaginary class system. (resent) --> <!--X-From-R13: Fenivf Qnfrl <rsvaqryNcbynevf.arg> --> <!--X-Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 11:20:15 -0700 --> <!--X-Message-Id: 8596.980711#io,com --> <!--X-Content-Type: text/plain --> <!--X-Reference: 01a301bdab61$a57186a0$3250f5cc#vulture,acclaim.com --> <!--X-Head-End--> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> <html> <head> <title>MUD-Dev message, [MUD-Dev] Re: Massive brainstorm rant about an imaginary class</title> <!-- meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" --> <link rev="made" href="mailto:efindel#polaris,net"> </head> <body background="/backgrounds/paperback.gif" bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000FF" alink="#FF0000" vlink="#006000"> <font size="+4" color="#804040"> <strong><em>MUD-Dev<br>mailing list archive</em></strong> </font> <br> [ <a href="../">Other Periods</a> | <a href="../../">Other mailing lists</a> | <a href="/search.php3">Search</a> ] <br clear=all><hr> <!--X-Body-Begin--> <!--X-User-Header--> <!--X-User-Header-End--> <!--X-TopPNI--> Date: [ <a href="msg00165.html">Previous</a> | <a href="msg00167.html">Next</a> ] Thread: [ <a href="msg00145.html">Previous</a> | <a href="msg00113.html">Next</a> ] Index: [ <A HREF="author.html#00166">Author</A> | <A HREF="#00166">Date</A> | <A HREF="thread.html#00166">Thread</A> ] <!--X-TopPNI-End--> <!--X-MsgBody--> <!--X-Subject-Header-Begin--> <H1>[MUD-Dev] Re: Massive brainstorm rant about an imaginary class system. (resent)</H1> <HR> <!--X-Subject-Header-End--> <!--X-Head-of-Message--> <UL> <LI><em>To</em>: Till Eulenspiegel <<A HREF="mailto:mud-dev#kanga,nu">mud-dev#kanga,nu</A>></LI> <LI><em>Subject</em>: [MUD-Dev] Re: Massive brainstorm rant about an imaginary class system. (resent)</LI> <LI><em>From</em>: Travis Casey <<A HREF="mailto:efindel#polaris,net">efindel#polaris,net</A>></LI> <LI><em>Date</em>: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 14:18:48 -0500</LI> <LI><em>Reply-To</em>: <A HREF="mailto:mud-dev#kanga,nu">mud-dev#kanga,nu</A></LI> </UL> <!--X-Head-of-Message-End--> <!--X-Head-Body-Sep-Begin--> <HR> <!--X-Head-Body-Sep-End--> <!--X-Body-of-Message--> <PRE> On 9 July 98, Till Eulenspiegel wrote: > /rant on You call this a rant? You haven't seen a rant yet... :-) > How I envision the class system working is a subcategorized > class/occupation tree. Each character picks a class (Warrior, > Mage, Rogue, Artisan) at level 'n' they can pick a > specialization. > I am just extemporizing but I see it like : > Class Exclusive specializations > Warrior: Knight, Archer, Swordsman > Mage: Alchemist, Sorcerer, etc. > Rogue: Assassin, Thief, Ranger, etc. > Artisan/Career specializations (available to any class) > Artisan: Blacksmith, healer, and other generic type skills Personally, I dislike class systems. Most often they don't make much sense in how they assign "special abilities" to different classes, or in how advancement is handled. In almost all cases, they stereotype characters, thereby damaging roleplaying. And, of course, most class systems make many characters conceptions impossible. With that in mind, I'd like to point out some illogical points and possible problems in this sort of class breakdown, using the examples you've given. > I'd want to let my players have some freedom, so they could > for instance be any class + 1 specialization of that class > or one artisan specialization. Some specializations would > be limited .. like only warriors can be swordsmen however, > and being mages would require that both (or all) of the > specializations be taken up with magic. I'm not sure what you mean by "both specializations ... taken up with magic". Does that mean that a mage only gets one specialization? Or that a mage gets two specializations, but they both have to be mage specializations? And in any event, why? Mages who are also healers, blacksmiths, or other artisan-type professions are common both in fantasy literature and in the legends that the literature is based on. Of course, if that's just the way you want magic to work in your world, that's fine... magic doesn't have to make sense, after all. > The Swordsman can parry, and learn advanced use of the sword > thereby increasing his damage, attack rate and success as well > as defense against swords. Can parry? And, I presume, other warriors can't? Parrying is one of the most basic things that *anyone* who's learning to fight with a sword (or any other weapon that can be used to parry) will learn. It makes no sense to restrict it to a particular group. All of the other abilities of a swordsman that are listed can easily be handled without a special "swordsman" class -- simply make warriors get better with the weapons they use most often, and get better at defending against the weapons they most often defend against. > The knight is trained in the use of plate mail and horsemanship. > He gets a bonus when fighting from horseback, and suffers less > penalties from using plate mail. He can use heaver shields > without stamina loss. How does one train in the use of plate mail? By wearing it and practicing doing things in it? If that's the case, though, then anyone who can afford plate mail should be able to do it, not just knights. These ideas are an example of stereotyping -- a knight is simply someone who's been knighted. While *most* knights were trained in fighting from horseback, and knights were the most likely group to own plate mail, by no means did all of them do/have those things. What if I want to play a poor landless knight who doesn't own a horse and can't afford a suit of plate mail? Part of the problem with stereotyping and class systems comes just from how classes are named -- if you name a class "knight", that implies to players that *all* knights have to be members of that class. If you're going to use classes, it's better to use more generic names -- e.g., "heavy cavalry" instead of "knight." It doesn't sound quite as good, but it's more accurate, and therefore less likely to cause confusion among the players. > The point here is that there is a substantial difference to the > career choices the player makes and each has strong abilities > that the other does not. Players work best by relying on one > another for their cross specialties. Why? This is an OK way of working things for an RPG system where you expect that an adventuring group is almost always going to consist of four to seven or so players, but why do this in a mud? What if someone wants to play a loner who doesn't get along with others? Why is it important that each class have an ability that other classes don't, when on a mud it's likely that there will always be several people of each class on? The only reasonable excuses I've seen for class systems are: 1. To keep characters from being able to do everything. 2. To prevent all characters from becoming the same. 3. To allow each character to have a specialty that makes him/her useful to the party, so everyone has their own moment to shine. IMHO, 1 and 2 are symptoms of problems in most RPGs: that advancement is too fast and there are too few abilities that are actually useful in the game. In the real world, very few people are capable of mastering more than one or two fields -- those who try usually know some about each one, but haven't mastered any of them. If a game has reasonable advancement, it should take too long for anyone to learn to do everything well, so characters will specialize anyways. If all the players in your world want to build characters who are the same, it's a symptom that there's something wrong with your world. There isn't a wide enough variety of skills that are actually *useful* in the game... if there were, characters wouldn't be able to become good enough at all of them to be useful, and thus would specialize. The third excuse doesn't make much sense on a mud where there will likely be dozens of each character type -- in a paper RPG, the group has to pretty much stick together, so if there's nothing a particular character can do in an adventure that no one else can, that character's player may get bored. On a mud, however, the player can easily choose to go off and do something else if his/her character's skills aren't needed by a particular group at the moment. Further, there's less of a feeling of "being special" when there are plenty of other players around with the same abilities. > /rant off Instead of a class system, you might want to consider using a skill-based system with templates: a player selects a character template, which includes a package of skills and possibly other things as well -- like equipment and advantages. The player could then be allowed to customize the template to some extent. For those who can't find a template that fits, you could offer a method for building characters from scratch. A template is IMHO better, because it merely represents what that character has learned and gained up to the point of starting the game -- it doesn't prevent the character from then branching off in another direction. -- |\ _,,,---,,_ Travis S. Casey <efindel#io,com> ZZzz /,`.-'`' -. ;-;;,_ No one agrees with me. Not even me. |,4- ) )-,_..;\ ( `'-' '---''(_/--' `-'\_) </PRE> <!--X-Body-of-Message-End--> <!--X-MsgBody-End--> <!--X-Follow-Ups--> <HR> <!--X-Follow-Ups-End--> <!--X-References--> <UL><LI><STRONG>References</STRONG>: <UL> <LI><STRONG><A NAME="00115" HREF="msg00115.html">[MUD-Dev] Massive brainstorm rant about an imaginary class system. (resent)</A></STRONG> <UL><LI><EM>From:</EM> "Till Eulenspiegel" <choke#sirius,com></LI></UL></LI> </UL></LI></UL> <!--X-References-End--> <!--X-BotPNI--> <UL> <LI>Prev by Date: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00165.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: You think users won't number crunch and statistise your MUD?</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Next by Date: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00167.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: Output Classification Notes, version 061098</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Prev by thread: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00145.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: Massive brainstorm rant about an imaginary classsystem. (resent)</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Next by thread: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00113.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wire d Magazine...)</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Index(es): <UL> <LI><A HREF="index.html#00166"><STRONG>Date</STRONG></A></LI> <LI><A HREF="thread.html#00166"><STRONG>Thread</STRONG></A></LI> </UL> </LI> </UL> <!--X-BotPNI-End--> <!--X-User-Footer--> <!--X-User-Footer-End--> <ul><li>Thread context: <BLOCKQUOTE><UL> <LI><STRONG>[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wi</STRONG>, <EM>(continued)</EM> <ul compact> <ul compact> <ul compact> <LI><strong><A NAME="00507" HREF="msg00507.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wi</A></strong>, J C Lawrence <a href="mailto:claw#under,engr.sgi.com">claw#under,engr.sgi.com</a>, Thu 06 Aug 1998, 02:08 GMT </LI> </ul> </ul> </ul> </LI> <LI><strong><A NAME="00118" HREF="msg00118.html">[MUD-Dev] PRNGs: Pseudo Random Number Generators</A></strong>, J C Lawrence <a href="mailto:claw#under,engr.sgi.com">claw#under,engr.sgi.com</a>, Thu 09 Jul 1998, 18:34 GMT <LI><strong><A NAME="00115" HREF="msg00115.html">[MUD-Dev] Massive brainstorm rant about an imaginary class system. (resent)</A></strong>, Till Eulenspiegel <a href="mailto:choke#sirius,com">choke#sirius,com</a>, Thu 09 Jul 1998, 17:48 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00145" HREF="msg00145.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: Massive brainstorm rant about an imaginary classsystem. (resent)</A></strong>, Ross Nicoll <a href="mailto:rnicoll#calmar-mud,com">rnicoll#calmar-mud,com</a>, Fri 10 Jul 1998, 09:43 GMT </LI> <LI><strong><A NAME="00166" HREF="msg00166.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: Massive brainstorm rant about an imaginary class system. (resent)</A></strong>, Travis Casey <a href="mailto:efindel#polaris,net">efindel#polaris,net</a>, Sat 11 Jul 1998, 18:20 GMT </LI> </UL> </LI> <LI><strong><A NAME="00113" HREF="msg00113.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wire d Magazine...)</A></strong>, cat <a href="mailto:cat#bga,com">cat#bga,com</a>, Thu 09 Jul 1998, 17:29 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00129" HREF="msg00129.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wire d Magazine...)</A></strong>, Dan Shiovitz <a href="mailto:dbs#cs,wisc.edu">dbs#cs,wisc.edu</a>, Thu 09 Jul 1998, 22:07 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00155" HREF="msg00155.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wire d Magazine...)</A></strong>, Adam Wiggins <a href="mailto:adam#angel,com">adam#angel,com</a>, Fri 10 Jul 1998, 21:53 GMT </LI> </UL> </LI> <LI><strong><A NAME="00421" HREF="msg00421.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wire d Magazine...)</A></strong>, J C Lawrence <a href="mailto:claw#under,engr.sgi.com">claw#under,engr.sgi.com</a>, Wed 29 Jul 1998, 23:29 GMT </LI> </UL> </LI> </UL></BLOCKQUOTE> </ul> <hr> <center> [ <a href="../">Other Periods</a> | <a href="../../">Other mailing lists</a> | <a href="/search.php3">Search</a> ] </center> <hr> </body> </html>