A polearm is a traditional 2 handed weapon like a halberd or pike, meant to be used with both hands.

The phalanx's shield wall is the only thing that made such a long spear viable, and even then mainly in defense. The moment that shield wall is significantly breached, you can kiss that phalanx goodbye. It was a very rigid formation, and extremely vulnerable at the flanks. The Spartans in 300 were hoplites. Spear, large round shield, and a sword for real fighting.

Look up the origins of the word "Marathon" and you'll find one of the most pivotal battles in Greek history won by the defensive strength of the phalanx.

Romans legionaries later used pilum, throwing spears with a soft iron core. Basically, the old world hollow-point because it would twist and bend very easily. This had the side effect of making the weapon useless once used properly. They also used hasta, the short thrusting spears you'd see the Legions using in Gladiator.


So, in short… history says that longer weapons (that would classify as a polearm) and matched with a shield are for defensive purposes and eventually became obsolete due to more diverse tactics and units being deployed.

/end greek/roman history lesson

You appear to be building from the bottom up, tricky to do and not get lost in the sea of numbers. :)

Looking from the top down, how do you envision your players actually playing the game? Will they select skills as they go, totally as they like? Will they have to join various guilds/societies that teach certain sets of skills? Can they belong to more than one such organization? Can they belong to any combination, or do some guilds compete against each other? For each type of skill tree, is there only a single right choice? By that, I mean… is a fire mage, a fire mage? Or might the Pacific Rim Fire Magi have a different set of skills or spells than the East Coast Fire Magi?

If you know how you want all that to play out, you'll have a better idea how you want to form your skill system to accomodate it.

No, not all polearms are used that way. Spear and shield is a classic combination in mythology. And one of the most iconic fantasy figures, the mounted knight in shining armour, is certainly capable of using both a lance and shield at the same time when slaying dragons.

Arguments about the historical viability of certain weapons is rather straying from the point of this thread. If the idea is to create a fun game with balanced abilities, then I would look towards fiction for inspiration rather than historical accounts.

But if you're dead set on historical accuracy, then simply change the skills so that players are limited to options you do feel are fairly balanced against each other. If you think polearms suck, then exclude them from the core skill set.

This is definitely true. I'm a coder by nature, who's just putting on the designer hat, so if the things I say look like algorithms, they likely are exactly how I intend to express the idea in code.

How I want players to gain skills is something I'm waffling on. In my ideal world, all skills (that the player is strong enough/educated enough to use, by the experience system) are available to every player, and they decide, by using those skills more often, which skills they want to be able to use better.

For spells in particular, ideally I would have *lots* of different spells. The spells would have arcane (in the literal definition) commands that need to be inputted to cast the spell, and these won't be freely given. I picture the old, mouldy spell book at the bottom of the trapped tomb type of deal. Of course, once the player knows the commands, they can macro them to whatever they want, but the barrier of knowledge is there. The part that I'm waffling on is, do I restrict the casting of a spell to if the player has actually read the book? Or can the player typing random gibberish accidentally rediscover a spell from the tomb without actually navigating past the traps?

In the first case, I can make each book readable once. The books can become an object of currency, where I can restrict access to the best spells by putting them behind multi layered death machines. Players can use their wits to plumb the depths of the tomb, and come out with a unique spell only they can cast. I think that that could be a fun mmo mechanic.

On the other hand, I do enjoy the thought of the social aspect of spell sharing. You discover a spell, so you tell your friend, who tells their friend, etc. I like the idea that spells can have popularity waves, and fade into obscurity. In that case, my idea would be to make the tombs MUCH harder to overcome, since only the first person to overcome the tomb get the reward (and probably much fame). I would couple this with setting up the spells in such a way that they can be accidentally discovered (give them syntax), so that there are other means other then death-risking to learn spells. However, I'm afraid that this won't be very fun for new players, since after a while, a lot (if not all) the good spells will be discovered, the new player will get handed them as they walk in the door, and they won't (for a little while) have the power or will to attempt to track down the last couple. I'm pretty much consigning myself to designing spells forever in this case, since players will discover all the spells I have, and get bored.

In the first case, the spells don't need to be excellent. People have shown that it doesn't matter if your spell only has a visual difference, as long as it's unique to them. In the second case, I need lots and lots of very good spells, so that even if the players have access to them all, they can't try them all. There also needs to be a solid, underlying reason to get new spells (in the first case, it would be to be able to get past new traps in new tombs).

I'm also troubled by the idea of designing content that only a couple people can experience before it expires :P.

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 deliberately selected three skill groups for my example that didn't have any crossover, because it makes them easier to balance - once again, these are the core skills, it's the weaker auxiliary skills that would provide synergy between different abilities.

You can provide five very different weapon specialties, then run them through a simulator for a few hundred thousand mock battles until you feel they're fairly well balanced. Do the same for the five styles and five protective skills, and you should have three groups of core skills that are all viable choices. This part, at least, is certainly achievable.

It does get more tricky when you get to the auxiliary skills though. They may be weaker than the core skills, and therefore have less impact on gameplay, but if you're not careful their synergy bonuses can make certain combinations of core skill more effective than others.

However I've still found this approach very effective, I've used it for balancing tabletop roleplaying games and found it made the process much easier. I would definitely use it for a mud if I were ever to develop another.

Actually, I think this is worth discussing (though perhaps in a separate thread, and discussion of historical accuracy of spear/shield builds aside…).

I think claims of 125 unique, balanced builds are always going to be overstated. In Kavir's system, it's much more likely to generate precisely the number of builds as the magnitude of one or two slots. If you're working hard to make sure that all your weapons skills are unique, but balanced against each other, your players are going to pick those, and then pick the best of everything else such that it makes those better. This isn't a bad thing. If you can get 10 balanced builds out of 125 options, then I think you're certainly doing something right. The problem is that the system doesn't inherently make 10 balanced builds (let alone 125). Even if the sword is equal to the pike, the sword and shield (Which is the best combination that the sword has) might be strictly worse to the pike and +piercing damage (from a design stand point, not historically!!), so even if the player wants to use a sword, they might be drawn to the pike for the synergy with +piercing.

There's probably no magic bullet for this (if there is, please, let me know, so I can effortlessly design good, unique and balanced things! :P). As far as design methodologies go, I've seen two options:

-Design lots of skills with no eye for balance. Wait for dominant strategies to emerge. Rank them, and then buff the lesser strategies to be equal to the dominant one / nerf the dominant strategy. Repeat until you have the desired number of viable strategies.
- Design a small, focused set of strategies, attempting at all turns to make them balanced as possible before release. After release, keep an eye on them to see if you're achieving the goal, and nerf/buff appropriately.

Are there others I'm missing?

Thus my comment in the previous post, "It does get more tricky when you get to the auxiliary skills though. They may be weaker than the core skills, and therefore have less impact on gameplay, but if you're not careful their synergy bonuses can make certain combinations of core skill more effective than others."

However if the core skills are initially balanced against each other, it makes it easier to build up from there. You don't need to start thinking in terms of "Pikes are weaker than swords, so that Piercing skill will need to be stronger than Slashing to compensate - but wait, what impact will that have on axes, which are even weaker than pikes?". If you know that pikes, swords and axes are reasonable well-balanced against each other, it makes it easier to design additional skills.

You can introduce the auxiliary skills in groups as well. Allow players to pick Piercing, Slashing or Crushing.


There isn't, but over the years I've found it's a lot easier to keep a growing system balanced if it starts out balanced. And if the core skills are noticably stronger than the auxiliary skills, it makes them the baseline for all character concepts, and also reduces the impact of minor imbalances among auxiliary skills.

My approach has been to ignore combinations altogether; they quickly get out of hand. I try to think of balance only in terms of effects. I don't care what bizarre configuration let someone get level 134 invisibility, I only care what the value of that invisibility is. To that end, I think of each effect as having a point cost, and try to balance off of that. X damage is worth Y points, and so on. When I get around to writing my skill system, I'm going to store skill ranks as only the points that go into them, and calculate the effectiveness of the skill by the point value of each effect, which can be adjusted as necessary. I'll be using a logarithmic scale, so skill combinations that result in obscenely high numbers won't break the system, and become less valuable than they would in a linear system.

That's the only way I can think of to have skill synergy without it becoming a balance nightmare.

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.

Anyway, with a vaguely balanced skill system, you shouldn't end up with cookie cutter builds. On God Wars II, for example, even characters with the same basic build concept can be quite different.

I think this is where the people who object to your idea are getting stuck, because most game treat "auxiliary skill's synergy bonuses making combinations of core skills more effective" as a primary feature. However….



… This is very true. Unfortunately, it does demand that on the outset you decide that "There will be X different melee builds, Y different magic builds, Z different thiefy builds", because you need to make that many core skills for each, in order to balance them. Also, auxiliary skills can't be very important (by design), otherwise they *will* screw up your balance. This isn't a bad way to approach it. On the contrary, it's probably one of the best, since you almost guarantee that you have X+Y+Z balanced builds, and if not, it should be pretty obvious which combination of aux skills broke your balance. But there won't be much difference between sword and shield player a and sword and shield player b, because to be a sword and shield player, they had to pick the sword and shield core skills, and the aux skills don't make much difference anyways.

Actually, thinking about it, there's (at least :)) two ways to make aux skills mean something. Either a combination of aux skills make S+S build a better then S+S build b (which is bad, since our goal is balance), or a combination of aux skills makes S+S build a play fundamentally differently then S+S build b. But this last is what the core skills are meant to do. It might not be worthwhile to try and make the aux skills really meaningful, since if they do the former they're broken, and if they do the latter they're really just core skills pretending. Aux skills should be like armor color. Nice to be able to choose, but not really meaningful.

I was going to say something to the effect of "If you predesign all your core skills to have a set of fixed (but balanced) combinations, and aux skills don't really make a difference in balance, then you've accidentally just reverse engineered a class system", but that gets dangerously close to going back and defining what a class based system is and a skill based system is. I don't want to get into that debate, but I'm starting to feel like to balance a skill based system, the best way is to impose classes on it and then balance the classes, or scrap the skill system and try to emulate the best parts of it in a class system. Or to not have the skills mean anything. All of those feel kind of like shaky compromises.





Neat idea. I'll give it some thought to see if it can be applied to my particular case. 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.


I would challenge you to find me a MUD where you couldn't classify skills like that. I think the key is to maximize disagreement between different player's lists. Make it a "one man's trash is another man's treasure", type thing.

* edit: I should qualify my original statement. I didn't mean that at design time, you're looking at your skills saying "This one will not be very good", or "This one will be inherently more useful then that one". I meant that your *players* are classifying your skills like that. And I agree that if your players are consistently calling a skill useless, then you should fix it, remove it, or replace it. And I will definitely agree that at design time you shouldn't be thinking like that. Though others may disagree



Eventually I should really get around to playing it, 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?

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.


Right, they're built on a relatively small number of core choices, and those determine their fundamental capabilities (rage or serenity, human or shapechanger, spellcaster or fighter, etc). But the flavour, the flexibility, the unique elements of the build, these are determined by what I term auxiliary abilities - they're far from useless, but they're add-ons, not the main source of your raw bonuses.



If you've got a typical mud, where combat ability is the most important differentiating factor between two characters, then that's what the core skills should focus on addressing. That mage can have a "mystical focus" weapon skill, a "mental discipline" fighting style and a "forcefield" protective skill, while the thief can have "daggers", "assassin training" and "evasion". Once they're balanced for combat, then you can worry about their other abilities.


They can be important, they just shouldn't be as strong as the core skills, because the idea is to make the core skills "must-haves" or "no-brainers" or whatever terminology you wish to use. The core skills are there to avoid the "one best skill" scenario, because you provide players with 125 clearly labelled combinations of "best skill" and they can only pick one of them.

In other other words, instead of trying to balance every skill with every other skill, you focus on carefully balancing a very small number of skills, and then put them a clear cut above the rest.



Most talents are already available to everyone, it's the powers that are usually exclusive to one class. If someone could take powers from every class, I'm not sure it would really make much difference to the number of available builds - although it could dramatically reduce the number of viable builds if there was a particularly broken combination (like stacking the rage powers from multiple classes).

I'm sorry, I'm showing my unfamiliarity with your MUD. I looked at the homepage to get an idea of your terminology, but grabbed the wrong one. Powers is what I meant.

Your statement that being able to pick powers from every class could reduce the number of viable builds is *precisely* the problem I'm trying to solve. Pretend you're designing for God Wars, but instead of making classes, you only get ONE class. How would you design it so that there are at least as many viable builds as you currently have?

Nice discussion, but in absolutely none of it I see any equipment involved.
My mud is a 'classic' one, ie:3 remort (ie skill up to level 51) and a hero class among them (level 51 100) this already allows some diversity as lower skills can add a lot.
Then I have fighting stances (defensive, offensive and 'normal') that will also affect how you play (some skills works better in defensive than in offensive) (and switching stances takes a round in fight, so you usually do not do it too often)
Then equipment: a two handed fighter wont play as a one handed + shield or a dual handed. (some skills require some specific equipment)And there is no ultimate piece of eq that works for all cases.
It addds so much diversity I as a coder cannot even find if there is a 'better' system. (too many skills to test in combination)
You could run a lot of fight among each build and eq combination and never find a cookie cutter. (tried, and failed, you would have to code a true AI to find out)
Because there is also a lot of randomness in a spell missing or not, or a skill etc.

In the end though, all this works cause there are mutually exclusive skills/ eq stats. Basically it ends up like being classes anyway (You do not give true invisibility AND most damage output skill to the same char)

Randomness is not really a problem, because if that were all, you could run thousands or millions of trials. The problem is that given enough skills, it is hard to run reasonable trials because a human would (probably) pick smarter skill combinations than the AI that you are likely to write. Of course, you could try building a learning AI agent that knows how to fight against other learning AI agents… but suddenly you have far more to worry about than just building a skill system. :smile:


It is like classes, but instead of having to design the classes yourself and force them onto people, you can have emergent design. Besides, being able to design your character beyond picking from a list of classes can be a fun part of the game in and of itself, even if many people pick similar designs.

An analytics strategy is gonna be your best bet for determining "best" combinations. Long beta test periods where you can collect data that real players produce is way better than any bot, AI, or statistics generation algorithms. That being said, there's actually a lot of use for determining theoretical min-max of builds. But in practice things are almost always different. For example, the required rotation may be so burdensome that human players never hit the max. Or the "best case" requires them to be stationary, not be disrupted, not have long cooldowns thwarted, etc etc. This goes back to why it's important to get real data from real players. Not only do they generally make nuanced decisions about their character builds, they produce more useful numbers in practice.

I often wonder how often it occurs that players think that they've found the best solution, and the social pressure to stick to it is strong enough that people don't explore the rest. In a sufficiently complex system, it strikes me as surprising that people could actually optimize it across all combinations. Then again, it also seems that a sufficiently complex system might actually have a serious, unintentional loophole somewhere.

In my experience playing competitive games, and watching how they develop early on, both these things happen frequently. "Master" strategies typically get broken up by the game's owner, or the player base gets bored and tries to explore new options. And, yes, complex games are prone to having one game winning combination. Less complex games have less of this.

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.


I tend to use the term "skill" pretty loosely, unless referring to a specific implementation. From a game design perspective I consider equipment to also be a type of "skill", and I balance it accordingly. I find this makes it much easier to support character builds that can't use equipment.


Actually I do. Invisibility is a tactical advantage, and one which can be overcome with other abilities - it doesn't add raw combat power, therefore I don't feel it's appropriate to balance it against something like damage.

Hmm well maybe not in your mud then, but not in mine ;p

A lot of studies have been made on the subject as it is very near from economic field.
Result was that mostly, people are NOT rational, so if the system is complex, optimum is likely never found, but trend are followed…I coded an algorithm to find out wich equipment combination was the best if you wanted to achieve some stats. Result was sometimes far away from what people were using, cause they were neglecting piece of eq on their face value (sometimes only one stat on it, but a big one that could not be achieved that easily by combining other one)
When you have 22 eq slot, and a wide array of possible eq, it is very hard to find the best combo (a lot easier to look at top players and gather the same stuff)
System that I broke anyway as I have now random eq drop ;p