11 Nov, 2009, Erok wrote in the 1st comment:
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Playing Guild Wars a couple of years back, and more recently Demigod and League of Legends, I was wondering what people thought of having a limited number abilities available to a player at any one time, rather than the entire pool of acquired abilities?

For example, let's say I've acquired some heal spells, some damage spells, and some melee skills. Before I leave the safe zone I'm in for an adjacent kill zone, I need to select a handful of spells/skills that I will take with me and use (basically populate a limited number of slots from the larger pool).

I guess you could say that abilities are similar to items, in that you must choose which to equip and which to leave in your inventory. One could even assign a weight to each ability, such that the player couldn't just always take the best ones, but would instead be forced to take a combination of weaker and stronger abilities in order to stay within an upper bound on the total weight.

I like the idea myself because it brings in the concept of builds, and should encourage team play through the use of complimentary builds.
11 Nov, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 2nd comment:
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Erok said:
Playing Guild Wars a couple of years back, and more recently Demigod and League of Legends, I was wondering what people thought of having a limited number abilities available to a player at any one time, rather than the entire pool of acquired abilities?

That's the approach I use for talents (boolean abilities) and class powers (ranked abilities), although players can choose from the full pool. I also have knowledges which need to be earned and "equipped" (for example a demon kills creatures in hell to learn 'warps', which can then be applied to different parts of their body - but each body part can only have one warp at a time). It works pretty well IMO, although people do have a tendancy to rebuild for specific opponents.
11 Nov, 2009, Orrin wrote in the 3rd comment:
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It can also be a nice money sink if you make changing build have some cost associated with it. I think it's a good system overall and I'll probably use something similar in our next game.
11 Nov, 2009, Hades_Kane wrote in the 4th comment:
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Not all together different from some "job" systems I've seen, usually modeled after either Final Fantasy 5 or Final Fantasy Tactics.
11 Nov, 2009, Tyche wrote in the 5th comment:
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The old D&D spell memorization system is similar.
I was never fond of it.
11 Nov, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 6th comment:
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Tyche said:
The old D&D spell memorization system is similar.

Except that those spells are one-shot. This is more like the D&D 3.5 Sorcerer class, or (as Erok pointed out) rearranging your equipment.

My talent and power systems were heavily inspired by the Diablo2 skill webs, but the one thing I never liked about them was that you could permanently screw up your character if you made bad choices. I used a third party tool to rearrange my Diablo2 characters (as the only other option was to restart), and figured it would be a good idea to have the same option in the mud while the abilities were still being tested and refined - but it proved so popular that I decided to keep it.

The problem with giving players choices is that many of them will make bad ones, and the more choices there are the worse the situation will become. If those choice are permanent, players will need to restart to correct their mistakes - which gives rise to similar player retention problems as permadeath.
12 Nov, 2009, Cratylus wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
Hades_Kane said:
Not all together different from some "job" systems I've seen, usually modeled after either Final Fantasy 5 or Final Fantasy Tactics.


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