26 Mar, 2011, Scandum wrote in the 61st comment:
Votes: 0
Orrin said:
I still don't believe that it is practical to balance those skills such that all combinations are equally viable unless the system is so bland that there's no synergy between skills and each skill within a group is functionally identical. In which case you've just got 125 versions of the same build.

Anyway, you're not going to convince me of your argument I'm afraid, so I won't derail the OP's thread any further on this issue.

I'll have to agree that low synergy systems are bland and boring, while high synergy systems create a large imbalance between expert and novice players. A handicap system might balance things out.

On topic, increased complexity and interactivity of the game world will create all kinds of possibilities for unique skills, but it's ultimately a creative effort to find them, and creativity is something that cannot be taught. Finding and utilizing creative individuals is an option, though they're often annoying to work with.

Regarding variety, utilizing economic principles is an option. Doctors make good money, but if half the population was a doctor competition for jobs would lower the wages. A game world can work in a mutual fashion to encourage variety, without strictly enforcing it.
26 Mar, 2011, quixadhal wrote in the 62nd comment:
Votes: 0
This brings us back to the general argument…. do you want diversity of roles where players are expected to group (hence the multi- part of multi-user dungeon?), or do you want everyone to be able to solo all the content. If you want everyone to be balanced against each other, and be able to solo everything, there's an easy solution.

Get rid of classes entirely.

No, really. What's the point of making a fighter that can heal as well as a cleric, who in turn can dish out damage like a mage, who in turn can tank via pets as well as a fighter? It's just flavor text over the same abilities. You may as well get rid of classes entirely and just have one skill tree to balance as you like.

Something I think many people forget is the idea of choice. When you select a class (or join a guild, or spec into a certain tree), you are making a choice that says "I want to be good at this kind of thing, even if it means sucking at other things." The idea of every class (guild/skill tree) being 100% as effective against everything in the game is stupid.

If you pick a mage, you want to blast things from a distance. That implies that you are going to have a really hard time fighting things which sneak up on you, or which are immune to magic. Duh!

If you pick a fighter, you want to bash things on the head. That implies you're not going to enjoy fighting mages who can blink around the battlefield and ignore your armor. Duh!

See the point I'm trying to make? If that isn't acceptable to you for some reason, then skills vs. class isn't the problem. The problem is that you're stuck with the choices you made. If you want to be able to solo everything with equal difficulty, then you need to allow free respecs at any point. Then when the player runs up against something hard, he can spec into the appropriate class to do the job, rather than having to (HORROR!) work with other players to finish it.
26 Mar, 2011, Ssolvarain wrote in the 63rd comment:
Votes: 0
Lets see you say that when the bobcats start climbing out of the wallpaper.

Anyways, yes I think you can safely say I find it boring to play a healer on most games. I don't have anything against healing, it's just that it's often not required unless it's a specific situation like bosses and stupid-hard expansion content. Playing a healer solo is usually a very slow ordeal, making it less desirable.
26 Mar, 2011, Orrin wrote in the 64th comment:
Votes: 0
Quixadhal said:
This brings us back to the general argument…. do you want diversity of roles where players are expected to group (hence the multi- part of multi-user dungeon?), or do you want everyone to be able to solo all the content. If you want everyone to be balanced against each other, and be able to solo everything, there's an easy solution.

Role specialisation isn't inevitable though. Take the mud Avalon for example which has distinct classes that are all competitive in 1v1 combat. Some classes may have the edge in certain situations and some may have more group or non-combat utility. However, over the 20 years the game has been running there have been dominant combatants from every class and it's as near to a balanced system as I've seen.
26 Mar, 2011, Dean wrote in the 65th comment:
Votes: 0
What's wrong with a cookie cutter build? People like cookies right? Hmm cookies.

On a more serious note: If I were looking to go the route of fantasy MU*, I'd probably look to employ something similar to the class system in Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
26 Mar, 2011, Tonitrus wrote in the 66th comment:
Votes: 0
Nich said:
Am I right in saying that your idea is to make 2 strength greater then 1 strength, but 20 strength not greatly better then 10 strength (Where 20 would be the maximum)? I can see how that would have a moderating effect on the high end of power. Although I can see it resulting in people who are good at everything, because it's more cost effective to invest the points you would spend getting a skill from 19 to 20 in getting another skill from 1-10 (depending on the curve, of course). You'll end up with a great deal more players with 10 in everything, which also isn't bad, but it's something to be mindful of.


Effectively yes. If you're using floats, you can just do something like log_2 (which is what I'm planning to do), but that's probably a steeper curve than most people would care for. I'm also a fan of triangular numbers (1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28, 36, 45, 55, etc). I had a Smaug-based design once that used stat trains to raise powers. During creation, stats were chosen by importance, and assigned numbers from a list (14, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8), and each +1 above your base stat from a stat train had a triangular cost. I.e., the first +1 cost 1, the second +1 cost 2 (for a total of 3), the third cost 3 (for a total of 6), and so on. So to determine their total stat, I'd just take their base cost, then what I call the triangular root of their trains, then any other bonuses they have and add them up. I'd also refund stat train points that didn't do anything. E.g., 5 is no better than 3, so I'd just refund the 2 points to make it 3. Ranks for skills worked the same way.

If you need a rationale for that, it's usually the higher numbers of powers that break designs, so they should be more costly. And yes, I'm aware of the issue of people trying to get the most out of their points by spreading them around, but I'm not sure how much an issue it'll be. I'll probably make a penalty for excessive numbers of skills if that's a concern.

I should also add that I wouldn't have a max, just an increasingly steep point cost. If people want to pay it, more power to them.

Nich said:
Eventually I should really get around to playing [God Wars II], but my basic understanding of the game was that it's a class based game. Admittedly, you can make diablo2 style builds (please correct me if I'm entirely wrong on this one), so the line is kind of blurry. If you were to try and list the number of viable builds in god wars 2, I think you would probably come out with more then the average skill based game. But could you take a game like god wars 2, strip out the class restrictions (giving everyone access to every talent tree), and then balance the skills such that there are as many (or more!) viable builds as in god wars 2? Or is the balance contingent on the class structure?


God Wars II doesn't really have classes in the traditional sense. Sure, it's true that Werewolves don't get the Shadow Infusion power, but each class has enough variety that they don't really qualify as classes in my mind. All other things being equal, if you encountered a player whose class you didn't know, who happened to be in wolf form, you wouldn't know if it was a vampire or a werewolf. If you encountered an invisible spell-caster, it could be just about any class, and the scariest Mage I encountered on GW2 didn't really even cast spells in combat, he'd just prepare beforehand and rip me apart with his weapons.

I think the classes only exist for thematic reasons. The framework for a completely classless mud is already present, if the talents are any indication. There'd probably be balance issues initially, but I think the end result would be better balance overall, since classes impose an artificial distinction.

KaVir said:
Tonitrus said:
Personally, I think if you can divide skills into useful/powerful/fluff/weak/fun, you're doing something wrong, although I'll grudgingly grant that KaVir's core/auxiliary distinction can work, given that I never even noticed his mud had auxiliary skills.

But you will have noticed that there are certain "must have" talents/powers - for example as a vampire I bet all of your builds used either (1) Rage of the Beast with some of the associated talents, powers and runes, (2) Martial Gnosis with at least one of the five Style Mastery talents, or (3) Blood Potency backed up with some of its associated abilities.

Likewise, one of the earliest decisions you'll have made whenever creating a vampire build will have been the form - human, bat, wolf or mist. And you'll have selected the rest of your powers and talents around that choice.

Or how about defensive talents? Evasion, Natural Fortitude, Heavy Armour Expert and Strong Magical Shields - all mutually exclusive. But almost everyone takes one of them, because they all provide solid bonuses.

If an ability is particularly good then it becomes a "must have". But if you can balance it against a handful of other equally good abilities, and make them mutually exclusive, you introduce a choice. The more viable choices there are, there more variety you'll see among character builds.


I can see the distinction now that you mention it, I just never thought of it that way. There were a number of talents I considered worthless, but I didn't ever think of Martial Gnosis as a core talent. I thought of it as absolutely necessary at all times, and hilariously powerful, but given the number of prerequisites it had, that seemed appropriate to me. I only tried one build without Gnosis – a Blood Potency build – and that was only for the 5 minutes it took me to realize I'd have to farm gear to make it work. It worked hilariously well against mobs, but my damage was terrible, and players would just tear me apart. I used Evasion for awhile, until I realized that players almost never kill me with physical damage, after which I added a new style mastery in its place. I wanted Strong Magical Shields pretty badly, but I couldn't fit it in the talent slots I had available.

Anyway, the point I was making about core/auxiliary is not so much that I didn't notice the must-have abilities, but that, of the abilities I used, I never thought of any of them as secondary or unnecessary. I was always scrambling for more points and cursing the number of talent slots. As a purist, the idea of core/auxiliary irks me a bit, but I think GW2 demonstrates it as a viable and effective strategy.
26 Mar, 2011, Nich wrote in the 67th comment:
Votes: 0
Tonitrus said:
Effectively yes. If you're using floats, you can just do something like log_2 (which is what I'm planning to do), but that's probably a steeper curve than most people would care for. I'm also a fan of triangular numbers (1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28, 36, 45, 55, etc). I had a Smaug-based design once that used stat trains to raise powers. During creation, stats were chosen by importance, and assigned numbers from a list (14, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8), and each +1 above your base stat from a stat train had a triangular cost. I.e., the first +1 cost 1, the second +1 cost 2 (for a total of 3), the third cost 3 (for a total of 6), and so on. So to determine their total stat, I'd just take their base cost, then what I call the triangular root of their trains, then any other bonuses they have and add them up. I'd also refund stat train points that didn't do anything. E.g., 5 is no better than 3, so I'd just refund the 2 points to make it 3. Ranks for skills worked the same way.

If you need a rationale for that, it's usually the higher numbers of powers that break designs, so they should be more costly. And yes, I'm aware of the issue of people trying to get the most out of their points by spreading them around, but I'm not sure how much an issue it'll be. I'll probably make a penalty for excessive numbers of skills if that's a concern.

I should also add that I wouldn't have a max, just an increasingly steep point cost. If people want to pay it, more power to them.


That's really neat, and I might adopt it for my group exp system. I would still have a cap at the top end (because the way it's designed, there needs to be a plateau), and put a truly powerful skill as a capstone to reward the people who are specializing. However, due to the logarithmic nature of it, the less points you spend on specializing, the more benefit you get to everything you're not specializing in, which fixes my problem of the weak generalist. Finally, I really like it in concept, because the steepness of the curve is something I can tweak. That's one of my favorite parts about mathematical design.

Tonitrus said:
God Wars II doesn't really have classes in the traditional sense. Sure, it's true that Werewolves don't get the Shadow Infusion power, but each class has enough variety that they don't really qualify as classes in my mind. All other things being equal, if you encountered a player whose class you didn't know, who happened to be in wolf form, you wouldn't know if it was a vampire or a werewolf. If you encountered an invisible spell-caster, it could be just about any class, and the scariest Mage I encountered on GW2 didn't really even cast spells in combat, he'd just prepare beforehand and rip me apart with his weapons.



I think the classes only exist for thematic reasons. The framework for a completely classless mud is already present, if the talents are any indication. There'd probably be balance issues initially, but I think the end result would be better balance overall, since classes impose an artificial distinction.



This gets really close to something I've been thinking about specifically in relation to KaVir's posts. The concept that class based vs non classed based is a flavour decision, rather then a mechanical one (though, as we've seen, it definitely has elements of both).

The way I see it, it's like you have two ice cream parlours. One picks, from the best the ice cream industry has to offer, 20 different flavours, and sells them. If sales of one ice cream are low, they might replace it, but in general it doesn't really matter, since even if one flavour is bad (and not really bad, just less popular), there are still 19 more, and the people who don't like it are perfectly free to pick a different one.

The other sells one type of ice cream, vanilla (or even more extreme, flavorless, but vanilla works). However, they also have 20 different base flavours that can be mixed and matched at will. Is it actually a concern if the people who go to that parlour overwhelmingly order the *same* combination (because, faced with large variety, they'd rather just take something that their friends have told them is good and tweak it until they like it)? If that custom flavour is so good, might the be better off just selling that flavour? If not wanting to be known as the ice cream parlour that sells the one really good combination is a goal, how should the owner pick the ingredients so that they can be combined in the maximum number of tasty ways?

I guess Godwars 2 fits in the middle, where instead of selling vanilla, they have 5 different base flavours, plus a lot of additional flavours, and they enforce constraints on which flavours can be combined so that people don't mix incompatible flavours with each other. I really like this model, and it obviously seems to work, but I would like to start with the premise that I only have one flavour to start with. How do I structure my ingredients?

I realize that this is an area completely distinct from balance, so it might warrant a different topic entirely.
26 Mar, 2011, Rarva.Riendf wrote in the 68th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
However, over the 20 years the game has been running there have been dominant combatants from every class and it's as near to a balanced system as I've seen.

I wonder how can a healer class can match it own in a one room fight against a warrior.
It is simply not possible unless you just give them both the same skill but just with a different name. I have no problem with this, as you can just make it so a warrior can inflict damage every round, while a healer could deal the same every few rounds, but in the end it is just about having same abilities. I find this personally very boring though.
In my mind there is no real classless sytem. Classes will jsut appear spontaneously out of it, as people choosing some skills will tend to all pick the same efficient stuff, hence the cookie cutter build. Having classes just provide a way to avoid bad build to newbie. If they want another one, make it so leveling is not that important in the first place. Time should not give that much of an adantage anyway (or that could not be overcome).
26 Mar, 2011, Tyche wrote in the 69th comment:
Votes: 0
I think balance is overrated, but then I prefer role-playing games. I expect certain roles to be more "powerful" in combat than others.
26 Mar, 2011, Nich wrote in the 70th comment:
Votes: 0
Rarva.Riendf said:
I wonder how can a healer class can match it own in a one room fight against a warrior.
It is simply not possible unless you just give them both the same skill but just with a different name. I have no problem with this, as you can just make it so a warrior can inflict damage every round, while a healer could deal the same every few rounds, but in the end it is just about having same abilities. I find this personally very boring though.
In my mind there is no real classless sytem. Classes will jsut appear spontaneously out of it, as people choosing some skills will tend to all pick the same efficient stuff, hence the cookie cutter build. Having classes just provide a way to avoid bad build to newbie. If they want another one, make it so leveling is not that important in the first place. Time should not give that much of an adantage anyway (or that could not be overcome).


So your thought is that having cookie cutter builds isn't a solvable problem, it just something that happens with skill focused MUDs? I would like there to be a better answer then that, but if I'm completely wrong about this being something I can fix, I might need to look into alternatives (Or alternatively, just cease looking at it as a problem).

I don't really want to do away with levels, since I plan to use them as a way of reducing the learning curve, and a lot of the focus on the MUD will be the skills and learning to use them better (in and out of game). I want to allow "easy" respecs, easy being easier then "start a new character from scratch". Probably it will take 50-75% of the time for someone who is respec'ing to reach the same level as someone who focused on something from the outset.

Right now, my idea is to divide my skills into mutually exclusive sections, give a limited number of points to distribute, offer a really big reward if a player invests a lot of points in a section, but make sure that the low investment skills are also pretty good. That, and just in general design all my skills to be really awesome, interesting, and worth having. That is, of course, where the actual hard work starts :).
26 Mar, 2011, KaVir wrote in the 71st comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
This brings us back to the general argument…. do you want diversity of roles where players are expected to group (hence the multi- part of multi-user dungeon?), or do you want everyone to be able to solo all the content. If you want everyone to be balanced against each other, and be able to solo everything, there's an easy solution.

Get rid of classes entirely.

It wouldn't be much of a dark fantasy theme if I got rid of the vampires, werewolves, demons, etc. Nor do I think it should be necessary for players to form groups containing one of each.

But even if I did, it wouldn't change anything, as diversity of roles doesn't depend on choice of class in my mud. Any class can play a tank, or a spellcaster, or a blaster, etc.


Nich said:
This gets really close to something I've been thinking about specifically in relation to KaVir's posts. The concept that class based vs non classed based is a flavour decision, rather then a mechanical one (though, as we've seen, it definitely has elements of both).

Right, it's primarily a flavour decision. If you later decide to add races to your mud, and you give each race its own unique abilities, then you'll be in the same situation - your mud will technically be class-based.
26 Mar, 2011, Nich wrote in the 72nd comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
Right, it's primarily a flavour decision. If you later decide to add races to your mud, and you give each race its own unique abilities, then you'll be in the same situation - your mud will technically be class-based.


Ok. Ignoring flavor completely, if you took out classes, and did what-ever else you needed to do to make it work (merge skills, remove skills, add some locks), could you then balance the MUD so that you have at least as many viable builds as before? Or do the classes provide the structure that makes that happen? And how would you approach the process of balancing?

Trivially, your players would have the same builds as before, because the skills aren't changed. But you would also get the hybrid builds that may or many not be much better then the old builds. So you've identified that build, and the skill combination that makes it powerful. Do you nerf the skills (potentially ruining other builds), do you set up an exclusion to make the build impossible?
26 Mar, 2011, KaVir wrote in the 73rd comment:
Votes: 0
Nich said:
Ok. Ignoring flavor completely, if you took out classes, and did what-ever else you needed to do to make it work (merge skills, remove skills, add some locks), could you then balance the MUD so that you have at least as many viable builds as before?

Yes, as I mentioned earlier, "I'd just need to replace some of the implicit blocks with explicit ones, as some of the powers were never intended to be used together. It wouldn't take long to do, but it would pretty much kill the theme."

Nich said:
Or do the classes provide the structure that makes that happen?

No, the classes just restrict certain combinations, so that (for example) you don't get werewolves that can transform into clouds of bats, or vampires that can grow bladed tails.

Nich said:
And how would you approach the process of balancing?

Exactly the same way I do now; each character picks a few of the available powers, with some powers blocking or unlocking other powers.

Nich said:
Trivially, your players would have the same builds as before, because the skills aren't changed. But you would also get the hybrid builds that may or many not be much better then the old builds. So you've identified that build, and the skill combination that makes it powerful. Do you nerf the skills (potentially ruining other builds), do you set up an exclusion to make the build impossible?

There'd need to be some explicit blocks assigned between some of the powers that are currently only blocked implicitly (because they're assigned to different classes).

Some powers would already be covered through dependencies though - for example the demon's Venomous Tail power requires either Demon Form or Warbeast, and only applies when using those powers, so you could never get a wolfman with a giant scorpion tail.

But many other powers incorporate bonuses that were intended to be taken only once per character. For example Lupine Fortitude, Elemental Infusion, Tainted Flesh and Human Form each grant up to 20% immunity to physical damage (1% per rank for the first 20 ranks). They each do other things as well, but that 20% physical immunity is a nice bonus, and isn't intended to be taken more than once per character. You certainly wouldn't want someone taking all four powers, particularly as they could add on the Evasion talent for the final 20%.
28 Mar, 2011, Orrin wrote in the 74th comment:
Votes: 0
Rarva.Riendf said:
Quote
However, over the 20 years the game has been running there have been dominant combatants from every class and it's as near to a balanced system as I've seen.

I wonder how can a healer class can match it own in a one room fight against a warrior.

That particular game doesn't have a "healer" class.
17 Aug, 2011, AppendixG wrote in the 75th comment:
Votes: 0
Hey guys, sorry to resurrect a somewhat old thread but I just put up a blog post about a classless system that I'm working out for our MUD.

I don't want to force anyone to go to our blog, so here is the post, and how I chose to approach the problem of balancing combat without using defined classes:

Quote
One thing we havent mentioned yet is our skill system.

In designing our skill system, we wanted to afford our players as much freedom as we could. We want our players to be able to be anything they want, from traditional and familiar concepts like devout priests and sword wielding warriors to completely out there concepts like idol worshiping architects and radioactive gunslingers. The best way we could figure to do this was by creating a classless system, a system where players choose individual skills rather than a class or entire skill sets.

Of course, this comes with its own problems, primarily in balancing the range of motion that is afforded to characters in such systems. To combat this, we created a system based, in part, on collectible card games: Every skill belongs to a skillset and every skillset belongs to a model; players use skill points to select individual skills from any skillset or model.

Skillsets

Skillsets are a collection of skills united under a central theme, and every skillset contains a number of skills that total 2500 skill points. Our initial plan is to have 35 skillsets, total, at launch. A few of the skillsets that we have designed already are:

* Enslavement (control model): Focuses on making your enemies subservient, forcing them to bend to your will, and ultimately causing them to die if forced to live without you.
* Chemistry (denial model): Focuses on synthesizing various compounds and using them to afflict and desensitize enemies, culminating in the tailoring of a compound that eats the enemy from the inside out.
* Transcendentalism (resilience model): Focuses on boosting mental ability and transforming physical damage into mental damage.
* Butchery (trauma model): Focuses on using small bladed weapons like cleavers, hatchets and straight razors to cause bleeding damage and damage to the extremities, with the ultimate goal of completely eviscerating their victim.
* Triage (vigor model): Focuses on quick and dirty battlefield solutions to afflictions and damage, using things like maggots to clean wounds and stop excessive bleeding.

Models

Models are a collection of skillsets united by a few core mechanical concepts. The five models are:

* Control: Focus on crowd control, forcing enemies to do things and hindering
* Denial: Focus on dealing out afflictions and limiting the number of decisions enemies can make
* Resilience: Focus on preventing damage, raising armor values and avoiding attacks
* Trauma: Focus on dealing raw health damage and damage to the limbs of enemies
* Vigor: Focus on healing health and afflictions and on regenerating lost resources

Mechanics

How this all works together is where the system gets interesting. If we allowed players to take any skill, from any skillset or model without penalty we would quickly run into balance issues. To resolve this, every skill has a base balance cost and a base resource cost.

The base balance cost of a skill is a fairly high value, somewhere around 6 to 8 seconds on average. The balance cost of a skill, for a particular user, is modified by the number of skill points that they have invested into that skills model.

For example, lets say a player has spent 400 skill points to take the skill Indoctrinate from the Hieromancy skillset, which is in the control model. Lets also say the player has spent no other points on control model skills. This means that the base balance cost for the player to use the Indoctrinate skill will hardly be modified at all. In this instance, using the skill would take around 7 seconds of balance.

Now, lets say another player takes the same skill, however, they have spent an additional 3500 points on control model skills. In their case, the base balance cost of using Indoctrinate would be highly reduced, resulting in the skill taking roughly 3.5 to 4s of balance.

The system works similarly for skillsets, except instead of reducing the base balance, it reduces the base cost, whether that cost be mind, health, psyche, potential, commodities or anything. Therefore, using a skill when you have taken an additional number of skills from its skillset results in those skills costing less to use.

Players, in creating their builds, must essentially balance the benefits of having a lot of different types of skills with the cost of using those skills. If they spend too wildly, they may find themselves ineffective because they are too slow, or because their skills expend too many resources.

Ultimately, in this way, players are allowed to take any skills they choose but are strongly and mechanically encouraged to create a thematic and unified build. We plan to balance the system itself around providing equal benefits to keeping your build consistent and within a few skillsets, while also allowing for Swiss army-type players who like to spread their points around many skillsets, ensuring they have an answer to every situation that may arise.


And, for anyone who wants to check out more about our project, check out our blog!
18 Aug, 2011, Nich wrote in the 76th comment:
Votes: 0
The thread was kind of old, but still on the front page, so I don't think it's too terrible to bring it back.

Your skill system is interesting. Something that you didn't mention in the post, but I can presume from your post, is that skills in the skillset aren't hierarchic. That is to say, if you want to learn a skill in Enslavement, you don't need to know any others in enslavement.

This, I think, is vital for your system, and something I kind of overlooked. If you included a hierarchy (in addition to your system), you wouldn't just deincentivise generality, you would eliminate it almost completely. Someone who isn't specializing would not only lose out on the "best" skills in the set (at the top), but the ones they did pick up would be worse then the specialist's, too. At least the way you have it set up, there's the potential for a certain chemistry skill to be very useful to enslavement, even if it doesn't benefit from the synergies.

It seems like your system would encourage picking few skillsets, mostly in the same model. I'm not designing your game, obviously, but I would personally prefer Models to be assigned at the skill level, rather then the skillset level. Just as an example, even if most of the Chemistry skills are denial, it would be neat if there were one or two that aided the control model instead, or additionally. That way builds won't be so focused on certain sets of Skillsets. That's just my preference, though.
18 Aug, 2011, quixadhal wrote in the 77th comment:
Votes: 0
Tiers are good. I'd take it a step further and make mutually exclusive tiers that overlap in what skills are available.

Pulling out my old favorite mage-guild model…. let's say you have a low level mage guild that will train pretty much anyone in basic magical spells. You join and decide you like finger-waggling, so you progress and learn all they have to teach you. At that point, you need to find a higher tier guild to teach you more advanced (and specialized) abilities. You decide to join Joe's fire mage guild. You learn all kinds of spiffy ways to set things on fire, and Joe teaches you a couple of his "signature" spells that folks in other fire guilds don't know. When you advance to the next tier up, Joe can recommend you to Billy's uber fire guild, or Fred's uber fire guild, or you can try to find one on your own.

The things of interest here are…. Joe's fire guild teaches stuff that Bob's fire guild doesn't, and visa-versa. If you want to join Billy's or Fred's guild, you may HAVE to have studied under Joe to join. In fact, it may be that Fred hates Bob, and won't accept students that trained under Bob at all.

Why is this good? Players get to learn spells that other players can't learn. This is neat and prevents cookie-cutter builds. It's extra-neat in PvP since you can't just *know* what spells somebody might bring against you… if they found a guild you didn't even know existed, they have a few surprises to bring to the table.

Of course, it is a bit more work. You have to mesh the multiple guilds into your world lore. You have extra spells to balance, as you don't want people to just automatically join Fred's guild because his signature spell is .001% better than anyone else's.
18 Aug, 2011, Nich wrote in the 78th comment:
Votes: 0
Quixadhal, you might want to re-read, since I was arguing against tiers in this case. That's neither here nor there, however.

Your point on the secret guilds is interesting, but I'm curious how you would keep a certain guild secret for any amount of time? Even in MUD's with a strong OOC policy, it's hard to keep any information known to someone secret for long.

The idea of exclusionary skills (Bob's guild vs Joe's guild) is neat too, but like you pointed out, you have to make really sure that one guild's spells can't be shown to be objectively better then the other's. That's a problem I've yet to tackle (still playing around with engine issues), and would warrant a topic on it's own.
19 Aug, 2011, AppendixG wrote in the 79th comment:
Votes: 0
Nich said:
This, I think, is vital for your system, and something I kind of overlooked. If you included a hierarchy (in addition to your system), you wouldn't just deincentivise generality, you would eliminate it almost completely.


Yeah, we're not planning on using any sort of hierarchy system at all. You can take any skills you want, from any skillsets you want and ignore everything else.

We're striving really hard to balance things, in regards to skillpoint cost and just general power. Players will have, roughly, 7500 'skillpoints' total to spend on skills for their 'class' skills, so we're hoping there are tough decisions in regards to what to take and what not to take. Sort of like deckbuilding in a game like Magic: The Gathering, where 60 cards is the optimal deck size, so you need to make some tough decisions on what gets the job done and what needs to be cut.

For example, two skills may be very similar, but one may have a much longer balance or a much higher cost. In that case, the cheap or short balance skill would have a relatively high skillpoint cost and the inexpensive or long balance skill would have a lower cost.

In regards to guilds, it's something we haven't tackled yet. We've been approaching everything from a sandbox perspective, though, so our thought is that we will let players create their own guilds.

Right now, players dig out and build their own cities with their own economies, buildings, products and governments. It's likely that what we'll do is allow them to build a 'guild hall' building and then define a guild loosely by skillpoint distribution.

For example, a "Road Priest" guild may require its members to spend 600 points in Reverence, 300 points in Gunslinging and 300 points in Eschatology. Kind of another way to encourage thematic builds without forcing them on the player. To continue the CCG analogy, it's kind of like forming a team of players who play all Red Burn decks, or who all use a certain combination of elves in their decks.

I do love the idea of guild-unique skills, but I fear that I'd get carried away with it and not be able to keep up with demand or produce quality/balanced skills at a rate that kept the players happy. If players are allowed to form their own guilds, it could potentially be a nightmare creating unique skills for every little 2-3 man guild out there just so that each one has its own identity.
20 Aug, 2011, quixadhal wrote in the 80th comment:
Votes: 0
Nich said:
Your point on the secret guilds is interesting, but I'm curious how you would keep a certain guild secret for any amount of time? Even in MUD's with a strong OOC policy, it's hard to keep any information known to someone secret for long.


I wasn't suggesting they be "secret" as in you can join them once you know about them, so much as "exclusive". That is, if you walk into Fred's advanced fire mage guild and he sees that you belong to Bob's guild, he will simply refuse to talk to you. If you walk into Fred's guild without an introduction from Joe (IE: you belong to Joe's guild), he might teach you or he might require you prove you're good enough to teach via some quests.
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