16 Oct, 2012, Qqwy wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
Hello there, everyone.

I'm thinking a lot about building a MUD lately. The last week I've mainly been thinking about what I would want to do different than MUDs do now.

One of the biggest ideas that I had was to drop the Class system as it is used in pretty much every MUD.It always felt to me that it restricts the game too much. Of course, restricting is the reason while we have Classes: Forcing players to work together (Because one can fight and one can heal. Or one can harvest and one can craft). However, I found it too restrictive. What if I would like to roleplay as a Monk who is also a Thief? Or a Mage who likes, say, to become a Merchant now and then?
So,instead of each Class have one or two sets of special abilities they can learn, everybody can learn all skills they want. Of course, this system also has its restrictions, but they are different.

Basically they can raise the level in a certain ability by using that ability a lot. Abilities have levels that take more experience exponentially(i.e. twice as much as the previous level).Many skills are dependent on knowing other skills already, before being able to be learned.

This way, players can decide if they want to master in one or two specific groups of skills, or learn many different things, but only partially.

Abilities also include the so-called 'attributes' or sometimes called 'mini-skills' like Health, Stamina, Agility.

For all Abilities the following is true: Using them gives you experience in them. Gaining levels in them makes that certain ability stronger/lower cooldown time/etc. and also possibly opens up another ability that is related to the last one.

Of course other ways of learning certain abilities might also be available. Like learning Herbology from a book, which might go faster than actually identifying and plucking herbs in the field.


Also, another note. These abilities are for everything in the game, and not only combat-based. Players might decide to go for Fishing and Crafting instead and don't need to fight at all. Other than many MUDS, where combat is the only (viable) way to earn levels, your level here will simply be determined by how many experience you've gathered in all your skills combined.



Now, my burning question to all of you: Will this work? :smirk:
17 Oct, 2012, arendjr wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
Hi there, I've had similar ideas myself and definitely think it can work. However I haven't advanced far enough to tell you whether it will actually work in practice, it's just my gut feeling saying it can :)

Btw, I'm in a very similar situation myself right now… thinking about starting a MUD, working out concepts, storylines and what not (in addition to my main skill which is building an engine). If you want to exchange ideas or possibly join forces just send me a private message…

Cheers!
Arend jr.
17 Oct, 2012, KaVir wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
Qqwy said:
One of the biggest ideas that I had was to drop the Class system as it is used in pretty much every MUD.It always felt to me that it restricts the game too much. Of course, restricting is the reason while we have Classes: Forcing players to work together (Because one can fight and one can heal. Or one can harvest and one can craft).

I'd say the main advantage of classes is that they provide a simplified framework for aggregating groups of abilities (easier to design, and easier for the players to understand). If you just want to force players to work together, you don't need strict classes, you just need to encourage specialised roles using skill trees/webs or whatever.

My mud has six classes, but they're all good at solo play, and each cover a wide range of different roles. I mostly use them for thematic reasons.

Qqwy said:
However, I found it too restrictive. What if I would like to roleplay as a Monk who is also a Thief? Or a Mage who likes, say, to become a Merchant now and then?

It depends very much on what your classes represent. The classes in my mud represent supernatural classifications - vampire, werewolf, mage, demon, dragon and titan - and their abilities reflect the capabilities of those classes.

I guess someone might want to play a dragon who can shapechange into a wolf, or a thirty-foot tall fire-breathing vampire…but that wouldn't really fit the theme. Where exceptions do fit (such as dracoliches, wendigos, angels, etc) I prefer to handle them explicitly as special subclasses, rather than letting people combine whatever supernatural abilities they like.

There's no real right or wrong solution here, it really depends on your design goals, but most muds fall somewhere between the two conceptual extremes of "class-based" and "classless". Check out this thread for a more lengthy discussion on the subject.

Qqwy said:
Basically they can raise the level in a certain ability by using that ability a lot.

A common problem faced by muds using that sort of system is players setting up triggers to spam their skills over and over. I've seen a variety of solutions (ranging from the ban hammer, to ignoring it, to introducing various hardcoded restrictions), but none of them seem to work particularly well.
17 Oct, 2012, Qqwy wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
Qqwy said:
One of the biggest ideas that I had was to drop the Class system as it is used in pretty much every MUD.It always felt to me that it restricts the game too much. Of course, restricting is the reason while we have Classes: Forcing players to work together (Because one can fight and one can heal. Or one can harvest and one can craft).

I'd say the main advantage of classes is that they provide a simplified framework for aggregating groups of abilities (easier to design, and easier for the players to understand). If you just want to force players to work together, you don't need strict classes, you just need to encourage specialised roles using skill trees/webs or whatever.
In fact, that's what I meant: if you want to force players to work together, you need to have skill sets that are restricted in some way.Classes are an easy way of doing that, and as such commonly used, but of course that's only one way of restricting.

Quote
My mud has six classes, but they're all good at solo play, and each cover a wide range of different roles. I mostly use them for thematic reasons.

Qqwy said:
However, I found it too restrictive. What if I would like to roleplay as a Monk who is also a Thief? Or a Mage who likes, say, to become a Merchant now and then?

It depends very much on what your classes represent. The classes in my mud represent supernatural classifications - vampire, werewolf, mage, demon, dragon and titan - and their abilities reflect the capabilities of those classes.

I guess someone might want to play a dragon who can shapechange into a wolf, or a thirty-foot tall fire-breathing vampire…but that wouldn't really fit the theme. Where exceptions do fit (such as dracoliches, wendigos, angels, etc) I prefer to handle them explicitly as special subclasses, rather than letting people combine whatever supernatural abilities they like.
If the classes in your game are the same as your races, this seems indeed the best solution to fix it.I agree with you and think that abilities should be 'limited' by one's physical traits: A being without wings shouldn't be allowed to learn to fly. But this is something different than one person both learning, say, Fishing and Magic. That he chose to be a Mage shouldn't mean he won't be allowed to learn some Fishing skills.

Quote
There's no real right or wrong solution here, it really depends on your design goals, but most muds fall somewhere between the two conceptual extremes of "class-based" and "classless". Check out this thread for a more lengthy discussion on the subject.

Thanks for pointing me to that topic. I didn't see it before, and it indeed looks like an interesting discussion.
Qqwy said:
Basically they can raise the level in a certain ability by using that ability a lot.

A common problem faced by muds using that sort of system is players setting up triggers to spam their skills over and over. I've seen a variety of solutions (ranging from the ban hammer, to ignoring it, to introducing various hardcoded restrictions), but none of them seem to work particularly well.

Hmm… I didn't think of that, but you're right. I think that most skills will have a certain cooldown time, to make triggering multiple times a second impossible. Also, (most) skills will probably use up some of your energy as well as 'depleting' the resources you're practicing your skill on. When there are no monsters in one area anymore, it's hard to kill them. Same for gathering flowers you've already picked up.

Still, this is not a full solution for this problem. Thanks for noting this.


@arendjr: Gut feelings are the best :grinning: .
17 Oct, 2012, KaVir wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
Qqwy said:
If the classes in your game are the same as your races, this seems indeed the best solution to fix it.I agree with you and think that abilities should be 'limited' by one's physical traits: A being without wings shouldn't be allowed to learn to fly. But this is something different than one person both learning, say, Fishing and Magic. That he chose to be a Mage shouldn't mean he won't be allowed to learn some Fishing skills.

Such a difference is rather subjective, and depends on theme rather than game design. In a setting where magic is genetic rather than simply learned, for example, those born without the innate talent (or sufficient faith, elf blood, midi-chlorians, etc) may never be able to learn it.

Similarly, while a person without wings may not be able to learn how to fly (unless they have other magical or technological means), the same argument could be extended to any skill. Perhaps a sentient wolf can catch fish, but certainly not with a fishing rod - and other races may not be able to catch fish at all.

Now you might decide that you want some skills to be available to every character, while others may have very specific limitations, but from a game design perspective they don't need to have separate implementations unless their mechanics are supposed to work very differently.

You may also find this thread of interest.

Qqwy said:
I think that most skills will have a certain cooldown time, to make triggering multiple times a second impossible.

Sadly such a restriction will just encourage botting, as a timed trigger will prove more effective than manually spamming the commands.

Qqwy said:
Also, (most) skills will probably use up some of your energy as well as 'depleting' the resources you're practicing your skill on. When there are no monsters in one area anymore, it's hard to kill them. Same for gathering flowers you've already picked up.

This will also encourage botting, as there'll be a strong incentive to clear the area as fast as possible (before someone else beats you to it).
17 Oct, 2012, quixadhal wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
The biggest problem with a free-form skill-based game is that they're incredibly difficult (tedius) to balance in such a way to prevent min/max players to keep picking a "flavor of the month" skill set. That's why many games stick to a class paradigm, not through any lack of imagination.

Basically, once you start organizing and grouping skills into trees to avoid everyone learning every skill, or having balance nightmares, you've re-invented classes anyways. Why not just present things as classes but don't make it a once-in-a-lifetime choice? There's no reason a mage can't also learn how to wield a greatsword, however he won't be as good a mage as one who devotes ALL his time and energy into it, nor will he be as good a swordsman as someone who specializes in only that.

The way I've always envisioned a class system is to have the player enter the game as a generic adventurer, with all the common skills every player expects to have. As they explore the world, they find guilds to join which will teach them sets of skills. Some guilds are highly specialized and have pre-requisites AND disqualifying conditions. Joe's Fire Mage guild will likely require you already be a mage, and that you NOT belong to another specialist mage guild (which includes both Bob's Frost Mage guild, and Ted's Fire Mage guild – a competitor). Now, perhaps Joe's guild is mid-level, and you can still belong to a fighter guild too, but if you advance to John's Halfling BBQ specialty guild, you have to abandon your fighter status because you can't devote the time to both super-advanced fire magic AND keeping your fighting skills honed.

As for botting… you can try to work out a system to prevent it, but to be successful you'll step on people's play styles. For example, requiring that you change up skills and don't spam just a few can work, but it also means players who ENJOY walking into a fight and spamming fireball are penalized as if they were botting.

The best compromise I can think of is to (a) have diminishing returns for killing the same creatures in a row, but design your areas very carefully so even in the orc caves, there are plenty of non-orcs to kill if you are not standing in the same room waiting on respawns, and (b) make skill use experience a special bonus, which is also on a diminishing return curve, both from repeated use AND based on current skill level. So, perhaps you can train up fireball from 20% to 50% just by using it, but at some point you have to train or do something else to get better.
18 Oct, 2012, Nathan wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:

The way I've always envisioned a class system is to have the player enter the game as a generic adventurer, with all the common skills every player expects to have. As they explore the world, they find guilds to join which will teach them sets of skills. Some guilds are highly specialized and have pre-requisites AND disqualifying conditions. Joe's Fire Mage guild will likely require you already be a mage, and that you NOT belong to another specialist mage guild (which includes both Bob's Frost Mage guild, and Ted's Fire Mage guild – a competitor). Now, perhaps Joe's guild is mid-level, and you can still belong to a fighter guild too, but if you advance to John's Halfling BBQ specialty guild, you have to abandon your fighter status because you can't devote the time to both super-advanced fire magic AND keeping your fighting skills honed.


Sounds reasonable, multi-classing anyone?

I feel like you need to have a limit on what skills you can train (at least at one time), because no one will care if you are good at something if everyone is good at it. There's no way to distinguish yourself from any other player. It makes no sense for a player with crafting skills to also be good with everything else.

Maybe it could be handled with some kind of skill decay? That would have to be handled carefully, though, since it would undermine the game if it were based on real world time – i.e. RL would be the bane of skill improvement. I commented on another topic over here http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=topi... on the topic of professions (kinda like skills). If skills that weren't used decayed based on game time spent doing something else, i.e. the more time you spend training magic, etc the more cumulative time that counts against your fighting skills. Unfortunately you then have to deal with how to get it back too. In the comment above I was proposing, if I recall correctly, a principle that applied here would mean that you'd have a set of skills that you were "working" on at any give time and you'd only be able to improve those without switching. If you're practicing fighting, magical prowess goes down?

I guess ultimately you need a notion for whether your game permits skill loss. If not, does it have an upper limit? Then there's the mechanics of how skills are acquired. Skyrim has a pretty nifty system where skill is acquired by doing something and it's easy to see how that works because of the graphics. It's a good notion and keeps you from doing some kind of skill acquisition to badass and then you're set for life. However, it also doesn't quite force you into the 5 skill points per level and that is it paradigm that means you have to select super carefully to avoid a desire for a skill external to your class, penalizing you later for not focusing on what benefits you the most.

Classes are, in my mind, a handy way to distinguish basic sets of choices so that players don't have to manually combine options to find the "best" one or just the one they want. It says this is what you are and then allows you to improve on that. Want to do magic, your a mage, less physical prowess is simply your lot in life on account of studying so much.

Maybe a more interesting mechanic would be to set strength defaults, and just allow actions and choices to increase or decrease it? E.g. everyone starts out with 10-12 strength (or whatever the average is) and then their actions affect it. So, fighters would gain strength through fighting and practicing those skills, whereas mages would initially stay the same, but start to lose strength if they didn't engage in fighting or some other physical thing for some portion of the time. Don't prevent mages for using swords or penalize them, but a strength of, say, 7 would result in sub-par fighting.
20 Oct, 2012, LeMonseural wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
I had been doing some thinking about something similar -I wanted to do a Talent tree (Offensive/Defensive/Utility) and to get any real benefit from any of them would be to go deep into the tree. Everyone would start out with the same basic abilities and you would have the chance to evolve after so many levels. For example your first evolution you would have a choice of growing claws (More Attack Damage), Exoskeleton (Increasing Defense/Resistance), Wings (Increasing Speed and allowing you to fly), and Divine Mind (More Magical Power).

Now on the next evolution 1 option will be able to be enhanced or you make pick another from the previous set - Let's say you went with Exoskeleton in the previous evolution, new choices could be: Growing Claws, Spiked Shell (Increases defense/resistance and returns damage when attacked), Wings, and Divine Mind.

And with evolutions you will gain access to new skills, so to unlock the bone spike skill you would need to evolve your exoskeleton into a Spiked Shell. This way I don't think you could really create a min/max type character, but rather have each player have a specific role in the group.

So it's possible you could specialize in the defensive talent tree and play the role of a tank, or spread out the points in both offensive and defensive and play somewhat of an offtank - As mentioned before you would have to go deep in the trees to get any real benefit from them.

What do you all think?

Also I was looking at 5-7 major evolutions and about 4-8 minor evolutions (Minor would include things like skin color, hair, etc..)
20 Oct, 2012, quixadhal wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
To me, that sounds like a tiered class system where you just don't want to call it a class sytem. :)

In my particular vision, there are benefits from having real, in-game, organizations that you join and belong to as you gain your skills. If you have actual guilds doing the skill training, those guilds can have allies, and they can have rivals, and they can have enemies. When you join a guild, you join in the politics they practice, and that can really drive storylines.

Perhaps the ONLY benefit text games retain over graphical games is depth of immersion, so for me, I think replacing classes with equivalent skill trees does nothing useful for the players. Either they'll follow the min/maxers and you'll end up with cookie-cutter builds that might as well be called classes, or they'll be confused at why they aren't doing as well as others around them. You also miss out on all the story elements that can be pinned to class membership.

Finally, it makes it harder to balance skills. If you have classes, and you keep skills/spells/etc unique to each class, you can balance the classes against each other (or against the role they play in a group). If you have skill trees, now you have to also look at how a tweak to "flame blade" will affect every role, since magic-heavy builds will use it, but so will some melee-fighter builds.

At the heart of the game mechanics, every player has three roles they can play. One role is solo… how good are they at killing your NPC's (in general), and how long does it take them to get from point A to point B. Some games try to balance so everyone can solo everything, others choose to make life rough in fair allotments (mages can breeze by some things, fighters can others). Another role is PvP… how good are the classes balanced against one another? If you have PvP, you probably don't want any class to be an "I win" button. Finally, there is their role in a group. How well does a fire mage of Fred fill the role of ranged DPS? How about healing? Can they tank at all? Crowd control?

IMHO, classes make that juggling act much simpler. Sure, you can still have cases where some guy joins Dave's axe wielding maniac guild AND Fred Fire guild, and the combo of some axe skill + some fire mage skill is over-powered… but at least if you tie the skills to guilds, you can tweak them without affecting nearly as many people. Touching Fred's spell won't affect the OTHER fire mage guilds.
20 Oct, 2012, LeMonseural wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
Yeah I agree with you, after so many years of playing MUDs I'm just looking for a different look/feel from the basic class/skill set. Also I was thinking about something similar to a game I've been playing which in turn you would call them classes. Referring to games like League of Legends (Set Passive & 4-5 Skills) think it'd be somewhat cool coming up with various/unique classes
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